Riding the Iron Rooster

by Paul Theroux

  Its walls and fortifications were mostly gone, but the ones that still stood made it seem a remarkable citadel. It had been an ancient capital of this region, and then a Tang city, and then a Uighur city, and at last the Mongols had captured it. The Uighurs didn't want the place destroyed, so they had surrendered without a struggle and let the Mongols take charge, as they had over the rest of China. It was the period of Mongol rule, the Yuan Empire of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when the first Westerners began traveling widely in China—among them, Marco Polo.

  By then Gaocheng was Muslim. It had previously been Buddhist. It had also been a center of heretics—first Manichaean, then Nestorian. It is impossible to consider these heresies without reaching the conclusion that they make a certain amount of sense. The Manichaeans, followers of the Persian prophet Manes, believed that there is good and evil in all humans, and that life is a struggle between these interdependent opposites, the light and the dark, the spirit and the flesh. The Nestorians were Christians who had been declared heretics for their belief that there were two separate persons in the incarnate Christ, denying that Christ was in one person both God and man. They went on to argue that Mary was either the mother of God or the mother of the man Jesus; but she couldn't have it both ways. For this the Nestorians were persecuted and exiled, after the Council of Ephesus (in 431, in present-day Turkey), and they ended up in the seventh century, at the last stage of the Silk Road, deep in China, where the first Nestorian church was founded in 638, in Changan—Xian.

  What made this all the more fascinating to me was that there was nothing left—no church, no heretics, no books, no pictures, no city. There was only the sun beating down on the mud bricks and the broken walls, and all the religion, trade, warfare, art, money, government and civilization had turned to dust. But there was something magnificent in the immensity of this dumb ruin. I kept on seeing this desert as a place where an ocean had been, a gigantic foreshore of smooth stones and seaside rubble; and this city of Gaocheng was quite in key with that, looking like a sand castle that the tide had mostly floated away.

  The only live things here were goats. The frescoes and statues had been stolen—and sold or else removed to museums. Farmers had dismantled many of the buildings so that they could use the bricks, and when the local people found pots or vases or amphoras (and they were good ones, for there was both Greek and Roman influence at Gaocheng), they used them in their kitchens, so that they wouldn't have to buy new ones.

  I went to a nearby village of Uighurs and asked them whether they knew anything about Gaocheng. "It is an old city," they said. The people I asked were brown-faced hawk-nosed men whose village was shady and totally off the map. They had donkeys, they had a mosque and a small market, but they didn't speak Chinese or any language other than Uighur. The place was called Flaming Mountain Commune, but that was merely a euphemism. The village had gone to sleep. The women watched me through the folds in their black shawls, and I saw one who looked exactly like my Italian grandmother.

  Mr. Liu, my guide, did not speak Uighur, though he had lived not far away for twenty years. I had the impression that these desert-dwelling Uighurs did not take the Han Chinese very seriously. When we started away there was a thump against the side of the car, and the driver slammed on the brakes and chased after the laughing kids. He made a fuss, but no one came to help—no one even listened. And then, a further insult. He stopped to ask directions to an ancient burying ground, the necropolis at Astana, and when he put his head out of the car window, two children stuck feathery reeds into his ears and tickled him. They ran away, as he got out and raged at them.

  'They are very bad boys," Mr. Liu said, and he glowered at me when he saw that I was laughing.

  The corpses in the underground tombs at Astana were 600 years old, but perfectly preserved, grinning, lying side by side on a decorated slab.

  "You want to take a picture of the dead people?" the caretaker asked me.

  "I don't have a camera."

  She paid no attention to that. She said, 'Ten yuan. One picture."

  Mr. Liu said, "I hate looking at dead bodies," and hurried up the stone stairs, fleeing the burial chamber.

  When he was gone, the caretaker said, "Shansh marnie?"

  I hated to leave Turfan. It was the first town I had seen in China that didn't look Chinese, and I wondered why this was so. It was the hottest place I had been, the lowest, the strangest, in the middle of nowhere, with sulky old men and rapacious women and stone-throwing kids. I didn't find any of it threatening—in fact I liked seeing people resisting Chinese dullness, and setting their faces against humorless and canting politicians. It was unusual that such a place had managed to keep its pride and its culture intact, even if its culture was little more than melons and tambourines and Islamic prostrations. It was a green island in lifeless wilderness: very exciting to arrive at on a train, and even better that it was on a gasping, drooling steam train.

  I took that same train out of Turfan, Mr. Fang by my side, and headed west through the desert towards Urumchi, which everyone called "Woolamoochie." It is only a hundred miles or so from Turfan, but the trip is slow because of the circuitous passage through the Tian Shan—The Heavenly Mountains. The series of intersecting valleys contain some of China's most beautiful scenery—cliffs, mountain streams, boulder-strewn gullies and deep gorges. The train labors through each of the twelve tunnels and then bursts into one of these valleys in the blinding Xinjiang sunshine, and the rushing water of the Baiyang River drowns out the gasps of the locomotive.

  At one point a black and white crane, five feet tall, gathered itself up and leaped out of the suds of the fast river, folded its legs and neck and beat itself slowly towards the cliffs. After several hours of these brilliantly lit valleys and bouncing clouds, the tracks straightened and we headed across brown desert to the large smoking city of Urumchi, the last place in China that is reachable by train. The next big town west of this is Alma-Ata, in the Soviet Union Republic of Kazakhstan. Horsemen and nomads don't recognize national frontiers. There are plenty of Kazakhs in Urumchi, along with Tatars, Uzbeks, Tazhiks and Mongols; but more than a third of the city's population is Uighur, and the railway station is in the Uighur style, the station sign in the Uighur script.

  It is almost impossible to find any traveler offering a kind word for Urumchi. What began as a Han outpost on the Silk Road, developed into a Tang trading center and then was captured by Huns and finally Mongols. It became the capital of Chinese Turkestan, but with a strong Russian flavor. For most early travelers it was the first stop in China and something of a disappointment ("no one leaves the town with regret"), because it was lacking in any cultural interest. The treasures, the tombs, the lost cities—all the good places to loot—lay farther east. Urumchi was merely political. Here were the offices, the interrogation centers, the jails, the bureaucrats, the spies. That was the case at the turn of the century, and at the time of the Russian Revolution, and it is pretty much the case now.

  Still it had a certain ugly charm, this city of a million and a half people, very few of whom were Han Chinese. It was surrounded by big brown mountains, and it had wide streets and shish kebab parlors. Many shops had rare animals strung up outside. It was very hot in the daytime, and one of the popular recreations was playing pool and billiards under the trees—there were pool tables all over Urumchi, in the open air.

  Mr. Fang disappeared when we reached the hotel, but his place was taken by Mr. Yang, who—when I asked about Russians—said there was a large Russian community here which dated from the 1930s. I had just missed their Easter celebration—the Chinese government had given them permission to hold it for the first time since Liberation.

  There were so many different ethnic groups in Urumchi I wondered what the Cultural Revolution had been like.

  "It was very bad here," Mr. Yang said. "But the minorities were not interested. They did not participate in the Cultural Revolution. Very few of them were Red Guards."


  "If they didn't participate, then they must have been persecuted," I said.

  "Oh, yes," Mr. Yang said, readily agreeing. "They were persecuted! Islamic religion was declared illegal. Praying was illegal. Mosques were considered bad. The Red Guards went in and smashed up the mosques. And people were punished."

  "How did they punish the Muslims?"

  "They made them raise pigs."

  Typical, I thought; and perfect in its way. It was always said that the Chinese under Mao were a forgiving bunch—believers in redemption and reeducation. But it seemed to me uniquely vindictive to make physicists assemble crappy radios, and to force literature teachers to hoe cabbages or shovel chicken shit, and to put Muslims to work in pigsties. That was on the same order as putting hysterical schoolkids in charge of the middle schools; the result was easily predictable, and in the event the little brats persecuted their teachers and passed in blank examination papers to prove they were good Maoist anti-intellectuals.

  "I'll bet the minorities didn't like that very much," I said.

  Mr. Yang shrieked with laughter. It was the Chinese laugh that means You said it!

  He said, 'They wanted to protest, but they didn't dare. They wanted to have a counterrevolution!"

  "Do they want to have a counterrevolution now?" It was a delicate question, because there were always rumors of Uighur discontent; and anyone who saw these frowning, disapproving and uncooperative Uighur faces all over Xinjiang could easily reach the conclusion that here were people who were not entirely sold on the aims of the People's Republic.

  Mr. Yang laughed again, a slower warning honk that meant: Do not ask that question. But that particular laugh was also a noise I interpreted as a complex yes.

  But I was stuck with Mr. Yang. He asked me what I wanted to see in Urumchi.

  I said, "Something memorable."

  We drove to Nanshan, the South Mountain Pasture. It was only twenty minutes out of Urumchi but it looked like western Uganda, a great green plain with the "Mountains of the Moon" rising out of it, several snowcapped peaks. What distinguishes these mountainsides from others in China are the spruce forests, tall, cool and blackish-green. On some of the meadows there were goatherds and shepherds with their flocks, and Kazakhs living in mud-smeared huts and log cabins. There were yurts, too, and near them men wearing fur hats with earflaps, and boots and riding breeches; and there were women in shawls and dresses and thick socks. They looked like Russian babushkas, and unlike the Chinese, these women were long nosed and potbellied. They tended vegetable gardens near their cabins, and they had donkeys and cranky dogs and snotty-nosed kids who, because of the cold, also had bright red cheeks.

  To avoid talking to Mr. Yang for a while, I walked fast up the slope and found a waterfall. Beneath it, in the stream, there was ice—big yellow crusts of it, and solid thick shelves of it frozen to the rocks. Twenty minutes down the road the townsfolk of Urumchi were perspiring and playing pool under the trees, and here it was freezing.

  I found a Uighur, Zhu Ma Hun—Hun means mister and the rest was the Chinese version of the Muslim name Juma (Friday—the Muslim sabbath). He seemed to claim that he had been the Chinese ambassador to Syria, but he may have meant that he worked in that embassy. His Chinese was as limited as mine. On the other hand, he spoke Turkish and Arabic as well as his native Uighur.

  He said he came from Tacheng, on the border of Soviet Kazakhstan, about 500 miles from Urumchi and about as far west as anyone can live in China and still be regarded as Chinese. That gave me an idea.

  "You're not Chinese, are you?"

  "Yes! I'm Chinese!"

  He was big and friendly, fat faced. He might have been a Turk, a Smyrna merchant, or a pasha with a big paunch. He said he had been to Mecca on the hajj.

  We were strolling along the mountain road. We passed a public toilet—the Chinese tend to erect them in the middle of all beauty spots—and though we were forty feet away, the thing gave off an overpowering stink. Every public toilet I saw in China was so vile it was unusable. Every foreigner mentioned them; the Chinese never did spontaneously—not because they were fastidious but because they were ashamed and phlegmatic, and preferred to suffer in silence.

  "I think you don't have many of those in the States," Zhu Ma Hun said.

  "Right," I said, thinking he meant the brick shit house, but I saw that he was pointing to a yurt, where an old nomad—possibly a Tadzhik—was lugging a bucket of water.

  "But do you have any tents?" he asked.

  "Not as many as you," I said.

  The Chinese idea of a picnic lunch is an assortment of dry sponge cake and stale cookies. Mr. Yang had given me a box in the car, and I had not realized what was in it until I was some distance up the mountain. I fed the whole thing to some cows.

  That afternoon, still hungry, I looked for something to eat in the market at Urumchi. My favorite street food was a kind of stuffed pancake called jiaozi or else fried dumplings. But the treat here was lamb kebabs and flat loaves of bread they called nang, probably from the same root word as the Urdu nan, familiar to anyone who has eaten in an Indian restaurant.

  There are so few Western travelers in Urumchi that Uighurs become animated when they see them. They stare, they gabble, they proffer dried fruit and bunches of fresh grapes. One man tried to interest me in his medicines: dried and splayed lizards (for high blood pressure), deer antlers (for potency), snakes, frogs, and birds' beaks, and a hideous little bundle of twiggy things that he said were the umbilical cords of donkeys.

  "They are very good for you," he said vaguely, when I asked what they were for.

  The traders in the market, selling the carpets which are woven in Urumchi and the clothes that arrive by train, were either bearded men in skullcaps or fat women in brown dresses. They held up their merchandise, they beckoned me over, but whenever I got close they breathed on me and snatched my wrist and spoke the Uighur greeting.

  "Shansh marnie?"

  There were more dead animals elsewhere in Urumchi. It is a measure of how deep in the hinterland the town is that there are still many wild animals in the surrounding countryside. At one shop I saw the usual snakes and dried lizards and umbilical cords, but also wolf pelts, fox furs, a half a dozen bearskins and the carcass of an eagle—a white-shouldered Imperial Eagle (so my bird book said), with a wingspan of about six feet. This beautiful bird was a great deal bigger than the Uighur woman selling it.

  "Do you want to buy it?" she said.

  "What would I do with it?"

  "You take the feathers and rub them on your skin. It's good medicine."

  "What about this?" I said, pointing to the skull of a gazelle, to which two lovely horns were attached.

  "Medicine. Grind it into powder. It makes you strong."

  There were any number of Western scientists who claimed that traditional Chinese medicine could be efficacious; but what this woman was saying—and the man in the market with his donkeys' umbilical cords—was surely complete nonsense?

  I was prepared to believe that the Chinese had the herbal solutions to high blood pressure, and that acupuncture had its practical uses; but when they scrunched up a dead owl and said, Yum, yum—good for your eyes, I wanted to say Bullshit. If I didn't, it was only because I didn't yet know the Chinese word for it.

  There are a handful of tigers in China, some in Hunan, some in the far northeast. Needless to say, they are an endangered species. There is so little food for them that when they're very hungry these tigers will eat insects and frogs. In a copy of a Chinese magazine (China Today) I read the following: 'The [Chinese] tiger is a kind of treasure. The hide of the tiger can be made into an expensive coat. The bones, the kidneys, the stomach and the penis are very valuable medicine. The medicine made from the ribs of the tiger is a very good and effective medicine for curing rheumatoid arthritis."

  It was bad enough that they were killing the few animals they had left, but they were doing it for the stupidest reasons. But it was probably true that the most
accurate epitaph for creatures that have become extinct is: It Tasted Good.

  I tried to get Mr. Fang to teach me how to say, "That is merely a superstitious belief with no scientific basis to support it," but we got nowhere. He asked me why I wanted to be able to say this, and I mentioned the Chinese habit of making the lovely little Asian Barred Owlet into soup. He said there were two good reasons for that: They tasted good and they were good for your eyesight.

  He was bewildered that anyone with sense should care for the life of a bird or an animal. I did not argue with him. The Chinese themselves often lived in such cramped and uncomfortable conditions that they could hardly be expected to sympathize with animals that lived the same way. Indeed, the way the Chinese lived and died bore a remarkable resemblance to their animals.

  Mr. Fang surprised me further by saying, "Mr. Jiao wants to see you."

  "Who is Mr. Jiao?"

  "General Manager of the Urumchi Branch of China Railways."

  "How does he know I'm here?"

  "I told him," Mr. Fang said, and looked sad in his sea-lion way. "He wants you to eat with him."

  Mr. Jiao Xi Ku was a dark, tough-looking man from the far-eastern province of Shandong. He had a short neck and a broad face, and as the evening advanced and he drank more and more Xinjiang white wine, his dark face was suffused with a kind of alcoholic blush and his eyes became smaller and very red, like two boiled berries.

  We were joined by his assistant, Mr. Jie, who—because he was an underling—did not say very much. After the formalities ("We are honored to have you") I realized that this would be a large meal. The cold dishes were set out and ignored; that meant there were about a dozen more courses to come.

  I asked Mr. Jiao about the railway. What were the problems in building and maintaining it? He said the worst problem was the sandstorms, the wind that often grew to force 9 or 10. A cold wind met a hot wind in the gobi and caused great turbulence. And then there were the tunnels through the Tian Shan—they had taken years to cut.