The rebellion was given strength and direction under two ministers of the late khan. One of them, Yolbas Khan, recruited the commander of an infamous Gansu warlord family, a young man of barely twenty who, according to Cable, “terrified north-west Gansu by the violence of his methods of warfare.” In the township of Chenfan, Cable alleged, he left three thousand corpses liquefying in the street.
Big Horse, Thunderbolt, Baby General—any warlord’s soubriquets are numerous, but his given name was Ma Zhongying. His officers, according to Cable, “obeyed him with a devotion that was almost a cult,” and his agents “were everywhere listening and reporting to Headquarters any word of treason against his rule.” It was the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin who translated Ma’s name as “Big Horse.” With the admiration of one who had a soft spot for uniformed tyrants, he described him as “good-looking, tall and slim, with a good figure.” But one of the rare pictures of the general reprinted in The Gobi Desert shows a frankly stolid, prideful youth in the uniform of the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party—forage cap, leather Sam Brown, arms crossed behind his back—staring down the camera with a brattish insolence, as if daring the photographer to discredit him. “Elegant, perfumed and effeminate,” according to Cable. She would have cause to despise him.
While the Uighurs of Hami welcomed the rebel army, the non-Muslim Chinese, many of whom had only arrived in recent years, took shelter in the ancient fortified town, precipitating a siege that would last a year and a half. It was an episode mythic in its squalor. The Chinese ate dogs and cats. Boiling oil was poured onto the besiegers. It was only the discovery by the Chinese of a buried eighteenth-century arsenal that allowed them to hold out. Finally withdrawing, Ma rode west to attack the city of Urumqi. He and his troops were met in the desert by Chinese forces supported by White Russian troops and Ma was injured—“shot through both legs,” Cable tells us, not without some satisfaction.
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AT THE RAILHEAD at Ansi (today’s Liuyuan) I boarded a packed minibus bound for Dunhuang, which lay eighty kilometres south across a plain scattered with saxaul, the green-grey bushes that are often the Gobi’s only vegetation. At Ansi, the ancient Silk Road split, and the reason for its splitting, like a stream around a boulder, was the Taklamakan Desert, 327,000 square kilometres of sand dunes, and a cause of dread even greater than the Gobi. The longer, greener branch headed north of the Taklamakan, via the oases of Hami and Kucha and Turpan, while the shorter more perilous one crossed the jinn-haunted Lop Desert and skirted the Taklamakan’s southern shore, passing through the town of Hotan before reconvening with the northern branch at Kashgar, after a journey of a thousand kilometres. For caravans taking this southern branch, the last place of rest and supplies before the Lop and the Taklamakan (weeks of salt flats, months of sand dunes) was Dunhuang. But for Cable and the Frenches, Dunhuang was not merely a site of antique wonder or an opportunity for “gossiping the gospels”; it was their sanctuary, a tranquil, familiar harbour.
When they arrived after two months of travelling, the Trio found the town inundated with Muslim refugees from Hami who “brought a terrible story of slaughter and devastation.” The Baby General and his troops having finally been routed, the Chinese soldiers and residents had taken revenge on the Muslims left behind. “Dunhuang became a city of beggars,” Cable wrote. “The typhus began to take its toll of victims and the temple entrances were full of men and women muttering in delusion.” The injured Ma, meanwhile (shot in both legs, you will recall), having been carried by litter from the desert battleground, established his new headquarters in nearby Ansi—“City of Peace.” Soon after their arrival in Dunhuang, Cable and the Frenches, with their rudimentary medical knowledge, received a summons to attend the injured general. As they set out for Ansi, a small band of converts came to see them off. “I am weak, but Thou art mighty,” they sang.
Again into the desert. “During the campaign,” Cable writes in A Desert Journal (another of the more than twenty books she co-authored with Francesca French), “there were so many dead bodies left unburied on the Gobi battlefields that during the heat the stench was intolerable, and this winter wolves are rampant.” After four days’ freezing journey they arrived in the City of Peace to find the general in good spirits, displaying what Cable called “a smiling, cruel sensuousness.” She allows herself a note of derision: as she tended Ma’s wounds, “his weary voice sharpened in fear, lest the disinfectant should cause a smart to his sensitive flesh.”
The road that took us to Dunhuang crossed a land of the severest flatness broken only by sporadic hazy islands of sandstone. Each of the other passengers carried on his or her knees a zippered holdall or an army-surplus rucksack or a cloth bundle bound in twine. The minibus jounced and squeaked and rattled deafeningly: there would be no conversation, no rest. The driver’s mate spoke intermittently into his mobile, as if updating someone on our progress. He and the driver had matching seat-covers: Hello Kitty.
Even this, the main highway to famous Dunhuang, was crumbling at its edges, its surface a mosaic of filled and refilled potholes, pocked every few hundred metres with new holes so deep that vehicles had to swerve to avoid them. This was what the desert did to infrastructure, as to stone: the daylight heat, the cold night, the wind and snow and the salt—even the most resilient materials were patiently prised apart. This was the terrain over which Cable and the Frenches moved back and forth—this, and worse. Here at least there was a little vegetation, waterholes, even occasional shade; further west, between Ansi and the Xinjiang border, was the feared “Black Gobi,” where you might go five days without fresh water, a region despised even by Cable, who had a genius for finding consolation in places others saw as irredeemable.
The saxaul gave way to sparse lines of poplar and then fields, cotton at first, then the region’s famous melons, drip-fed with aquifer water and tenderly wrapped in foam squares against frost even as they grew. The desert was giving way to the oasis—so it seemed. But this was a false dawn, just an outlying island of watered land. As suddenly as the settlement had appeared, the desert and the saxaul, the salt crust and the pink grit returned, the same as far as the eye could see, the same on the other side of the road. The bustling market town of Cable’s day when we reached it an hour later was now a tranquil gleaming Oz of designer boutiques and unaffordable hostelries. The streets were sluiced down twice daily to suppress dust. On my pillow when I checked in to my hotel was a pink teddy bear with enormous, brimming eyes.
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IT IS IMPOSSIBLE, today, simply to go to the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. They lie within an enormous fenced sector and you can’t visit them without first penetrating the monolithic, newly opened visitor centre, which itself can be entered only during the slot prescribed by your ticket. Until then you will wait in a holding compound resembling a richly endowed Baptist church, a domed hall built around a stained-glass core, where you will buy scarves printed with flying apsaras.
In frigid coaches we were eventually ferried the thirteen kilometres from the visitor centre on a private road. The only noise was the hum of the air conditioning: it was as if we were gliding on oil. To enjoy the ease of our journey, its coolness and comfort, and then to think of the hardships of travel here until only a few decades ago. It had taken Mildred Cable and the Frenches—none of them younger than forty-five—the best part of a day to reach the caves across “fifteen miles of uncompromising sterility,” but as Cable wrote, “it was fitting that a few hours of silence and solitude should be imposed on us, for to pass, without transition, from any restless or noisy life to this reliquary would be to offer it an insult.”
Viewed from the coach park, the cliff into which the dozens of caves are dug—the “Precipice of the Immortals”—has something about it of a sand-martin colony, a honeycombed skirt of yellow rock fifteen metres high heaped over by a towering brim of sand, like snow on a wall. I
t’s also, tangibly, a sanctuary. Under the cave-mouths in their tiers, poplars shingle in a breeze. Scattered across the surrounding plain are the eroded stone cones of stupas, marking the tombs of monks.
In AD 366, a Buddhist monk named Yuezen arrived. Following “a vision of a golden radiance in the form of a thousand Buddhas,” he dug into the soft conglomerate of the cliff-face, creating a cave. In it he settled to meditate. Over the course of nine dynasties, hundreds of further caves were excavated and consecrated alongside. In 1899, 1,500 years after Yuezen’s arrival, an itinerant Taoist monk was passing through Dunhuang. Finding the cave site unoccupied and neglected, he selected one of the caves and made it his home. He was born in the far eastern province of Hubei, and had once been a soldier in Jiuquan. According to one account, he established himself as a seller of Taoist spells to the local Chinese. Mildred Cable met him several times, and recognised something in him. “He determined to devote his life to the cultivation of this stony waste,” she wrote. Much of his time seems to have been spent touring nearby settlements, raising funds for the caves’ renovation. With this meagre income he commissioned the renovation of some of the wall paintings and statuary, and the removal of many tonnes of drift-sand from the cave-mouths.
In the few photographs of him—sometimes he is named Wang Yuanlu, elsewhere he is Wang Tao-shih; Westerners tend to prefer “Abbot Wang,” while his Taoist name was Fa Zhen—he is a tiny figure. You can tell, even in the absence of references of scale. In his gaze and bearing there is humour, forbearance. Not the dupe he is often taken for. His robe sleeves hang to his knees, and he is always squinting, as if just emerged into the light. Little is known about him—soldier, spell-merchant, priest, custodian—and yet few figures are more important in the history of the caves. He has been scrutinised by Chinese and foreigners alike; each according to their allegiances: “a very queer person, extremely shy and nervous, with an occasional expression of cunning”; “wary and of a suspicious mind”; “timorous,” “diligent,” “thief.”
In 1900, during the removal of sand from one of the caves (known to modern archaeologists as “Cave 16”), Wang noticed a crack in the wall close to the entrance. He looked closer and found the bricked-up entrance to an antechamber. On inspection it proved to be packed, floor to ceiling, with tens of thousands of ancient documents. If his discovery was to transform the understanding of China’s history, it would also redirect the course of Wang’s own quiet life. He would find himself courted and exhorted by foreign travellers then vilified by his countrymen. After a lifetime of devotion to the caves, he died—and again we must rely on the most meagre of narratives—impoverished and embittered.
You enter the caves via a network of wooden gantries fixed to the cliff-face. Outside is only the empty anonymous desert, the fathoms of sand and gravel above your head, while in the cool hush and gloom one intimate scene after another is revealed, more intimate still under torchlight, a whole solar system shimmering in malachite, azurite, orpiment, cinnabar, iron oxide, gold leaf, lamp black, kaolin, red ochre, white lead. The sheer opulence of the caves themselves is hardly diminished. The walls and ceiling of each of the hundreds of remaining shrines are crowded with bright paintings: scenes from the life of Buddha; devas, apsaras, yakshas and other divine beings; portraits of the caves’ sponsors; niches and platforms crammed with Buddhas and bodhisattvas sculpted in clay and stucco.
Throwing off my mandatory guide, I lingered in the Cave of the Reclining Buddha. A huge recumbent body materialised from the darkness. The Buddha in repose—fourteen metres from head to foot, two tonnes of clay and stucco on a timber skeleton—was imbued with such airiness that a picture came to mind unbidden of him rising to the ceiling. And behind the great body stood his mourners, a fraction of the larger figure’s size, looking out across his flank in a line two-deep, like a crowd at a barrier. Seventy-two figures gazing back at me, each bearing his or her individual expression of despair. Levered lips and gritted teeth; brows stunned to fixity; nostrils aquiver, hands clasped not in piety so much as self-comfort. It was as if they were standing at the mouth of a grave—just as they had stood since the High Tang dynasty 1,200 years ago.
He was called the Reclining Buddha, but his rest was the rest of eternity, of liberation from the treadmill of existence, for the statue depicted the Mahaparinirvana, the Great Completed Nirvana. Buddha in death. His face, unlike his body, seemed lifeless; his brows were a black-painted M, his lips taut, his eyes mere slits exposing a slot of black pupil—the eyes of a cat asleep. The red, yellow, green and blue of the mourners’ clothing; their pink lips and rosy cheeks; the theatricality of their gestures; the altar, which was a stage—it was as if I’d come in at the end of a boisterous piece of theatre, the last notes of the chorus still sounding. The vignettes on the wall behind the mourning statues, skin tones oxidised to tea-and-coffee browns, depicted the continuation of the procession in two dimensions: Buddha’s casket shouldered by pallbearers and escorted by banner-wielding kings and priests and bodhisattvas. Sombre, ceremonial, but also quite a jamboree. On top of the casket a rooster, dispelling evil spirits. The god Indra, busily jemmying sacred teeth from Buddha’s mouth, as if lifting the marque from a car’s grille.
I emerged into bakery heat and icy dazzle. Fresh air soughing the tops of the poplars. The sudden absence of adornment and colour was like a buzzing in my ears. The caves were an assault against the desert’s monotony—that was their human glory. Here—in spite of everything, in spite of the weeks of sand, wind and salt that awaited those who prayed here, and the camels and companions left to perish by those who completed the return journey—here was life and replenishment.
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IN BIGGLES IN THE GOBI (1953) the eponymous hero crash-lands in the Communist desert while attempting to evacuate a party of British missionaries. Meanwhile two of his lieutenants, having parachuted from Biggles’s Halifax in order to clear a landing strip, are sheltering with the terrified missionaries in the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. Aided by a band of Kirghiz nomads, they must fend off a troop of Chinese soldiers, whose nefarious leader, Ma Chang—“a little frog-faced man”—appears to be modelled on Big Ma. The author, W. E. Johns, did not visit the caves himself, but in a foreword acknowledges his debt to the explorer Sir Marc Aurel Stein and his book Ruins of Desert Cathay (1912). Stein is an important figure in the caves’ modern history. Born in Budapest in 1862, he studied in England, where he would become a naturalised subject. He was as wiry and insatiable as the terriers that were his most constant companions. His moustache frequently froze hard as wood on desert nights. There was none of the sentimentality about him of the Arabian explorers, no desire to emulate the natives, far from it: a European gentleman, down to the hanky poking from his breast pocket. From an early age his heroes were three, and he would shadow them till his death: first Alexander the Great; then those he found himself following in China and India: Marco Polo and above all Xuanzang.
He was forty-five when he arrived at Dunhuang in 1907. He had planned only a short visit to the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, following his excavation of a previously unknown extension of the Great Wall. But while he was staying in Dunhuang he heard rumours that a huge ancient library had been discovered among the caves. He describes arriving at the site and seeing the “multitude of dark cavities…honeycombing the sombre rock in irregular tiers.” It was a scene that recalled for him “fancy pictures of troglodyte dwellings of anchorites such as I remembered having seen long, long ago in early Italian paintings.” (Who knows, but perhaps he was thinking of the Master of the Osservanza’s portrayal of St. Antony embracing St. Paul.) It was not the last time he would be reminded, during his time at the caves, of the lives of the Desert Fathers. When he finally left the site and returned to Dunhuang, “the oasis looked delightfully green and refreshing, and I greeted it like an anchorite set free from another Thebaid.”
The shrine, he noted, “
was in the charge of a Taoist priest”—Wang, who at the time of Stein’s arrival was away on a “begging tour” with his acolytes. The priest, when he returned, was wary. In Ruins of Desert Cathay Stein notes his “occasional expression of cunning” and adds: “he would be a difficult person to handle.” Initially the very suggestion that the Englishman might buy one of the specimens was met with “such perturbation” by Wang that the subject was temporarily dropped. What finally changed his position, in Stein’s narrative, was the explorer’s invocation of his “patron saint,” Xuanzang. “Very soon I felt sure that the Tao-shih…was quite as ardent an admirer in his own way of [Xuanzang] as I am in another.” Stein went on to tell Wang that he had followed in the pilgrim’s footsteps “from India over ten thousand li across inhospitable mountains and deserts.” Wang led Stein to a modern temple he had built among the poplars in the shadow of the cliff: its veranda walls were adorned with newly commissioned scenes from Xuanzang’s journey, including one that showed the monk on the bank of a river, preparing to lead across his horse laden with manuscripts—a reference, Stein realised, to the twenty-two pony-loads of sacred books and relics Xuanzang had removed from India.
The Immeasurable World Page 13