A Total Eclipse and the Last Fort Under Heaven
31-July-2008
To Jiayuguan by Train
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| China |
Although both Xi’an and Lanzhou lie in the Yellow River Valley, it is obvious why the connecting railway does not follow the river. At least it does not follow the Yellow River, but sets off west along its much more modest tributary the Wei He.
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| We start with an overnight train journey from Xi'an to Jiayuguang (ringed in red) via Lanzhou |
The track traverses a strange flat plateau between low hills. The land is heavily cultivated and although we passed few centres of population, we saw many people labouring in the fields. The work was hard and manual, power being supplied by animals more often than tractors. For many miles the Wei He runs in a small gorge some hundred metres across and ten deep, as though a slit had been cut through the land and the river dropped into it. When occasionally the gorge meandered or widened we could see cultivation continuing right down to river level; any land that could be planted had been planted.
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| The Wei He in its narrow gorge |
Eventually we left the Wei He, and without a noticeable rise or fall found ourselves at Lanzhou.
There are dozens of cities in China I am not entirely sure I have heard of, and then discover
they are home to several million people. Lanzhou is one such city. Thirty
kilometres of industrial ugliness smeared along the riverbank, the capital of
Gansu Province looks like most other Chinese cities, and its railway station
could be anywhere, particularly as there are precious few signboards saying Lanzhou in Chinese or pinyin.
For a while we ran beside the Yellow River - which was actually muddy brown.
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| The Huang He (Yellow River) near Lanzhou |
Our route followed the Hexi corridor, the main access – or in our case exit - to the Han Chinese
heartland from the wilds of Central Asia. As night fell we entered the Gobi
desert, the change from well-watered farmland to scrub passing unseen. We were
asleep as the train thundered towards what the Chinese once thought of as the
very edge of civilization, yet not very deeply asleep – our arrival at
Jiayuguan was scheduled for a few minutes after four o’clock.
01-Aug-2008
Arriving in Jiayuguan
We were awake before the carriage attendant came to warn us. Our Japanese companions slept,
or pretended to sleep, through the inevitable disruption. Clearly, they had
succeeded in booking direct to Dunhuang (see end of Previous post.)
Outside the station we were greeted by our prebooked guide, who introduced herself as Orlando, and her driver Mr Wu. Jiayuguan is a small, modern city with big wide streets built on the inevitable grid plan. The streets were
empty as we were driven to our hotel on the southern edge of town. ‘The whole
city is only forty years old,’ Orlando told us. ‘Never mind,’ we
said, ‘we’re only here for the eclipse’.
Version 1 of our itinerary had taken us, like our erstwhile Japanese companions, straight to
Dunhuang (see Previous post). Wen I learned that in early August that a total eclipse would cut a
swathe across northern China we changed our dates and
introduced a stop in Jiayuguan just inside the path of totality.
Orlando looked perplexed, giving the impression that she was unaware of any eclipse. That was worrying, had we come to the wrong place?. I did not then know she had spent the
previous day escorting an Indian couple from Dunhuang to Hami and had arrived
in Jiayuguan only a little before us. We had had little sleep, she had had
none and had every excuse for seeming dozy.
Orlando seemed a strange name for a young woman. She had told us her Chinese name, but with my wooden ear and stiff tongue I was grateful that, like most
Chinese who come into regular contact with Europeans, she had an adopted
western name. But why Orlando? It seemed rude to ask, but our daughter had
taught English in a Chinese kindergarten and part of her job was assigning
names. She had one class with all Welsh names, little Chinese Rhiannons and
Gethins, and another named after the characters in a particular long running
soap opera. Doubtless Orlando’s teacher had something in mind when they parcelled out the names, and it was probably not their charge’s future career.
Our hotel was new and wanted to be smarter than its three-star designation, but was let down by attention to detail. The receptionist was lounging in the foyer
when we arrived; she climbed over her desk to check us in.
Exploring Jiayuguan on Foot
Several hours later, after an attempt at sleep, we shared a cold breakfast – nobody had put lights under the warming dishes - with a dozen or more Germans all earnestly talking astronomy. Clearly we were in the right place.
As we finished a rested and much more clued up Orlando arrived. She suggested that around six o’clock we should drive out to some sixth century tombs in the desert to
see the wall paintings and then stay for the eclipse. The desert, she
explained, was absolutely flat and although the sun would not be very high, we would
have no visibility problems. We agreed a price for the jaunt as it was not part of the package, and wandered off to explore Jiayuguan.
It was rush hour, but the wide streets were still deserted. South of our hotel a forest of cranes was throwing up yet more apartment blocks with the usual Chinese
haste. Beyond this we could see the desert rising to an area of heavily eroded
badlands and beyond that the snow-capped Qilian mountains.
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| Cranes, badlands and the Qilian Mountains, Jiayuguan |
Our hotel was beside a wide boulevard. On a road off to the north we spotted a mosque, not the first we had seen in China, but the first built in Middle Eastern, or at least Central Asian style. We crossed the empty boulevard and headed towards it.
This almost equally wide street was lined with weeping willows. The shade was welcome though the air was much drier than in Shanghai or Xi’an and the heat was agreeable rather than oppressive. Dry or not, there were several clouds above us, and more over
the mountains; if they moved across they would seriously threaten our view of
the eclipse. The pavements were awaiting construction and covered with rubble,
but walking in the road was not dangerous. Being used to the population pressure
which defines most Chinese cities, it was strange to walk round a town which
seemed, if not empty, at least under-populated.
Before reaching the mosque, we were seduced by a market laid out on a side road leading towards open spaces and an area of low-rise dwellings. Melons, peaches, squash,
tomatoes, a whole variety of cabbages, elongated aubergines, leeks,
spring onions and the freshest plumpest ginger roots imaginable were arranged
along the roadside, the stallholders sitting on the ground under tatty umbrellas. The quality looked good and there were a few people buying, but
business was hardly brisk.
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| Looking back towards the mosque, Jiayuguan |
Gone are the days when foreigners were routinely stared at in China; large clumsy people with round eyes and huge noses are a common sight on the streets of Beijing or Shanghai, but Jiayuguan is different. Some people seemed so interested in us that we wondered if we were the first westerners they had seen. Their interest, though,
seemed friendly and the staring never felt hostile. We waved at children
playing in the street and their parents smiled and waved back.
At the end of the market was an area of clean, narrow alleys with long rows of single storey barrack-like buildings. A caged songbird chirruped above every front door and bunches of chillies hung drying in the sun; it was a rare glimpse of an older China, a China that existed before the rush to modernisation and the mania for building high.
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| A glimpse of an older China, Jiayuguan |
Beyond the houses we were we found another broad empty boulevard and beside it the unusual sight of a Christian church. Recently built, its style combined English parish church with American town hall, whilst suggesting the designer had never actually seen either. It sat beside the road in mildly embarrassed incongruity.
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| Church, Jiayuguan |
Modern Jiayuguan is pleasant enough, in a rather characterless way. Keeping a watch on the gathering clouds and attempting to will them away, we tramped the streets looking doggedly for the Great Wall Museum marked in our Rough Guide, but never found it. The centre, slightly perversely, is on the western side, well away from the huge steelworks that dominate the north-eastern corner and explain why this ancient and once remote village is being developed into a modern town. Jiayuguan is a work in progress, but for the moment, it is welcoming, relaxed and mercifully free of crowds and beggars. The air, too, is clean by Chinese standards though current developments may yet see to that.>/span?>/p>
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| The centre of modern Jiayuguan |
The Wei-Jin 'Gallery' and a Total Eclipse
At 6 o'clock Mr Lu drove us out of town, then through agricultural land, negotiating his way round tractors and donkey carts, to the well-defined edge of the Gobi desert. It was as flat as Orlando had promised, a vast plain of grey grit stretching away to the distant mountains. The heat of the day was beginning to moderate, and the sky had become mercifully clear.
The eclipse was not until seven and we arrived just before the six thirty closing time of the Wei-Jin Underground Gallery, which is not a gallery at all, but a tomb. Over a thousand tombs were chiselled into this bleak landscape in the Wei and Jin period, but only one is available for public viewing.
The ‘Wei and Jin’ period, over fifteen hundred years ago, was the first time Jiayuguan had been incorporated into an entity which we would recognise as China. For 400 years,
the Han dynasty had ruled a united China based on Xi’an that stretched south beyond the Yangzi basin and north along the Yellow River, but never this far
north or west. When Han rule collapsed in 220 CE, China entered a period of
disunity known as the ‘Three Kingdoms’. The kingdoms engaged in semi-continuous
warfare, but around 265 AD the Jin dynasty emerged in the northernmost
kingdom, and by 280 had largely reunified China and extended their rule to
include the area around Jiayuguan.
Turkic invaders attacked the Jin's northern and western territories and by 386 Jiayuguan had became part of the Northern Wei Empire. The Wei-Jin tombs were constructed between the late 3rd and 5th centuries under both the Jin and the Northern Wei.
None of the other thousand tombs are visible to a casual glance, but the one we were to visit is crowned with a hut and a corrugated iron roof. The tomb keeper
opened up and we descended a well-lit flight of stairs some four metres into
the ground. At the entrance painted tomb guardians warned us off, but we took
no notice and boldly entered. The tombs are built of flat, creamy coloured
bricks, which form a complex vaulted ceiling. The sides of the two chambers are
lined with bricks set on their edges, each one bearing an individual painting,
hence the name ‘galleries’.
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| Photography was no allowed so I have 'borrowed' this picture from the website of Chinese tour company Visit Our China in return for this free publicity |
The brickwork is of a remarkable standard for the period; the paintings are too, although they are often negatively compared with the Buddhist paintings at Mogao (see Dunhuang: Dunes in the Gobi) and Bezeklik (see Turpan: Ruined Cities of the Silk Road).
They are certainly less complex and the use of colour is limited, but they
perform a different function. The Buddhist paintings are entirely religious,
and although it would be difficult to maintain that artwork in a tomb has no
religious connotation, the Wei-Jin paintings are largely vernacular. There
are no flying apsaras, representations of the Buddha or denizens of the
underworld, instead there are dozens of vigorous line drawings showing aspects
of daily life in the 5th century. We saw them ploughing, cooking, butchering a
pig and playing musical instruments. The essentials of life have changed little
in one and a half millennia.
We were still looking at the pictures when Orlando shouted down that the eclipse was starting. After her apparent indifference earlier, she now seemed beside
herself with excitement. After delivering her Indian clients to an official
eclipse viewing sites she had thought she was going to miss the event. The
government had laid on a viewing area for some twenty thousand people at Hami,
but although they had made great efforts to package and sell the eclipse, not
even the Chinese Communist Party could actually own it. ‘Ownership’, as
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon would have reminded them, ‘is theft’ and you cannot
thieve an eclipse.
Using our eclipse glasses we could see that moon was just starting to overlap the sun. Mr Lu had smoked a piece of broken glass with his lighter and was looking at the sky through that. The eclipse glasses were not only safer but more efficient so to general excitement we passed them to Mr Lu and then to Orlando and onto the tomb-warden. Our group of five was joined by three young men on bicycles, students from Lanzhou University on a cycling holiday. They also had no equipment for viewing the eclipse so our glasses were passed round the newcomers who made suitably awed noises.
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| Lynne shows Mr Lu her attempts to photograph the sun, with the tomb warden on her right, Orlando on her left Wei Jin Tombs, Jiayuguan |
The moon made slow progress and without using the glasses it was impossible to tell that anything was happening. A sneaky glance at the sun – medically inadvisable, but
impossible to resist – showed nothing but the usual ball of fire; looking away,
the desert seemed to be bathed in the normal quantity of light for seven
o’clock on a summer evening.
The eight of us stood around chatting, taking turns with the eclipse glasses and admiring the photographic equipment of one of the Lanzhou students; you need - as we
were shortly to discover - a camera of some quality to take meaningful pictures
of an eclipse. Sadly we had no such camera.
The field of view was excellent, the sky was clear and the evening sun was not so high that we had to crane our necks. By the time the moon had achieved two thirds coverage
and still nothing seemed to be happening, except when seen through the eclipse glasses, I
was beginning to wonder whether an eclipse was all it was cracked up to be.
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| So there is an eclipse happening -- could you tell from this picture? Jiayugan |
To the unequipped observer the climax would have come almost without warning. As totality approached the light level suddenly dropped, blackness overwhelmed the sun leaving only a halo of fire, and from a single point on the circumference, there was a sudden blaze of light, the so-called ‘diamond ring effect’. Eight people's simultaneous intake of breath was easily audible.
The earth was dark; the sun a ball of infinite blackness hanging in a dark sky. The world slipped into a profound silence.
Despite our different backgrounds, we were all twenty-first century people, with the usual blasé approach to apparent miracles like cars, computers and digital cameras.
We all understood the essentially very simple trick of nature we were watching,
yet our common reaction was one of total awe. I can only imagine how the sudden
darkness must have felt to our unsuspecting ancestors.
Totality lasted little more than a minute and then the world returned unhurriedly to life. I found myself breathless and disorientated. I looked round to see seven other faces, Chinese
and European alike, struggling back to normality.
What do you do or say after the greatest free show on earth? None of us seemed to know, and for a while we stood in silence. We recovered more slowly than the world
around us, but eventually we took leave of our new friends from Lanzhou and,
although it was well past official closing time, the tomb warden invited us to see the second chamber.
The two coffins and the grave goods had long been removed, but there were more paintings to admire. When the tomb was completed and occupied, a candle had been lowered through a
small hole in the apex of the vaulted ceiling and the hole closed. By the
time the candle burned out the corpses were sealed in an inert environment. I
am not sure this was really much use to the dead, but it was good news for the
archaeologists some fifteen hundred year later. The grave goods and other
artefacts are in various museums, including the one on site - not that it
was open. A less systematic grave robbing had taken place in earlier centuries,
sometimes so neatly done that it has been suggested tomb builders and tomb
robbers were actually the same people.
02-Aug-2008
The Last Fort Under Heaven
Next morning we dropped in on The Last Fort Under Heaven in the northwest of the city. There has probably been a fort here since Han times and the original settlement of Jiayuguan served the fort and was dependant on it. The current structure is Nibg and was completed in 1372.
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| Lynne at the Last Fort under Heaven Jiayuguan |
Two courtyards are surrounded by sturdy walls and surmounted by the standard flamboyant Ming gatehouses and guardhouses. There were quarters for the commander and a Buddhist
temple for his spiritual needs. Just outside the fort is the new location of
the museum we had failed to find yesterday.
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| The Commander's private temple Last fort Under Heaven, Jiayuguan, |
According to legend, the builders calculated they required 999,999 bricks. One million were duly delivered. The spare brick can be seen sitting on a ledge above the inner courtyard. You may believe that if you wish; easier to believe, given the pristine condition of the fort, is that it has been the victim of heavy-handed restoration.
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| The Last Fort Under Heaven, Jiayuguan |
Inside one courtyard a squad of Ming soldiers – students with holiday jobs - were being put through complex drills. From a distance, they seemed to be slashing at each other with deadly weapons.....
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| Comples weapon drill, Last Fort Under Heaven, Jiayuguan |
...but close up, the blades were reassuringly flimsy, the weapons little more than overgrown cutlery.
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| On guard with oversgrown cutlery, Last Fort Under Heaven, Jiayuguan |
From the battlements the importance of the fort is obvious. At Jiayuguan the Hexi corridor bottle-necks before opening out into the Gobi desert. The Great Wall can be seen stretching out to the Qilian Mountains in the south and northwards to the smaller Mazong Mountains. The wall here is simple mud brick, not the elaborate structure it is near Beijing, but it does not need to be. No army or trade caravan approaching China from the West could pass the fort unseen. The Last Fort Under Heaven had total control over the frontier between civilization and barbarism.
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| The Great Wall stretches away to the Qilian Mountains, Jiayuguan |
At various times, Chinese power and influence have spread several thousand kilometres west of here – as they do today. In those days sections of wall reached out into the desert to remote forts, now levelled by time or reduced to stumps in the sand. Later, when the Chinese withdrew into their heartland, this was their final frontier. Even today, beyond Jiayuguan the Han are a minority and many of the people could not be described as ethnically Chinese.
We walked through the fort and out the far side through the Last Gate Under Heaven. The Chinese call their country Zhong Guo, The Middle Land. Once through this gate, you were
very much on the edge and no longer under the protection of heaven. Here
weeping loved ones said goodbye to those bound for exile, and it still looks a
frightening prospect today. Beyond the gate, there is nothing but desert, a
bare, flat wilderness bounded only by the distant horizon. Only a gang of boys,
each holding a camel on a lead and touting rides, brought any humanity to the
scene. We walked back in, through the First Gate Under Heaven.
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| The First Gate Under Heaven, Jiayuguan |
It is a fine fort, the walls and guardhouses more delicate than their heavier cousins in Xi’an, but it is recognisably from the same source. By the fourteenth century, Chinese
civilization was far more developed than anything in Europe or anywhere else in
the world. They were so far ahead they confused their achievements with
perfection. They sat snugly, and indeed smugly, behind their wall and treated
the rest of the world with disdain – if they bothered to think about it at all.
A trip round any major museum will show that the incredibly advanced porcelain
they were producing in the eleventh century was still being made in the
seventeenth; that Chinese landscape painting became so stylised they seemed to
be forever repeating the same picture. When you have seen one Ming palace you
have seen them all, and their forts and their tombs. Once perfection is
achieved, there can be no development. The Qing dynasty (1644-1911) saw some
slight changes in fashion - furniture became a little heavier - but no change
in mind set. By the time the Chinese looked over the parapet again, it was the
twentieth century and to their horror, they found the barbarians had not only
caught up, they had raced on ahead. It is only in the last three decades that
the Chinese have woken up to what has happened. The current headlong rush for
modernisation can only end with China playing a more important role in the
world, a role that befits a nation with vast resources and a quarter of the
world’s population.
Orlando Buys Lunch
By eleven o’clock we had seen the fort and Orlando suggested we go for lunch. We protested. ‘It was too early,’ we said, ‘wouldn’t it be better to set off for Dunhuang and find
something on the way?’ Orlando said there was nothing on the way. In urban
China it is difficult to walk a hundred metres without tripping over several
restaurants, I found it difficult to believe we could drive several hundred
kilometres without finding one, but Orlando was adamant (and would be proved right).
We sat in a restaurant, nibbling watermelon and waiting until our stomachs said lunch would be acceptable. Around us, the staff were clearing up after a Chinese coach
party. There was an incredible quantity of waste and they were dumping whole
plates of food, some of them completely untouched, straight into big buckets on
the floor. There was no doubt that when we were ready to eat we would again
receive enough for six. Orlando was keen to order for us and we know Chinese tour guides are taught that westerners hate spicey food, so we had already
primed her not to hold back on the chillies.
The meal, when it came, was as big as expected, the spicing mild, to say the least.
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| Lunch for two, Jiayuguan |
‘It wasn’t too spicy for you?’ she asked anxiously as we left. ‘More chillies would be good,’ I said and watched her struggle to understand. You can tell a Chinese tour guide that many westerners enjoy a chilli or two, but you cannot make them believe you. We would have a few more days with Orkando, and we would work on her.
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