Shadow of the Silk Road Read online

  COLIN THUBRON

  Shadow of the Silk Road

  For Paul Bergne

  Contents

  Maps

  Author’s note

  1. Dawn

  2. The Capital

  3. Mantra

  4. The Last Gate Under Heaven

  5. The Southern Road

  6. Kashgar

  7. The Mountain Passage

  8. To Samarkand

  9. Over the Oxus

  10. Mourning

  11. The Mongol Peace

  12. To Antioch

  Timeline

  Searchable Terms

  About the Author

  Other Books by Colin Thubron

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Maps

  The Silk Road

  Xian to Kashgar

  Kashgar to Meshed

  Meshed to Antakya

  Maps drawn by Reginald Piggott

  The Silk Road

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The journey recorded here was broken by fighting in northern Afghanistan. The section delayed there was travelled the following year, in the same season.

  In the midst of political uncertainty, the identities of several people described in the narrative have been disguised.

  Xian to Kashgar

  1

  Dawn

  In the dawn the land is empty. A causeway stretches across the lake on a bridge of silvery granite, and beyond it, pale on its reflection, a temple shines. The light falls pure and still. The noises of the town have faded away, and the silence intensifies the void–the artificial lake, the temple, the bridge–like the shapes for a ceremony which has been forgotten.

  As I climb the triple terrace to the shrine, a dark mountain bulks alongside, dense to the skyline with ancient trees. My feet sound frail on the steps. The new stone and the old trees make a soft confusion in the mind. Somewhere in the forest above me, among the thousand-year-old cypresses, lies the tomb of the Yellow Emperor, the mythic ancestor of the Chinese people.

  A few pilgrims are wandering in the temple courtyard, and vendors under yellow awnings are offering yellow roses. It is quiet and thick with shadows. Giant cypresses have invaded the compound and now stand, grey and aged, as if turning to stone. One, it is said, was planted by the Yellow Emperor himself; another is the tree where the great emperor Wudi, founder of the shrine two thousand years ago, hung up his armour before prayer.

  The pilgrims are taking photographs of one another. They pose gravely, accruing prestige from the magic of the place. Here their past becomes holy. The only sound is the rustling of the bamboo and the murmuring of the visitors. They pay homage in this temple to their own inheritance, their pride of place in the world. For the Yellow Emperor invented civilisation itself. He brought China–and wisdom–into being.

  The woman is gazing at a boulder indented by two huge footprints. Slight and girlish, she jumps at the sight of a foreigner. Foreigners don’t come here–she laughs through her fingers–she is sorry. The footprints, she says, belong to the Yellow Emperor.

  ‘Not really?’

  ‘Yes. One of his concubines used them to make boots. He invented boots.’

  We walk for a moment where memorial stones are carved with the tribute of early emperors, and come at the court’s end to the Hall of the Founder of Human Civilisation. Its altar is ablaze with candles and incense, and heaped with plastic fruit. The woman’s gaze, when I question her, stays candid on mine. The Yellow Emperor invented writing, music and mathematics, she says. He discovered silk. This was where history began. People had been coming here generation after generation. ‘And now you too. Are you from your government?’ But her eyes dip to my worn trousers and dusty trainers. ‘A teacher?’

  ‘Yes,’ I lie. Already a new identity is unfurling: a teacher with a taste for history, and a family back home. I want to go unquestioned.

  So that’s why you speak Mandarin, she says (although it is poor, almost toneless). ‘And where are you going?’

  I think of saying Turkey, the Mediterranean, but it sounds preposterous. I hear myself answer: ‘Along the Silk Road to the north-west, to Kashgar.’ And this sounds strange enough. She smiles nervously. She feels she has already reached out too far, and turns silent. But the unvoiced question Why are you going? gathers between her eyes in a faint, perplexed fleur-de-lis. This Why?, in China, is rarely asked. It is too intrusive, too internal. We walk in silence.

  Sometimes a journey arises out of hope and instinct, the heady conviction, as your finger travels along the map: Yes, here and here…and here. These are the nerve-ends of the world…

  A hundred reasons clamour for your going. You go to touch on human identities, to people an empty map. You have a notion that this is the world’s heart. You go to encounter the protean shapes of faith. You go because you are still young and crave excitement, the crunch of your boots in the dust; you go because you are old and need to understand something before it’s too late. You go to see what will happen.

  Yet to follow the Silk Road is to follow a ghost. It flows through the heart of Asia, but it has officially vanished, leaving behind it the pattern of its restlessness: counterfeit borders, unmapped peoples. The road forks and wanders wherever you are. It is not a single way, but many: a web of choices. Mine stretches more than seven thousand miles, and is occasionally dangerous.

  But in the temple of the Yellow Emperor, the woman’s gaze has drifted north. ‘He was buried up there on the mountain,’ she says. ‘It’s written that people tugged at the emperor’s clothes as he flew to heaven, trying to pull him back. Some say that only his clothes are buried there. But I don’t think this is true.’ She speaks softly, with a tinge of unexplained sadness. ‘The grave is quite small, not like those of later emperors. I think life was simpler in those days.’

  We walk for a minute longer under the eaves of the temple. Then, suddenly, the quiet is shattered by the stutter of power-drills and the groan of dump-trucks.

  ‘They’re building the new temple,’ she says. ‘For celebrations and conferences. This one’s too small. The new one will hold five thousand people.’

  Later I peer down from the hillside on the building site where it will be. I imagine the stressless, unchanging temple-pavilions of China rising from their wan granite. This place, Huangling, is only a hundred miles north of modern Xian, but is lost deep in another time of erosion and poverty. Who will come?

  But the whole site is resurrecting as a national shrine, and already the older temple is filled with the memorial stelae of China’s statesmen offering homage to ‘the father of the nation’. Here is the stone calligraphy of Sun Yatsen from 1912, and of Chiang Kai-shek, predictably coarse; of Mao Zedong, who was later to condemn the Yellow Emperor as feudal; of Deng Xiaoping and the hated Li Peng.

  The clamour of restoration dies as you climb the track where it snakes through the cypress woods. From somewhere sounds the drilling of a woodpecker, and human voices echo and fade above you. Here and there a yellow flag on a bamboo pole marks the way. You are sinking back in time. Close to the summit the path becomes a stone stairway, and the trees turn phantasmal, their trunks twisted like sticks of barley-sugar or wrenched open on swirling slate-blue veins. Here the grandest mandarin, even the emperor, abandoned his sedan chair and approached the mausoleum on foot.

  For there is little in the end–from music to the calendar–whose discovery is not attributed to the Yellow Emperor. He reigned for a hundred years until 2597 BC before ascending to heaven on a dragon. It was he who instituted the festivals of earth and silk. After him the reigning emperors, from a remote time, inaugurated the year by ploughing a ritual furrow, while their empr
esses offered cocoons and mulberry leaves at the altar of his wife Lei-tzu, the Lady of the Silk Worms.

  It was Lei-tzu, in legend, who discovered silk. While walking in her garden, she noticed a strange worm gorging on mulberry leaves. For several days she watched it spinning itself a golden net, and imagined it the soul of an ancestor. Then she saw it close itself away, and thought it dead–until the reincarnate moth burst from its cocoon. Toying, mystified, with its minute broken shroud, the empress mistakenly dropped it into her tea. Idly she picked at the softened fibre, then began to unwind it, with growing astonishment, into a long, glistening filament of silk. In time she became the teacher of silk-weaving and of the rearing of the mysterious worm, and she was deified at her death and placed in the sky in the celestial home of Scorpio, the constellation Silk House.

  You reach the summit of the hill, which the ancients called Mount Qiao. Incense and sunlight filter through the trees. People have made sacrifice here since the eighth century BC, and the emperor Wudi built a prayer platform, now softly decaying. The few attendants stare at you in mute surprise. Beside the platform, cauldrons the size of cement-mixers are stuffed with joss sticks, and a suspended log is being swung at a monstrous bell, whose clang shakes the woods.

  Beyond, enclosed in a sombre wall so crowded by cypresses that it is almost invisible, rises the grave-mound of the Yellow Emperor. It is only twelve feet high, rank and tufted by shrubs. You circle it tentatively on a path of beaten earth. The funeral stele planted before it reads: ‘The Dragon-rider on Mount Qiao’. But you wonder how he really died, and who he was. Some historians believe that the dragon is the memory of a meteor, in whose cataclysmic fall the emperor vanished. Its remnants have been identified nearby.

  As you wander the rim of the mountain, the enigma deepens. Far on all sides the arid hills belong not to classical China but to a harsher world. This is where Shaanxi province points to Mongolia. Down its corridor the barbarian tribes–Huns, Turks, Mongols–descended south into China’s heartland, to the teeming cities of the Yellow River. In the more rigorous early histories, the Yellow Emperor was himself the forerunner of these: a clan leader who invaded from the north-west and unified the people in his path. It is curious. As if to still this nomad flood into controllable history, sages as long ago as the eleventh century BC slotted the conqueror into time as their ancestor. His colour changed to the yellow soil of inner China, where the wind-blown loess from the northern deserts settles into fertile fields. The notional shade of barbarian soils was black or red, and white the tint of death and of the West. But yellow was the colour of the world’s heart.

  I circle back to the grave in confusion. Suddenly its mound is not a relic from some golden age, but the primitive barrow of a nomad chief. The father of China was not Chinese at all.

  As for the Lady of the Silk Worms, she too fades from known history. The cultivation of silk had spread along the Chinese rivers long before her. More than six thousand years ago somebody in a Neolithic village carved a silkworm on an ivory cup, and archaeologists unearthed an artificially broken cocoon. Silk from the late third millennium BC turned up in a ruined city of Turkmenistan, and early sites have yielded spinning tools and even red-dyed silk ribbons.

  In the forest clearing, by the prayer platform, one of the attendants opens his hand to me for money, hoping to sell me incense. But whimsically I choose another tribute. I swing the painted log–it moves swifter, heavier than I expect–against the hanging bell. In the dark clearing it reverberates with a diffused clamour. Long after I’ve relinquished the log, the noise goes on. It booms over the platform, the forest, the tomb, like some melancholy knowledge. It is indefinably alarming. The other pilgrims turn to stare. The sound is more intrusive than any incense or candle.

  2

  The Capital

  The sun rose over a new city. Along its inner avenues, and far out to the skyline, Xian had suffered a hallucinatory change. Eighteen years before, I trudged through a run-down provincial capital. Its sombre ramparts, survivors of the Cultural Revolution, had enclosed little but concrete office blocks and half-empty state emporia. There is a stench of coal dust in my memory, and autumnal mud. Rusting trucks and a river of bicycles had meandered the ghostly grid of ancient streets. The colours along the sidewalks were regulation brown, grey and serge blue. It seemed a place of inert history, and fatal patience.

  But now it had shattered into life. I recognised almost nothing. It had not frozen to grandeur like Beijing, but transformed into a hectic procession of overcrowded shopping malls, restaurants and high-tech industrial suburbs. The nine-mile circuit of its walls, which once seemed to enclose nothing, was bursting with reborn vigour, the massive gates funnelling in traffic which clogged the boulevards for miles. Eight-lane highways–including the beleaguered bicycle lane–shot between hotels and prestige apartment blocks carrying the new-fangled private cars and a fleet of ten thousand Citroen taxis.

  At the city’s heart, the Ming dynasty bell tower had become a swirling traffic island. As you circle its upper gallery, banging your head on its crossbeams, an enormous shopping mall opposite showers you with computerised advertisements, and a cavernous McDonald’s gleams alongside; slogans proclaim new motor scooters, CD players, mobile phones. From here the traffic streams away to the four points of the Ming compass. At every boulevard’s end the fort-like gates leave jaundiced profiles in the smog, while beyond them hovers a crowd of suburban skyscrapers, like the ghost of the future waiting to break through.

  The future can hardly wait. The whole city is in a turmoil of construction. Every other site is marked by a giant computer image of what will be built there–glass-and-tile institutes and company headquarters topped by tilted eaves and temple turrets like paper hats, with a scattering of blond visitors dotted in below for prestige and perspective–so that whole stretches of avenue become futuristic theatre-sets. If you return next year, these vistas promise, you will enter a different city. All that China wants to be, Xian is becoming.

  Already the shops and hoardings are persuading you that everywhere is here: Paris, New York, London. The supermarkets are stacked with goods inaccessible even five years ago: electrical products pour in from eastern China; food is piled up in what to older people seems a curious dream. And here and there some glossy mall oversteps into Elysium altogether. These cold palaces offer an unmediated West: Givenchy, Arden, Bally, Gieves & Hawkes, Dior, L’Oréal. The assistants look blank and sanitised, as if adapting by instinct to their role, and their customers, appearing shyly provincial–boyish men, girlish women–glide up and down bedazzled on the escalators.

  Sometimes, through half-closed eyes, I tried to reimagine the city of my memory. But I found myself recalling a place which I was no longer sure had existed, under whose louring ramparts, now reverberating with traffic, the farmers had spread their market stalls, and avenues had run deserted. Already this older Xian was retreating to a sepia photograph in my head. I struggled to recover it, but it faded by the hour.

  All around now, another generation was on the move. Their pace was more nervous and directed. Little silver cellphones glittered at every ear. In my memory, their parents’ expressions were guarded or blank, and footsteps lumbered. But now they had wakened into difference: more changeable, demonstrative, uneasy. A few reminded me of friends in the West. I half expected them to ignite in recognition. Couples were walking hand in hand, even kissing–a Maoist outrage. Women with auburn-dyed hair were walking little dogs. Long, pointed shoes were in fashion–like jesters’ slippers–and luridly bleached jeans.

  Something had been licensed which they called the West. I gawped at it like a stranger. Yet the outbreak of individualism, I sensed, was not quite that. Being Western was a kind of conformity. Even as the West touched them, they might be turning it Chinese. And among these crowds of urban young an undertow of rural migrants–like shockwaves from their past–was threading the streets: loud-mouthed men and women with sun-blackened faces and bushy hair, whos
e harsh voices filled the noodle shops.

  On this transforming city, old people gazed as if at some heartless pageant. Dressed in their leftover Mao caps and frayed cloth slippers, they would settle by a roundabout or park and stare for hours as the changed world unfolded. It was hard to look at them unmoved. Men and women born in civil war and Japanese invasion, who had eked out their lives through famine in the Great Leap Forward and survived the Cultural Revolution, had emerged at last to find themselves redundant. Under their shocks of grey hair the faces looked strained or emptied by history. Sometimes they seemed faintly to smile. They smoked continuously, if they could afford it, and tugged their trouser legs above their knees to catch the sun. And sometimes their expressions had quietened into a kind of peace, even amusement, so that I wondered in surprise what memory can have been so sweet.

  Stray from any avenue within the walls, and you become lost in a skein of old suburbs. Just behind the concrete boulevards, they pulse like the city’s unconscious–twist and bifurcate into claustrophobic courtyards where the flimsy wooden walls of family compounds, studded with cracked windows, last out the cold winters under grey-tiled roofs or corrugated tin. As you walk here, the weight of Xian’s past returns. You hear only the squeak of bicycles or the clatter of a pedicab as it deposits its bone-shaken passengers.

  In one street, where artists and calligraphers toiled in dark studios, I was surrounded by classical ink-stones for sale, and ranks of badger-hair brushes in discrete sizes (with a stuffed ferret-badger hanging alongside as guarantee). Vendors of bamboo pipes and bottle-flutes blew them in quaint seduction as I passed. But the wonky eaves and balconies above them had been self-consciously restored, and the alley was called ‘Old Culture Street’. Beyond it, lanes selling painted fans and classical opera costumes merged into a market of massed artefacts in lacquer and porcelain, jade and bone. Reproduced as antique, they occupied a shadowland where the old crafts had grown nostalgic, food for tourists. Among them all–the quaint and the occasionally beautiful–I even found mementoes of the Cultural Revolution, manufactured as curiosities. There were Little Red Books for sale, published as posthumous souvenirs; cigarette lighters played ‘The East is Red’ as they lit up. On a popular wristwatch a painted image of Mao Zedong waved his hand jerkily with every second. ‘He is not greeting you,’ the vendor grinned. ‘He is saying goodbye.’ It was as if those years, with all their horror, were being sucked already into the slipstream of the past. The pain was leaving them. They had become kitsch.