by Rob Gifford
Or, to put it another way, China is the Last Great Empire. All the other empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the British and French, the Ottoman and Soviet—are gone. If we put aside for a moment the theory that the United States has become an imperial power, then only the Chinese Empire remains, wanting to go forward as a modern nation-state, but encumbered with the constraints of an empire that can be held together only by force. Few Chinese people admit this, and many who read this book are likely to disagree strongly with me, and criticize me for my anti-Chinese sentiments and my desire to split the motherland. But objective historical evidence suggests that it is true. One of the most successful myths the Chinese Communist Party has established in the minds of its people is that China has always looked the way it does today. Students are taught this in schools. When The Cambridge History of China was translated into Chinese, the map of Ming dynasty China (1368–1644) was changed from not including Tibet and Chinese Turkestan in the original English version to including them in the Chinese one, in direct contradiction of the reality of history.
All of this history hangs in the air as you approach Lanzhou along Route 312 from the southeast.
Lanzhou holds the dubious distinction of being one of the world’s most polluted cities, the deadly legacy of Chairman Mao’s attempts at industrialization in the 1950s and ’60s. The city has a population of nearly 3 million people, and it stretches along the banks of the Yellow River, squeezed on four sides by mountains. The mountains are one reason for the pollution, because the smog from the factories is unable to escape. In the 1990s, there had been plans to remedy this by blasting a huge pollution escape hole in one of the mountain ranges, but that scheme seems to have come to nothing. For local governments in China, as in most countries, there are more advantages in spending money on new industry (jobs, taxes, social stability, moderate prosperity) than there are in spending money to deal with industry’s negative consequences.
The city itself, it seems to me, is too much maligned. There is a certain pleasant grittiness about it, if you like grittiness (which I do). As long as the lining of your bronchial tubes is not required to interact with the so-called air of the city for too long, you will probably enjoy Lanzhou, with its frontier town atmosphere, great noodle bars, and ethnic mix. But I would imagine the respiratory wards of the city’s hospitals are like war zones.
The mountains around Lanzhou are as brown as the Yellow River, which defies its name as it weaves, laden with silt, right through the heart of the city. Perhaps it’s the color of the mountains or the sight of Muslim or Tibetan faces on the streets, but when you are here, you always have a feeling in the back of your mind that there is something different out there, lurking beyond those mountains. And of course there is.
What is out there is euphemistically known in Chinese as the xibu, the western regions. They are made up of the whole Tibetan Plateau to the southwest, the wide-open province of Qinghai to the west, a long, narrow stretch of Gansu province (of which Lanzhou is the capital), and finally the region of Xinjiang to the northwest, where I am heading. Soon after Lanzhou, the Gobi Desert starts, and it doesn’t end for a very, very long time.
It was only the night before, as I read the guidebook about Gansu province in my hotel room, that I had realized just how close I was to the Tibetan Plateau. I had not planned a diversion southward, but as I looked at the map, it seemed too good an opportunity to miss. Xiahe, right on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau, 170 miles southwest of Lanzhou, is the leading monastery town outside the Tibetan capital, Lhasa. Several friends from Beijing had visited Xiahe (pronounced Shyah-huh) and told me how wonderful it is, so I changed my plans and the next morning boarded a bus south out of Lanzhou.
If you want an accurate road map of China, you have to go directly to the publishing house and rip it off the printing press. And even then it will be out-of-date. The speed of road building is phenomenal and the quality of the new roads amazing.
The road south is a new four-lane expressway, which neither I nor my map had anticipated, a shiny streak of black tarmac and steel barriers forging its way through the yellow semidesert outside Lanzhou. The struggle of man against nature begins to intensify here, and many of the hillsides are terraced, allowing the local people at least to try to squeeze some fertility from the reluctant yellow earth.
The DVD player on the bus is pumping out patriotic songs with pictures of men and women dressed in 1950s People’s Liberation Army fatigues. They seem to be teaching the minority peoples about the joys of being Chinese. There’s one song about Mongolians, then one about the Tibetan Plateau. The words of the songs are helpfully written along the bottom of the screen in case anyone wants to join in.
The DVD is playing several hundred decibels above the level permissible in heavy industrial factories in the United States, though I don’t at first realize this. It’s only when the child in the seat behind leans over the back of the seat next to me and starts singing that I realize how, over time, I have become inoculated against Chinese noise. This is the sort of thing that used to infuriate me. “What are you doing, kid, crooning out of tune in my ear? And what is the driver doing playing that music so loud in the first place?” Now, I astound myself by even smiling in encouragement to the boy, as though I think that out-of-tune wailing in my ear with no sense of rhythm is just fine.
China does that to you. You go back to the United States or Europe, and people wonder why you’re not jumping up and down with annoyance at some minor noise or irritation, and you look at them and think, What’s your problem? We have such low thresholds of annoyance in our cozy Western world. (The danger is, though, that you also forget to fit back into Western ways of, say, road safety or table manners on returning to your homeland.)
The road flows alongside a small river for a while, then the driver turns off the supershiny highway onto a well-paved rural road that bends and turns down a hill before descending into the green valley of Linxia (pronounced Lin-shyah).
Lanzhou has a mixture of ethnicities, but it is ostensibly a large Chinese city. This little valley, only a hundred miles south, is the first I have passed through that is really not Han Chinese at all. There are small Muslim communities dotted around China farther east, but here, around Linxia, it is almost 100 percent Muslim. Every village has a mosque. All the men are wearing white Islamic caps on their heads and sporting wispy beards. The women wear head scarves to cover their hair. Suddenly it doesn’t feel quite like China. Many of the village mosques are a combination of architectural styles, less traditionally mosquelike than their Middle East equivalents but not as Chinese as the main mosque in Xi’an, which was built almost like an old Chinese-style temple.
The Muslims around here are known as the Hui people (pronounced Hway). Their ancestors were soldiers, merchants, and craftsmen who came to China from Persia and Central Asia between the seventh and thirteenth centuries. After they settled in China, they intermarried with the Han Chinese and came to speak Chinese (while often retaining some Arabic too). Eventually the Hui became largely assimilated, although they retained their Islamic faith and to this day do not eat pork. Relations are much better between the Han Chinese and the Hui than they are between the Han and other Muslim groups in northwest China, such as the Uighurs, but despite the Hui’s assimilation, their faith puts a big gap between them and the Han. There are occasional flare-ups of ethnic tension, usually over some religious slur or minor issue of food or religious practice. The state always moves in quickly to break up such incidents, and all sides know that little can be achieved by more conflict, so people of all ethnicities tend to grate along side by side.
I change buses at Linxia, which also has the feel of a frontier town. Stores are full of daggers and saddles and animal furs. The bus to Xiahe is crowded and raucous and full of smoke. It is a much cheaper model than the previous one, which is good news, because the general rule when traveling in China is that the cheaper the bus, the more friendly the people. There are some seat
s toward the back, so I clamber over limbs and bags to reach one. Most of the people on this bus are Tibetan. The man I sit next to, in almost unintelligible Mandarin, says that he is from a minority group I had never even heard of, one of the smallest in China, called the Dongxiang.
There are fifty-six different ethnic minority groups within the borders of the People’s Republic that are officially recognized and some four hundred that are not. The government in Beijing says they are all zhong guo ren, “people of the Middle Kingdom,” Chinese people. But if you ask them, their first allegiance is usually to their ethnic group. There are only 300,000 Dongxiang people in the whole world, and they all live around Linxia. They are Muslims, but they trace their ancestry back to the Mongols, when Genghis Khan swept through here in the thirteenth century.
“Do you have your own language? Your own script?” I ask the Dongxiang man.
“We have our own language, but it is not written down,” he replies. “It is similar to Mongolian. But I can’t read anyway,” says the man with a smile, “so it doesn’t make any difference.”
Just before the bus departs, two rather glamorously dressed Han Chinese women get on. I had seen them on the bus from Lanzhou. They see the seats near me and begin to squeeze their way, in a very self-consciously feminine manner, to the back of the bus. They remind me of Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis boarding the train all dressed up in drag in Some Like It Hot.
The two of them seem more out of place than I do, pushing their identical shocking pink overnight bags into the overhead luggage rack between a large watermelon and a huge, coarse cloth sack full of I don’t know what. Certainly these are the first shocking pink overnight bags ever to grace this particular overhead rack. The pair clamber into the very last row of seats, diagonally behind me, brushing off the filthy cushions before they sit down.
The smaller of the two women is dressed all in white, a strange choice of clothing for travel in this part of China. She has short, frizzed hair that is slightly tinted and, most strikingly, bright pink-framed eyeglasses that have thick sidebars studded with rhinestones.
Her friend has a more femme fatale look. She is dressed completely in black, like some female Gary Cooper riding out to tame the Western frontier. Her shiny black polyester top has small sequins hanging from the waist, and her matching pants have the same sequins hanging from around her ankles. She has slight streaks of brown dye in her hair. The two of them look almost comical, at the back of this filthy bus, squeezed in between the Tibetan farmers.
As they settle into their seats, chattering away in very pure Mandarin behind me, Femme Fatale pulls out a small bag of baby wipes and rather melodramatically wipes her face. She offers one to her friend, who with a regal air wipes her hands, then throws the used wipe on the already filthy floor.
“Eeeeeew. This bus is so dirty,” squeals Femme Fatale.
Princess Pinky nods in agreement. They set about sending text messages on their fancy cell phones.
Outside, mud houses are zipping by, beside billboards promoting the ubiquitous but elusive goal of xiaokang, moderate prosperity. Others offer the twenty-first century to the farmers of southern Gansu province:
Broadband changes your life.
If you’re going to bring life-changing inventions to this part of the country, it seems that some kind of basic agricultural mechanization might be a better place to start.
The road is being widened between Linxia and Xiahe, perhaps in anticipation of more tourists, and the bus frequently has to pull onto a stretch of uneven dirt track beside the road. The bumpity-bumping on the dirt track causes the large watermelon in the luggage rack to fall onto the head of a child. The child lets out a squeal but seems not to be seriously hurt. No one gets angry. No one threatens to sue. Falling watermelons are just an occupational hazard of travel in China.
Finally I decide to strike up a conversation with the two princesses behind me, feeling rather sheepish at my own rather dirty state.
“We’re going to Xiahe,” Princess Pinky answers my inquiry.
“How long are you staying?”
“Probably just one night, then we are heading on to Hezuo.”
“Are you on vacation?”
“Sort of vacation,” says Femme Fatale, “but working too.”
“What sort of work do you do?”
“Cosmetics.”
It emerges that they both work for a Shanghai makeup company called Meisu, which this year has opened a branch in Lanzhou and now also has stores in both Xiahe and Hezuo, the regional capital of southern Gansu. The women are cosmetics missionaries.
“Wherever there are women, there is Meisu,” says Princess Pinky with a smile. “That’s our slogan.”
“So is there a market among the Tibetans?” I ask.
“No, it’s the Han Chinese who buy cosmetics,” she says. “The minority peoples aren’t really interested in that sort of thing.”
“What do your stores sell? Just lipstick and rouge and the usual stuff?”
“Yes, but also lots of whitening cream, to make your skin paler. We hate dark skin.”
I tell her how Western women buy suntan cream to make their skin look darker. She looks repelled, not seeming to care that every face on the bus is either the dark skin of a Tibetan or Hui Muslim, or the darkened skin of a Chinese farmer who works all day in the sun. “Dark skin is ugly. White skin is beautiful,” she says.
Then she actually asks the young Tibetan man next to her why his skin is so dark.
“I don’t know,” he replies graciously in perfect Mandarin. “We are just born that way.”
The bus crosses through a sort of wooden gateway. This is Tumenguan, the entrance into southern Gansu province. Almost immediately, the countryside becomes greener and there are temples in the villages and on the hillsides, as though, in some sudden Narnia moment, we have passed through a door into a different kingdom.
I mention this, and the young Tibetan man who has just been quizzed about his dermatological details chips in. “We’re entering Gannan,” he says. “This is a Tibetan autonomous region.”
“How’s life here?” I ask him.
“It’s getting better. There is more investment here these days. There are now two factories here. One making medicine, the other processing milk.”
“Do people here want xiaokang? Moderate prosperity? As in the government slogans?”
He looks at me, bemused by my query. “Of course we do,” he replies.
Even a foreigner who has lived a long time in China, and who knows that the Tibet question is not as simple as it is sometimes portrayed, still assumes identity might be more important than progress.
It turns out that the young man, who says his Chinese name is Xiao Lin, is a teacher who is returning from training in Lanzhou to his hometown farther south, beyond Xiahe.
“What do you teach?” I ask him.
“Chinese,” he replies.
I stare at him. “You teach Chinese? To whom?”
“Tibetan high school kids.”
“You’re a Tibetan, teaching the Chinese language to Tibetan kids?”
“That’s right,” he says, smiling.
I search his face for a sign of how he feels about this. He doesn’t betray much, sitting as he is beside two very Han Chinese women, but he gives me a faint smile, and he jots down his cell-phone number at my request. As he gives it to me, he raises his eyebrows as if to say, Call me and I will tell you more.
Xiao Lin (pronounced Shao Lin) says he is getting off just before Xiahe to see a friend. He reiterates that I should call him. I say I will, and he jumps off, a rather modern-looking Tibetan in a sea of farmers.
There are more slogans all around, often painted on the simple brick or mud walls of houses beside the road. The Department of Family Planning here has actually quantified the financial benefit of not having too many children, though it’s not clear if this is the cost of the fine for having too many or the cost of raising an extra child. Many peasants here ea
rn only about a thousand yuan per year from the land.
One child less will save you 3000–5000 yuan [$400–$600]
There is other propaganda too, encouraging and warning.
Speed up road construction. Speed up the development of the west.
There is no copper in roadside cables.
Thieves will be severely punished.
But most of the road signs focus on one subject: education. The civilizing mission of the Chinese in the days of old was to spread their culture, their bureaucracy, their Confucian order to the barbarians. There is still the sense of superiority toward the ethnic minorities of China’s fringe, but when the Chinese threw out their own civilization with the arrival of the Ocean People, their mission statement toward the people of Inner Asia changed too. Now, it is science and progress that they are bringing to the benighted barbarians on the fringes of civilization.
Revive the nation through science and education.
As you work toward moderate prosperity, education is the most important thing.
Knowledge is strength.
13. Monks and Nomads
The main prayer hall of Labrang Monastery is full of monks, sitting in rows, some swaying silently, some chatting, some chanting in the half dark. There must be four or five hundred of them, their shaven heads bobbing among the painted pillars. Half are facing one way, about ten rows of them in all, then, in the middle of the hall, an invisible line divides them, and the other ten rows sit facing them. They sit cross-legged on cushions, some dressed simply in burgundy robes, others in larger, thicker cloaks against the surprising chill of the summer morning.
The original three-hundred-year-old prayer hall was the centerpiece of the monastery but was tragically burned down in a huge fire in 1985, caused by an electrical fault. The hall was soon rebuilt in a way that seems to fit in well with the surrounding ancient buildings. There are no windows, so the inside is very dark, illuminated only by the light that splashes in through several doorways, and by the much fainter glow of dozens of butter candles that line the walls. It is an impressive space, with a high ceiling, its rows of brightly painted pillars like funky tree trunks in a coniferous forest. The butter candles, made from yaks’ milk, give off the slightly rancid smell that pervades everything in Tibetan areas.