Shadow of the Silk Road

by Colin Thubron

  For more than half the year the sky above the town was opaque muslin, dense with unseen sand, and the sun only a white coin discarded there. From the invisible Kun Lun mountains, the twin Black and White Jade rivers came winding out of mist between banks of silt and pebbles, flowing through the oasis to the desert.

  The Kun Lun seem to retreat forever into a cold elusiveness. Here, in the Chinese mind, bloomed the orchards of immortality and the white land of death, where the Queen Mother of the West ruled from her jade mountain at the gate of heaven.

  So jade, swept down by the twin rivers, was the chance detritus of another world. In the third millennium BC, before any official Silk Road existed, a Jade Road foreshadowed the same path, carrying the stone westward to Mesopotamia and eastward to China, whose emperors all but worshipped it. In autumn, after the mountain floods have abated, people still wade along the river with linked arms, feeling for the jade with their toes. Women are most gifted at this–they attract the male yang in the stone–and often used to comb the waters by the full moon. Jade, some said, was crystallised moonlight.

  I waded into the White Jade river with Osman, an old taxi-driver who had once found a jade bigger than his fist, he said. A few families straggled across the gravel shoals, digging with little spades. I had seen stones being traded on the Khotan streets–one the size of a football–but these days, Osman said, people found fewer and fewer. He chanted Allah, Allah as he threaded the shallows, and sometimes told his beads. Each time you chanted Allah, he said, you prolonged your life. His eyes were tired and soft above a waterfall of beard. He should have retired long ago, but he had four old relatives at home to support.

  Several times I imagined I had discovered a piece, and so did he. The stones gleamed translucent and olive-green in the water; but once dry in our pockets, they faded to common rock, and we tossed them disconsolately back. I realised I did not know what I was looking for. The colour of the nephrite jade which has so haunted China ranged from black through spinach green and reddish tints to the treasured milky ‘mutton-fat’. Half the stones shimmering underwater could persuade you they were jade.

  Then, paddling in the shallows, my toes encountered a pebble smoother than the rest. It shone moss-green against my feet, and was a little oily to the fingers, as nephrite is. I slipped it into my pocket, at once smug and guilty that Osman, with Allah’s help, had found nothing. The fragment seemed a key or talisman. I had China in my pocket. No stone has ever fascinated a people more. To Confucius jade exemplified the virtues of the perfect man: strong as intelligence, moist and smooth like benevolence, loyal, humble (it hung down in beads), righteous. It elicited a nervous awe. Only the emperor, the Son of Heaven, could use the pure white kind, and the princes and mandarins below him carried ministerial tablets of minutely graded jade and dignity. At the winter solstice jade was sacrificed in fire, and the beasts slaughtered and laid in jade dishes were the colour of the emperor’s nephrite wand. His authority itself rested on six ancestral seals–with a seventh, secret one–of incised white jade.

  There were those to whom the stone became a madness. The eighteenth-century emperor Qianlong penned eight hundred poems to it, and would sleep only in a jade bed. Vital to astrology and divination, it turned people invisible and made them fly. It was sculpted into statuettes (even of Xuanzong’s dancing horses) and all the vessels of state ceremony; it adorned swords and girdles–aesthete-courtiers tinkled as they walked–and became hairpins and bells and flutes. Hung in frames, it emitted celestial music.

  Above all, it promised immortality. The rich sometimes swallowed powdered jade, or drank it with rice and dew. In death, they imagined, it would preserve them from decay and hasten resurrection. Jade amulets covered the corpse’s eyes, tongue and lips, stopped up its orifices and sheathed its penis. Princes were buried like gorgeous reptiles plated from head to foot in jade, stitched with gold thread.

  I fingered the stone like an amulet in my pocket. Its symbolism cropped up everywhere. In Chinese literature the sleek luminosity of jade became a metaphor for the purity of a woman’s skin, and old handbooks of sexuality exalted the jade stalk entering the jade garden until jade fountains overflowed. At the other end of time, ancient emperors commanded jade to abate storms and floods, and imbibed it as an aphrodisiac.

  I walked a little way downriver to examine my fragment alone. But when I unclasped it in my hands, I saw only a pebble of coarse gneiss. I searched my other pockets, disappointment dawning. There was nothing else. There would be no flying, no immortality. Like all the others, it had dulled to matt rock. And soon Osman was coming towards me with his hands dangling empty, chuckling, and wanting to go home.

  I sit at a restaurant table beside an empty chair. The room is blue with smoke. Solitude is lonelier in public places. Suoman noodles in a sea of fried tomatoes, flat bread and spiced laghman: their smells drowse in the air.

  Then a man sits down beside me. He is heavy and restless, and starts to talk about nothing in particular. I sense I’m being tested. Under his flat cap the face is coffee-brown, simmering. After a while he says: ‘You are Russian.’

  ‘I’m English. You’re Uighur?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Yes, I’m Uighur. But I’ve just got Kazakh nationality.’ He flashes his new passport at me. ‘My wife is Kazakh.’

  ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘I’m not here. My family is all in Kazakhstan now. And I’m leaving tomorrow.’ Then there breaks from him a headlong anger. There are feelings he has to speak to someone, anyone, before it is too late. He glares about us, then slides into Russian. ‘Getting out of this filthy society. These Chinese motherfuckers. Do you know how many are settling in my homeland every day?’

  Seven thousand, I had heard: a silent, demographic genocide. In 1949, at the dawn of Communist power, there were fewer than three hundred thousand Chinese in the province. Now, in purposeful, ever-mounting waves, they outnumbered the eight million Uighur.

  The man says: ‘This is a military occupation. It’s like Tibet. It’s like Kosovo. It’s like…’ He runs out of parallels, then seizes my fork and clasps it to his chest. ‘Could I take this and say it’s mine? No! But that’s what they’re doing.’ He drops it on the table. ‘This Chinese…shit…they will…they will get out of our country.’

  I say mercilessly: ‘It won’t happen. Your country’s too rich.’ Its vast gas fields and recently discovered oil were already feeding the industries of the Pacific coast. The mineral resources here were greater than in all the rest of China.

  The man tears his cap from a massive, balding head. ‘Yes, my country’s rich, and they’re destroying it. They live in their filthy high-rises and make cities of smog. And they loved Stalin, the Chinese did.’ He clasps his two hands in accord. ‘I think they have no souls. In middle school Chinese teachers told us we were descended from monkeys. Monkeys! And the Chinese eat monkeys. They eat their ancestors…’

  Were it not for the plight of his people, I would think him overacting, perhaps an agent provocateur. But his fury is old. He carries it like a virtue. ‘They want to brainwash us. In school we’re forced to learn Chinese, just like black slaves learnt English. A foreign language! An imposter!’ He glances round the tables, but they are filled only by Uighurs celebrating. ‘They create jobs, yes, then they fill them themselves. You’ll never find a Uighur in a decent job. Even in the army–a lieutenant, yes, a captain maybe. But nothing higher. We’re the cannon-fodder. My brother got out years ago. He went into the army in Russia–he was in rockets, secret stuff–and got promoted under Dudayev, the Chechen general in Moscow, before Dudayev turned on the Russians. We’re brothers, you know, the Chechens and Uighurs, and the Uzbeks and the Kazakhs and the Kyrgyz.’ He lifts his arms. ‘All Turkish brothers!’

  I mutter: ‘Yes…’ But this is a frail identity. For centuries the Uighur had related more fiercely to their separate oases than to any notional state. The very name Uighur, ironically, after resurrection in the thirties, had been
enforced by Communist Beijing, inadvertently handing its bearers a nationality. Above all, perhaps, it is hatred of the oppressor which has turned this scattered and diluted people into a tentative nation.

  ‘This is a dead place,’ the man says. ‘Kazakhstan isn’t wonderful–I’ll take a factory job–but it’s better than here. Freedom’s a delusion here. You speak your mind and…’ He draws his hand across his throat. ‘But if we decided, we could throw them out!’ He fires an imaginary rifle with bitter glee. ‘Yes!’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘There are too many.’

  ‘We could do it! Perhaps America would help us. It’s the same as Iraq here, the suppression. They’d come to our aid…and the British…’

  I think he has forgotten my nationality. I feel ashamed. ‘No…’

  A sense of hopelessness descends on me. Rebellions and riots have erupted here ever since the Communist takeover in 1949, and the Chinese response has always been ruthless: mass arrests, indoctrination courses, public executions, and the disappearance of thousands of suspects into labour reform camps. In the 1990s, especially, after neighbouring Central Asian states gained independence, the tension had heightened; and since the attack on the World Trade Center the United States–in a political windfall for Beijing–had condemned the shadowy East Turkestan Islamic Movement, for acts the movement largely disowned.

  The restaurant is closing down. A matt-haired man has hovered up behind us and is listening. A wiry beard dribbles from his cheeks, and under his creased and recessed brows two myopic eyes glimmer out.

  For the first time my companion looks nervous. ‘Chinese KGB,’ he murmurs. He stares back at the man, who does not move.

  ‘He’s just a farmer,’ I say.

  ‘He’s Chinese. That’s what they look like, the Chinese KGB. I tell you. I know. They’re peasants.’

  The man retires, still watching us through small, perplexed eyes. But my companion has stood up and is leaving. ‘I told you.’ He is shaking with anger or fear, I cannot tell. Now I too am shivering inside, as if a cold draught was blowing in. ‘They have no souls.’

  Threading the giant oasis in his old, nursed taxi, Osman carried me to graveyards and shrines and lonely mazars, the tombs of holy men. His head was full of wonders. He knew caves where spiders had woven webs to protect Muslim pilgrims hiding there, and a place where cornfields had turned to stone to starve unbelievers. But he had aged into poignant sympathies. He slowed down before every sick tree with tender outrage–the walnuts and mulberries were diseased this year–and once he swerved into an irrigation ditch to avoid a hoopoe pecking in the road. He would have liked me to become a Muslim, I think, and made me repeat There is no God but God, as if its incantatory power might work some good.

  But the shrines we entered were rife with heresy. In a great cemetery–a dust-sea of graves on the desert’s edge–the flags and headstones teemed with shamanic tridents and Buddhist wheels. An official Chinese notice labelled this a historical place, and so protected–and cauterised–but it was crammed with the recent dead, and long belief.

  At the holiest of these sites, the tomb of Imam Asmu, it was a time of festival, Osman said, but the Chinese had warned away worshippers because of the SARS epidemic. We travelled through sad fields. The mulberry trees had sickened to reddish tufts along their ditches, and the sand was blowing in. Our track ended at a copse of date palms on the desert’s edge. A storm was scything over the dunes. In other years, Osman said, the path was lined by beggars and abdals–dervishes rumoured to wander under a curse–and pilgrims would feed them raisins. Now only a single ancient in rags, his eyes ice-blue, sightless, lifted a wasted Mongolian face to us, and washed his hands over his cheeks in blessing as we passed. Then Osman’s feet slowed in the sand. The grave was over there, he said–he gestured across the dunes–but he would not go on.

  The Chinese fear these mazars as seedbeds of revolt. Their rumoured dead are Muslim warriors martyred in battle a thousand years ago, fighting the Buddhist infidels of Khotan and buried where they fell. But their true age is unknown. Imam Asmu, said Osman as I left him, had been killed by a poisoned spear in the eleventh century.

  At first I could see nothing as I went. Then, dropping between one ridge and another, as if time had slipped, I came upon a band of pilgrims kneeling in the dunes, their hands cupped before them. They wore outsize fur hats and lavish mounds of turban, and the women’s veils were blowing in the wind. Their half-sung prayers trembled in the quiet.

  Soon afterwards the sanctuary appeared. It might have been improvised from driftwood. A long, low mosque was bleaching in the wind, its dome stuck with flying sand, and latrines had been built over the grave of the saint’s killer. Beyond it, high walls of blistered plaster–ringed by a palisade of stakes and streaming flags–floated above the desert like a fantastical galleon on a yellow sea. Enclosed on its platform, the saint’s tomb was like the grave of a giant, daubed blue and yellow, under a rustling tumult of banners.

  Barely fifty pilgrims had reached it. Most looked grimly poor. They stood along the protective fence, becalmed in worship. The stutter of their prayer, and the women’s mewling cries, were faint in the gathering storm. They looked like the occupants of a concentration camp, but they were all gazing inward, longing to enter, while knotted to every strand of the fence the rags of other worshippers–left as pleas for health, fortune, babies–fluttered in their torn thousands.

  A group of caretakers stood nearby. And there were two plainclothes police. The workers joked with me: they were hoping somebody would donate a sheep. ‘Then we can feed you!’ The agents sat separate, bored. But when a stately old mullah arrived with a gaggle of villagers, one of the silent men detached himself and told them to return. The old man replied that they had come a long way, and the saint would protect them from SARS. They were permitted to pray for ten minutes.

  The policeman, noticing my anger, said: ‘We are rooting out Wahabis.’

  Wahabi had become a label for any Muslim zealot. There were surely none here. The mazars, said Osman later, were sites of seasonal celebration and the voicing of simple needs.

  Nobody stopped me as I walked among the pilgrims round the fence. They prayed with muted sadness, several of the women crying, in a quiet, transposed grief for someone unknown, perhaps imaginary, killed a thousand years before. The spindly flagpoles, bound with the fleeces of sacrificial sheep, flapped and rasped above them. As the storm thickened, they did not move. Only the fence quivered and shook with its votive burden–with poverty, barrenness and misfortune–as the wind sifted the dunes around the martyr’s grave.

  Gul took me next morning to the Place of Drumbeats. Near the site of old Khotan, it marks the spot where the monk Xuanzang, returning from India in 644, was welcomed by the king with drums and incense into the city. This obscure tradition led us down overgrown tracks to a hillock dense with bamboo. Gul lingered below, playing with her small son, while I climbed a maze of footpaths to the summit.

  The mound heaved among willows dripping dust. I clambered unthinking through the noon heat, the air sultry and windless. Suddenly I came on a heap of skeletons. Their skulls gleamed among scattered shin-bones and rib-cages. Bamboo was growing through their eye-sockets. Soon I was labouring up over a blackened litter of legs and arms and pates. My feet sent up spurts of anonymous dust. The entire slope, I realised, was man-made: I was ascending a hill of compacted corpses. At its summit a tower of baked brick had worn smooth and hollow. The hard grasses pierced its floor.

  Descending, I saw a man in the fields. What was this place? I called. How old? He did not know. He came towards me. In rustic Mandarin he recounted a garbled myth of Buddhists butchering Muslims at Friday prayer. So the place opened in my journey like a dark space, awaiting explanation, which never came.

  I blundered down, covered in dust, sick. Women were walking with hoes through the wheatfields, singing, and Gul was sitting under a willow nearby, while her son sprinkled her with a rain of dandelions.
/>   The pilgrim monk Xuanzang recorded a strange story as he drew near Khotan from the west. The region was dimpled by mounds, he wrote, which were the home of gold-and silver-haired rats, the size of hedgehogs. Centuries before, an army of Huns had camped here against Buddhist Khotan, whose king, with a small contingent, confronted them in despair. But on the eve of battle he dreamt that the King of the Rats promised him help, and when the Buddhists attacked next dawn the Huns found that in the night their harness and bowstrings had been gnawed through by a rodent army, and they were routed headlong. Thereafter, the rats were worshipped. The king built them a temple, and passers-by would descend from their chariots to offer them propitiatory gifts of clothes, flowers and meat.

  A millennium and a half later Aurel Stein, travelling the same way, found the site still sacred, but its story transformed. The king of Khotan had become an Islamic saint, slain in battle against the Buddhists, and the rats were transposed into traitors from a nearby village who had entered the Muslim camp at night disguised as dogs, and dismantled its arms. (Later the village fell under a curse: all its males were born with four feet and a tail.) But from the Muslim martyr’s breast two sacred doves had flown, and in Stein’s day their descendants clouded the desert in their thousands above the shrine of Qumrabat Padshahim, ‘My King’s Castle in the Sand’, and were fed corn by pious passers-by.

  Thirty miles west of Khotan, where Stein and Xuanzang had found the site, Gul and I enquired among blank-faced villagers. For hours we were passed from one family to the next, seated ceremoniously on quilts and carpets, fed on yoghurt and home-baked bread, until at last, in a hut poorer than the rest, we found the wife of the shrine’s guardian.