Shadow of the Silk Road

by Colin Thubron

  ‘Is this good for her, do you think?’ My mind was crammed with Western notions of childhood. ‘So many people?’

  He grimaced suddenly. ‘I think not so good. But I have to do this. Later she will follow me.’

  As he talked about work permits and aeroplane tickets, his spirits revived. He gulped down his doubts with the pork, then grew a little maudlin, because this was our last evening. He wondered if we would meet again. My journey was dangerous to him, more dangerous than his. Here in Xian things were all right, he said, but in those north-west lands…He shuddered visibly. His was the old Chinese fear of inner Asia lapping at the Great Wall, the emptiness beyond the Celestial Kingdom. And I had not even mentioned Afghanistan…

  ‘I like talking with you,’ he said. ‘I will miss you. We Chinese just make chicken-talk, just surface things, joking. You are different.’

  We got up to go. Would he return to China? I wondered. In old age, at least, the first generation of emigrants often came back, to build prestigious houses and die where they were born. But Huang said no. He would not come back to any village. Others would tend his parents’ graves. ‘After death there is nothing. I believe only in knowledge.’

  Out in the street a light rain was falling. He took no notice of it.

  Something else was bothering him, small but insistent. He said: ‘We have a tomb-sweeping day, you know, when we burn paper money for the dead. For two years now, just before this day, my dead grandparents have come to me in dreams…’

  But this coincidence was all he knew of faith, and the thought dwindled away with the rain. He took my hand. He was afraid for me, he said. Then, with an incongruous sweetness, he became reluctant to say goodbye. He thought of me as his father, he said depressingly. I was so old and my health wasn’t good (I had a cold). And the railway stations were dangerous. I must never talk to anyone in a station. They were full of drifters and criminals. ‘And you must not go out at night. Here’s my mobile number…you must ring me if you ever have trouble…’

  But as he drifted away from me, perpetually turning to wave, turning again until the rain and the dark subsumed him, it was his own journey that I wondered at–the self-exile of millions of his countrymen. That night I tried to picture him succeeding. I surprised myself by badly wanting this. I almost telephoned him. In the hotel’s quiet it became uncomfortable, then painful, to envisage the alternatives: Huang scraping a pittance in some crime-ridden barrio, while his dream faded away.

  I closed my eyes, imagining a distant, changed time. This other fantasy developed pleasurably as I fell asleep. In some unknown future, needing financial help–a loan perhaps, to support my old age–I would find myself in a grand banker’s office wavering down a gauntlet of secretaries and assistant managers; and there at the end, his hedgehog hair flecked discreetly with grey, proffering his gold-ringed hand from behind the director’s desk, would be my old friend.

  Through the cold halls of the Confucian temple, 2,300 stone stelae rise in ranks higher than a man. Sacred texts, imperial edicts, early poems: this imperishable library accumulated for a thousand years, after the Roman-era Han dynasty. Some stand isolated on the backs of stone tortoises, symbols of longevity, topped by a twirl of dragons; others stretch in seamless walls of black granite, eight feet high. Ancient classics–the Book of Rites, the Book of Odes, the Book of Changes–become avenues of stone you walk through. The core texts alone cover the surface of 114 giant stones. There are laws about fields and canals, records of peasant uprisings and the removal of ancestral graves, even the killing of missionaries, copybooks of calligraphy, maps, and a single six-foot-high character, ‘Harmony’, carved on its own stele. You are walking through the memory-trace of a whole people. You have no power to turn a page or unfurl a scroll. The words might be the voice of the stone. Incorruptible, they have been proof against the Chinese whispers of generations of scribes.

  Their redundancy was majestic now. The neat, incised characters in their vertical columns struck me like a chilly magic. I had learnt to speak Mandarin only through the pinyin system which Romanises the characters. I could not read them. But each character, I knew, was discrete, inflexible. The language had no developed past or future, no gender, no singular or plural. In these dank halls it suddenly seemed less a living organism than a wondrous monument. Locked in a changeless system of notating history, the near and the distant past might seem to co-exist. Duration was recorded by the reign of emperors, or in sixty-year cycles. There was no trajectory to the future, no opening-out of the centuries, no last day. Instead, sometimes, there was the illusion of perfect equilibrium.

  This gloomy power followed me through hall after hall of granite memory. I went in fascinated alienation, as if tramping between tombstones. The characters were filing up and down their stelae like worker ants. The word had become immortal, and dead. The tortoises groaned under their loads.

  Once, where the Book of Odes moved in a curtain of interlocked slabs, I heard a subdued noise. The stones seemed to be mewing. Round the corner was a young woman tracing a passage with her finger, and trying to sing.

  I go through open lands,

  The trees are flowering,

  Married, I lived with you,

  Uncherished, I returned.

  ‘I can’t sing it, I was just experimenting.’ She covered her mouth. ‘Even by the twelfth century they couldn’t remember how to sing the songs of the Tang. They pronounced the words differently too, and we can’t tell how. Every poem was written to be sung. But now we have the words only.’ She was copying the ode from the stone into a notebook. ‘I love these. But everybody seems to have forgotten them. People don’t know what our ancestors left us. I feel sorry for them.’

  Sorry for her ancestors or contemporaries, I did not know. But the words were beautiful, weren’t they? She did not have a husband (she was only twenty-two) and nor had she returned. But the words were already potent, although even the meaning of many was controversial, I knew. One translator went so far as to say: ‘There is not one single word in these ancient poems whose precise significance we understand.’ You could wander their interpretations for ever. I left her alone with her notebook, thinking, and soon afterwards the stones were mewing again.

  The stele I was hunting was quite another. The dragons that crested it writhed around a flaming pearl and a vivid superscription. Along its base and sides, running like light cavalry round the Chinese columns, was a cursive script which turned out to be Syriac. The carved inscription read: ‘Record of the Transmission of the Western Religion of Pure Light through China’. And it was crowned by a Christian cross.

  Raised in AD 781, the stone recorded the arrival of the priest Aloban from the West a century and a half earlier. He ‘came on azure clouds bearing the true scriptures’, and the emperor Taizong received him, indulging the translation of his books in the imperial library, and even founding a monastery. ‘If we carefully examine the meaning of the teaching it is mysterious, wonderful, full of repose,’ the emperor decreed astonishingly. ‘It is right that it should have free course under the sky.’ The stone goes on–drenched in Buddhist and Taoist imagery–to celebrate the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth and Christ’s Ascension. But the Crucifixion is only cryptically remembered, and the Resurrection not at all.

  I scrutinised the Syriac as if I might decipher it. Who on earth were these Christians?

  It happened like this. In AD 431 the patriarch of Constantinople, Nestorius, maintained with half the eastern Church that the nature of Christ was not indissolubly divine, but dual–that he was a man sometimes visited by divinity–so that Mary could not rightly be called the Mother of God. ‘I cannot imagine God as a little boy,’ he said. The heresy split Christendom. Within a few years the Nestorians were taking refuge in the Persian empire, and spreading east along the Silk Road, and perhaps it was for this that their great stele describes how at the Nativity the light-dazzled Magi came with their gifts from Persia.

  But in the Chin
ese heartland the Nestorians dwindled as suddenly as they had arrived, persecuted as the Tang dynasty declined, their monasteries in ruins. No authenticated trace of their churches has ever been detected here. If the Xian stele did not exist, you could imagine their coming a myth.

  Yet five years ago, fifty miles south of the city, a British Sinologist rediscovered an obscure site named Da Qin, ‘Roman empire’ or ‘the West’, the name by which Nestorian communities were known. It was located eerily in the Taoist precincts most sacred to the emperors, the forgotten Vatican of the Tang, where the Qinling mountains open northwards on the road to the West.

  The Sinologist’s agent was a careful, silent man. He had been born in a peasant village, but his studious intelligence had lifted him to another life. He wanted to be called Peter. Southward beyond the smog and detritus of Xian, we drove together towards mountains we could not see. It was early April and the foxglove trees were in lilac bloom along the fields. In the villages the cottage walls were stacked with last year’s maize, and New Year posters still dangled from their doors. Once we came behind a truckload of mourners, their heads bound in white bands, who threw out symbolic money to blow like blossom over the road. Beyond them, we found ourselves traversing empty fields and patches of scrubland alive with sand-coloured marmots.

  Then the shadow-waves of mountains came pouring to the plain. Our road twisted into green foothills. The air was limpid, as if after rain. China had become beautiful. As we entered the Pass to the West, imagined exiles and merchants rode past us the other way. Suddenly Peter said: ‘There’s Da Qin!’

  The pagoda was leaning against the mountain mists. Wheat-sown hills curved in green terraces around it, and poplars made faint brush-strokes in the valleys. It was utterly still: a willow-pattern dream of rural China. This pagoda was all that was left, Peter said. Its seven creamy tiers, their roofs limned with grass, tapered to a ribbed pinnacle. It kept a lonely grace. Thirteen centuries had pushed it aslant to the wind.

  But as we drew near, it loomed into harder focus. What had appeared frail in the hills’ spaces was in fact formidably solid and ninety foot high. It dwarfed everything beneath it: a rustic shrine, two farmhouses. A lone survivor from the Tang–a monastery library, perhaps–it betrayed some once-opulent community.

  I wandered the rutted ground beneath it for a long time. A Buddhist monk and nun had guarded the place for years. Now she lay under its earth–her tombstone put her age at 116–while he tended her grave, but had gone mad. But if Da Qin had been Buddhist, Peter said, its temples would have probably aligned north–south, whereas this plateau ran east–west. It was covered by a weft of yellow flowers shifting with black butterflies; there was an orchard of kiwi fruit, and the monk had planted some garlic. East of the pagoda, perhaps, the Nestorian dead had awaited in their graves Christ’s coming from the sunrise. On its other side, the church may have lain. But even the excavator’s spade might unearth no conclusion. Long after Christianity was suppressed in 845, Buddhists had spread their own temple here. In 1556 an earthquake had emptied the site of its last inhabitants. Now a caretaker kept the few fragments come to light: some clay tracery painted chrome green; a torn stone wing.

  The doors of the pagoda were blocked. Earthquake and repair alike had sealed it. The corn-coloured plaster was flaking off its brick. But someone stretched a huge ladder against one wall for me, reaching to the third storey, and on this I climbed shakily in. Through the window’s tunnel, its stone smooth and dry under my hands, I crawled into a high chamber. The light faded away. Pigeons were moaning somewhere. In front of me, against the walls’ angle and startlingly pale in the semi-darkness, a ten-foot-high plaster statue was splashed against the brick. In a double mandorla of foliage and mountains, its figure had been reduced to a pair of mysteriously reclining legs. Where the plaster had been torn away, wisps of straw still showed in the clay, and a wooden peg jutted empty. The upper body had left no outline there. Only the legs–an outstretched calf and a bent knee–rested in formal eloquence. They were dressed in wide trousers caught up under the knee in the Persian fashion, and the hem of a short tunic survived above.

  Who this figure was–overarched by a froth of Taoist hills–was still unknown. The Sinologist believes it is the Virgin Mary, reclining in Byzantine posture beside her Child. You may even imagine the shadow of a draped arm in the plaster, holding something. Or perhaps it is the Buddhist saviour Guanyin, lounging in this pose named ‘royal ease’, resting her right arm before her in consolation. Or perhaps it is neither.

  Peter had crept in beside me, and we clambered by wooden stairs to upper storeys. On the floor above, a surge of sculptured plaster enshrined a figure in repose, more ruined than the other. Higher again, around the topmost tier, a dense cloud of pollen floated in the still air. In one window the Qinling mountains rose, and birdsong sounded; in another, wedged on its own tree-clouded hill, was the Taoist monastery of Lou Guan Tai which had ushered in this region’s holiness.

  In the years of tolerance, I imagined, the Taoists must have gazed across at the Christians, mystified. The Nestorians, it seems, never adapted to Chinese taste the death and resurrection of their complicated god. But they shared with Taoism a belief in the innate purity of the soul. They were egalitarian and rather ascetic, vegetarian, refusing slaves. Every dawn they gathered to the clang of their wooden semantra, and periodically indulged in their mysterious Eucharist: for ‘every seven days we have an audience with heaven’.

  Peter found Christianity deeply alien, he said, although he worked for the Christian Sinologist. Crouched beside me in the topmost window, he wondered at its miracle-laden history and theological maze. Sometimes the lines of his forehead gathered between his eyes in a questing knot, and he took on an eager student’s concentration. This was the weapon he kept sharp: the mind which had bettered him. ‘My mother was a Buddhist,’ he said, ‘but my father was an official in our village. He was always a little cool, a little sceptical.’ He touched his chest. ‘Like me.’

  But he pointed out to me, on three separate bricks, a trace of spidery writing, still untranslated. It was raised in the surface–a mason’s mark, perhaps–and might have been a name in broken Syriac, the liturgical language of the Church of the East. In time, I thought, this web-like clue might unravel the whole pagoda. Peter would not guess who had inscribed it. It had simply been left behind: a tiny, teasing signature.

  In 845 Nestorianism was banished from China. As its lifeline to Persia shrank, it contracted westward along the Silk Road, fortifying itself in the oases of the Taklamakan desert, and proselytising the Mongols. By the thirteenth century, in the reign of Kublai Khan, it revived once more, only to dwindle away with the collapse of his dynasty. Centuries later Jesuit missionaries found in China a few estranged people who unthinkingly made the sign of the cross over their meals.

  You climb a cobbled way under trees shaking with cicadas. It is almost dark. Nothing tells you that you are entering the Vatican of a once great faith. Behind you the Da Qin pagoda has returned to its lonely frailty against the mountains. In front is the Taoist sanctuary of Lou Guan Tai, which the parvenu Tang emperors, whose blood was more barbarian than Chinese, adopted as their ancestral shrine, covering the surrounding hills with chapels.

  Soon you are lost among its courts and altars. Worn steps climb and descend through circular moon-gates to grey-walled terraces. The air is awash with incense. There is a whiff of dereliction. The roofs are sloughing their tiles, and rubbish drifts along the paths. Inside the halls preside monstrous fairytale divinities. They repel all thought, all meaning. Lao-tzu himself, ‘Old Sage’–in legend the sixth-century BC founder of Taoism–sits huge and high-coloured behind his altar, a white waterfall of beard forking to his waist. He may have been less a man, in fact, than the name for a compendium of wisdom: a mystic pantheism, the faith of the recluse.

  But his way became lost. The monks live casually in wood-latticed cells along the courts. They are sallow and young. Their hair is
bunched into shiny knots on their heads, and their chins wisped in sleek beards. Dressed in black with white gaiters, they seem a race apart: slight men with shifting eyes.

  Peter despises them. ‘The religion has sunk very low. It’s not like Buddhism or even Christianity here. There are only ten thousand of these monks in all China. Some of them are criminals, I think. They join the sect to escape the law. They make some kind of living, then disappear again.’

  So the vision of Lao-tzu has sunk to this. Around its unworldly philosophy–the Tao was both spiritual path and transcendent knowledge–it had always been rife with magic and outlandish deities, and was obsessed with immortality. Even here a fortune-teller murmurs over an astrological chart, and the monks keep a hexagonal stone–when struck, it sings like metal–which the goddess Nuwa gave to Lao-tzu while she mended the sky.

  Beneath the temple of the Queen Mother of the West, who keeps the peaches of immortality in the Kun Lun mountains where I was going, I stare up at a giantess in painted plaster. Her altar is jumbled with paper flowers, some old bottles and a bag of steamed buns. She brandishes a peach in one hand, a half-moon in the other, and her pinprick mouth is drowned in double chins.

  Peter says: ‘This is strange to me too. I don’t know what she is.’

  He starts to wonder aloud what hallmark identifies this religion–in Christianity it is love; in Islam, perhaps, justice–then his brows curdle and he does not guess. What is it, then, to a secular countryman of Confucius? I wonder. The Queen Mother’s neutered gaze fixes us through her curtained canopy. At last he says: ‘Integrity.’

  It was for lack of integrity in the world, it seems, that Lao-tzu–if he existed–mounted a black buffalo and prepared to shake the dust of China from his hoofs. The corruption of court life, it is said, had sickened him. Here in the Pass to the West, two and a half millennia ago, a watchman saw him coming–a moon-gate in grey brick enshrines the view–and persuaded him to stop. For a single night the sage distilled his doctrine for posterity in the Tao Te Ching, the Taoist bible. Then he remounted his black buffalo and disappeared into the west.