On the Silk Road, at the speed of muscle:
The caravan crossroads were places where worlds met, and where the past encountered the future. And because the surrounding landscapes remain so unalterably harsh, life today along the Silk Road retains its ancient feel, isolated and preserved by its forbidding rigors -- much as the dry heat of the Sahara has maintained the monuments of Pharaonic Egypt, or as the salt graves of the Takla Makan have mummified 4,000-year-old corpses.
In Luntai, at the northern end of the road across the Takla Makan, there is a new hotel for the tourists and oil men who now travel the desert. Dust, the color and consistency of light powdered chocolate, covers the cars and trucks and minivans in the parking lot in front of the hotel. The grounds of the hotel are taken up entirely by this parking lot, the forecourt of a modern caravansary, landscaped with the Chinese love of symmetrical, efficient, easily swept cement. Mulberry saplings will eventually grow to relieve the heat glaring off a far wall, a vague memorial to the silk trade and the middle route of the camel road that passed this way.
Inside the hotel smells of new wood, new carpeting, clean and calm with constant Western muzak. The staff of young Uighur girls, pretty and petite in their striped waistcoats and fitted skirts, muscle guests' luggage up and down the three flights of stairs. The hotel does not have an elevator. There is no hot water until after dark, and then there is no cold. The well-appointed bathrooms have a sign warning that the water is "non-potable," and a basket reminds that toilet paper must not be flushed.
In Luntai and all over western China, the bareheaded men are han -- Chinese who have been relocated by the government in Beijing to create a colonial and greatly resented presence among the native Islamic population. The other 90% of the men in Chinese Central Asia wear their identifying headgear -- Uighurs in their embroidered skullcaps; Kyrgyz in their fleece-side-in kalpaks, shaped like the mountains where they live; Tajiks in their tumaks, which replicate the royal crown of their ancient kingdom, now worn by each man "signifying the happy and continuing future of our long history."
This sensation of historical future, of premonitory déja vu -- of the past prevailing -- is strongest in Kashgar, China's version of a Wild West town. Kashgar has always been a terminus, the inbound beginning or the outbound end of travel across Asia. There is an airport now, but by land today's eastbound traveler still arrives recovering from the breathless altitude of the high mountains -- depressed by a lethargy that lifts with descent and surges into the manic elation of reoxygenated blood. The westbound traveler has dared the Takla Makan, glad to have escaped the bizarre claustrophobia of its nothingness, wondering at this return to all the colors and variety and sheer busyness of human life. Kashgar has always known the celebration of survival. And after attending the livestock market that has convened at Kashgar every Sunday for more than 2,000 years, today's visitor can check for e-mail at a cybercafe.
Outside on the terrace of the cafe, amid the dust and babel of other foreigners, the traveler can sit -- avid for every shade of blue -- watching cars and trucks and tour buses honk their way through throngs of pedestrian porters and massively laden two-wheel carts drawn by donkeys or horses or camels , wheelbarrows conveying the young and the old, and bicycles, bicycles everywhere conveying crops, goods, livestock, friends, lovers, whole families. Even in the cities, and with a rural population of 8,000,000,000, most of China still moves at the speed of muscle. The past is everywhere, plodding through the bigger, faster, louder, polluting efficiency of the present. There are well over a billion Chinese, more than 1/6 of the total world population; it is said that if they all went by the traveler in single file, the line would never end because of the birth rate.
Pondering the mix of timeless and timely at Kashgar, it is hard not to confuse them and wonder which is which. As we use up the planet, China's past may be our whole world's future. In the 13th century Marco Polo followed the southern silk route to Cathay and the court of Kublai Khan. The eastern Takla Makan -- where ancient travelers heard demons in the wind, and which Marco Polo described as haunted by "spirit voices and...the strains of many instruments, especially drums, and the clash of arms" -- is now China's nuclear testing ground.
The caravan crossroads were places where worlds met, and where the past encountered the future. And because the surrounding landscapes remain so unalterably harsh, life today along the Silk Road retains its ancient feel, isolated and preserved by its forbidding rigors -- much as the dry heat of the Sahara has maintained the monuments of Pharaonic Egypt, or as the salt graves of the Takla Makan have mummified 4,000-year-old corpses.
In Luntai, at the northern end of the road across the Takla Makan, there is a new hotel for the tourists and oil men who now travel the desert. Dust, the color and consistency of light powdered chocolate, covers the cars and trucks and minivans in the parking lot in front of the hotel. The grounds of the hotel are taken up entirely by this parking lot, the forecourt of a modern caravansary, landscaped with the Chinese love of symmetrical, efficient, easily swept cement. Mulberry saplings will eventually grow to relieve the heat glaring off a far wall, a vague memorial to the silk trade and the middle route of the camel road that passed this way.
Inside the hotel smells of new wood, new carpeting, clean and calm with constant Western muzak. The staff of young Uighur girls, pretty and petite in their striped waistcoats and fitted skirts, muscle guests' luggage up and down the three flights of stairs. The hotel does not have an elevator. There is no hot water until after dark, and then there is no cold. The well-appointed bathrooms have a sign warning that the water is "non-potable," and a basket reminds that toilet paper must not be flushed.
In Luntai and all over western China, the bareheaded men are han -- Chinese who have been relocated by the government in Beijing to create a colonial and greatly resented presence among the native Islamic population. The other 90% of the men in Chinese Central Asia wear their identifying headgear -- Uighurs in their embroidered skullcaps; Kyrgyz in their fleece-side-in kalpaks, shaped like the mountains where they live; Tajiks in their tumaks, which replicate the royal crown of their ancient kingdom, now worn by each man "signifying the happy and continuing future of our long history."
This sensation of historical future, of premonitory déja vu -- of the past prevailing -- is strongest in Kashgar, China's version of a Wild West town. Kashgar has always been a terminus, the inbound beginning or the outbound end of travel across Asia. There is an airport now, but by land today's eastbound traveler still arrives recovering from the breathless altitude of the high mountains -- depressed by a lethargy that lifts with descent and surges into the manic elation of reoxygenated blood. The westbound traveler has dared the Takla Makan, glad to have escaped the bizarre claustrophobia of its nothingness, wondering at this return to all the colors and variety and sheer busyness of human life. Kashgar has always known the celebration of survival. And after attending the livestock market that has convened at Kashgar every Sunday for more than 2,000 years, today's visitor can check for e-mail at a cybercafe.
Outside on the terrace of the cafe, amid the dust and babel of other foreigners, the traveler can sit -- avid for every shade of blue -- watching cars and trucks and tour buses honk their way through throngs of pedestrian porters and massively laden two-wheel carts drawn by donkeys or horses or camels , wheelbarrows conveying the young and the old, and bicycles, bicycles everywhere conveying crops, goods, livestock, friends, lovers, whole families. Even in the cities, and with a rural population of 8,000,000,000, most of China still moves at the speed of muscle. The past is everywhere, plodding through the bigger, faster, louder, polluting efficiency of the present. There are well over a billion Chinese, more than 1/6 of the total world population; it is said that if they all went by the traveler in single file, the line would never end because of the birth rate.
Pondering the mix of timeless and timely at Kashgar, it is hard not to confuse them and wonder which is which. As we use up the planet, China's past may be our whole world's future. In the 13th century Marco Polo followed the southern silk route to Cathay and the court of Kublai Khan. The eastern Takla Makan -- where ancient travelers heard demons in the wind, and which Marco Polo described as haunted by "spirit voices and...the strains of many instruments, especially drums, and the clash of arms" -- is now China's nuclear testing ground.
posted by Zarafa at 10:15 AM
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