The Emperor Far Away

by David Eimer

  So isolated is the frontier that, even when it was open, just a handful of westerners journeyed across it. Francis Younghusband went through on Great Game business after his stay in Kashgar. An 1873 agreement resulted in the British and Russians designating the Wakhan Corridor as the dividing line between their empires. Both sides monitored the Corridor to make sure there were no unauthorised incursions.

  The last westerner known to have crossed the border was the Briton H. W. Tilman. A much decorated soldier in both world wars, Tilman was born too late for the Great Game but was still a character out of a Boy’s Own annual. A noted mountain climber, often in the company of Eric Shipton, the last of Britain’s Kashgar consuls, he was the sort of man who shinned up 7,000-metre peaks in a Norfolk jacket and a pair of stout walking boots. In 1947, after a failed attempt on Mutzagh Ata, Tilman travelled alone into the Wakhan Corridor via the Wakhjir Pass in search of the source of the Oxus River.

  Reading about Tilman’s exploits had induced romantic visions of me following in his footsteps, ghosting up the track disguised as a local and slipping past the PLA guards to reach the frontier. I knew that wasn’t actually possible, but I still wanted to see how far I could travel along the track, or at least get close enough to know where it began. Lao Yu, though, wouldn’t even consider it.

  ‘I’ll be in trouble and so will you. The army are building a new road to the border and there are checkpoints and cameras now,’ he said. I pondered the irony of the fact that the Chinese–Afghan frontier has been all but ignored by Beijing since 1949, yet I’d arrived just at the time when they had decided to take an interest in it. That sudden surge in activity has been prompted by the presence of NATO soldiers in Badakhshan Province. The new road will enable the Chinese side of the border to be reinforced speedily, and in strength, should they decide to march east to Xinjiang.

  Gazing at the seemingly impenetrable crags which shielded the new road from view was the closest I got to Afghanistan. We carried on towards the mountains in front of us, which mark the beginning of the Karakoram Range. Somewhere over 4,000 metres, we reached the snowline and my ears started to pop. From then on, Lao Yu negotiated a series of switchback curves as we ascended the last few hundred metres to the Khunjerab Pass.

  Another checkpoint and then we were at the frontier. A double line of barbed wire rose above the snow lying knee-deep on either side of the road, and there was a giant arch which hadn’t been there in 1988. On the far side of it were two Chinese, one PLA officer and a Wu Jing soldier, and a bearded Pakistani in mirrored sunglasses and camouflage. I strolled up and asked if I was in Pakistan now. They nodded in assent.

  We shared cigarettes and I fielded the inevitable questions about where I was from and what I was doing. The officer told me the soldiers did one month at the pass and then one back in Tashkurgan, even when the border closed for winter. He was the chattiest PLA man I have ever encountered, at least while on duty, and spoke good English. ‘I have to – that’s how we communicate with the Pakistanis,’ he said. But I didn’t envy him his posting. It was frigid, even in the midday sun, and I was shivering in three layers of summer clothes.

  On the way back, Lao Yu gave me the benefit of his thoughts on the Uighurs. Five years of working in Tashkurgan had enriched his pocket, while leaving him severely prejudiced against the natives. He had no problem with the ethnic Tajiks. ‘They’re fine, they don’t cause trouble.’ Instead, it was the Uighurs he disliked. For Lao Yu, they were jiade, or fake, Chinese people. I thought most Uighurs would agree with that, except they would qualify it by saying they were also unwilling Chinese citizens.

  Lao Yu was just getting started. Meiyou wenhua was the phrase he repeated over and over again in connection with the Uighurs. It literally translates as ‘having no education’, but has a wider meaning implying that the person, or people, lacks civilisation and culture. ‘They think they can be like the Kuomintang and have their own state like Taiwan, that’s how stupid the Uighurs are,’ he said with a nasty sneer.

  ‘You know why they’re so stupid? You know the person we call an uncle? For a Uighur, that’s their elder brother not their uncle. They all marry their brothers, sisters and cousins and that’s why they are so stupid.’ I didn’t know how to respond. During my time in China, I’d listened to many Han complaints about the Uighurs. How they are lazy, prone to petty crime, unwilling or unable to learn Mandarin, ate too much lamb and are overly religious. But Lao Yu’s theory that the Uighurs are incestuous was new to me.

  In the evening I played pool with Majid, a Uighur art student from Kashgar who was in Tashkurgan to sketch the Pamirs, and wondered if I should broach the subject with him. I decided against it. Majid was sparky and inquisitive and didn’t look or sound inbred to me. We were in one of Tashkurgan’s pool halls, essentially a shop holding a few tables with rock-hard cushions and patched baize. In all small towns in rural Xinjiang, as in many other parts of country China, pool is the only entertainment option outside of drinking beer in a restaurant.

  I have lost at pool all across China. Once, I shot a few frames in Beijing with a giggly sixteen-year-old farmer’s daughter from Henan Province who had just been crowned the World Nine-Ball Pool Champion. She was barely taller than her cue, but thrashed me off the table. Majid wasn’t in her league, but he still beat me while a crowd of young Tajik and Uighur lads looked on smiling and offering advice.

  Majid wanted to be an art teacher, preferably abroad. ‘I’d like to go to London,’ he said with a cheeky grin. I told him he should try. ‘It’s hard enough to get a permit to come here. It’s almost impossible to get a passport,’ replied Majid. He was right. Most Uighurs under the age of fifty have as much chance of obtaining a passport as they do of winning one of China’s lotteries. Old people with relatives overseas can travel, but a twenty-three-year-old like Majid would need both connections at home and a powerful sponsor in his destination country to leave.

  He spoke English, which is perhaps why he felt he could be outspoken despite the audience watching us play. I didn’t have to ask leading questions to get Majid to talk about the situation in his homeland. ‘Most Uighurs want independence, but Xinjiang has too much oil and gas for the Chinese to let that happen. It’s cruel, because if we were independent then all our resources would enable us to develop very quickly. We could sell them and use the money to raise our living standards. But there’s no hope of that. Uighurs have tried to be independent many times and it has never worked,’ he said.

  Neighbouring countries like Kazakhstan are resource-rich too, but also extremely corrupt, so that little money trickles down from the government to the people. Majid brushed that fact aside, as easily as he pocketed balls. ‘Maybe, but we’d still rather be like them,’ he said. ‘You know why Uighurs are jealous of the ethnic Kazakhs and the Kyrgyz and even the Tajiks? It’s because if they have a problem here, they can always go to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan. We don’t have that option. If there was a Uighurstan, none of us would be here.’

  7

  Uighurstan

  Talking to Majid reinforced how frustrating it must be not to have a homeland, while living alongside people with their own countries next door. It had been easier for the Uighurs before 1991 and the break-up of the USSR, when central Asia was still subsumed within the Soviet empire. Now, there are five ’stans, three of which border Xinjiang, and they are a permanent reminder to the Uighurs of what they lack the most.

  The closest thing to a Uighurstan lies in the far south of Xinjiang, where the former oases of the southern Silk Road are strung along the edge of the Taklamakan in a long slow curve. Those towns are the Uighur heartland, the places with the fewest Chinese migrants. Exploring them would be my long goodbye to Xinjiang, as I travelled back towards Han China along a route dating back thousands of years.

  I spent a disappointing time in Yarkand, searching vainly for an echo of the trade terminus it once was. Most of the city’s historic buildings were knocked down in the 1960s and 1970
s during the Cultural Revolution, with even the so-called old town no more than a cluster of rebuilt alleys. Only the Altun Mosque, a smaller version of the Id Kah in Kashgar, and the mausoleums of Yarkand royalty survived the Red Guards’ fury. They sat in a square, overlooked by restaurants and carpet shops.

  Yarkand was important not just as a Silk Road stop, but because it is where Xinjiang starts to bleed into India and Tibet. Until 1949, when the Chinese closed the border with India which lies some 300 kilometres south of Yarkand, caravans of Buddhist traders from Leh in Ladakh were regular visitors, along with Hindu merchants. Now much of what was formerly north-east Ladakh is a disputed no man’s land, occupied by China but claimed by India as part of its territory.

  Known as Aksai Chin, it is a region where high-altitude desert, saltwater lakes and untouched peaks combine in a landscape that could be a science-fiction writer’s dream of a far-off planet. Barely inhabited, save for PLA soldiers, and barred to foreigners, Aksai Chin can be reached only via Highway 219, which snakes south from Xinjiang for almost 2,100 kilometres, across passes as high as 5,400 metres, before it reaches Lhatse in Tibet.

  The construction of 219 caused a war. The Chinese started building a road linking Xinjiang with Tibet in the early 1950s. Only after it had been completed in 1957 did New Delhi discover it passed through Aksai Chin, which India regards as belonging to its state of Jammu and Kashmir. The tensions that arose out of 219 running through contested territory played a major part in setting off the 1962 Sino-Indian War.

  Soon after leaving Yarkand, I passed the turn-off for 219. My road south to Hotan was not nearly as rugged as that highway, but all around me was the unnerving country that makes up southern Xinjiang. The few villages here are merely tolerated by the desert, which in turn is watched over by brutal, elemental rock formations. Through the dust-caked right-hand window of the bus, the Kunlun Mountains, which form a natural barrier between Xinjiang and Tibet, were barely visible in the far distance. But the Taklamakan was everywhere, a vast sand sea stretching away towards each compass point.

  A stiff wind picked up grains of sand, lifting them over the new railway line, linking Kashgar to Hotan, which runs alongside the highway, and blowing them across the road in steady waves. Skinny poplar trees, ubiquitous to every oasis in southern Xinjiang, rose ahead at infrequent intervals to indicate we were approaching a small settlement, the only relief from the harshness of the land surrounding us until the outskirts of Hotan appeared.

  Hotan will never be the spiritual home of the Uighurs; that honour is Kashgar’s alone. There is no equivalent of the Id Kah Mosque, or of Kashgar’s vanishing old town. Yet Hotan has a far better claim to be the capital of Xinjiang than either Kashgar or Urumqi, because its population is still overwhelmingly Uighur. The railway’s arrival will inevitably change that, but for now the Han remain a tiny minority. Their smooth pale faces are an anomaly in a city where men flout the CCP’s ‘no beards’ policy and many women shield their faces from view.

  Far fewer people understood Mandarin in Hotan than anywhere else I’d been in Xinjiang. It made getting around difficult, as not only did the taxi drivers fail to understand what I was saying, but they couldn’t read an address either. Most ignored or didn’t know the Chinese names given to the streets anyway. They navigated around the city via landmarks like the Juma Mosque and the nearby main market, which spilled out of its allocated space in the north-east of town on to the surrounding streets.

  Every inch of the pavements around the bazaar was occupied by someone selling something. Piles of vegetables and fruit, clothes hurled on to carts which the women customers stood three deep in front of as they rooted through them, and everywhere mobile food stalls. There were giant vats of polo, baby chickens turning slowly brown in primitive rotisseries, kebabs and lamb on the bone, as well as the sticky walnut cake beloved by the sweet-toothed Uighurs.

  If food determines a city’s status, then Hotan is the heart of Uighurstan, the undisputed culinary capital of Xinjiang. Much of what is on the menu is unique to the south, like the gosh kurdah, a big pastry filled with lamb and potato reminiscent of a Cornish pasty. Best of all are the rough hunks of lamb cooked slowly on a hook in a tonur, so the flesh comes apart with a gentle pull of the fingers. Served with a fresh naan embedded with thin strips of red onion, they combine to create a delicious and unexpected local version of a roast-lamb sandwich.

  On Sundays, the residents of Hotan and the surrounding area gravitate to the market as if they are being summoned to the mosque. Early in the morning, the roads leading to it are a mêlée of motorbikes carrying whole families, donkey carts and the three-wheeled electric vehicles with rug-covered benches in the back that serve as buses in the outlying villages. By the afternoon, such is the press of people packed tightly together in the bazaar’s alleys that moving in any direction becomes a struggle.

  What is on offer gives a clue to Uighur life in southern Xinjiang. Tools, used washing machines and spare parts for carts and bikes mingle with butchers’ stalls where sheep dangle from hooks. Luxury items like silk and gold jewellery are sold from hole-in-the-wall shops. Medicine men stand on the back of their carts, armed with a microphone, extolling the virtues of herbal cures and ageing pharmaceutical products.

  There are none of the tour groups, either Chinese or western, which have turned the Sunday market in Kashgar into a mere attraction. Instead, the white skullcaps worn by devout Muslims bobbed along in front of me as I inched through the crowds. They were more numerous than the doppa, a hat which indicates Uighur identity rather than faith in Islam. Most of the women were covered up in both the bright colours I’d seen elsewhere in Xinjiang and the more fundamentalist all-black. When the call to prayer wailed out from the nearby Juma Mosque, everyone dropped to their knees and turned west towards Mecca.

  Unlike deracinated Kashgar, daily life in Hotan recalled the Xinjiang I experienced in 1988. The Han have only a toehold here, and I was elated by that after seeing the Uighurs shunted to the fringes of their traditional capital. I strolled around town with a smile on my face, stroking my moustache like a pantomime villain and gorging myself on street food at every opportunity.

  Of course, I was dreaming. The new railway line alone is evidence of Beijing’s vision of a Hotan that will be far less Uighur-dominated. One afternoon, I was snapped out of my reverie as I returned from a trip to the country. On the eastern outskirts of Hotan, close to the Jade Dragon River, my taxi became snarled up in a chaotic traffic jam. Cars were pointing in opposite directions on the same side of the road and backed up all the way to the other side of the river.

  Ahead, police prevented anyone moving. We sat immobile for an hour until the first of a convoy of more than fifty PLA vehicles appeared. The soldiers wore steel helmets and stared out at us from the back of the trucks with expressionless faces. Their officers gestured and shouted at anyone who came too close. We were being held up to let them pass, and the Uighurs waited in silence as what looked more like an occupying force than the people’s army went by.

  I realised then that Hotan isn’t just the unofficial capital of Uighurstan; it is the current front line in Beijing’s battle to subjugate all Xinjiang. Not long after my visit, eighteen people died when the police station close to the bazaar was stormed by a group of Uighurs armed with petrol bombs and knives. They tore down the Chinese flag and raised a black one with a red crescent on it, before being killed or taken prisoner.

  Uighurs said the attack was prompted by the city government trying to stop women from wearing all-black robes and especially veils, an ongoing campaign by the Chinese across all Xinjiang. They claimed, too, that men were being forced to shave their beards. The Xinjiang government said the assault was an act of terrorism and that the attackers had called for a jihad. But no evidence was produced to demonstrate any tangible link between Uighur nationalists and the militant Islamic groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan and central Asia.

  Beijing, though, reveals little substantive informat
ion about the separatist groups it claims are operating in Xinjiang. Over the years, their names have mutated – the East Turkestan Islamic Organisation, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, the Turkestan Islamic Party – as if their very existence is in question. Every so often, the Chinese media run a report saying a remote training camp has been overrun, or weapons confiscated. But no proof is ever offered of those raids, no captured rifles displayed.

  Undoubtedly, there are Uighurs fighting for independence with bombs and guns and some have received guerrilla training in Pakistan or Uzbekistan. Yet their numbers are tiny. Nor have the restrictions imposed by the CCP on the Uighurs’ practice of their faith spurred a rush to embrace radical Islam. Many are now more determined to demonstrate their loyalty to their religion. But growing a beard or wearing a veil is hardly akin to the extremist beliefs which provide Al-Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups with their motivation.

  Going in search of the source of the Uighurs’ religious identity took me further into the desert than I’d ever been before. After Hotan, there are no more cities. From here on, southern Xinjiang is a collection of tiny towns clinging to the edge of the Taklamakan and populated overwhelmingly by Uighur farmers. Niya was the first of them, a dusty one-camel settlement whose inhabitants are so sleepy not even the presence of a foreigner arouses much excitement.

  Ninety kilometres north of Niya is Mazar Iman Jafar Sadiq, the holiest shrine in all Xinjiang, the Mecca of East Turkestan. Isolated out in the desert, far from the corrupting power of civilisation, it was a Buddhist pilgrimage site long before the Uighurs converted to Islam. Like Glastonbury in Britain, it straddles the ley lines and transmits a mystical charge, one that transcends mere religions.

  No buses travel there so I asked Mahmut, a local Uighur, to drive me. Just outside town, we ran into a checkpoint. I was told I needed police permission to visit the shrine. We reversed down the road and Mahmut made a couple of calls. ‘You can pay 300 yuan for the police permit, or give me an extra fifty and I’ll go round the checkpoint,’ he said. I chose to line Mahmut’s pocket rather than those of the local authorities.