In China, heading west

It appears I haven’t blogged about China at all. Well. Since Beijing and Xi’an – at the latter I saw the terracotta warriors and some tasty markets and walked all the way round the big grey city wall – I’ve been moving almost every day. Xi’an to Lanzhou to Jiayuguan to Dunhuang to Turpan and, later today, to Urumqi. Heading west by train and bus along one of the Silk Roads.

Most of my time is spent on public transport, sleeping – if I don’t manage to sleep on the public transport – and getting out to the various points of interest in/near the town. Travel here is fun and frustrating, interesting and tiring, like all travel, really, but some of the difficulties are more pronounced. The language barrier, oh my. I spend my spare time, after I’ve tracked down a train/bus ticket office and pointed my way to a ticket, watching things on my laptop or seeking supermarket snacks that I can identify. (Some Chinese snacks, I cannot tell if it was an animal, plant or lab invention.) The lack of wifi since Xi’an has just made blogging that little bit harder to fit in.

Some things I’ve seen:

At Jiayuguan, a reconstructed bit of Great Wall and the fort that marked the end of the Wall, the end of China, beyond which lay less civilised peoples. The Wall was made with local materials, so while it’s made of stone near Beijing and surrounded by lush green plants, in the desert it’s made of earth and plants. It’s narrower too. Near Beijing, four or five horses could ride abreast. In the desert, two people can walk together. The reconstructed bit climbs the side of an almost plant-bare hill to two watchtowers, offering a view of a small oasis farm-settlement, bright green amid the sandy landscape, with the more modern town of Jiayuguan on the horizon and far to the south, mountains capped with snow. The fort, containing the Chinese commander’s houses, was nearby. The reconstruction was a bit less tastefully done: regular bricks painted the appropriate colour, as far as I could tell. Oh, China. The Chinese posted here in the past didn’t have a lot to do: stare at the desert, see traders pass through, complete various drills and duties.

The desert out here is even more barren than in Mongolia. On the train from Jiayuguan, I saw land where nothing at all grew. I also saw the islands of green trees and houses and fields with mudbrick shelters at one side, presumably to protect against the prevailing wind.

At Dunhuang, where you can be sitting at the bus station and see, over the wall and a construction site and tall, thin trees, a sand dune like a hill, I got a bus out to the Magao Buddhist grottoes. The caves were built into the cliff in the first millennium and surprised me with their boxiness and how they’re side by side in neat, packed rows, maximising cliff space. The Chinese have built concrete walkways and at first I thought this a bit over-modernising, but originally the walkways were of wood and a wooden facade concealed each cave, protecting its paintings. This wood disintegrated in the time before the caves’ rediscovery by non-locals, exposing the outsides to the sun and the interior to oxygen, which blackened some of the paint. Still, the colours are amazingly bright and a lot of it’s original – statues tended to get replaced in later dynasties, while murals were often left alone. Lots of lotus patterns, Buddhas and Bodhisattvas and Apsaras, and some storytelling scenes (lives and deaths of Buddhas). Saw the now-empty Library Cave that got ransacked by Europeans. A few texts were on display in a nearby museum.

At Turpan, I got in a minibus with a group of Chinese tourists who got really annoying by the end of the trip (grabbing my arm and talking at me in Chinese) and I saw several cool things. Uighur villages, containing boxish houses the same sandy colour as the land and, sometimes, bright painted doors, and colourful mosques that have four small pillars at the entrance gate. An old man gave me a tour of his house, with its small rooms and multipurpose raised platforms for sleeping, food prep, lounging around, and a room at the back for the sheep. The women wear headscarves but often bare their forearms and lower legs. The people look almost the same as the Han Chinese. Around their houses are vines, covered in sweet green grapes. I saw more grottoes, their murals almost entirely removed by Europeans, but a multiracial scene of rulers making offerings remains. I saw a karez, one of the underground channels bringing water from the mountains to the town, utterly touristified, the channel lit with changing disco lights and a route that forces you through several souvenir shops selling almost the same stuff I saw in Beijing and Xi’an. Mao memorabilia, “old” coins, jade, seals, boxes, “old” manuscripts. The fabric is different. (This, mind, is not for Western tourists. There are very few of us here. This is for Chinese tourists, whose government builds awful tourist parks around many of the interesting or scenic sites. I rarely see them buying souvenirs, though, besides fruit.) I saw the ruins of Jiaohe, a Chinese garrison city dating from the Han Dynasty, protecting trade interests in these barbarian lands. For some reason the Chinese tourists stopped at a lookout point, while I wandered ahead on paths among old building-corners and walls and monastery-remains.

Today, still in Turpan, I walked through an Uighur part of the town to the Emin Minaret, which is one of the most beautiful minarets I’ve seen. It appeared above the vines, made of sandy brick, wide at the bottom and narrowing to the top, covered in geometric brick-patterns. In, naturally, a small tourist park.

Photos of all this will go up as soon as I get a bit more organised.

Now I’m hungry and want to pop into the bazaar before I get a bus to Urumqi.