Kyoto Journal 74, Silk Roads: From Samarkand to Nara

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Journal

74

Silk Roads S a m a r k a n d — to — N a r a

A

t once both metaphor and well-trodden geographic means to ends, the Silk Roads linked strikingly different cultures, enriching lives, crafts and arts from the Mediterranean to the far side of the Asian landmass — and beyond.

Metaphorically, silk speaks of brilliant threads weaving complex interfaces, intricate interplay of elaborate craft processes, subtle aesthetics and the erotic charge of luxury and wealth. In the West, it has since Roman times conjured an exotic, mysterious Orient.

Ever pragmatic, China traded silk for the “heavenly horses” of Central Asia, up to forty bolts of silk for each fleet mount, buying its military equal footing with the nomadic foes that harassed its borders.

In the East, the Road itself is the more powerful metaphor. Every path of personal development, in martial or aesthetic arts, is a Way. In the even bigger picture, the Dao — written with , the same character as ‘road’ — signifies the true nature of the universe.

Roads and trade both embody reciprocity. Along with trade-goods, China absorbed far-distant influences, especially in Tang times — opening up to fullblown cultural transmissions in language, music, dance, cuisine, and decorative arts, from central Asia and distant Persia. In exchange, silk journeyed west, followed by a host of world-changing Chinese innovations including paper, print, even gunpowder.

At times the Roads reverberated with marauding armies, but arduous journeys of passionate believers in disparate faiths also had long-term consequences.

Buddhism’s adoption in China was relayed to Japan (and later, on to the West). Distinctive local arts flourished, and passed from hand to hand as marvels of the wider world, beyond national borders. A priceless collection representing this rich heritage is still held in Nara’s eighth-century Shosoin treasure-house.

By comparison, what we now call globalization seems bland, almost perverse — simple mono-culturalization, based on exchanges of cheap generic goods and universal brands, backed by rapacious demands for raw materials, natural energy and cheap labor.

What metaphors are we inventing now; what means to what ends?

Silk shimmers like a desert mirage; the Roads beckon.

— Ken Rodgers

PHOTO: PAUL SCOTT

PHOTO: TERESA HA

Roads on the

Many roads; many journeys. t h e s i l k r o a d s e x p l o r e d t h r o u g h g e o g r a p h y, t i m e a n d t r av e l e r s e y e s

© SPICE, Stanford University, 2006

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Photographs by Michael Marchant, Paul Scott, Jeff Fuchs, and John Einarsen design by Jeffrey l. osborn, burning Q media

SILK ROAD KEY DATES

BCE

CE

3630 Approximate date of earliest silk found in Henan province, China

190 Chang’an becomes eastern terminus of Silk Road

563 Birth of the Buddha

138 China opens borders for trade, first Silk Road caravans

326 Greek culture reaches Gandhara, witH Alexander the Great 214 China begins to construct Great Wall 210 Qin Emperor Shi Huangdi dies, interred with ‘Terracotta Army’

106 Chinese send delegation to Parthian capital, trades silk for horses 102 China seizes the Tarim Basin

1 Chinese silk first reaches Rome 70 Han Emperor Mingdi’s envoy to India brings back two Buddhist monks 144-172 Buddhism adopted

by Kushans, GraecoBuddhist art develops in Gandhara 166 First Roman envoy sent to China

366 Construction of Dunhuang caves begins, in use until 14th century

618 Chang-an becomes capital of China; Tang dynasty lasts until 907

399-413 Chinese Buddhist monk Fa-hsien walks to India, returns by sea

629-645 Xuanzang’s pilgrimage to India, returning with Heart Sutra

507, 554 Bamiyan Buddhas carved by Kushans

630 Japan establishes formal relations with Tang China

685-761 rule of Emperor Xuangzong in Chang’an, apex of Tang era

635 First Christian (Nestorian) missionaries arrive in China

710 Construction of Nara (Heijôkyô) begins, based on Tang architecture

538 Buddhism reaches Japan 570 Birth of the prophet Muhammad

650 Saad ibn Waqqas introduces Islam to China; first mosque built in Guangzhou 651 Arab conquest of Sassanian Persia

“Crossing a stony desert, we come to Ling-shan (ice-mountain)... The roads are steep and dangerous, the cold wind is extremely biting, and frequently fierce dragons impede and molest travellers with their inflictions. Those who travel this road should not wear red garments nor carry loud-sounding calabashes. The least forgetfulness of these precautions entails certain misfortune.”

“Historians claim its inception for the second century BC, but the traffic started long before accounts of it were written. Chinese silk from 1500 BC has turned up in tombs in north Afghanistan, and strands were discovered twisted into the hair of a tenth-century BC Egyptian mummy. Four centuries later, silk found its way into a princely grave of Iron Age Germany...”

–Xuanzang, 646, Record of the Western Regions

–Colin Thubron, Shadow of the Silk Road

“For three days’ journey from Chang’an the traveller passes through a fine country full of thriving towns and villages, living by commerce and industry. The people are idolators, using paper money and subject to the Great Khan, and amply provided with all the means of life. Then he reaches the splendid city of Kinsai [Hang-chau], whose name means ‘City of Heaven’. It well merits a description, because it is without doubt the finest and most splendid city in the world.”

–Marco Polo, The Travels

“Central Asia has been both a Silk Road conduit of East-West globalization and a Great Game laboratory of unambiguous imperial competition, the two metaphors for the region’s past as well as its future. Indeed, in the twentyfirst century it will be both—for each aspect is inadvertently driving the other.”

“During these years rumor made me a “French and American King,” “Commander of a Russian Corps,” and “King of all Buddhists.” I succeeded in dying twice. I succeeded in being simultaneously in Siberia, America and Tibet.

According to the words of Mongols of Tsaidam I carried on a war with the Amban of Sining. And according to the words of the Taotai of Khotan I brought a small cannon which would, in ten minutes, destroy entire Khotan and its 100,000 inhabitants.”

–Parag Khanna, The Second World

–Nicholas Roerich, 1927-28, Altai-Tibe

740 EARLIEST DATED BLOCKPRINTED SCRIPT – ON SILK, JAPAN 750 Arabs defeat Chinese at Talas and capture Chinese papermakers 755 An Lushan rebellion in China 794 Kyoto laid out on pattern of Chang’an 841-847 Suppression of Buddhism in China, temples destroyed

868 Diamond Sutra, the world’s oldest known printed book made in Dunhuang

1245 Franciscan Friar Giovanni Carpini leaves Rome for Mongol capital, Karakorum.

904 First use of gunpowder,

by Chinese against Mongols

1271 Marco Polo leaves Venice China-bound, meets Kublai Khan 1274

960 Paper money introduced in China

1279 Kublai Khan defeats Song China, establishes the Yuan dynasty.

1206 Temujin unites Mongolia, takes title of “Genghis Khan” 1220 Ghenghis Khan attacks Transoxiania, Iran, and Iraq

1280 Gunpowder formula carried across Silk Road, published in Europe

1292 Marco Polo visits India, homeward bound 1343 Mongols close western Silk Road, refusing trade with Christians 1405 Chinese Muslim admiral Zheng He begins voYages, Indian Ocean to East Africa 1877 Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen coins term “Silk Road” (Seidenstrasse)

1900 Archaeologist Aurel Stein’s first expedition retraces Xuanzang’s journey 1902-1910 Japanese Otani expeditions to “Chinese Turkistan” 1907 Stein discovers & loots Dunhuang caves; returns in 1915, raids tombs 1980 CCTV/ NHK TV series on Silk Road (12 episodes) aired

1986 Karakorum Highway completed, from Islamabad to Kashgar 1994 International Dunhuang Project founded 1998 “TRACECA Summit Restoration of the Historic Silk Route” in Baku/Azerbaijan 2010 Nara’s 1500th anniversary year

Silk Roads S a m a r k a n d — to — N a r a G u e s t E d ito r : Map:

Le an n e Oga sawar a |

De s ig n :

Ke vin Fole y |

Cov e r i m ag e :

Oleg Novi kov

J e ffre y L . Os born

6 10,000 Miles Away Chang’an and Nara

68 The Hollow Staff: Western Music and the Silk Road — Pau l Ro dr i g u e z

12 Of Bonds, ‘the Word’ and Trade — J e f f F u c h s

71 Silk Road Synchronicity — Pr e s to n H o u s e r

18 The Great Kashgar Bus Convoy — r e d p i n e

26 Along the Silk Road Today — P i co I y e r

30 The Kashgar Case — M a r k M o r d u e

72 Collaboration in Harmony: An Interview with Miki Minoru — C . B . L i d d e ll a n d Le a n n e Og a s awa r a

— Ya s u n o r i Um e wa k a

79 Pig’s Heaven Inn

— I s a ac B l ac k s i n

— A rth u r Sze

40 Over Samarkand

80 Journeys to the Western Realm

— N i co l a s C h o r i e r

— J e a n M i ya k e Dow n e y

45 Digital Bezeklik

88 Behind Glass: Japan’s Silk Roads Memorabilia — I s a ac B l ac k s i n

48 On the Trail of Texts — I s a ac B l ac k s i n

92 Japan’s Birthplace Commemorates its Silk Roads Heritage

51 Alexander Csoma de Kõrösi The Grandfather of Modern Day Tibetan Translation

— S h i n n o H a ru k a

— M at teo P i s tO n o

— N a m it A ro r a

54 Civilizations Never Clash, Ignorance Does

97 Rawak Stupa

94 Marco Polo’s India

— Do n C ro N e r

— H at to r i E i j i

56 Tibet and Xinjiang: the New Bamboo Curtain

100 Bright Road — Ro b e rt B r a dy

— Pa r ag K h a n N a

102 Reviews

60 Beauty and Power on China’s Silk Road

112 Contributors

— S a m C r a n e

64 The Treasures of Dunhuang (1) 2000 Buddhas — J e ro m e Roth e n b e rg

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Le a n n e Og a s awa r a

16 All Roads Lead to Oxiana 66 Gandhara 85 Kuchean Dancers and the Sogdian Whirl 106 All the Peonies of Chang’an

76 Reflections on the Hagoromo Legend

34 Observations from the Field: Space and Its Discontents in Kashgar

— Le a n n e Og a s awa r a

Tang v dynasty v time S

PHOTO: PAUL SCOTT

co n t e n ts

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PHOTO: HARUHISA 6 |YAMAGUCHI k yoto jou r na l 74

Away »

Miles

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» Chang’an and Nara T h e p o e t Pa n K u praised Emperor Han Gaozu, founder

of the Han dynasty (206 bce – 220 ce), for his choice of a site for his glorious capital, Chang’an, suggesting that a city created in harmony with universal energies would become a force in its own right. Although the Han capital would eventually fall into ruin, five hundred years later Pan Ku’s forecast was spectacularly fulfilled.

Located just outside of present-day Xian, Chang’an — meaning “Everlasting Peace” — revived magnificently during the Tang dynasty (618–907). At the confluence of the Wei and Feng rivers, in a valley traversed by trade routes to Central Asia, Tang planners and builders created a walled city of evocatively-named buildings, a metropolis constructed according to the Taoist science of feng shui geomancy. The Great Luminous Palace on Dragon Head Plain overlooked Chang’an’s massive major north-south streets, landscaped lakes, a polo field, and the lyrical Hibiscus Garden, eulogized by poets. The Big Wild Goose Pagoda — still standing, though now reduced from ten to seven stories — housed the library of the legendary pilgrim Xuanzang, who passed his later years just outside the city at the Jade Flower Palace Monastery.

During the first half of the eighth century, the population of resurgent Chang’an swelled to around two million people, reflecting myriad ethnicities and religions. From all over Eurasia, merchants, musicians, teachers, students, and pilgrims came to Chang’an during the Tang era — Persians, Syrians, Arabs, Greeks, Africans, Japanese, Koreans, Indians, Tibetans, Sogdians. Jewish traders arrived from Persia, Nestorian Christians from communities in Turkestan. Visitors and

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immigrants traveled by caravan from Central Asian kingdoms over the Silk Roads and by maritime routes from Korea, Japan, India and Indonesia. They brought with them Central Asian spinach and pistachio nuts, Indonesian dill, Turkestan almonds, Khotan jade, Byzantine glass, Indian medicines, Samarkand crystals, and Turfanese cotton. The noisy, bustling great public markets and bazaars were crowded with Central Asian street acrobats and storytellers, Persian gem dealers, and Turkish pawnbrokers.

Thousands of slaves, including Mongolians and Central Asians captured in wars who served as grooms and falconers or potters and weavers for Chinese aristocrats, also brought to Chang’an their cultural influences. The city had 16 Taoist monasteries and nunneries and 81 Buddhist monasteries and nunneries that attracted Buddhist monks from present-day India, Ceylon, Korea, and Japan. Syrians established Manichean temples and Nestorian churches. Jewish traders worshipped at their own synagogues. Four Zoroastrian temples served Persian expatriates. And the Tang government constructed mosques for Arab traders who were crucial to maritime trade, particularly in the great port of Guangzhou (Canton).

By the year 710, when Japan’s imperial capital was moved to Nara (a city modeled on Chang’an, as was the later capital Kyoto), Tang China was booming. The Tang period — the only time when a woman, the fascinating Empress Wu, ruled China — was the most open era in that nation’s history, giving rise to a rich multiethnic and multicultural empire, encompassing Turkestan, nine kingdoms around Samarkand and Tashkent, 16 kingdoms in present-day Kashmir, Afghanistan and Iran, Manchuria, and present-day Korea. The Tang era is widely considered to be the zenith in Chinese civilization, superior even to the great Han dynasty, by which time China was already connected by caravan routes to Rome and Persia, and by sea to Japan.

PHOTO: JEFF FUCHS

For his purpose, he took thought of the Spirits of Heaven and Earth, That he might suitably determine the place that was to be the Heavenly City.

PHOTO: MICHAEL MARCHANT

China developed as a fusion culture, as did the other poliShang, fused to produce proto-Chinese civilization. Ancient ties across the Eurasian landmass, united at various times in Chinese culture included multicultural features — massive history by Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and Tamerimperial burial mounds originating in Central Asia — fox failane. The result: overlapping languages, syncretic faith tradirytales from the forest-dwelling hunter-gatherers in Manchutions, a vibrant mix of musical traditions, and a rich cuisine. ria — and the cult of Heaven echoing ancient worldviews from British poet Rudyard Kipling’s oft-quoted description of a the Northern Steppes. As the Chinese empire expanded, swalstatic and discrete “East” and “West” — “and never the twain lowing up tribal cultures whenever it seized territory, these tribal cultures did not completely disapshall meet” — is not supported by historical pear.

Instead, aspects of tribal myths, fact. Instead, the very opposite has been The Chinese happening ever since humans moved out of motifs, and arts became integral parts of enthusiastically Africa into Eurasian crossroads. Groups did Chinese culture, although their origins embraced Turkish not just split off, but continued to meet again became obscured. folksingers, and again throughout history, re-merging Comparative mythology scholar Mirtheir cultures every time around. The titiancea Eliade has described how the Chu’u Eurasian stories and [Zhou], who established their kingdom plaited, tartan-clad mummies, preserved in fairytales, about 1100 BCE, created the basis of salty, dry desert sands, discovered in presCambodian dancers, Taoist beliefs: “The Chou, who had ent-day China’s Tarim Basin, who are most assimilated the Chang [Shang] culture, probably long-vanished Tocharians, have and foreign sports, faces believed to resemble those of ancient were of Mongol origin, and their religion including polo, Celts. Their discovery fired the popular was characterized by shamanism and introduced imagination and made scholars realize how techniques of ecstasy. The unification of by trendsetting little they knew about the earliest exchanges China under the Han, though it brought across Eurasia. Prehistoric precursors to the the destruction of Chou culture, faciliPersians.

Silk Roads, the land and sea Silk Roads durtated the dissemination of their religious ing the Han and Roman empires all contributed to east-west beliefs and practices throughout China. It is probable that a dispersions of music, visual images, ideas, and every other number of their cosmological myths and religious practices aspect of culture. were adopted by Chinese culture; as for their ecstatic techEven apart from ancient and later Silk Road contacts, Chiniques, they reappear in certain Taoist circles.” nese culture was already an amalgamated culture, permeated After the Han dynasty’s third-century collapse fragmented with diverse if forgotten influences. The Han Chinese did the empire, more multicultural historical processes continnot emerge from one original group and their culture did not ued to shape China. Conquest by nomadic tribes from central spread from a single center outward. Instead, many different and northern Asia followed, and their rule of upper China ethnic groups and separate centers of tribal cultures, includthroughout the Northern and Southern dynasties (4th to 6th ing the proto-Thai, proto-Tibetan, proto-Mongolian, and the centuries CE), until the Sui reunification in 581, intensified the

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PHOTOS: JACOBA AKAZAWA

collision and merging of different cultures in China. The still Chinese culture as waves of influence moved eastward, espepopular story about Mu Lan, a young girl who disguises hercially during Tang times. A striking example of this is Mahayself as a warrior, originates from a Northern Dynasty tribal, ana Buddhism. One of the most powerful influences on the not a Han Chinese, tale. The Northern Dynasty rulers also Korean and Japanese cultures, this religion did not arrive in favored trade and interaction with Central Asian Buddhists China directly from India, but via Greco-Indian and Grecowho brought Indian music and chanting to China.

Iranian Buddhist kingdoms in Afghanistan and Central Asia.

Cultural historians have just begun to recognize how This is why the varieties of Mahayana Buddhism that later diversity catalyzed creativity in China. In the past, scholars reached the Korean peninsula and Japan differed significantly deprecated the Northern and Southern from the first form of Hinayana Buddhism Nara’s leaders Dynasties period, opining that tribal “barin India. Chinese, Korean and Japanese barian” influence eroded the “essence” of Mahayana Buddhist forms all include synmodeled themselves Chinese art. But recently-revised views turn cretic elements from the ancient Greco-Perafter Tang society, this nativist notion on its head. Now scholsian-Indian (and other) hybrid cultures of a culture ars are attributing much of the astonishing Central Asia which merged elements from that was not simply creativity of the Tang period to the fruition Greek, Middle Eastern, Indian, Persian, nomadic, and numerous smaller cultures of seeds planted during vigorous intercul“Chinese,” but tural exchanges when the northern tribes during Alexander’s rule and later. Hence, one of the richest ruled upper China. Because of the rich flux the Mahayanist iconography of the historic examples of of multicultural inspiration reaching China Buddha and the concept of a pantheon of intercultural fusion then, the dominance of orthodox Confumany different buddhas and bodhisattvas cianism began to yield to Taoism and Budderives from Central Asian fusion. These in world history. dhism, and Chinese writers stopped their cultural influences moved both westward rote imitation of past masters. Fresh influences nurtured a and eastward. Nimbus imagery around the heads of Buddha cultivation of uninhibited, individualistic, and even eccentric and bodhisattvas corresponds to halos in European Christian originality among Chinese writers including Li Po and Tu Fu, iconography through a shared Eurasian heritage. whose brilliant poetry of this era would later fire the imagiBy Tang times, traders, itinerant musicians, spiritual seeknations of medieval Japanese aristocrats in Nara and Kyoto. ers, and other travelers created interactive streams of culture Even before the Tang era, countless cultural influences that moved between Damascus, Constantinople, Rome, Antifrom centuries of Silk Road trade permeated China. In the och, Alexandria, and Samarkand, further intermixing in the fourth century bce, Alexander the Great’s conquest of Central Eurasian caravan and oasis towns deeper into the Silk Roads.

Asia, Persia, and North India brought many brilliant cultures In East Asia, these streams converged in Chang’an, as the imperial western capital of the Tang dynasty and far eastof this region in close contact with Mediterranean ways of life. The result: spontaneous intercultural fusion at the edges ern center of Afro-Eurasian trade. During the eighth century, of the Chinese empire that would ultimately change the face of

Chang’an was the largest, wealthiest, and most advanced city in the world — a precursor to today’s “global” cities.

Especially among the cosmopolitan elite, multicultural style was “in.” The wealthy wore Turkish hairstyles, followed the Persian fashion of tight bodices and sleeves, and ate fusion cuisine — mixing Silk Road spices and cooking techniques.

The royal court of Imperial China permanently hosted at least ten foreign orchestras, composed of mostly Central Asian musicians. The Chinese enthusiastically embraced Turkish folksingers, Eurasian stories and fairytales, Cambodian dancers, and foreign sports, including polo, introduced by trendsetting Persians.

Students came from Korea’s Three Kingdoms, Japan, Turfan and Tibet to study Confucianism, Buddhism, literature, art and architecture at the National Academy. The lingua franca of the East Asian educated elite was written Chinese. Around two thousand Japanese went to China as overseas monastic students. A few Japanese expats became permanent residents in China, competing with Chinese in civil service examinations, adopting Chinese names and serving the Tang court.

Although it is commonly believed nowadays that ancient and medieval Japanese “borrowed” culture from “China,” this view is somewhat misleading in that it treats these cultures as singular and discrete entities, and does not acknowledge the crucial process of historical intercultural fusion, or the intimacy of these encounters. With the aid of early medieval multilingual exchange students, government officials, and expatriate monks, artists, and scribes, Nara’s leaders modeled themselves after Tang society, a culture that was not simply “Chinese,” but one of the richest examples of intercultural fusion in world history.

From Chang’an, travelers brought Silk Road culture to the port of Hakata in Kyushu, the gateway to the early Japanese state. From Hakata, the same roads and Inland Sea water-

ways that had earlier brought immigrants (many of them wartime and religious refugees), student returnees, visitors, books, ideas, art works, flowers, fruits, teas, foods, music, fabrics, visual motifs and philosophies to the former capital in Asuka, Fujiwara-kyo, also brought the latest Tang ideas and artifacts to the new capital, Nara, in breathtaking waves.

During the eighth century, the kiku (the chrysanthemum, symbol of the imperial family) — the koto, a stringed musical instrument — the biwa, a lute, originally from Persia and Arabia — and somen, wheat noodles — all came from China to Japan. The board game, Go, also arrived, but was only played by the aristocracy until the thirteenth century, when it became popularized, following the dissemination pattern of most traditional Japanese culture, including Buddhism — originating as an overseas import accessible only to the rich and powerful, and then with the passage of time eventually filtering down to Japanese society throughout the archipelago.

This cosmopolitan spirit was forever memorialized by one of the Tang dynasty’s greatest poets, Po Chu-I [Bai Juyi], describing the wondrous masked dance dramas from Central Asia that found their way to Japan during this era.

The rhythms and motifs from those ancient performances live on in the lion dance still performed today, leading off folk festivals in Japan: Skilled dancers from Xiliang Persian masks and lion masks.

The heads are carved of wood, The tails are woven with thread.

Pupils are flecked with gold And teeth capped with silver.

They wave fur costumes And flap their ears As if from across the drifting sands Ten thousand miles away.

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of

“Tough and weathered, clad in leathers and skins, the muleteers spent most of their lives in perpetual motion, ferrying goods to and from, winding their way in disciplined ranks through dozens of cultures and over dizzying peaks. Their exploits had rarely been heard of…theirs was an oral history, the memories kept alive by the tongues of a handful of survivors.”

— The Ancient Tea Horse Road

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PHOTO:: JEFF FUCHS

Bonds, ‘the word’ and trade

written by:

Jeff Fuchs

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There are ‘ no straight lines through the mountains.’

This ‘truth’ rumbles out of Lobsang’s mouth, a mouth that seems as unyielding and direct as the words that pass through it. I have heard these words before from ancient traders who still remember a time when mule and camel caravans, wound their way to and from the great market towns of Asia and the Middle East. The words are a testament to the astonishing geographies involved and gives an inkling of the character necessary to pass unscathed along the ancient trade routes.

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had to understand very quickly the informal ways and honor codes of the tribes.

For over a millennium traders have forged, suffered and given life along the globe’s great tradeways, hauling trinkets, essentials — anything that could be transported — thousands of kilometers through some of nature’s most unforgiving terrain.

Whether winding through rippled black folds of the Himalayas or meandering through wind blown taupe deserts, both the risks and ‘profits’ of trade were great. Along these trade routes, through isolated cultures and landscapes these ‘journeys’ joined peoples, products and ideas across huge lands like a giant rosary. It is perhaps this role as unofficial ‘joiner’ that the routes played, that has gone flickering, barely noticed.

Geographies are given lifeblood by the peoples that inhabit them and it was the peoples that more often than not, defined the ‘success’ (or not) of both the caravans and more importantly, trade itself. Relationships, bonds and that almost forgotten virtue, honor, were crucial along the almost mythical trade routes.

Crucial enough for traders to refer to an oft quoted ‘mountain maxim’ and philosophy, when describing voyages: “Cooperate or perish.”

While scholars and history have painstakingly noted the sheer numbers and statistics of trade; the precious cargoes, distances and economics, there is seldom mention of that wonderfully understated intangible, that allowed for thousands of years of uninhibited travel: relationships. Before an agreement was made, a relationship was sought. Banditry, intrigue and bloodshed existed and rash greed always hovered in the minds of men. Ultimately though, codes of conduct prevailed along routes because without them the long links and economies themselves would founder. Trade needed, beyond any other single element, these unwritten codes. In the magnificent and brutal lands that constituted the frontiers, power rested with

PHOTOs:: JEFF FUCHS

Deep black lines criss-cross Lobsang’s face, a face both ravaged and enlightened by the earth’s elements. Soulful eyes that are calm and fearless stare out. He is a being who has been shaped by another time. Lobsang, through almost eight decades has been trader, muleteer and observer, bearing witness to nature’s mighty forces and human frailties. His long languid body, still powerful hands and a brutally self-sufficient face reflect a life spent in the magnificent and furious eye of mountains, sun and of movement.

His character reveal something rare in the modern rush.

“In the days of trade people needed people. This has changed.”

This observation is made without judgment but with a voice that is convinced of what it says. It seems that he is incapable of speaking with anything but almost numbing metaphorical clarity. Lobsang should know, as in his time he has ushered caravans along the musk and medicine routes in Xingjiang and Tibet and traded the length of the salt routes of eastern Tibet, which reached up to the Silk Road. He has plodded along most of the six thousand kilometer length of the mighty Tea Horse Road through China, Tibet, India and Nepal.

We sit tucked into his small stone hut, speaking of a time when words meant something, when words were expected to intimate behavior. At 4,200 meters, all is close and immediate, with a wind that screams and threatens to throw us into the nearby peaks. China’s western frontier province of Qinghai (Amdo) is famous for its winter winds and sturdy tribes. Lobsang is of the few ‘ancient’ traders left to recount the ‘human’ side of trade, upon which the ‘business’ of trade depended. On my own travels through the nomadic regions to find these last relics of the physical age of voyage, there is often this forceful reminder of trade’s inextricable link to community.

In the ‘frontier’ lands which caravans inevitably had to forge through on their voyages, a trader, caravan — anyone, one

relationships. Months’ long journeys, like many of life’s great efforts, required more than material incentives and monetary rewards to complete; they needed the generosity of hosts and a unity of purpose. Traders, leaders, handlers, taxmen, and indigenous dwellers were all privy to these agreements.

Throughout Asia, trust in the individual overrides trust in the institution, and to this day remains true. Relationships thrived or broke apart based upon trust, and in the spirit of that personal approach, the finicky business of trade was no different along the trade corridors. Nothing supported this informal claim more than the words I would hear while trekking along a portion of a trade road in northern Tibet in the hallucinatory spaces of the Nyanqentanglha Mountains. Yet another ancient muleteer speaking in the informal way ‘oral cultures’ summed up his disgust with the observation of the modern world’s character saying,“What strange times we live in now, where a handshake and someone’s word mean nothing; where people need a paper contract to trust an oath.”

Words and sharing sealed ‘deals’. A cup of tea often bound a ‘contract’, as to share the fluid was the equivalent of an ‘oral signature’. “An old saying hinted at tea’s importance in the lives of the mountain people: ‘Yak butter tea is a more lasting possession than a son.’ The sharing of tea was considered binding, cups of the thick liquid taking the place of signatures.

When tea wasn’t offered, it was a sure sign that there would be no relationship.” (P. 29, The Ancient Tea Horse Road) Traders, government representatives and outsiders sat down with locals and shared a cup, a meal and a conversation and then discussions could begin about crossing lands unscathed, but not before. As much as trade has been the dominion of colonial powers, rarely were feudal warlords, nomads or indigenous peoples not pivotal in the link.

One brash saying of Xinjiang in northwestern China, the abode of Uygers, Tibetans, Kazakhs and Mongols, speaks to this: “Trade originated in the lands in between.” Without the links, no ends could meet.

Even the binding cup of tea supports the essential informality of an agreement in the times of trade. Tea, an exotic item, brought from far away; a tender leaf of infinite value from lands never seen, shared between strangers — often enough to ensure a safe passage. Salts, medicines, items of trade were often imparted to hosts and towns that provided hospitality as they had far more worth than any monetary commodities. Many of the traders who lived and died along the great trade routes were illiterate with no need to sign anything, as a verbal agreement was an agreement that carried weight; the weight of one’s honor and that of one’s entire family, and the weight of accountability. The temporal nature of trade ironically, was bound to that which was eternal, the word.

Buddhism too aided and spread its touch along routes because of its emphasis on compassion and peace — both requisites to keeping trade (and humans) alive and harmonious.

Just as precious items of trade passed along the routes, so too did reputations and gossip. Bodies and trade items would come and go but one’s word was like the skin, it remained with one. Rough, dusty and worn traders were often treated with deference, with a kind of awe. After all it was they who were the brave conduits of products and tales. One of the rarely mentioned qualities of the ancient trade routes was their unofficial role as a ‘connector’ of peoples and ideas. For centuries, exotic treats from leagues away, tales of distant cultures and customs funneled into isolated communities, giving remote villages and communities a hint, a whiff of the lands beyond their own.

Along with economies, a knowledge of the ‘outside world’ developed, a sense of what lie beyond view, making the trade routes funnels of education. While nations might simply be referred to as ‘the lands under the mountains’ or ‘the peoples beyond two deserts,’ the fact that it was known at all to the isolated peoples so distant is amazing. Communities hidden from all knew by way of the caravans that there was a grand breadth of life and land beyond the hovering horizons.

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Tang v dynasty v time S As important as trade was, thieving, deception and murder was alive and well and not that every word or promise held, but for those that went against these codes, these pledges, punishment was (just as the people and land were) swift and unambiguous. During a trek along the shattered remains of an archaic salt route in eastern Tibet, I would hear a blunt declaration supporting this claim of the sanctity of trade and its tributaries. The bearer of these words was another of the ‘ancients’ who inevitably struck me as part warrior, part philosopher. His insight was remarkably keen despite a vertical scar that bisected his brow: “One could war and kill, steal and undermine — these things are inevitable, but to disturb the trade caravans was to invite instant death and eternal suffering. Tampering with the caravans was tampering with the very links and relationships of man, as it was not only the goods one disturbed, it was the harmony. It was an unforgivable sin. It has been like this since trade began.”

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The Road to Oxiana The almond groves of Samarqand, Bokhara, where red lilies blow.

And Oxus, by whose yellow sand The grave white-turbaned merchants go — Oscar Wilde A thousand years before the infamous “Great Game,” the name given to the intense rivalry that existed at the turn of the century between Czarist Russia and Victorian England for supremacy in Central Asia, there was another “Great Game.”This older rivalry occurred between the Chinese, the Arabs, the Tibetans, and the Turkish peoples.

The region they were fighting for was the same old stretch of land — one that has somehow remained right smack in the middle of everything for a millenium.

Such was China’s greatness under the Tang dynasty that none save the Arabs to the West were said to rival her. Rome had long been overrun, and for all intents and purposes Byzantium was in a state of great decline. The Arabs — in what was a stunning rise to power — after toppling the Persian Sassanian dynasty in 637, had turned their attention to the East.

Despite the astonishing speed at which the countries of the Middle East came under the power of the Arabs and Islam, the nations of Central Asia, which had long been part of the Persian sphere of influence, proved to be a much tougher nut to crack. As the Arabs made increasing encroachments into areas long considered by the Chinese to be part of their sphere of influence (particularly Transoxiana) the Chinese and Arabs increasingly clashed along China’s western borders.

The Chinese, however, also had to contend with the Tibetan Empire (which had reached its zenith during Tang times) to the southwest and various nomadic peoples (such as the Turkish Uighurs and Mongols) with their shifting alliances and shifting moods to the north as well.

Perhaps what is most surprising, as Susan Whitfield points out in her fascinating book, Life Along the Silk Road, is that these empires and super-powers clashed in places that were not only thousands of miles from their home bases, but were in some of the most remote spots on earth.The battles occurred almost exclusively on frozen mountain terrain or in desolate and burning deserts.

Of course, skirmishes like this continue today. We still see India, China, and Pakistan (among others) wrestling for control of a Himalayan peak 17,000 feet above sea level, or some stretch of highway in the desert, following strategic foreign policy that is as old as the silk road.

It is the terrain that perhaps more than anything defines Central Asia. In addition to being dominated by some of the highest mountain ranges on earth, the area is also home to some of the most deadly deserts and lifeless basin areas. Completely landlocked, it is a land of great extremes. Through this rough terrain, two great rivers flow north — down from the mountains into the Aral Sea.These rivers are the lifeblood of the people.

PHOTO:: JEFF FUCHS

In the present time when so much ‘established’ order is legitimately doubted, when written contracts and ethics seem almost contradictory, it is perhaps time to revisit or at least pay homage to the ‘old ways’ and a time when one sat down with a tea, a meal and took that magic word, ‘time’, with people. Trade along the great routes continued unabated for thousands of years functioning because of economic necessity, and a collective understanding of the need to keep it alive and vital. But it also thrived due to relationships.

A sweet irony that the tenacious men and women who traded, lived and loved along the great trade routes, knew and managed so well through the centuries, spoke and do still speak of that elusive quality of ‘character’.

Again the words of a trader to speak to the bonds that held people in times far more difficult than now: “Tell the tale of these ancient highways and remind people that for thousands of years man and the land had an unending relationship that depended on good will and guile. People forget how much was risked, to bring goods from one land to another. They forget how much we once needed each other.”

Might be time to remember those wise words once again.

Leanne Ogasawara’s blog, HYPERLINK “http://www.tangdynastytimes.com” was the catalyst for this special themed issue of KJ. In posts that read as dispatches from outposts on a journey of exploration deep into the history of relations between East and West, she reflects on aspects of what a truly global culture might encompass, presenting Tang multiculturalism and Silk Road cosmopolitanism (and much, much more) as reference points for our present times...

www.tangdynastytimes.com

PHOTO : THE SYR DAVYA RIVER, BY SHAVKAT KHOLMATOV

Forming a natural border between Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, and between Tajikistan and Afghanistan, is the Amu Darya.The river is known locally as the Jayhoun, which is thought to be derived from Gihon — one of the four rivers of the Garden of Eden.The West knows it by its Classical Greek name, the Oxus. The other river, the Syr Darya, further to the east, flows the great length of Central Asia from the Krgyz Republic; briefly into Uzbekistan and then through Kazakhstan. This river is also commonly referred to by its ancient Greek name, the Jaxartes — being perhaps most famous as the northernmost point of Alexander the Great’s conquests in the East.

From ancient Greek times, the land between these rivers was known as Transoxiana — or Oxiana.

Associated in Western minds perhaps primarily with Alexander the Great, the area was long dominated by Persian peoples. Because of the hybrid Persian /Greek /Buddhist culture that flourished there, Western art historians sometimes refer to the area as Serindia. A made-up name, it is used to distinguish the hugely cosmopolitan hybrid classical art of the land between the rivers.

It was not far from the Syr Darya that the decisive Battle of Talas took place in 751. This five day clash is one of the most important battles of the East (and yet few in the West have even heard of it!). The Arabs in their push eastward (into lands previously held by the Persians) were seriously encroaching on China’s strategic Silk Road Garrisons. Something had to be done, so the Emperor sent out his best forces under the leadership of the famed Korean commander Gao Xianshi. who had made a career out engaging with China’s enemies to the West. Inflicting defeat on Turks,Tibetans and Arabs, the battles were fought almost exclusively in the dazzlingly high Pamir Mountains.

Neither side wanted war, as it would interrupt what had for centuries been the incredibly lucrative trade of luxury items that passed through Transoxiana. Silk was the most famous item traded, but passing from the West through Oxiana on its way East was the lucrative trade in furs, amber, honey and walrus ivory from Eastern Europe. Both had other enemies to contend with as well. Emissaries were dispatched to each other’s capitals to negotiate — yet they were on an inevitable collision course.

The underlying cause of the Battle actually had nothing whatsoever to do with Chinese-Arab relations, but rather was caused by tensions with Tibet and a local feud between two small Central Asian Kingdoms.

The Tibetans at the time not only had a highly sophisticated culture but they also had a strong military — a military which was on the move.They had caused China no end of troubles with their incursions further and further North (into areas long considered under Chinese suzerainty).

To stave off any further ambitions, China established alliances with the Kingdoms to their rear in Kashmir and in the Pamirs. But, things came to a head when the King of the Kingdom of Gilgit announced himself as being pro-Tibetan. The Chinese had had enough and sent in their Commander of the Mountains, Gao Xianshi.

Swooping down on the enemy in a surprise attack, he destroyed the bridges into the Kingdom thereby cutting off help expected from the Tibetans, and before any allies could arrive to fight alongside them, Gao had cut off the heads of the King and his advisers. And that was that.

Commander Gao became the Military Governor of the region, including Kucha and Kashmir, and from that base, China kept a hand in all that went on in the area. It seemed that an uneasy alliance between the Tibetans and Chinese, as well as the Chinese and Arabs had been formed, until a petty feud between two Kings further north in Transoxiana brought things to a head again.This time, it wasn’t just the Tibetans either, but the Arabs who were also said to have played a role, when the King of Ferghana was deposed with the alleged help of both the Tibetans and Arabs.

The deposed King escaped to Kucha where he requested help from his old ally Commander Gao, who was still there as Military Governor. In the process of re-installing the King, Gao led massacres in three towns in Sogdiana, which were increasingly closer to the Arab-controlled regions.

Sensing that the time had come to put the Chinese in their place, the Abbassid Governor in Khorasan mobilized his army. Marching from Merv, they crossed the Oxus, heading straight for Kashgar.The two Titans finally collided on the banks of the Talas River, in Kyrgystan. During the encounter, the Arabs achieved a stunning victory which they credit to superior strategy. The Chinese, for their part, blame defection of their allies part way through the battle.

While it was neither excessively long or bloody, the Battle of Talas remains the battle people talk about. Arab sites give it an almost jihad-ish flavor as the battle which caused the “infidels to take flight.” And both sides seem to agree that if the Battle had gone the other way, it would have been China, not Islam which would have been the great influence Central Asia. For with this battle, the lines were finally drawn in the sand: Turkestan belonged to the Arabs, and China thereafter withdrew to its garrisons in the Tarim Basin.

Nobody, of course, thinks that this one battle was the sole reason for the Chinese withdraw East of the Pamirs, but it became the last nail in the coffin of the Tang dynasty as the event that heralded the infamous An Lushan Rebellion (755–763).

It is said to have been the only time in history that the Arabs and Chinese fought, but the Battle of Talas was to have a profound impact on world history. As mention above, Chinese expansion West was firmly stopped at the Pamirs, and Central Asia would forever after be influenced

by Arab and Islamic (Persian) culture. In addition, at the battle’s end, Chinese paper-making artisans were kidnapped and brought back to the new Abbasid capital at Baghdad. At last, the mysteries of paper-making were unlocked. It was thanks to this technical know-how that the Arab empire embarked on what was a huge cultural enterprise to translate and propagate Greek philosophy, mathematics, and medicine.

Without this Arab effort, the great riches of Classical Greek culture would have been lost forever as Medieval Europe had turned its back on its classical past.The work of Aristotle was most famously preserved under the Arabs, but so too was Euclidean geometry and Alexandrian astronomy. Knowledge was not only preserved, but was also refined and re-worked into the great body of knowledge and culture which was propagated during the Arab golden age. For example. classical mathematical theory formed the basis of algebra, which was pioneered during the Golden Age of the Abbasinian dynasty.

Whether intentional or not, French philosophers (and occasional Japanese) again and again urge us not to forget the pivotal role the Abbasids in Baghdad (with great Persian influence) — as well as the Muslim philosophers and scholars of al-Andalus — had on the Renaissance that occurred in Europe not long after. From the East, the Arabs received the technical achievements of the Chinese and Indians, and from the West, they took the body of Western Classical culture. They then dedicated themselves to preserving and expanding this body of knowledge. It was philosophers like Averroes and Avicenna who kept the light of philosophy and mathematics, physics and medicine burning brightly in what was a great cauldron of intellectual activity centered on Baghdad.

It seems at times — whether one is interested in the achievements of the East or of the West — that all roads truly lead to Oxiana; as Oxiana, perhaps more than anywhere on earth, has been a land that has stood at the crossroads of civilizations.

— Leanne Ogasawara

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T H E G r e at

Kashgar BUS Convoy in t he fall of 1992

Finn Wilcox and I set out on the Silk Road from its eastern terminus in Sian/Xian. Four weeks later, we were sitting in the lobby of the Chini Bagh Hotel in Kashgar. We had traveled as far west in China as we could go and were waiting for word on how to proceed to our final destination, which was Islamabad. The Karakoram Highway was the only road there, and it had been closed by landslides more than a month. And there were no flights. * written by:

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Red Pine

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T

day. But we left. As we followed the old city wall west out of The Chini Bagh was where the old British Consulate used to be. The former Russian Consulate was down the street town, no one said a word. No one believed it was actually masquerading as the West Gate Hotel. A hundred years happening. We expected to turn back any moment. But we earlier, when Russia, Britain and China vied for control of kept going.

Central Asia, these two consulates, along with the local ChiOnce we were out of Kashgar, we entered a landscape barnese yamen, housed the principal adversaries in what became ren of everything but rocks and began following the Ghez known as the Great Game. During the heady days of impeRiver upstream into a long, narrow valley of wine-red sandrialist expansion, the empires of China, Russia and Britain stone cliffs that rose straight out of the river. As the road all met in Kashgar. For its part, China had preceded its rivals wound higher and higher onto the Pamir Plateau, my altimthere by 200 years, but Moscow was just as close as Beijing, eter went from 1,300 meters to 3,200. After struggling over and Delhi was a lot closer than either. our first pass, the driver stopped, and all the Pakistanis got But the Great Game was over, and Kashgar was once again out, washed their feet in the icy stream at the side of the road, a city of merchants, especially Pakistani merchants. The Chini unrolled their prayer mats, faced Mecca, and joined us in Bagh was where most of them stayed, because it was from the praying for our bus.

Chini Bagh that the chartered buses left that took them and An hour or so later, our driver stopped again along the their merchandise home. The landslides that closed the only edge of a lake, this time for a bladder break. The Pakistanis road to Pakistan had been a disaster for them. Many had to were all dressed in their knee-length kameez shirts and squatresort to reselling what they had bought in Kashgar to pay for ted to pee, while Finn and I stood. But we all gazed in admiraanother meal or another night at the Chini Bagh. tion at what was one of the most beautiful scenes in China: The Pakistani sitting next to us said his government was the snowy peaks of 7,700-meter Mount Kongur and 7,500planning to charter several 747s to take him and his countrymeter Muztagh Ata shimmering in the breathless waters of men home, although he didn’t know when. Another Pakistani Lake Karakul. During the summer, the surrounding grasslands were dotted with the yurts and herds of the Kirghiz cautioned patience, the road would re-open in a few more days. But a Pakistani tour operator wandering the lobby said nomads who lived in that part of China. But it was fall, and it was too dangerous, an American girl who tried to cross one they had moved to lower pastures. of the landslides had died the previous day, and the Chinese An hour later the sun set behind the Pamirs, and any warmth that lingered in the bus soon disappeared. To take authorities were telling everyone the road wouldn’t re-open for months, if at all. the chill off, I reached into my pack and pulled out the first While the Pakistanis continued trading rumors — and in of two bottles of Chinese brandy. We were rolling along at truth they didn’t have anything better to do, we finished our an elevation of over 3,600 meters in what was Tajik territory. beers and decided the hell with it. We walked down the street And we didn’t stop rolling until ten o’clock, when we pulled to buy plane tickets back to Sian via the provincial capital of into the town of Tashkorgan.

Urumchi. But by the time we reached the local airline office, When Ptolemy described the limits of the known world in the front door was locked. A sign said, “Closed for lunch.” the second century A.D., he called Tashkorgan the westernWe decided to wait and joined another foreigner sitting in the most town in the Land of Silk, which was what the Greeks shade. He was from Australia. Like us, he was waiting to buy called China in those days. In those days, the inhabitants of a ticket to Urumchi to spare himself the agony of the threeTashkorgan were called Sarikolis, after the river that flowed day bus ride. But unlike us, he hadn’t come through the town. The Sarikolis were Tajiks, from Urumchi. He said he had just arrived and unlike other groups that migrated into the area, the Sarikolis depended on agriculfrom Islamabad.

Instead of What? Islamabad? Wasn’t the road ture and trade instead of herding. And Tashstopping to inspect closed? Well, yes and no. He said there were korgan was their capital. The name meant the damage, the landslides all right, but there were trucks “stone fortress,” and its ancient ruins, we driver stepped on and vans waiting to carry people to the next were told, were on a hillside south of town.

But we arrived at night. slide. That was all we needed to hear, and the gas… Around back we went to the Chini Bagh to spread After ten hours on the road, all we the next bend, the the news. Apparently we weren’t the only could think of was a meal and a bed. As we road was blocked ones to meet a recent arrival from south of checked into the bus station hotel, the girl by dozens of the border. We no sooner returned to the at the desk told us the road ahead was still hotel than the front desk announced the blocked by landslides. The slides, she said, boulders, some of sale of bus tickets. A convoy was leaving were all on the Pakistan side, and we were them bigger than the next morning. All the Pakistanis sitting still a hundred kilometers short of the borour bus. in the lobby rushed to the counter. As luck der. The girl added that nothing bigger than would have it, we just happened to be standa bicycle had made it through for the past ing there and managed to come up with the forty days and that we would have to walk first two tickets. They weren’t cheap at 150 RMB, or 30 bucks sixty kilometers to get through all the slides. She laughed at apiece, but they were tickets on a bus heading south. the idea of our convoy making it.

And sure enough, early the next morning two hundred We sighed at the thought of the road ahead. The road we Pakistanis began loading what was left of their merchandise were traveling was the Karakorum Highway, named for the onto the roofs of the five buses that made up the convoy. It mountain range it cut through on the Pakistan side. Trade took three hours to load it all, and we didn’t leave until midroutes had passed through these mountains since Neolithic

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PHOTO (previous page & this page);: Red Pine

times, but this was the first road. Work on it began in the 1960s when China and Pakistan decided to patch up their differences to counter improving ties between India and Russia. When the Chinese took over Tibet in the 1950s, they also claimed extensive areas of Northern India and Pakistan — and still do. But in the early 1960s, when the Pakistanis held out an olive branch, the Chinese grabbed it and ceded 2,000 square kilometers of disputed territory and agreed to cooperate on a cross-border highway.

The highway took 30,000 Pakistanis and Chinese twenty years to build and cost more than a thousand lives. It was first opened to official traffic and cross-border trade in 1982 and to tourism in 1986. Since then, it had been closed periodically by landslides, but never for more than a few days — at least not until we showed up. But we had other concerns than the road ahead. We were famished.

Thankfully, someone from the Chini Bagh had called ahead, and the hotel restaurant was still open. I have no memory of what we ate. But while were digesting whatever it was we ordered, the electricity suddenly went off. Before we could do anything more than stare helplessly into the dark, the hotel staff reappeared just as suddenly bearing candles and started handing them out. The town, they said, turned off the juice every night at twelve. Fortunately, we were done with dinner, and once we found our way to our rooms, we were asleep within minutes.

The next morning, we rose with the sun and got ready to face another day of Silk Road uncertainty. But when we went outside, the buses were gone. What the hell? We rushed back inside to find out why they had left without us. Our dis-

tress was short-lived. The woman at the front desk said they had gone to fill up with gas, they would be back in an hour, which they were. Finally, just after ten o’clock, we resumed our journey.

From Tashkorgan, the road continued up a wide valley whose only signs of life was the occasional herd of horses or yaks or camels. Two hours later, we arrived at the Chinese border post of Pirali where we had to clear immigration.

No vehicles had been through in over a month, and no one was expecting us. It took another two hours to round up the proper officials with the requisite keys and appropriate chops, which seemed especially mysterious since there were only four small buildings. Apparently, everyone was sleeping, and after they woke up, they had to have lunch.

We milled around outside in the frigid wind and waited.

Finally, a Chinese official came out and told us they weren’t going to let us through because the pass was still closed by landslides on the Pakistan side, and we would just have to come back, and no one had a re-entry visa. That was when the negotiations began. A group of Pakistani elders followed the official back inside, while we continued to huddle outside.

Two hours later, a few snowflakes drifted out of the sky.

But just as they did, the Pakistani elders came outside waving our passports. The Chinese authorities had agreed to let us through with the understanding that none of us would be allowed back should the Khunjerab Pass prove impassable. As one of the border guards lifted the barrier to let us through, someone tossed out a string of firecrackers to scare off any ghosts we might have picked up along the way. Everyone cheered and/or thanked Allah, and we began our final push

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PHOTO: Red Pine

toward the highest pass through which mankind has managed to build a road.

The elevation of the Khunjerab Pass was over 4,600 meters, or 15,000 feet, in what botanists called the frigid zone. During the summer, the snow melted just long enough for wild flowers to bloom, then it was back to winter. Khunjerab was Tajik for “Blood Valley.” The name came from the blood of the packhorses through whose muzzles their owners drove nails to relieve the pressure from the altitude. Early Western travelers noted the blood-stained rocks that lined the way to the pass. But all we saw was snow.

From Pirali, it took us an hour to wind our way up the last, broad slopes of the Pamirs. The sign at the pass said 4,700 meters. My own altimeter put it at a shade over 4,600.

The sign also said, “Welcome to Pakistan.” As we drove by it, two hundred Pakistanis and a dozen foreigners cheered. Just below the pass, we stopped at a military checkpoint. It consisted of two lonesome cement huts in the middle of a snowfield. A Pakistani soldier came out. He was wearing a beret and a commando sweater and boots. He actually looked like a soldier. His uniform fitted, unlike the one-size-fits-all outfits worn by his Chinese counterparts at Pirali.

After checking our passports and visas, the guard smiled and waved, and he kept waving until we disappeared into the dark gorge cut by the Khunjerab River through the Karakorums where we began a series of switchbacks that took us from 4,600 meters to 3,000 meters in a matter of minutes.

In Turkish, kara meant “black” and korum meant “loose rock.” And the road was, indeed, an obstacle course of boulders. But at least we were in Pakistan, and everyone was smil-

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ing. Then, just as we rounded a bend, there was a crash, and the whole bus shuddered. A large boulder just missed one of the windows and hit the side of the vehicle.

Instead of stopping to inspect the damage, the driver stepped on the gas, and we didn’t look back. We didn’t have time to look back. Around the next bend, the road was blocked by dozens of boulders, some of them bigger than our bus. Suddenly, we realized why no vehicles had made it through in more than a month.

We all piled out: half a dozen Westerners, half a dozen Chinese, and two hundred Pakistanis. As we walked around and inspected the situation, it didn’t look good. And no amount of walking around made it look any better. Still, we had to do something, so we began filling in holes with the smaller rocks and rolling the boulders into the gorge. Some of them took two or three men to move, others took a dozen. But there was one that even two hundred Pakistanis couldn’t budge.

While we were all standing there wondering what to do next, the Chinese official in charge of the convoy told everyone to get back into the buses. He was turning the convoy around and taking us back to China. We could wait, he said, in Tashkorgan until the road could be cleared or new entry visas could be arranged.

While the Pakistanis were feigning ignorance of Chinese, and the Chinese official was trying to get the other Westerners to translate, Finn and I walked over to the big boulder that blocked the road. We picked up two good-sized rocks and banged them against its side. A chunk of the boulder fell off.

We hit it again, and another chunk fell off. After a few more hits, two Pakistanis came over and joined us, then two more,

for this. This would have never happened in China with Chiand two more. Pretty soon there were about fifty of us banging away at a boulder the size of a house. But the house was nese passengers. Who did these Pakistanis think they were? getting smaller. And with each disappearing chunk another This was mutiny. It was a stand-off is what it was. And the cheer rose from the onlookers. Then, as the echo of the cheers Chinese official blinked first. died away, everyone suddenly stopped. Rocks were falling on Once he realized the untenable nature of his position, he the other side of the gorge. We all looked up at our side. There told the drivers to turn off their engines, and the mutineers wasn’t much sunlight left, and we wouldn’t have seen anycheered. Then we all gathered back around the brushwood fires and warmed ourselves with hot tea and fried nan, our thing until it hit us anyway. We went back to work. Finally, one huge chunk fell off the boulder, and everyone gathered first meal since leaving Tashkorgan, supplied by our Pakistani around to measure the distance between the boulder and the bus-mates. Afterwards, we returned to the work of clearing edge of the cliff that formed the other side of the road. There the road. But this time, we weren’t alone. The Pakistani solwas just enough room for a bus, with about a foot to spare. diers stationed inside the guardhouse joined us, and they had dynamite. Whenever we came to a boulder too big to budge, Unfortunately, four of the five bus drivers were Chinese, and none of them were willing to risk it. But the lone Pakistani we crouched down and covered our ears, while they blew it to driver agreed to try. We all held our breaths. He scraped off smithereens. They said they hadn’t bothered doing this earlier some paint, but he made it. Once again two hundred cheers because no buses had ventured into Pakistan from China for over a month. shook a few more rocks loose from the cliffs. The other buses quickly followed, while they could, and we all got back on and And so we proceeded down the Khunjerab Gorge, clearcontinued into one of the longest nights of our lives. ing the road as we went. Around noon we blew our way past As we rumbled on, stopping periodically to roll away boulthe Pakistani military camp at Dih and continued another ders, the sun went down. As it did, the first bus turned on its six kilometers to where the road finally ceased to exist. This headlights, while the other drivers followed behind holding was where the American girl had died a few days earlier. She flashlights out their windows. I know it sounds ridiculous, but was walking across the slide that erased the road with several they thought they would drain their batteries if they turned friends when a boulder came careening down the mountain. on their headlights. But it didn’t matter. We were just inching Her friends jumped out of the way, but she froze. The boulder along anyway. And it wasn’t only dark, it was freezing, and hit her in the chest, and she died instantly. it began to snow.

The slide was so extensive the only way forward was to Around nine o’clock we finally reached a place where the leave our buses behind, cross the gorge on a log bridge, hike gorge opened up just enough for a military guard post and over a mountain, re-cross the gorge downstream, and re-join the road on the other side of the slide. where we could park far enough from the cliffs so we wouldn’t have to worry about being crushed by a boulder during the Several dozen men from nearby mountain villages were night. And that was where we spent the night, in the bus, waiting to help passengers with their luggage. They were askshivering and wondering if we would ever see the dawn. We ing 300 rupees, or 15 dollars to carry two bags. couldn’t feel our toes, and we hadn’t eaten all day. At least Finn and I demurred and strapped on our rucksacks and Finn and I were able to share the huge coat Finn had purtiptoed across. The bridge consisted of a series of logs lashed chased at a Mongol trading post on the Bayanbulak Plateau together and a guide wire to hold onto. It looked more danthe week before. It must have had a whole sheep on the inside. gerous than it was. But once across, we started up one of the steepest slopes either of us had ever But even beneath our sheep, we shivered all climbed. For every two steps forward, we night. And it was a long night. slid one step back, sending dirt and rocks As soon as there was a glimmer of gold the only way on the western cliffs, a few passengers went into the faces of those unlucky enough to be forward was to outside and gathered some brush from along below us. It was slow, arduous going, but we leave our buses the river that cut through the gorge. Before finally made it. behind, cross the long, they had a fire going. One by one the Going down the other side was a lot easier, but re-crossing the gorge wasn’t. rest of us struggled out of our seats and into gorge on a log the frigid morning air to warm our frostThis time the bridge consisted of a series of bridge, hike over wooden planks laid end to end but with no bitten toes. Sometime during the night the a mountain, resnow stopped falling and the sky cleared. guide wire to hold onto. The Pakistanis in cross the gorge About the time everyone was standing front of us crawled across and still almost around outside wondering what was next, fell. But we had rucksacks strapped to our downstream, and the Chinese official in charge of our conbacks and had no choice but to walk across. re-join the road on voy asked me to tell the Pakistanis that the As we stepped onto the planks, we could the other side… road ahead was impassable. He was turnsee the water swirling below us. We looked straight ahead instead and started walking. ing the convoy around and heading back to the Chinese border. I reluctantly relayed his The last few steps were pure luck, but we didn’t argue with luck. We collapsed onto what was left of message in English, and my English was rendered into Urdu.

The drivers meanwhile started up their engines. But the the road and congratulated ourselves on getting past yet one Pakistanis were furious. They weren’t about to go back to more obstacle on the Silk Road.

China. And they made it clear they were in charge of the situaOnce we regained our composure, we hiked down the road two kilometers and past an even bigger slide. On the tion, not the Chinese. They put rocks in front of the bus wheels and refused to stand clear. The Chinese official wasn’t ready other side were half a dozen pickup trucks waiting to ferry

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rising where we had been standing when we waved to our driver. Fortunately for us, we’ve never been guilty of prolonged goodbyes.

We continued on, invincible in the midday sun. Our near deaths notwithstanding, it was a beautiful day. Halfway across the slide, we caught up to a group of Pakistanis who were also part of the convoy. They had hired local porters to carry their heavier luggage, while they carried their personal gear on their backs. We all stopped to catch our breaths and reminisce about the three days and two nights we spent together crossing the Khunjerab Pass. We shared a few mushy apples but were on our own with the remains of our Chinese brandy. We waved goodbye and continued on. Two hours later, we reached the end of the slide, where two bulldozers were at work.

Once again we climbed aboard one of the small vans waiting to take travelers as far as the next slide. But it turned out there was no next slide. The road south had been cleared. The driver was also a surprise. He was blue-eyed and fair-skinned.

He said he was from the Hunza Valley, which was where we were headed. When we asked him about his eyes and complexion, he said his ancestors had come there over 2,000 years ago. They were the remnant forces of Alexander the Great, who marched across the plains south of the Karakorums in the fourth century B.C. Less than an hour later we were there. Just past the village of Ganesh, our driver turned onto a road that snaked up the hillside to the village of Karimabad. Karimabad, he said, was where most travelers stayed in the Hunza Valley.

He dropped us off at the Park Hotel, which looked like a European pension. There were no other guests, and the owner showed us the best room in the place. It was spotless, and the beds were like clouds, and there were two huge windows.

One of them opened onto Ultar Peak. At 7,400 meters, it was 1,400 meters short of Everest. But unlike Everest, Ultar had never been climbed. It looked a white diamond set in a ring of clouds. The other window opened onto a garden of fruit trees and flowers and, briefly, the owner’s unmarried daughter washing clothes.

The owner said he normally charged 300 rupees, but since it was the off-season he would only charge us 250, or 12 dollars. And that included a big bucket of scalding hot water anytime we wanted it. It wasn’t long before we wanted it. And it wasn’t long before we wanted food, too. Less than thirty minutes after we asked, the owner led us into the dining room where we were the only diners at a table big enough for twenty and where we dined on stewed lamb and creamed spinach and potato croquettes the like of which neither of us had ever tasted. We felt like we had died and gone to heaven.

Actually, we were alive and well and in Shangri-la. The Hunza Valley it turns out was the place James Hilton had in mind when he wrote his book Lost Horizon, in which several Westerners flee a revolution in India and crash land in a valley cut off from man’s inhumanity to man and where people lead long and happy lives. The only question we had after dinner was: if we left, could we ever find our way back?

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Note: This account was edited from a series of 280 two-minute programs on the Silk Road Bill Porter wrote and produced for an English-language radio station in Hong Kong in 1992. The accompanying photographs are also his.

PHOTOS: RED PINE

travelers to another twenty kilometers away. We were so elated at having crossed the Slide of Doom, we decided not to wait for the pickup we boarded to fill up, which might have taken an hour or two considering the speed with which our fellow passengers were conveying their baggage there. We agreed to pay the “special booking fee,” as they called it, of 200 rupees, or 10 dollars. We waved for the driver to take off, and he took us at breakneck speed down what remained of the road to Sust.

Sust was where travelers went through border formalities. Before taking us to find a room for the night, our driver pulled up in front of the immigration Pakistan border post of Sust office, and we got out. The official in charge was playing bridge outside on the veranda with three other men. After trumping the last trick, he motioned for us to follow him inside. We were too dazed to sit, so we just stood there in front of his desk while he looked at our passports and visas and entered our names in his ledger. Then he stamped our passports and said, “Welcome to Pakistan.” We wanted to tell him how glad we were to be there, how much trouble we had endured to be there, but we were simply too tired. All we wanted to do was eat and sleep.

At least the Khunjerab Pass was behind us, and our passports were stamped, and we were not spending the night on the bus but at the Mountain Refuge Hotel, where a double with a hot shower cost 200 rupees. The owner’s name was Ibraham, and the hot milk-tea and fried bread and curry he made for us that night was divine.

Afterwards, we slept the sleep of the dead and could have slept for days. But we still had miles to go. The next morning, after supplying us with more hot milk-tea, Ibraham arranged a jeep for us and several other survivors of the Great Kashgar Bus Convoy. For 100 rupees, or 5 dollars apiece, the driver took us as far as the next slide, which was another sixty kilometers down the road that followed alongside the Khunjerab River.

The river’s name, though, had changed. It was now called the Hunza River, in honor of the small mountain kingdom of the same name toward which we now proceeded in pouring rain and heavy fog. Two hours later, we reached a six-kilometer-long pile of rubble that separated us from the next clear section of roadway. We braced ourselves for a long, wet slog. But just as we disembarked, the weather miraculously cleared, and for the first time since entering Pakistan, we could see the surrounding landscape.

Back when there were still dinosaurs on Earth, a huge piece of the primordial continent of Gondwanaland broke off and started migrating across the planet. Seventy million years ago, as it collided with the Asian Plate, its northern edge slipped beneath the Asian Plate’s southern edge and began lifting it up. The result of this collision, which is still going on, was the formation of the Hindu Kush, the Pamirs, the Himalayas, and the Karakorams, whose stupendous peaks we now took in. It was an unforgettable sight.

But we didn’t pause to enjoy it. We waved goodbye to our driver and began negotiating the boulders that made up the slide. We hadn’t gone more than fifty meters when we heard a loud crash behind us. We turned and saw a column of dust

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To get to the

Desert Rain coffee‑house in central Leh, you have to walk off the crowded main street that leads to the mosque and slither through a passageway to a parallel back lane, barely paved, too narrow for more than three people to pass at a time, in the process forever of being completed, so it seems, with the ruins of Leh Palace above it on a hill. You enter through an opening in the back of the building and then, in the classic Himalayan fashion, ascend a steep flight of stairs to a small second-floor space overlooking Bazaar Road. You step into it, slipping off your shoes, and enter a seeming miracle of sunlight and calm, with little tables set here and there where you can drink cappucino and browse among the books all around you.

I climbed up these steps one day in midsummer recently, on a Saturday night, for what I thought of as the “Kyoto Connection” of the Indian Himalayas: an open-mic night is held in the Desert Rain now and then to allow people to share song and dreams. On this night, every other person in the room but me was Ladakhi. They were girls, most of them, of high-school age, whom tourist dollars were sending to private-schools in Delhi or around the plains of India; they were conversant with Nike and Britney and most of the wonders of the world, giggling like regular Valley Girls as they asked me what I did for a living and what I was doing in their land. At the front

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of the room, an earnest young Ladakhi in glasses was struggling his way through “The Times, They are A-Changin’” and old Eagles hits, the girls delightedly singing along with every word, though his delivery had none of the conviction of the renditions of “Hotel California” or “Californication” you can hear among Tibetans in the coffee-houses of Dharamsala.

We sat in the little space, ringed by snowcaps, under a pulsing moon, 10,000 feet above the sea, and many hours from what the Eagles might consider civilization, and we tried to jolly into being all their songs of hard women in Los Angeles, the dangers of cocaine. The proprietress of the Desert Rain — from Colorado — came in from the back and the population of foreigners was doubled (I’d seen her a day or two before share pie and coffee with some English soldiers helping to keep the peace in Kashmir, not far away). The very name of the fresh and spotlessly clean space might have suggested the desert rain of Rumi poems, familiar to skullcapped petitioners at the mosque down the road, or just a play on what music meant in this parched and desolate plain among the Himalayas. In fact — I looked around more closely at the books on every side — it spoke for a Christian vision of grace; here in Leh, as in the South Pacific and among the Indians of South America, it was Mennonites who were coming to bring their own songs of salvation to those long denied much contact with the West.

I had thought, in my ignorance, that Ladakh was the last unspoiled corner of Himalayan tradition (Bhutan was more pristine, but only because of a policy of cultural homogeneity that Nepalis and Tibetans see as fascism). I knew that it had great Buddhist gompas on its hilltops and that its people still lived in whitewashed, two-story houses among the barley fields that were more “Tibetan” than anything you’d find these days in Tibet. But on arrival in the faraway mountain kingdom, not far from an ongoing “Line of Control” separating the enemy armies of India and Pakistan, I found that, officially, roughly half the population of Ladakh is Moslem — hence the

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NT

great mosque down the street — and that for centuries it has been one of the major trading centers of the Silk Road. To the Westerner from afar, Ladakh means an area that was closed to tourists by the Indian government till 1974, and that did not see street lighting till the end of the first Clinton administration — the last word in Buddhist isolation. Along Bazaar Road, though, the faces of the women seated on the sidewalk selling vegetables spoke for Herat, Kasghar, Samarkand, and centuries of traders going on from here to offer silk and indigo and gold and opium to far-flung neighbors.

The Silk Road is a living presence in Leh, therefore, and speaks for a natural crossroads where Tibetans and Nepalis and Indians converge to trade their goods, to run hotels for a while, to contribute what each can to a medley culture. But down the road from the mosque is a Pizza de Hut restaurant on a rooftop, offering tacos and fries under red-and-white umbrellas that advertise cell-phones. At the nearest intersection sit many of the little settlement’s 150 travel agencies, selling themselves to foreign visitors with names like “Ecological Footprint Travels” and “TIBET EXPEDITION.” You can learn traditional Thai massage now in the tiny Himalayan town, see Pirates of the Caribbean days after it opened in L.A. and stop in at a German bakery on your way to a Full Moon Partry. When you disembark at the little airport, you are greeted by notices — in English — that tell you to “avoid buying products from multinational corporations, which are eroding cultural diversity.”

The new Silk Road — 20 years ago I called it the “Denim Route” — exists in Prague and Lamu, in Cuzco and Sumatra; it has its most vibrant and growing life, perhaps, in the virtual global village of cyberspace. And when I go to a place like Leh —or to Lhasa or Kathmandu or any of the great trading-posts in the Himalayas--what I find is all the ways it’s adapting to new markets, different audiences, a more global need these days. It’s still crisscrossing Central Asia, but now it’s full of young Danes carrying stories of trekking across the Andes and peace-keeping forces from Montana in search of apple pie; of Japanese boys with pony-tails bringing aid to less materially fortunate nations and Himalayan kids singing “Tequila Sunrise” in Christian-run coffee-houses to an Indian from England who likes to imagine he lives in Japan.

The foreigner who comes to Ladakh — let’s say me — is coming for the “authentic,” as he sees it, and tends to be

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unsettled, even outraged, by the fact that other foreigners have come to Ladakh in search of same; often, in fact, he cries that Ladakh is “spoiled” because it’s so full of people like himself (sounding like those compulsive criminals who beg that they be imprisoned before they can do more harm). In Leh many of the foreigners who have come over the last three decades have worked heroically to try to encourage Ladakhi traditions, to protect old customs before they are swept away, to protect the Ladakhis, in all senses, from themselves. The Ladakhis I met seem to cry out to be “spoiled” and long for the privileges that allow people like me to travel across the world and learn from cultures different from my own. Tourism, in fact, is just the latest industry that has enabled them to set up their tents farther afield and ensure that their children have better jobs and lives than they could have imagined.

For centuries their ancestors have sat along these dusty streets watching the caravans take off in every direction, towards Srinagar or Yarkand, bringing unimagined riches and treasures into a somewhat secluded land. The routes they survey have nothing to do with right and wrong, and everything to do with supply and demand. Need is what all of us have in common, they might be saying, and one part of a fruitful friendship is that you give me something that I’m in need of, and I do the same for you. Teach me the words to “Life in the Fast Lane” — and what that reference to “blow” means — and I will tell you the story my grandmother’s grandmother told me about Padmasambhava and his transport to the cave.

I sat in the Desert Rain on this warm summer evening, rejoicing in a quiet space where the airport is named after a lama and the only newspaper in my hotel was eight years old. Men in elegant dressing-gowns (as they looked to me) were conducting traditional archery contests in the outskirts of town, among the fields, and a few days before I’d watched marmots and wild kiang up at a pass 18,350 feet above the sea. When I climbed to the rooftop in my hotel I could see stars beyond number, and large Buddhist structures in the hills all around looking over me. I thanked Jet Airways and Singapore Airlines for bringing me here, the mighty dollar and the fact of immigration, which allowed me to be born in England, as opposed to my parents’ Bombay, and so to grow up with a much wider sense of possibility than they had.

The girls around me giggled and asked me for a businesscard. “Can I write to you?” one said. Of course; I was one way she could begin to make contact with a world as romantic and exciting to her as hers was to me — to feel that she had the beginnings of a foothold in the magical realm she’d heard of in the Eagles’ songs. I hadn’t come here for trade, and nor had she. But here we were, in the little candled space, built by traders in an alien faith, engaging in the age-old Ladakhi custom. You have gold, she might have been saying to me, as she glimpsed my passport peeping out of my pocket; I have tea and incense and stories.

Silk seems so exotic to us now, though once it was as everyday as any other good being bartered. One day perhaps “The Last Resort” or “The End of the Innocence” will acquire that faraway glow, too. All of us were traveling as we sat in the warm, bright room, and the lights around town began to go out around us; but we were heading in opposite directions, as travelers had always done among the snowy passes, the dusty thoroughfares, of the Silk Road.

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The

written by:

Kashgar Case

mark mordue

Some t i me ago at the Byron Bay Writers Festival I was invited to speak on a travel panel called “Evocative Images from Around the World.” We were asked to describe how we translated exotic images into stories, and what this meant for both the writer and the reader. Did something substantial occur, or was it just armchair travelling?

By dint of that latter observation, I felt were we also being asked something much less flattering: whether travel writing was doing as much to remove us from the world as a disengaged news report, rather than bringing us closer together.

And if that were true, whether it had become another form of careless Western consumption. This idea depressed me.

Despite having written a book that was full of global travel stories from which I was supposed to draw anecdotes and wisdoms, whatever I started to write down for my speech felt fake and forced. By the day of the panel I still had nothing prepared. The impulse to wing it was fast disintegrating into something more despairing: a travel writer with nothing to report from the world at all.

That uneasy morning I found myself looking at a slim, small briefcase my partner and I had recently bought in the bustling town of Kashgar in Xinjiang in far western China.

The briefcase was a souvenir from our travels, nothing more.

And yet the longer I looked at it the more I thought about that particular trip and what it meant for me now. How, like every other city in China, Kashgar was being refashioned in the generic style rabidly popular across the nation: with vistas of obliterating grey concrete roads and endless cheap apartment blocks shrouded in a brownish atmosphere of decay.

The old and legendary Kashgar, a place of ornately decorated wood and creaking donkey carts, medieval secrets-andshadows and hard clay homes, seemed to be shrinking by the moment in the face of such changes. Soon, I felt, the exotic

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The theme “evocative images from around the world” invited the idea that travel writers really are just walking, talking postcards, delivering the world, pleasantly, to our readers’ doors. But I’d like to think it is possible to do more. turning point of hundreds of years worth of travel diaries from Marco Polo on would no longer exist. With that loss went, of course, a people and their history: the Uighurs of Central Asia.

Aware of this imminent erasure, we ventured into the old quarter of Kashgar where Uighur architecture and customs still predominate despite the relentless Chinese fondness for “development,” a part of which involves a long-running program of Han population re-settlement into the area.

Our grieving felt premature, however, as we stood there watching hundreds of heavily moustached men playing pool on badly torn felt, their lopsided tables lined up like racing cars on the grid at Le Mans; starting right out front of the Id Kah mosque and surging on into the middle of the Friday night markets. I was surprised by this brazen rub of entertainment, commerce and worship, though no one else seemed to mind a bit, least of all the men, smoking and shouting and cheering around the clacking tables.

Nearby a wall of ghetto blasters roared an artless musique concrete at full ranting-and-wailing volume from an area set aside for selling electrical goods.

An ice cream stall had a small television wired to a loudhailer system that was belting out the soundtrack to an Indian action movie — attracting another solid crowd of hundred or so people, sighing and groaning to the action at hand.

The life force here was certainly intimidating in its vitality and heckling energy — I could see how it might worry an occupying power. Even in such impoverished circumstances, these were not a people to take lightly. They exuded energy like an electrical charge.

Everywhere we looked this aliveness roared through the commerce of their community. There were Uighurs selling clothes, wooden bowls, lamb on skewers, ornately decorated

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rocking cribs for babies, more lamb on skewers, knives so sharp they shaved the hair off your arms in one clean stroke (look! See!), all manner of shoes, proud hats, sad fruit, even more lamb on skewers, lamb stew, lamb with lamb, tasty flat bread with bits of stone from the walls of wood-fire ovens stuck to the base (easily picked off with those sharp knives or simply crunched on with a bitter jolt), and a variety of animal skins including that of a large wild wolf.

It was that faint time between twilight and night itself. At first we could barely see them as they sat, crouched over and poor looking, on the periphery of the main square while the market thronged wildly away from them: a Uighur man and his family, with a few belongings scattered in the dirt. It was the pencil-sketched faintness of their presence that actually attracted my eye, the fact that they hardly seemed to exist at all.

As I looked closer it seemed to me they had raided what little of their lives might be of value: a maroon brown briefcase covered in dust; a badly dented soup ladle; the snapped pedal from a bicycle; some other bits of metal and wire that were like things, curiosities, you might see lying by the roadside if your eyesight was good and you were traveling on foot. I was amazed they were even trying to sell these scraps.

The look of the family in the encroaching darkness, their meagre offerings, tugged at our hearts. So we asked how much for the briefcase and the soup ladle. The father looked up and held all the fingers in his hand out towards me. Five yuan was equal to one American dollar. It was like asking for nothing.

It’s normal in markets like these to bargain hard, but we gave them the five yuan without argument and left, while other traders in the square laughed at me, pointing at the absurdity of a Westerner walking around with an old soup ladle in his hand.

We had hoped the man and his family might ask for ten or even twenty yuan. We didn’t need the soup ladle, and the briefcase didn’t look like it was fit for any document I would value.

We just wanted to give them something, and this was a way to do it with dignity left intact: the age-old process of barter-andexchange at a market on the Old Silk Road. Much as I wanted to hand over more money once the deal was done, I knew it was not the right thing to do. That our soup ladle and briefcase and the five yuan now in his hand were the best things that could happen for everyone that strangely pulsing evening.

The condition of this family summed up, for me, everything happening in Xinjiang while I was there: how poor and oppressed Uighur people are under Chinese rule; the ragged, brutalised flavor to their lives.

Famous for their fighting spirit and their flamboyant, emerald-studded knives, the Uighurs are surrounded by wild, stunning mountains along their west and south-west borders with the former Soviet republics of Kazakstan, Kyrgystan and Tajikistan, as well as Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Tibet; while the Taklimakan Desert (which translates roughly as “you go in but you won’t come out”) to the east further serves to isolate the region from the rest of China.

Despite these natural barriers and their own unruly spirit, the Uighurs have seen their beautiful countryside invaded and reinvaded for centuries.

At first it was the Arabs, Mongols and Chinese who flooded back and forth on missions of conquest and trade.

Then the region became part of the push and pull of Russian and British influences in that imperial chess match of nineteenth century geo-politics known as “The Great Game.”

Chinese and Soviet forces continued to vie for dominance in the area, the latter triumphing in support of a brief Islamic regime called the Eastern Turkestan Republic that began in 1944 and fell in 1950. Since then the Chinese have ruled with an increasing iron fist, renaming the territory the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Beyond concerns for regional security and the long-running imperial claims that it has always been a part of greater China, the fact that Xinjiang is fabulously rich in oil and tin makes it an even more desirable asset for the Chinese.

Given its physical extremities and extreme isolation, Xinjiang remains a volatile zone, prone to internal instability and disruptive external influences. The Uighurs have looked on enviously at the breakaway Soviet states across the border, and Islamic extremism continues to filter through as an influence despite the essentially moderate faith of most Uighurs.

Small bomb explosions from Kashgar to Beijing have gone off in the name of various terrorist/independence groups, while most Chinese associate displaced Uighurs across the country with a culture of crime that ranges from black market money exchanges to drug smuggling — a not entirely unreasonable stereotype.

Since September 11, 2001 the Uighurs in Xinjiang have been more shat upon than ever before by the communist government. The West’s panic to maintain the “war on terror” has given the Chinese licence to do as they please in remote regions like Xinjiang — and to make sure that the independence dreams of Islamic Uighurs stay ground into the dirt. As the Chinese propaganda against “Uighur splittists” so neatly puts it, “they shall be beaten down as a rat crosses a road”.

Once I got back to Sydney I cleaned up the briefcase and polished it and found it wasn’t in such bad condition after all.

I imagined it might have served as their child’s school satchel.

Along with everything else about my memories of that day, this lone speculation made me feel intensely sad for this thing now in my hands, for all the miles it had travelled and who might have carried it before me, dreaming of better days.

And yet when I first came to the Byron Bay Writers Festival, I had bought the case along for no grand reason other than the fact that I thought it made me look good. I liked the fit of it under my arm as a fashion item. It was cool.

Only when I began to think about what I would say for this literary panel that had so troubled me, how I would deal with the phrase ‘Evocative Images from Around the World’ and the moral dilemmas it provoked, did I really look at the case again and decide that it was worth dusting off, opening up.

The theme “evocative images from around the world” invited the idea that travel writers really are just walking, talking postcards, delivering the world, pleasantly, to our readers’ doors. There is nothing wrong with that, I guess. But I’d like to think it is possible to do more and I said so on the day in much the same way as I am saying so now. I said that it’s possible to bring back images and feelings that contain some humane and deeper relationship to a place or a people, no matter how fleeting the connections might seem. As one might unclip an old, beaten briefcase to reach inside and see, suddenly, despite its emptiness, another kind of story, trav* T his story was first published in Spinach7 (Australia) and Bad Idea (UK)

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Langzhou: The Lives of Cities “foreign ghosts” or “bastards” in the old words old ways in the spaces between races unresolved the lives of cities take a new turn spin into the future bright with lights their centers filled to bursting screens with giant faces streaming down of politicians arms akimbo summoning the lame & blind with velvet singers dazzled by their own vibratos aimed at the voyagers below who know the world as theme park but without the grace that life can bring the emptiness no less than at your birth a time to which the age turns back like memories & music in blind retreat.

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The old cit y spaces seem, at first, ubiquitously brown. It is a brown that is flat and expansive and entrenched. But as one penetrates toward the center of old Kashgar, through the flatbread-oven smoke and the hordes of blue-uniformed schoolkids, twisting through alleyway meanderings, up a little shaded staircase and down beneath another snug archway, the apparent solidity of this ancient desert brown dissolves.

Revealed are deep mahoganies and smooth umbers, reds upon rusts upon charcoal grays, the dusky sheen reflected in a cold ocean at night, the colors in the bottom of a well.

But the color of the holes does not change; they remain stagnant in hue, an absence of color to match the absence of form. The inkiness of the holes becomes a static plane that reaches from the carved poplar doorway of the cobbler’s workshop to the close-set eaves of the bakery. These holes tend to draw the eye away from the mud-brick dwellings around them, toward a space that is all shadow and dust. They draw the eye like a wound where flesh used to be, like a carcass on the open freeway, and seem in their nature

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Observations from the Field:

Space and Its

Dis contents in Kashgar to become like the black holes of the cosmos, sucking in all surrounding energy. The holes, eventually, occupy more space then the homes they replaced once did.

s

An old gr ay man, sitting on a mattress on a bed frame in the bright

written by:

Isaac Blacksin PHOTOGRAPHS by:

TERESA HA (OPENING PHOTO: BILL HORBERG)

desert sun, fingers his prayer beads pensively and slowly removes his embroidered pakul cap. He seems minuscule and perhaps anachronistic, swallowed up by the monolithic apartment buildings that surround him so resolutely.

Toward the outskirts of Kashgar stands a new city, not yet completed, in which great white sentinels proudly display their right-angled concrete bulk, waiting. Closer to the melon orchards than the city center, these are the new homes — some ten stories high, many twenty — to which a sizable chunk of Kashgar’s population, upwards of 13,000 families, will be moved in the months and years ahead. It is the silkscreen of a hundred Chinese

sil k roa ds | 35

s

W ithin the old cit y wall , one does not encounter the doings of life, the experiences of being, until it is being experienced itself. There are too many corners for caution in the old city, too many twists and turns to benefit any hesitation. The old city, which was once called simply Kashgar, is a veritable maze of little single-cart tunnels and side street mosques, tumbling back-lane wanderings and winding staircase shadows. It is a bit like Tangiers or old Varanasi, but better tended or tidied it seems, quieter, a desert city truly.

Some of the houses here are five hundred years old, with rose-bushed courtyards and outdoor brick ovens, women’s quarters separated from the men’s, intricately carved paneling and columns made of poplar, heavy red-painted doors with imposing brass knockers. The alleyways themselves are mostly cobble though many are packed earth, and watermelon carts pulled by the famous Yopurghu donkeys barely squeeze beneath windowed archways. From the pigeoncooped rooftops one can see the peaks of Tienshen to the north, the Pamirs to the west, the parallel ranges of Kunlun and Karakoram in the south. And from above, the labyrinthine streets of old Kashgar remind one of a snowflake, with its tiny pieces of ice coordinated in that random elaboration of symmetry said to be one of a kind. Eighty-five percent of the old city’s structures will melt away in the years to come; the certainty of bulldozers, those from the outside argue, trumps the possibility of earthquakes.

The old city used to stretch across Kashgar, surrounded by a high earthen wall and moat. Today, the wall is broken and the old city has been split into seven distinct sections, islands

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themselves, connected only by their relations to a whole that is itself in flux. There are reasons for this — the extraction of sewage and refuse, the difficulties of electricity and clean water access and fire hydrants, an increase in the use of cars and emergency vehicles. The solidity of Kashgar’s spaces has been dismembered, and the isolated pieces seem somehow afloat. This is true especially in their relation to the epicenter, the place to which, when one wanders long enough in the old city skein, all roads lead.

s

The mosque has long been the center of Kashgar, a posi-

tion it holds in many Muslim communities. Spiritually, it is the pivot around which the lives of the devout rotate, a space of communication and contact with other community members, with the larger Muslim world, and with god. Below the spiraled minarets of Idkah Mosque, Kashgar’s largest of about 40 mosques, stretches an expansive square of dusty cobble. It is lined with shops selling wooden instruments and skewered meats, and the goings and comings of men in grey suits and women at their daily errands creates a sphere of energy, of convergence. Yet the old epicenter has a new rival in the cobbled square; about two years ago arrived a television, also Kashgar’s largest. At twelve meters across and seven high, perched on a stand that is itself four meters tall, the screen towers above camel and coppersmith and tea stall, occupying a space in the square truly opposite the mosque.

The television too is a locus of communication, though more linear in approach, beaming in Uyghur-language news and soap operas as sanctioned by that less and less distant periphery, Beijing. Commercials compete for attention with the muezzin’s call to prayer, and throughout the day one can see the jostling centripetal forces of these two poles, like twin suns in some outer galaxy, around which Kashgar rotates. They are both instruments of broadcast, where one transmits a holy message from the heavens (despite proscriptions against teaching the Quran) and the other a worldly message from a different kind of power. One creates the means by which dispersed groups, existing across a sacred territory, can consistently connect with a peripheral population; the other establishes the constant presence of an entity demanding connection with its territorial periphery. The mosque sets the boundary between this space and the next; the television alters the lines between what is inside Kashgar and what is out.

s

Defining inside and outside was once the domain of

a large earthen wall that surrounded the city of Kashgar.

Eight meters thick and ten high, the wall created a differential between the in and the out by virtue of its ability to separate the two. The twin roles of center and periphery were established through mud and sweat and dust. For about 400 years, the wall ran an elliptical orbit around Idkah Mosque and the old city, extending more than 1,000 meters from east to west and 600 from north to south, with large iron gates restricting the minglings of the outside with the in. The wall was a theoretic of space, a tool of delineation, and a judgment. It was spatial control, where the control of space was the control of destiny. In the early 1980s, as the devel-

FACING PHOTOS: TERESA HA

cities, in which small boxes are stacked to the sky, a Lego-land of uniformity and spatial control. The five- and even sevengeneration households of the old city will be deconstructed to single-family units here, and the multifunction of a homeworkshop-store will be divided and compartmentalized. The intricate wreath of alleyways in old Kashgar is here replaced with a grid, and it is within this grid that perspective dissolves and one begins to reside in some vast plane. Center and periphery hold no relation to each other, and the exactitude of uniformity resists both expression and context. Reference points vanish, the pivot disappears, and there remains that certain spacelessness in which disparate parts lose all connection to the larger whole. There is no longer organism, but instead a factory floor — flat, methodical.

The skeletons of unfinished apartment blocks greet the passerby with steel bones outstretched along wide empty avenues. Some are shrouded in black scaffolding like a judge’s robes, while others begin to don the concrete façade of the modern world, cranes angling above like television antennae.

Here and there lounge the first of the new residents, wearing the same embroidered hats of the old city, making the same quiet gossip beneath their burqas, running and shouting with the same pent-up schoolboy exuberance. In Kashgar’s periphery, unlike the center, one sees these people from very far away — five blocks down the purposeful four-lane thoroughfare, or from the far side of a dusty path that slides between two massive buildings, and then two more, and then two more. On the periphery of Kashgar, one tends to see things long before they actually are.

sil k roa ds | 37

But why, then,

does the city

eWhat xist? line

separates the inside from the outside,

the rumble

of wheels from

the howl of wolves?

— Italo Calv ino

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facing PHOTOS: TERESA HA

opment of Kashgar entered an accelerated pace, faraway Beijing called for the layout of wide thoroughfares, one of which sliced through the wall and the city center. The wall’s moat was filled in with concrete. Wide sprawling roads run from peripheral production to central consumption, carrying away coal and gold into the Chinese mainland, and construction materials to Kashgar for oil extraction or the building of new banks and barracks. The roads bring coca-cola and pornography and Mandarin language textbooks. They run from dead-end center to peripheral opportunity, carrying the manifest destinies of Han populations who seek new businesses and eased restrictions to development and birthrate; they take young Uyghurs seeking employment opportunities in the industrialized east; they carry dreams and hard realities. This is the new Silk Road, a road of population shift and mineral extraction, of natural gas pipelines to the Stans and prosperity pipedreams to the coast.

A road is linear, a here to a there, bisecting space and bypassing traditional paradigms of inside and out. A road blurs distinctions in its push toward the horizon; its asphalt tentacle grasps at foreign trade and energy, at population reassignment or removal, at weapons testing grounds, at penal colonies. A road disregards spatial context in its ability to push into and through all space. The wall is no longer an arbiter or a reference, but thin pieces of line that neither connects nor divides. One can stand on the road today and see the wall in cross-section, its russet interior exposed, its meters of mud devoid of meaning, judging nothing, an empty mass like a dead bird in the subway station. Context has been broken and the pieces float freely. The wall slowly crumbles; one brushes it off brown shoes at the end of the day, in a bathroom of an old foreign consulate that was once outside the wall.

s

There are many cities called Kashgar today. The congre-

gation of spaces depends upon a plurality of contexts, which can be seen in lines ethnic (Uyghur, Tajik, Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Hui, Han), in divisions of language and script (Chinese Mandarin, Cyrillic Russian and Mongol, Arabic scripted Uyghur, Uzbek, Tajik and Urdu, among others), and in diverging positions of power (those selling watermelons and those selling cities, those unable to sell anything at all). There are many cities called Kashgar today because new cities rest upon old, and old upon new; there are cities called holes and there are cities called skeletons; there are city centers that are peripheries, and there are peripheries that disappear.

One may find, when at risk of losing the way at dusk among the close-set houses in the old city maze, it’s a good idea to keep a visual reference point in another Kashgar. Amidst the crowded workshops and the holes that were once workshops, in alleyways leading around and around, one might keep an eye on a ferris wheel — all neon pinks and crimsons — spinning in an oblivion of nightclubs and glamour hotels. From the pensive browns and murmured prayers of one Kashgar, this other Kashgar can be seen through the dust. The ferris wheel is striking from such a vantage point, its neon revolutions mesmerizing in their cyclic path toward themselves. When examined up close, however, from within its context, the neon naturally floats together with the bright lights of this separate space, just next door to old Kashgar yet another cosmos

entirely. Here is the glow of Kashgar’s future, where carmine hues soften the beat of techno-pop from teenage motorbikes, where skyscraper skeletons bask in an ambiance of hurried footsteps and plastic bags caught in the desert breeze. Tight jeans and pointy leather shoes; chalk-white banks like Miami drug-lord mansions; sport utilities and prostitute futilities and an invisible man with a needle shrugged down against the entrance to Peoples Park. There is a Mao statue here, a hundred feet tall, with arm extended to Beijing like a giant quarterback mid-pass. ‘Go long, comrade.’

It is difficult to lose the way within the six-lane boulevard grid of this Kashgar, unless perhaps one forgets which Chinese city it belongs to. This is a good thing, because visual reference points in the old city are not possible at night. There is no bright neon there to guide one home. In a city with many names — Kashgar, Kashgaria, Cascar, Kashi, Shule — keeping at least two times, Beijing official and Xinjiang unofficial, there is a ferris wheel that remains a constant. It turns and turns in space, following itself forever.

s

Space has been for the city of Kashgar both the salt in

its bread and the salt of its tears. As a fulcrum of Eurasia, it has benefited tremendously from its position as spatial axis, a Silk Roads crossroads connecting faraway centers here in the Taklamakan desert periphery. Such an axis created in Kashgar a true cosmopolitanism, where disparate cultures intersected within a space of contact and efflorescence.

Artistic motifs, religious traditions, patterns of language and politics from the corners of Eurasia converged, and in some ways coalesced, in this city to which all roads led. As the classic Silk Roads oasis, Kashgar figured as both center and periphery simultaneously; it was both near and far, critically dispersed and crucially pivoted. Kashgar was, and is still, a geographic plurality and a contextual amalgam. It is also home to the richest energy and mineral deposits in China, and is an access point to westward trade. So is Mao throwing the football or receiving it? Is this a space or a line, a goal or a platform? Are empty holes where homes used to be an absence of form or its potential?

When Mohammad thinks about space, he thinks about his workshop in Kashgar’s old city. It is where he sleeps and where he keeps his modest belongings; it is where he earns his living by making leather soles for the cobbler. These soles will carry people from here to there, center to periphery, around and around, to the mosque and the nightclub and the hospital. When he thinks about space he thinks about power, the power of the bulldozer around the corner, which will likely knock down his workshop by the time of the spring thaw. He thinks about the Han and European tourists who visit the new old city — a thin shopping mall replica of traditional Islamic architecture — who arrive in wide tour buses via wide roads from some other place to view the periphery of an empire, the center of a continent. Mohammad thinks about the center of his world and downward casts his brown almond eyes; he hasn’t seen her in six months and his ex-wife gets full custody. He wonders aloud what will happen next, and remains content because there will be space for him somewhere. It is time for the evening prayer now, and afterwards, a Chinese soap opera on a giant television in the middle of nowhere.

sil k roa ds | 39

His camera — attached by cable to a kite — is sent aloft.

In 2005, French photographer Nicolas Chorier captured these kite-eye views of the ancient cities of Uzbekistan, that once stood along the great Silk Road. photos by:

Nicolas Chorier

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O Above: The Registan, heart of the historic city of Samarkand (foreground, minaret of Madrasah Ulug Beg; background, mosque dome of Madrasah Tilia).

Right: The minaret of Islam Khodja still stands as the highest structure in the medieval walled city of Khiva, western Uzbekistan.

VER SAMARKAND sil k roa ds | 41

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view from a kite Dazzling Blue-tiled Landmarks

Gleaming glazed tiles mark mosques and other historic buildings in the fabled Silk Road cities of Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand.

Above left: Pahlavan Mahmud Mausoleum Dome, Khiva.

Above right: Chor Minor.

Built in comparatively recent times (1807), this is one of the more famous buildings in old Bukhara.

Samarkand’s Registan is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. Important monuments preserved within the Registan include three madrasahs from different centuries, each containing mosques, minarets, domes and other architectural marvels.

Below left: The southern ribbed dome of the Registan’s Sher Dor Madrasah.

Persian-speaking Travellers of Khorezm

Like the Sogdians, the Persian-speaking traders of ancient Khorezm travelled the length of the Silk Roads. Dancers and musicians from this area were especially popular in the Tang Dynasty Chinese court. Elements of their styles still remain in traditional forms from Eastern Europe to Japan.

Below center: Part of the desert fortress Ayaz Kala, in the Khorezm Desert, north of Khiva.

Located along the lower reaches of the Amu-Darya in Transoxiana, Ayaz Kala dates back to the 4th century BCE. Below right: The Kalyan Minaret, Bukhara, (1127) — so spectacular that it was spared destruction by Genghis Khan in the 13th century.

sil k roa ds | 43

Mausoleum Overshadowed by a Minaret Above: Another UNESCO World Heritage site, the vast Pahlavan Mahmud Mausoleum is the shrine of Khiva’s patron saint, Pahlavan Mahmud and burial place

of the Qungrat Khans who ruled Khiva during the 17th–18th centuries.

Below: A panoramic view of Khiva with the uncompleted Kalta Minar minaret (1855) in right foreground, originally planned to be “so tall that one could see Bukhara.”

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Kites of the Silk Road Of the many common cultural practices found along the Silk Road, from Samarkand to Nara, kite‑flying must be one of the most beloved.

An avid kite-flyer since his boyhood, Chorier

combines his childhood passion with his professional skills as a photographer. He uses three kites; the largest spans 12 square meters and can soar up to 1,000 feet, “though low altitudes often prove to be more interesting,” he says.

For more of these outstanding images , see:

w w w.nicopix.com

DIGITAL RECREATION OF BEZEKLIK MURAL [SEE NEXT PAGE],

Written by: LEANNE OGASAWARA

RYUKOKU UNIVERSITY ; LOWER RIGHT: FLAMING MOUNTAINS AND BEZEKLIK CAVES, PHOTO: JACOBA AKAZAWA

LONG-LOST CAVE FRESCOES have been brought back to life — virtually — by the hi-tech expertise of Ryukoku University’s Digital Archives Research Center, in association with NHK, Japan’s national public broadcaster.

The famous murals of Bezeklik are reputed to have been among the most beautiful of all the cave paintings found in the deserts of the Silk Road. Located in a valley near the “Flaming Mountains” on the northern rim of the Taklamakan Desert, Bezeklik in the Uighur language means “a place with paintings,” or “a beautifully decorated place.”

Two-meter-tall murals depicting Buddhist teachings once covered the walls, corridors and ceilings of 77 caves. In a dazzling palette of colors, the murals provided stunning evidence of a long-since vanished era. At the time when most of the murals were created (6th-11th centuries), this region was devoutly Buddhist. The rulers were Uighurs, but like all the Kingdoms along the Silk Road, Bezeklik was a bustling cosmopolitan mix of temples, merchants and goods from places as far-flung as Rome and the Levant to the west, and China to the east.

The art of Bezeklik reflected this rich cultural over-lapping: European explorers who roamed the deserts of Central Asia at the beginning of the 20th century were astonished to uncover dazzling paintings of figures with Persian, Indian, and Chinese features. In addition to Buddhism, the murals reveal some Christian Manichean and Nestorian characteristics.

Japanese explorers were equally surprised to recognize the Persian-style flower motifs long associated with 8th-century Japanese temples in Nara. However, the foreigners’ awe rapidly turned to no-holds-barred acquisitiveness, and within just a few years, they had stripped the caves of their artistic heritage.

Digital Bezeklik “The Chinese complain, and the foreigner cannot well deny it,” wrote Sir Eric Teichman in 1937, in his Journey to Turkistan, “that caravan-loads of priceless treasures from the temples, tombs and ruins of Chinese Turkistan have been carried off to foreign museums and are forever lost to China.”

One particular set of murals, perhaps more than any other, exemplifies the fate of the wall paintings of Bezeklik.

Originally adorning the long, arched corridor walls of Cave 15 were fifteen paintings depicting past lives of the Buddha.

Created around the 11th century, these images were considered by Japanese researchers to represent the zenith of the art at Bezeklik. Cut from the cave walls, one was taken

by Albert von Le Coq to Berlin; the remaining fourteen are

sil k roa d | 45

25

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now held in museums in China, Korea, Japan, Russia, India, and England.

Indeed, if one obtains the requisite special permission to visit Cave 15 today, there’s not much to see. Just one large image of a bodhisattva with its eyes and nose gouged out, and a few left-behind fragments including the sandaled feet of a monk or Buddha. That’s about all. It’s difficult now to believe that these almost featureless walls were once so lavishly decorated.

But

imagine stepping out of the dry heat and blinding light of the desert into the relative coolness of a temple cave, and there, lighting a candle, walking down silent corridors, covered floor to ceiling in breathtakingly rich representations of another era. What would that have felt like? A team of Japanese researchers could not resist trying to find out.

46 |

k yoto jou r na l

74

www.afc.ryukoku.ac.jp

With help from NHK, Japan’s national broadcasting company, a team at Ryukoku University worked for well over a year to digitally reconstruct the murals that once appeared in Cave 15. The university (founded as part of Kyoto’s historic Nishihongan-ji Temple in 1639) has a close connection with Bezeklik. It holds a major collection of artifacts gathered by three expeditions to Central Asia (19031910), financed by the temple’s 22nd abbott, the charismatic Count Otani Kozui, to research the history of the propagation of Buddhism, as it moved east from India into Central Asia and China.

The more one thinks about it, the more it sounds like an impossible task — for not only are the remaining paintings from Cave 15 now kept in half a dozen museums around the world, but so much has also been lost, faded or degraded.

RECONSTRUCTED MUR AL AND CAVE 15, RYUKOKU UNIVERSIT Y

12

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“Wholesale Removal” The German team that first discovered the caves at Bezeklik in 1905 found them literally buried in the sand. Peter Hopkirk, in his book Foreign Devils on the Silk Road, describes the tension that existed between Albert von Le Coq, the independently wealthy leader of the team, and Albert Grünwedel, the Director of the famous Berlin Ethnological Museum, who had a more conservative approach than Le Coq’s “penchant for wholesale removal.” Le Coq was obviously not on the losing side of the argument, as hardly anything remains of the art that once covered the walls and ceilings of the caves.

Just how does one “remove” images painted onto solid rock inside caves 1,500 years previously? They used very sharp knives to cut around the paintings and then jimmied in pickaxes to create the space necessary to get their saws in.After huge slabs of rock had been removed, the paintings were further cut down for transport. In Germany the murals were carefully reassembled and presented magnificently in large glass cases at the Ethnological Museum (Le Coq was by then its Director). The people of Berlin are said to have loved the paintings dearly, and the manner in which they were displayed en masse

must have contributed to their popularity.

Even in photographs, one can sense something of the incredible splendor of the caves when they were originally created.

Unfortunately, their secure manner of display was their undoing.Too big and too firmly fixed in place to evacuate when the Allied air raids started in 1944, they were completely destroyed. In later times, the Chinese would lament that more art was forever lost to history in one night of bombing than all the Muslim and Chinese tomb raids in history.

Ironically, cave raider Le Coq’s catalogues and notebooks now serve as priceless relics of those magnificent lost masterpieces.

As is well known, the German team

was not working alone in the deserts of what was then called Chinese Turkistan. Most of the other European and Japanese expeditions took home material from Bezeklik as well.

The American Langdon Warner — one of the models for Indiana Jones — used a “new” chemical method to peel the murals off the walls; a method every bit as destructive as just plain hacking them down.

While the murals were not being studied

PROFESSOR OK ADA WITH MODEL OF THE DIGITAL RECONSTRUCTION, PHOTO: STEWART WACHS

Under the leadership of the Director of the Digital Archives Research Center, Dr. Okada Yoshihiro, the team painstakingly examined as many of the remaining pieces as they could in Russia, India, Korea, Europe and of course in China.

After meticulously photographing the remaining fragments and then digitalizing these images, the team then pored over all the expedition notebooks, old photographs and sketches related to the site to try and piece together what at times must have felt like an impossibly large jigsaw puzzle.

Just take, for example, choosing the precise shade of red of a monk's robe or the color of a Bodhisattva's beads. When Okada and his team examined the extant murals, they were greatly surprised to find the colors varying from museum to museum. Each museum had gone about its conservation work in isolation, relying on its own documents and records, and thereby came up with a different shade of red. The Digital Archives team, with an uncompromising commitment to reproduce as accurately as possible the murals in their original state, trawled laboriously through everything in the historical record. There were some 20,000 documents. Asked what he thought was the most fascinating part of the project, Okada remarked that it was the collecting and then analyzing of what came to be an immense volume of data.

After the details were all finally decided, the team then used computer graphic technology and next-generation SR high definition digital cameras to digitally reconstruct in CAD form not only the murals, but the effect that an 11th century pilgrim must have experienced walking down the

or cared for in their original settings, and many works of art — paintings and sculptures — had been destroyed or badly damaged in earlier times by iconoclast Muslims, it should be emphasized that all the excavating and removal of art treasures and artifacts went on without any permission from local authorities.

The “British-Hungarian” Sir Aurel Stein used out-and-out deceit to get his hands on the famed documents of Dunhuang. When the monk guarding the hidden library at first refused to sell him any treasures, Stein then announced himself to be a messenger sent by the highly-revered 7th century Buddhist pilgrim monk Xuanzang on a mission to take the precious Buddhist documents and relics away for safekeeping.

Reading their expedition journals, sometimes it seemed that these adventurers could not have stooped any lower. And yet — the more one reads, the more one is struck by their obvious passion and appreciation for the artworks that they believed themselves to be liberating. Risking their lives in what remains one of the most daunting environments on earth, they went about their objective with absolute precision — and yes, even brilliance.

narrow corridor of Cave 15. They paid particular attention to the lighting effects that would have been experienced when looking at the paintings in the light of a wax candle. Okada calls this the virtual torchlight effect. Indeed, the virtual 3D experience of being there is one of the most impressive results of the project.

“Human beings, religion and technology” — these are the keywords used by Okada and his team to describe their research, developing new technologies for digitally archiving, preserving and digitally reconstructing ancient artifacts.

Working in 3D computer graphics and with special attention to lighting, virtual reality archaeology is unique in the way it aims to re-construct not only the artifacts themselves, but the original experience of human interaction with these artifacts (see interview, www.kyotojournal/bezeklik].

The Ryukoku University Digital Archive project — similar to the work being done in the UK at the International Dunhuang Project — is building a publically-accessible digital database, available both via the Internet and through exhibitions and other international exchanges. The team is now working hard preparing a permanent exhibition for the planned new Ryukoku Museum at Nishihonganji temple in Kyoto, scheduled to open in April of 2011. Displaying many precious artifacts related to the history of Buddhism, brought back from India, Central Asia and China, the museum will feature a state-of-the-art high-definition digital theater where the brilliant murals of Bezeklik will once again dazzle present-day visitors.

sil k roa d | 47

Trail of

On the

Reflecting Kyoto’s sustained interest in the Silk Roads since the Otani Expeditions to Dunhuang in 1902—04 and 1911—12, a special exhibition, “On the Trail of Texts Along the Silk Road: The Russian Expedition’s Discovery of Manuscripts in Central Asia,” was held at the Kyoto National Museum in August 2009. On show was a historical collection held permanently in St. Petersburg and displayed most recently at the Hermitage Museum. Isaac Blacksin interviewed Eikei Akao, special research chair and senior curator of Buddhist manuscripts at the Kyoto National Museum , who is also a visiting professor at Kyoto University’s Postgraduate School. Takayuki Okazaki interpreted.

written by:

48 | k yoto jou r na l 74

Isaac Blacksin

IMAGES COURTESY OF THE KYOTO NATIONAL MUSEUM

What is the significance of this exhibit, both in general and for Japanese viewers? If Kyoto is indeed the “birthplace of Silk Roads Studies” [as claimed in the exhibit introduction] can this exhibit be seen as something of a homecoming?

kyoto journal

The Silk Roads exhibit on display here is really a technical matter and not intended for a general audience.

Be that as it may, Kyoto has a long tradition of “Dunhuangology” especially at Kyoto University. The Stein and Pelliot expeditions from Europe predated the Japanese Silk Roads excursions, and the latter collections are of course well known here in Japan, but the Russian expeditions and collections remain relatively unknown here. In this sense this exhibit is quite significant, for a Japanese audience in general, but especially for Dunhuangologists. For instance, the exhibit displays a few fragments from central Asian cave frescoes that will be popular with the general public, but it is the manuscripts that are the real gem. The Khotanese Dhammapada manuscript E I K E I A K AO

as a physical form. One reason for this is the nature of kanji itself; as an ideography, it carries a meaning and a story in its very form, as opposed to [a phonic] alphabet. There is another point here, which concerns the beginning of sutra writing.

When the Buddha was alive, the teachings were of course oral. After his death, his immediate disciples attempted to preserve the oral transmission, but this must have become difficult, so they decided to write. This is also significant to the value of writing.

The diversity of writing systems, print and binding formats, and transcription styles displayed in the exhibit is quite astounding. Can you comment on the poly-culturalism of the Silk Roads as compared with today’s growing monoculture?

Does the diversity on display here teach us something about modern modes of experience and communication?

The biggest factor in monoculturalization today is the mass

Texts [1st–2nd century, in the Gandhari language Kharosthi, and among the earliest extant Buddhist scriptures] was written on white birch. Just looking at it, one can see how strong the belief was, how strong the emotion was, in preserving the religious teachings. One of the themes of this exhibit is the transmission of Buddhism from West to East, which occurred basically in one line [through central Asia]. Another theme is the words and letters themselves, that culture which preserves the lives of ordinary people. In the case of this Dhammapada, we know that paper was not yet available, so people must have looked to trees and thought, maybe we can use this. That itself shows the strength in which Buddhism had taken hold.

Does the longevity of the written word as physical form, evidenced here by manuscripts dating from the 1st through 12th centuries, tell us something about the value of writing itself, its ability to persevere and transmit, beyond those individuals and cultures from which it was born? Is there something about manuscript culture, which a Japanese audience connects with more than a European one?

There is definitely a certain value in writing removed from that of the spoken word. In writing something down, there is the act of preserving something that people wanted to save.

That itself is a major significance. There is a cultural of appreciation here in Japan for looking at words, experiencing words

infiltration of technology. Information has been standardized — everyone on Internet — as opposed to information that is diffused through small communities and therefore not commodified; it is dispersed and thus diversified. The bigger the community gets, the more people want to have a standard of communication. The European Union is perhaps an example of this process: while the EU represents many languages, English is becoming increasingly prominent in order to ease communication and information sharing. It becomes inevitable that as communities grow, culture becomes unified.

It becomes the choice of the people to either preserve the individual cultures in existence, or to unify them. Which choice is good and which bad is up to the people to decide.

Some say that the internet is like a modern Silk Road.

Do you think that the ideals of the Silk Roads — cross-cultural interface, inter‑religious dialogue, exchange and re-invention — exist somewhere today?

What is important is to see the real thing. Some of the manuscripts’ pictures in this booklet [mentioned above] are on Internet, but this is virtual. The more you look at the virtual world, the less you can appreciate real-world things. If you really want to be able to judge what is real and what is not, look to the real. If you are always looking at the virtual, at

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the unreal, you become numb, you become insensitive to the real. Strong belief occurs when people look at the real thing. [Here, EA opens the manuscript catalog to an image of the Buddha’s face, which takes up an entire 8x11 inch page; in reality the image is only about 2 inches squared].

The images you receive virtually are filtered, while the real thing can be completely different from the images thereof. I want people to see the real things, and that is why we are having this exhibit. The experience of seeing the real thing gives you much more information, and much more emotion. Seeing the real thing allows one to decide what is beautiful. As the Internet gets popular, everyone receives the same information. In the past, a good researcher could recover information that others couldn’t, but now, every researcher has access to the same information. The important thing now is approach — how you cook the same fish. What the researcher can accomplish in terms of analysis is still wide open.

Do you have a favorite item from the exhibit?

The Dhammapada on white birch [mentioned above] is sewed together with hemp string — it’s really interesting. By sewing the birch fragments together, the reader can tell the order of the scriptural verses, because each verse is written on a separate piece of bark and then sewed. The person or persons who wrote this version had the idea of sewing with the intention of preserving the proper verse order, allowing people to learn the Buddhist teachings properly. And this technique has preserved the proper order until today. I also like the 5th-century Chinese version of the Three Tactics of Huang Shigong. It is in this manuscript that we find the famous saying “That which is flexible prevails” which most Japanese people know [as “jyu yoku go o seisu”]. This must be the oldest version of that saying. My third favorite piece is this example of Tangut script

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See International Dunhuang Project:

ht tp://idp/bl/uk

[of the Western Xia dynasty (1038–1227). The manuscript is written in Tangut, with a Chinese translation alongside]. Each letter is so beautiful; each letter has so much power. This is the first time that the Japanese can see Tangut script of this quality and in this quantity.

It is impressive how much Silk Roads material has been found and examined during the last century. Do you think the next hundred years of Silk Roads study will be as interesting as the last?

The collections presently in existence have been dispersed across three continents and many countries, but through the Internet*, they are finally in one place. In this sense, the next century will perhaps be as important as the last in terms of analyzing and interpreting the material. Before, you could not put the collection together as a whole; now you can. It is up to the researchers to decide how to cook the fish. The collecting itself is done, now we have to analyze, to interpret. There is a lot of work left to do. Now we can see the big picture, but we need to decide its meaning.

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