by Sun Shuyun
Xuanzang would have known how dangerous the Turks were. The year before his departure, in 626, more than one million Eastern Turks flung themselves in a bold raid across the Mongolian plateau, and advanced on Chang’an, demanding tributes and threatening to sack the capital. Taizong personally went into battle and drove them away. In order to avoid any recurrence of the Turkish threat, Taizong was advised to restore or to strengthen the Great Wall. Smiling, he said, ‘What need is there to strengthen the frontiers?’ He would remove the threat once and for all. He used the tactic of divide and conquer: he would first take on the Eastern Turks, who lived on the Mongolian steppes; for that he would need to pacify the Western Turks, who controlled the territory to the west of China. The Western Turks knew the game the Chinese emperor was playing and watched in apprehension, no doubt thinking of their own next move. Taizong’s strategy worked and in barely two years he wiped out the Eastern Turks, and the same fate fell on their brothers in the west two decades later, their vast empire subsumed into that of the Chinese. Xuanzang was travelling at the moment of greatest uncertainty during this deadly manoeuvring.
I touched down in Bishkek. Xuanzang would have passed through when it was only pastures and sheep. It was a pleasant place, built by the Russians in 1878; you could see tall mountain peaks in the distance, and trees were everywhere, turning to autumn gold, sheltering wide boulevards, blocks of villas and office buildings. There were not many people about, just some old ladies picking up acorns, and a few women elegantly dressed, as if they had just come back from Milan. A strange somnolence draped itself over the town, as if by decree. After the noise and crowds of Chinese cities, I took it as a welcome respite.
After checking in to my huge room in a gloomy, empty hotel, I rang John, a British economist working for the Kyrgyz government. He was one of hundreds of foreign experts drafted in to try to galvanize the Kyrgyz economy. But this was not international altruism: President Akayev is the only non-Communist head of state in the Central Asian republics, committed to economic reform, free elections and a degree of press and religious freedom. The West was keen for him to survive, as an example of the triumph of democracy in a region still very much controlled by Communism, and struggling with rising Islamic fundamentalism at the same time.
John told me his office was on the main square, opposite the State Museum and next to the Parliament building, two solid masses of socialist-realist construction on a grand scale. I had no trouble finding it – Bishkek was like a Chinese city without the crowds, with landmarks from the Communist era dominating the cityscape. I even felt at home.
‘How nice it is to have a visitor.’ He extended his long arms to greet me, and gave me a big hug, even though he had never met me before.
‘I like it here,’ I said. ‘It’s like a bargain version of Switzerland.’
‘It is, you’re right. Although not that many people would agree with you right now.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
He looked at me quizzically. ‘Haven’t you heard what’s going on?’
I had been travelling inside China for nearly three months, mostly in small towns and remote areas, with little access to international news except on Chinese television and in newspapers. Their coverage of the world was minimal and highly selective, to say the least. I did read about the summit in Bishkek on August 24–25 where the presidents of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Russia and China met, as they had done every year since 1996, and ‘discussed closer cooperation in regional development and in fighting terrorism, religious extremism and separatist movements’.
‘You don’t know about the IMU, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan? Their militants kidnapped fourteen people and held two villages in August.’ John spoke calmly. He did not want to frighten me.
‘Where did it happen, who are the hostages?’ I asked. I had heard nothing about this.
‘In southern Kyrgyzstan. The hostages included four Japanese geologists working for a mining company, villagers, government officials, soldiers. They even took a Kyrgyz general who went to look for the Japanese.’ John laughed awkwardly. ‘They kidnapped the Japanese on the twenty-third of August, the day before the opening of the summit in Bishkek. You can imagine the chaos.’
‘What happened to the hostages?’
‘Uzbekistan sent planes to bomb the villages held by the IMU. They killed a dozen villagers. The Kyrgyz government is frantically negotiating behind the scenes for the release of the hostages but they can’t agree to the conditions put forward by the IMU. So, stalemate.’ John shrugged.
‘What do the IMU want?’
‘Lots of money, of course,’ John said. ‘They’ve also demanded the release of fifty thousand Muslims from Uzbek prisons, and a couple of other things.’
‘Why is this all happening in Kyrgyzstan, not Uzbekistan?’ I was puzzled.
‘Kyrgyzstan is easier to get in and out of. The Uzbek government has a much tighter grip on its country, just like the old Soviet days,’ he explained. ‘So here you are, right where the action is. But I don’t think you should worry.’ John tried to reassure me. ‘In fact, it is the safest time. The Kyrgyz and Uzbek governments are closing in on the hostage-takers, with a bit of help from the Russian and Japanese secret services. It will be winter soon. The drama will have to end somehow, otherwise the IMU cannot get back to their base in the mountains, on the Afghan border.’
Before I came on the trip I had read that apart from Kyrgyzstan, all the republics of Central Asia see the revival of Islam as a threat, as dangerous as democracy, to be contained at all costs. Immediately after its independence, Tajikistan was torn apart by a civil war fought between the old Communist government and the popular Islamic Renaissance Party. Tens of thousands of Tajiks died; whole villages were emptied as people fled the country to Afghanistan and Iran. After five years of guerrilla war there was a fragile peace, a coalition of Communists and Muslims. But in Uzbekistan, President Karamov refuses to accommodate the growing popularity of Islam. Police question anyone with beards and women can be arrested for wearing the veil. Muslims can pray only in mosques approved by the Party and madrassahs are closed down regularly. It is as bad as the Soviet times when people had to hide the Koran inside Communist textbook covers. All this suppression only helps to ferment Islamic fundamentalism, which is why the IMU declared a jihad against President Karamov.
What John did not tell me, as I discovered much later, was that the IMU also included Xinjiang in its jihad. Perhaps he did not know, or he did not want me to worry too much. There are half a million Uighurs living in Central Asia – fifty thousand in Kyrgyzstan alone – and quite a few of them are fighting for the IMU. They want to establish an independent Eastern Turkestan Islamic Republic in Xinjiang. The Chinese government is stepping up its own crackdown there; at the same time it has provided technical and military assistance to Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, in return for their help in keeping a grip on the Uighurs in their countries. Both have obliged; Uighur publications and offices were shut down; Uighurs critical of Chinese policies were arrested; border control was tighter than ever before, to prevent the export of arms or funds to Xinjiang. But it is a difficult task. A few months after I left, Uighur militants held a Chinese businessman in Bishkek for a ransom of 100,000 dollars, killed his nephew and burned down the Chinese market in the city. When a senior Chinese government official came from Urumqi to investigate the case, he was killed too.
I had dinner with John and his wife that evening, and we discussed my visit. He said he would give his interpreter a few days off to keep me company. ‘You will have to pay her – this is Kyrgyzstan,’ he said. Back in the hotel, I went to my room and tried to sleep, but I was awake for quite a while. There was a drunken brawl on the street; a car honked; footsteps in the corridor outside my room gave me a little fright. What if some Uighurs burst in and took me hostage? I began to realize why this beautiful city was so quiet; there were few tourists, and the streets were so empty when I arrived. I was a walking tar
get, and there were not many others. Had I been careless? The hostage crisis had been going on for almost two months, and I knew nothing of it. I had no idea Uighur fundamentalists were fighting their holy war outside China. There was trouble in Xinjiang, even bombing, but it was mainly against organizations like the police, and high-profile Uighurs working for the government. I had never heard of their kidnapping ordinary Chinese, but perhaps they were learning from the IMU. Did I have too much faith in the Chinese government’s ability to keep everything under control? The situation in Xinjiang was even more serious than I had realized. No wonder Salim said no Chinese woman would travel in Xinjiang alone, and my aunt and her family felt so hostile and fearful.
The severity of the situation dawned on me. Xuanzang’s mission was more important than his life. He was truly fearless, and nothing would stop him until death came along. Even then, he could vow to continue the journey in his next life. I cannot say my journey was more important than life, and I did not have to complete it in a hurry. But strangely, I was not worried about death, not because I am brave, nor because I do not value life. But I would not know anything at the other end of the dark tunnel. So what is there to worry about? The more I thought of it, what really worried me was pain, the pain of torture. I still remembered watching revolutionary films which showed Communists being tortured by Japanese soldiers or the old government secret police, their bodies covered with blood, their faces seared with burns, an iron rod heating up on the fire. Of course they never gave in, never betrayed the Party. I always came out of the cinema sweating like a pig and scared to death. I dared not tell anyone but I knew I would be a traitor under torture. How the Communists dealt with it, or the monks in the Cultural Revolution, I still cannot grasp. Physical pain is physical pain, whether you think it is inflicted unjustly, your own fault, or down to your bad karma. When we were asked to write reports on what we had learned from the films and how we would cope, I pretended I was brave and said I would rather kill myself for the revolution than be caught by the enemy. I could only hope I was never put to the test.
The longer I thought about it, the less I seemed to have the option of going back. The current problem in Xinjiang and the whole of Central Asia was not going to go away; it might worsen before it improved. I had to give Afghanistan a miss because of the war there, and I was still trying to get my Uzbek visa. Kyrgyzstan was the only Central Asian country Xuanzang visited that I knew I could get to. I could not simply walk out now; I had to persevere, not give up at the first hurdle. I just had to be extra careful, make as thorough preparations as I could, go nowhere on my own – and concentrate on two crucial places: Karakul, the biggest town in Eastern Kyrgyzstan, at the foot of the Heavenly Mountains where Xuanzang would have rested after his close shave with death; and Ak-beshim, one hour’s drive from Bishkek near Tokmak, where Xuanzang met the Yagabhu Khan, the man who would ensure the monk’s safe journey through his empire. I still had a long way to go. No doubt there would be more headaches to contend with.
The interpreter, Guljan, came to my hotel in the morning. She was a short, quiet and attentive woman in her mid-thirties. She was happy to come with me – she had never been to Karakul, a famous holiday resort. We caught a bus there along the northern shore of Lake Issyk-Kul. The bus was very much like a Chinese one, battered and dirty, filled with bent old men and women, and a dusty goat. It took its time, rumbling along at a leisurely thirty miles an hour, and stopping frequently to let passengers on and off. I worried that we would not be able to reach our destination before dark. But I was too tired from the endless scenarios I had imagined in the night. I fell into a deep slumber.
Karakul is a well-kept little town at the far end of the lake; I woke up as the bus reached it. The sun was going down. A flaming red ball that seemed as if it was going to melt the white peaks of the mountains soaked the lake in a rosy light; even the geese on the water looked more like flamingos. The spire of the Russian Orthodox church was caught in this intense evening glow, and so was the upswept roof of what appeared to be a Chinese pagoda.
This was the landscape, dotted with a few yurts and their nomadic dwellers, that would have greeted Xuanzang after his struggles on the mountain. It remained unchanged until the mid-nineteenth century when the Russians set up a military post here and began to map the peaks and valleys that separated their empire from the Chinese. Karakul means ‘black wrist’ in the local language, presumably referring to the hands of the early Russian settlers. But it is most closely associated with another Russian, the famous explorer N. M. Przhevalsky. The town was renamed Przhevalsk after he died here preparing his fifth expedition to China, which would have taken him through the same pass Xuanzang took more than a thousand years earlier. For all Przhevalsky’s extraordinary achievements in mapping many uncharted territories, including the sources of the Yellow River and the Yangzi River, Xuanzang would not have appreciated the Russian’s undisguised hatred of his beloved country: ‘The Chinese here is a Jew plus a Muscovite pickpocket, both squared. But the lamentable thing is to see Europeans being polite to this rabble.’ He might even have lost his calm, as he did in Kucha, if he had heard Przhevalsky denouncing Buddhism as ‘a religion that sapped vitality and hindered progress’. The Kyrgyz people hated him just as much. As soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, they demanded to restore the town to its old name.
But what was the Chinese pagoda doing here? Could there be descendants of the people Xuanzang described in his Record? He says he passed an isolated village where ‘there are three hundred households, all Chinese. They are captives of the Turks and have decided to settle down and live together in this place. Their clothes are similar to the Turks’ but their language and their moral beliefs are Chinese.’
I received an answer soon enough from Galina, a warm, energetic woman in her forties who ran the hostel where we stayed the night. ‘Oh, that is called the Dongan Pagoda,’ she told me, intrigued with her first-ever Chinese customer.
‘But who were the Dongans?’ I asked.
‘They are Chinese, just like you,’ she said, looking puzzled, as if I should know my countrymen living here. ‘There are hundreds of thousands of them in Kyrgyzstan. You can go to the market tomorrow. They sell everything we use. We would starve to death without them.’
Over dinner, Galina and her husband asked me what I would like to see and do in Karakul. Most people used it as a base for mountaineering and trekking. I had not found it easy to explain to people what I was doing – most Chinese thought I was slightly mad. But foreigners presented a different kind of problem. A Chinese monk, who went to India in the seventh century, looking for what he thought was the true Buddhism? There were so many things to explain, I did not know where to start. As I was struggling to come up with something simple and comprehensible, Galina pressed her palms together like a monk and said, ‘You are following Xuanzang.’ Before I could express surprise she had put down her fork, excused herself and run out. In a minute she was back with a big map. Her husband stood up, pushed the plates aside, and helped her spread the map on the table. I could not believe my eyes. In the lower right-hand corner was Xuanzang, like the portrait in my rubbing from the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. ‘He is a great hero for us,’ Galina said. ‘You know he kept such a detailed record of our country. And so accurate! We are very grateful to him. He was a truly remarkable man. He almost lost his life here, on the Heavenly Mountains. That’s why we honour him by putting him on this map.’ With a big smile, Galina folded up the map and handed it to me. ‘Please keep this as a souvenir.’
I was literally speechless. I was in an unassuming guesthouse in a tourist town in Kyrgyzstan, among non-Chinese and non-Buddhists, and my hosts were displaying more interest in Xuanzang than I had encountered in my homeland. They not only knew of Xuanzang, he was on the map of their country. I felt shamed, yet also elated. Over the last few months of my journey, I had realized just how little my fellow-countrymen knew about Xuanzang. I had begun to wonder what I would be able to find
out about him outside China, except for visiting ruins and talking to academics. And here he was, a local hero. I began to forget the dangers, and to be more confident about my journey. I was already finding out things about Xuanzang at this early stage. And how much more I would be able to discover when I reached India.
Galina asked me what I wanted to see in Kyrgyzstan. ‘You should go up the Heavenly Mountains,’ she said. ‘You can experience what your monk went through.’ I could do it on foot, by horse, or in a Russian military truck. It took three days to get to the top. ‘Not much faster than Xuanzang.’ She looked at me. ‘He took seven days up and down the mountains in deep winter.’ Galina was standing up again, this time to get some photos she had taken of the path.
Looking at her pictures of the snow-covered mountain, the travellers with their rucksacks, and the packhorses that carried the tents and cooking gear, I could almost visualize Xuanzang among them. Things really had not changed much; Galina’s snapshots reminded me of the pictures of nineteenth- and twentieth-century travellers like Aurel Stein and Albert von Le Coq. They both talked about the difficulty of crossing the mountains. Von Le Coq and his men came across heaps of bones and mummified bodies on their route. On the roadside there were piles of stones, the graves of men who died and were fortunate enough to be buried by their companions. If a caravan was overtaken by a snowstorm, the German explorer tells us, ‘The loads of the fallen animals are all put together in orderly fashion in as sheltered a spot as can be found near the scene of disaster. Later on they are fetched away, and the caravan code of honour most strictly forbids any interference with these stores belonging to other people. We ourselves often pass such heaps of property.’ To prevent snow blindness, they cut the tails off yaks and horses, and put them underneath their hats to cover their faces. The other danger for the Germans was mountain sickness, which he said only attacked strangers to the mountains. It was lethal, causing severe headaches, nausea and the swelling of hands and feet, and then death within twenty-four hours.