Turpan, Ruined Cities of the Silk Road: The Chinese Silk Road Part 4

15 years ago we reached Turpan on our journey along the Chinese part of the Silk Road. Old posts were longer than those I write now; they covered a location rather than a single day. There is a lot in it, and I enjoyed re-reading it (if that is any recommendation).

The Turpan Oasis, the Hottest Place in China at the Hottest Time of Year

Dunhuang to Turpan

China

Sleep comes easily with the gentle rocking of a moving train, and vanishes as quickly when the rocking stops. Somewhere in the night we had a long halt in the wind-scoured desert. Then we were moving again, but this time in the opposite direction. This would have been mildly disconcerted had not the rocking lulled us back to sleep.

Sunset over the Gobi Desert

We had watched the sun set over flat and featureless desolation. Morning brought more of the same, but not quite so flat. Low cliffs trailed aimlessly through a landscape punctuated by odd heaps of grit, like a vast builder's yard abandoned at the dawn of time. Empty culverts channelled non-existent water away from the railway line and there were several outbreaks of nodding donkeys - there is oil and gas below the grit. The odd patch of greenery was accompanied by sad, neglected buildings, and twice, in the middle of nowhere, we passed huge industrial plants, their black smoke a sharp edged stain on the blue desert sky. We seemed to take forever to pass a distant wind farm

Wind Farm in the Gobi

08-Aug-2008

Arriving in Turpan

Despite feeling that we were going in the wrong direction, we duly arrived at Turpan station an hour or so later than scheduled.

Dragging our cases,we joined the crowd pushing past the ticket inspector and emerged into the small square of what seemed to be a frontier town. Around the perimeter stalls were being set up but despite this activity, there was a peculiar air of nothing happening.

We have just alighted from the overnight train from Dunhuang to Turpan

No one seemed to be there to meet us. Then we saw a man holding up the base of a cardboard box and staring at us with a worried expression. We walked towards him. Encouraged, he walked towards us. When we were right in front of him we could see our name, or some approximation to it, scrawled in ballpoint pen on the cardboard. We identified ourselves and the man looked relieved. He pulled a phone from his pocket, dialled a number and passed it to me.

“Hello, I’m Rana, your guide.” The voice had a distinct American twang. “My train has been delayed by high winds. I am sorry. I am still in Urumqi, but the driver will take you to your hotel. I hope to be able to join you for lunch.”

I returned the phone to the driver who pocketed it, smiled and took charge of our cases. “Our guide’s late,” I told Lynne, “wrong sort of sand on the tracks.”

Turpan station is, we discovered, a small settlement some thirty kilometres from the city itself. Beyond the square we drove through an area of industrial dereliction as ugly as any we have ever seen, and then we were crossing the desert grit on a straight and well-made road.

After twenty minutes, grit gave way to vineyards and we were in Turpan. Pleasantly bright and clean, it was big enough to be a city yet small enough for the feeling of being in an oasis to be ever present. The wide streets with a regular grid pattern were very Chinese, but among the usual buildings, others were of a very different design. Domes and arabesques reminded us we were now in Central Asia, well beyond the Chinese heartland. In the Xinjiang Autonomous Region the ethnic majority are Uighers, a Turkic people whose language is written in a modified Arabic script. They make up 80% of Turpan’s population and it was strange seeing Arabic signs jostling for space with the Chinese lanterns.

Turpan, the wide streets on a regular grid pattern are very Chinese

Our hotel and its courtyard occupied a whole block approached by a narrow road off one of the main thoroughfares and it was here we first encountered Xinjiang security. The driver was stopped and told to open the boot. Satisfied that it only contained suitcases we were waved through. At reception, the staff searched our cases before checking us in, though this was done with such polite embarrassment I doubt they would have troubled a genuine evil-doer. Apparently convinced we had not come to blow them up, they provided us with a pleasant ground floor room overlooking a garden, and a belated and much needed breakfast.

A City Stroll

Lynne had a rest and I took a walk round the city. After a cool morning, it was warming up and I moved slowly, observing the locals to see if I could tell Uigher from Han Chinese. Those wearing the distinctive four-cornered Uigher hat made it easy. There were many others whose faces and colouring were clearly not Chinese though they did not advertise the fact with their headgear. With the majority, however, I was unsure. If 80% of the people I was seeing considered themselves Uighers, then there must be plenty of Chinese looking Uighers and inter-marriage was common, and had been going on for a long time. The physical differences between Chinese and Uighers, I discovered, would become more pronounced as we travelled further west.

Qingnian Lu

Turpan oasis is famed across China for its grapes, and much of the land is covered with vineyards. A pedestrian street roofed with a vine-covered trellis covers a city centre stree called Qingnian Lu. It is pleasant to walk through China’s hottest city in the dappled shade of trailing vines. That, at least, is the theory and it so very nearly works. In late July the grapes were ripe - some two months earlier than in Europe – and in the fields the harvest was in full swing. In town only the birds were harvesting the trellised grapes and many inevitably fell to the floor. This was good news for the large and healthy gerbil population, but meant that the marble surface was uniformly sticky with grape juice. All progress along Qingnian Lu was accompanied by the sound of shoes tearing themselves from the pavement. It is, I am sure, preferable to chewing gum, but harder to avoid.

Qingnian Lu, Turpan

Cartloads of melons were stationed at road intersections, the donkeys and drivers waiting patiently for custom. Donkeys are easy to find in the countryside, but this was the first time I had seen donkey carts in urban China.

A Turpan melon donkey
(photographed that evening)

Lunch with Rana

When Rana arrived there was no doubting her ethnicity. A slim and very attractive girl in her early twenties; her skin was too brown, her eyes were too round and her shoulder length dark hair had too much body for anyone to think she was Chinese. Her American accent, she said, was due to an American teacher. Like all the other guides we met, she had never travelled outside China.

>We visited a Uigher restaurant for lunch. The heavy wooden furniture, staircase and balcony could not have been less Chinese. Rana asked, somewhat meekly, if she and the driver should eat with us. We said ‘yes’, aware that although it is normal for guides in the Middle East and North Africa to eat with their clients, the Chinese invariably disappear to a table on the far side of the restaurant. The food was different, too, as were the eating utensils. Chopsticks were available but most diners used metal spoons. The mutton pilaf, with a yoghurt accompaniment, was purely central Asian while the 'macaroni' dish[it was actually laghman, of which much more later, but I did not know that at the time] - also containing mutton – was a reminder that Marco Polo had passed this way. Mutton kebabs were already slightly too familiar, but here they were in their heartland, not the exotic dish of a minority community.

>Finding the pilaf a little dull I reached for a pot of what I took to be chilli pickle and dug in a spoon. “Stop!” Rana said urgently, almost shouting. “It’s chilli.” “I know,” I said, letting a dollop fall onto my rice. I mixed it in and was transferring a spoonful to my mouth when she said: “Perhaps you should try a little less.” I ignored her well-intentioned advice. She and the driver waited expectantly for an explosion that never came. It was actually not particularly hot, so I stirred in some more while the driver sat slack-jawed with amazement, shaking his head as though witnessing an event as rare and remarkable as the eclipse.

Jiaohe

In the afternoon we visited Jiaohe on the edge of the oasis some nine kilometres east of Turpan. Everywhere, grapes by the million were being packed into boxes for transport to market...

Grapes ready to go to market, Turpan

Turpan Raisons and Drying Houses

It is, however, not fresh grapes that make Turpan famous but raisins. Every road was lined with grape drying houses, single storey mud brick cubes with a lattice of missing bricks to allow circulating air to slowly shrivel the hanging bunches of grapes into intensely sweet green raisins.

Grape drying houses line the road,Turpan

Jiaohe City

The city of Jiaohe had a spectacular setting. Ten metre high cliffs at the confluence of two dry rivers provided a plateau with secure naturally defences on three sides, while a ditch protected the fourth. The city was founded around 100 BC as the capital of the Jushi Kingdom. Around 450 AD it became part of Tang dynasty China and remained so until the ninth century when it briefly became part of the Uigher Empire before being overrun by the Kyrgyz in 840. Being on the Silk Road ensured the city survived all these changes, but as the importance of the Silk Road waned Genghis Khan paid a visit, after which the Jiaohe was abandoned.

Jiaohe - a site with natural defences

Walking through the ruins the street plan is discernible - even where modern paths have not been laid - but the mud brick has spent seven hundred years reincorporating itself into the desert and the buildings are too far gone to work out what they were.

Walking the remains of Jiaohe's streets

The central Buddhist temple is obviously the remains of an important building and I circled it three times in a clockwise direction to show proper devotion and ensure our share of good luck.

The Buddhist temple, Jiaohe

Looking through the ruins and across the ravine to the grape drying houses beyond, it is easy to see that building methods have not changed that much. The sandy colours of the buildings ancient and modern blending so well that through half closed eyes it was impossible to tell which was which.

The old walls and the modern grape drying houses blend remarkably, Jiaohe

Karez Irrigation Canals

On our way back we stopped to see the karez underground irrigation channels. While Turpan hasfertile soil but minimal rainfall, water is plentiful in the snow-covered Tian Shan Mountains, so an underground canal was dug from the mountains to the city. They sank a series of vertical shafts, tunnelled from one to the next and so allowed gravity to deliver cool, clean water all the way from the mountains to the people, the gerbils and the vineyards they share. We descended the rocky steps into the cool interior and watched water flow from darkness, through the section lit for tourists then off into more darkness.

The longest canal in the Turpan area runs for over 30 kilometres and altogether there are almost a thousand with a total length of some 5000 kilometres. The earliest karez date from the second century BC and are similar to the qanats in Iran. The Chinese, reluctant as ever to give credit to anyone else, claim their system is entirely different. It is not, though the earlier Persian system was slightly more sophisticated; a combination of qanats and wind towers allowing them to maintain a supply of ice in the middle of the scorching desert. The concept, like so much else, moved along the Silk Road. It came east to China, spread west throughout the Middle East and was picked up by the Romans. They built qanat systems in North Africa, from where the Moors took the idea to Spain. The Spanish in their turn built qanats in South America. The water running cool and clear in Turpan to this day is testament to much visionary hard work many hundreds of years ago and to the importance of the Silk Road.

Karez underground irrigation system, Turpan

Wine Tasting and a Special, if Busty, Malt Whiskey

Although Uighers are Muslims, and China has no great wine making tradition, it would be contrary to human nature if this land of vineyards produced only table grapes and raisins. Outside the karez well, we sat at a large wooden table to taste three local wines.

Poured by a girl who looked Chinese but was, Rana assured us, Uigher, we first sipped a light fragrant red, like a red Muscat, then a wine labelled Cabernet Sauvignon, which tasted as if it might have been but probably was not, and finally a wine made from wind-dried grapes with more than a passing resemblance to Tuscan Vin Santo. Pleasantly surprised by the quality, I would have taken a bottle of the wind-dried wine home, had the open bottle not been the last they had. As it turned out this was a blessing though (see Khotan Airport Shenanigans), at the time, well disguised.

Later, while fruitlessly searching Turpan's poshest supermarket for 'wind-dried grape wine', my eye fell upon the familiar black label of a much-respected Irish whiskey. I was surprised to see it priced at 50 pence until I looked more closely. Perhaps 50p was indeed a reasonable price for a bottle of ‘Bushtits Single Malt Whiskey’. I was amused but did not buy any – a failure I have regretted ever since.

09-Aug-2008

Gaochang

The Flaming Hills

The following morning we drove through the Flaming Hills towards the ruined city of Gaochang. From afar the shimmering heat, reddish rocks and floating clouds give the impression that the hills are ablaze, whilst from the middle distance they resemble a sleeping red dragon. Well, that is what the Chinese tourist authorities want you to see. The less imaginative can easily observe a small range of very hot rocky hills.

The Flaming Hills, near Turpan

The sixteenth century epic ‘Journey to the West’ is a highly fictionalised account of the adventures of the seventh century monk Xuanzang and his companions on their quest to fetch Buddhist texts from India*. Once beyond the borders of China they meet all manner of grotesques, particularly in the Flaming Hills where flesh-eating demons were the least of their problems. We, on the other hand, drove through with remarkable ease, passing the ‘Journey to the West’ theme park on the way - if a fenced off rectangle of desert containing several camels and few statues can be called a theme park. Charitably, we decided it was a ‘work in progress’.

Nearing Gaochang, we ran into the first of the countless roadblocks that we would meet in Xinjiang. It proved one of the more difficult as our driver was not displaying a current insurance sticker. The policeman had him out of the car for a long, serious lecture. The necessary sticker was, it turned out, in the glove compartment and our driver sheepishly extracted it and stuck it on the window. After much finger-wagging we were allowed to proceed.

Gaochang City

The ruins of Gaochang date from the same period as Jiaohe and are similar, though without the dramatic setting. The advantage Gaochang does have, however, is a working public transport system. Beyond a corrugated iron gate in a corner of a vineyard, donkey carts were waiting to take visitors to the centre of town.

Riding into Gaochang on 'public transport'

We clopped along steadily, passing ruined walls, large and small, standing at all sorts of angles, making it impossible to discern streets or houses or much of a road plan.

Walls in Gaochang, though nobody has any idea what they were the walls of

Lacking Jiaohe’s natural defences, Gaochang has been vulnerable to military and non-military attack. Long ago the locals discovered that the stucco covered mud bricks made effective fertiliser and they have been ploughing them into the surrounding fields for generations. Ancient monument abuse is not a peculiarly Chinese idea - stones from Hadrian’s Wall are incorporated into many Northumberland farmhouses - and it stopped the instant they realised there was more money to be made out of muppets like us who come to see the monuments. Not that there were many, or indeed any, other such muppets the day we were at Gaochang. There is, of course, important archaeological and conservation work being done but judging from the rebuilding of the central hall and the scaffolding all over the Buddhist temple, the authorities seem more concerned with over-restoration than conservation.

Over-restored Buddhist temple, Gaochang

Ignoring the building work and walking slowly through the ruins we tried to recreate the city in our minds. The wind soughing gently through the shattered walls became the sound of long-dead merchants haggling in the bazaars. We imagined women making their way to the wells where now wild watermelons struggled in the parched soil, their fruits perfect miniatures of the cultivated plant....

Wild watermelons, Gaochang

...and lizards skittered in the sand. It was some time before we returned to our donkey who was waiting patiently to transport us back to the modern world.

Well camoflaged lizard, Gaochang

The Bezeklik Caves

Leaving Gaochang, we returned to the Flaming Hills, survived another roadblock and made our way to Bezeklik.

The Bezeklik Caves were hewn into a ledge below the lip of a steep valley. Like the caves at Mogao, they contained a treasury of Buddhist art from the great days of the Silk Road. Being a much smaller site, we were able to see most of the caves, but there was, sadly, little worth seeing. The arrival of Islam in the tenth century had moved religious fanatics to scratch out the face of every Buddha, angel and demon. The arrival of Europeans in the nineteenth century saw collecting fanatics spirit away any murals that might have survived the Muslims. The arrival of the Red Guards in the twentieth century inspired political fanatics to destroy anything that had survived the Muslims and the Europeans. We saw only sad hints of former glories.

The Bezeklik Caves

At the end of the terrace, an old man in a four-cornered Uigher hat sat with a rawap - a four stringed guitar-like instrument - on his knees. He needed little persuasion to play folk songs, and the only other visitor, who had obviously come from far less distant parts than us, sang along. The tune was central Asian, entirely unrelated in style to the singing of the porter in Huashan.

Rawap player, Bezeklik Caves

Returning towards the oasis we saw dozens of houses marching in straight lines across the desert. They had been built, we were told, to house people displaced by the Three Gorges Dam. Three years before we had watched the destruction of whole towns that would pose an obstruction to shipping when they were covered by the waters rising behind the newly completed dam. We were assured the Chinese government had gone to great lengths to house those displaced. Now we were looking at the promised replacements. They were all empty. The buildings are good, but who could possibly live here? Clearly not even the desperate.

Resettlement home near Turpan

The Emin Mosque

Amid the greenery on the edge of the city, the Emin Mosque was built in the eighteenth century by Prince Suleiman and named in honour of his father Emin Khoja. The region had recently been incorporated into China by the Qing dynasty, but they treated their empire with a light touch and encouraged their supporters in the building of the mosque. Uighers have been Muslims since the tenth century but after decades of communist repression, religious observance in Turpan is not overt. We walked round the elegant building and its well-tended grounds, the beneficiaries of much government cash.

The Emin Mosque, Turpan

Perhaps significantly, the building is no longer in use as a mosque. The huge pepper-pot minaret, at 44m the highest in China, was like nothing we had seen before, but photographs suggest it is a cousin to those in Samarkand and Bukhara.

Inside the Emin Mosque, Turpan

Back in the City

After lunch we walked out to a small artificial lake in the south of the town. According to Rana it was the place where everything happened, although obviously not in the heat of the afternoon. Olympic Rings sat in the centre of the lake and there was a promontory of decking with a gazebo. The music, blaring from loud speakers disguised as ornamental rocks in the flowerbeds, was turned off as we arrived. Empty tables were set out along the far side beyond the waterless fountains. We were almost the only people there. Walking round the lake, we found a family feeding not the ducks as they might in England, but the carp. The children squatted on the bank and the adults passed them titbits. The bright red carp beat the water to foam in their feeding frenzy.

Feeding the carp, Turpan

A little further on we came across a few people seated at tables set up outside a shop. The owner pointed to an empty table and we needed no second invitation. It was not a bar as such, but in true Chinese entrepreneurial style they were selling whatever customers needed, and on a hot afternoon a cold beer was exactly that. A telephone stood on a table outside the door. Few people have telephones at home and there are no public phones, but mobiles are so common that ‘phone shops’ have become hard to find in Beijing and Shanghai. They were, as we discovered, alive and well throughout Xinjiang.

Turpan Night Market

At nine o’clock the car park outside the posh supermarket was transformed into a night market with kebab cookers, sausage salesmen, chicken vendors and a beer stall. Mutton kebabs were, as ever, ubiquitous, but there was also other sheepy parts impaled on the scimitar like skewers. ‘Westerners don’t eat liver and kidneys,’ Rana told us when we discussed it the following morning. Fortunately, no one had told the man who sold them to us. The second night we had a chicken. Brought to the market ready cooked it was dismembered by the stall holders own fair hands and plonked on a bed of crisp but unrecognised salad vegetables before being covered with a thin cold sauce. It was good, if not without the risk of food poisoning.

Turpan night market

Full of chicken, we followed the crowd back to the lake which was almost unrecognisable from our earlier visit. Hundreds of people were milling around, some of them dressed in their finest. There were children on little rides, teenagers jumping in and out of the now gushing fountains and adults buying lottery tickets and sucking ice creams. The Chinese love of neon had been given full reign, the gazebo glowed purple and garish strips covered every edge and reflected in the rippling water. The Olympic rings, now in appropriate colours, revolved in the middle of the lake. Rana had been right, this was where everyone went.

They do like a bit of neon, Turpan

10-Aug-2008

Early Morning in Turpan

Happily unpoisoned, I went out next morning to buy supplies for our train journey. It was eight o’clock, but I seemed to have Turpan to myself. Strolling around in the cool, clean morning air I eventually came across a butcher taking delivery of his day’s meat, but could not buy even a bottle of water.

Delivery at the butcher's, Turpan

China is a vast country but has only one time zone, all clocks are set to Beijing time. We were now so far west that clock time and natural time were some two hours apart. Hence, the night market at Turpan started as those in Shanghai closed down, and the shops were closed when most Shanghainese would be going to work.

Returning to the hotel I found a baker had fired up his oven in the roadway leading to the entrance. Mrs Baker passed roundels of dough through the window and Mr Baker placed them on a moistened pad and pressed them into a mixture of onion and coriander before carefully leaning over and patting them onto the inside of his tandoor-like oven. Then he pulled out a half done loaf with a metal spike, moistened the other side and stuck it back. I joined the small crowd jostling against the oven’s concrete surround and waved a banknote. Five minutes later I was the proud owner of a Uigher naan, a 20cm disc of unleavened bread with a thick raised rim. I carried it back to Lynne in triumph, the sole product of my shopping expedition.

Breakfast at the hotel was interesting though not for the food. Every day we had two fried eggs and half a sausage, garnished with tomato and cucumber. It was the same ‘western’ breakfast for everybody and the places were laid with knives and forks. Although Lynne and I have become fairly proficient with chopsticks we have, over the years, provided amusement to fellow diners as we learned the art. I think, therefore, I am entitled to get my own back by enjoying the Chinese struggling with knives and forks. I had never realised there were so many different ways to hold them, and so many ways to attempt to transfer food from plate to face. Many were only partially successful; often leaving those attempting to look worldly and cosmopolitan with, quite literally, egg on their face.

Taking the Train from Turpan to Kashgar

We returned to the station at mid-morning and this time passed the X-ray inspection with ease. Inside, a large, ebullient woman who was clearly in charge checked our tickets and mother-henned us into seats in the appropriate waiting area.

As the time for the train approached, she took up her position on the gate to the platforms. The doors to the toilets were just to her right and poorly signed. I spotted a man inadvertently wandering into the woman’s toilet, and seconds later a woman beetled out and spoke to the Woman-in-Charge. She pointed at the errant pee-er, still hidden from the view of the waiting masses and started to give him a lecture. She made sure she was loud enough to attract everybody’s attention, and when the man re-emerged covered in confusion, eighty faces were pointing in his direction, most of them laughing. It was cruel, and he reddened dramatically, but seemed to take it in good part. Then the train arrived and we all surged through the gate and into the tunnel.

Possibly to prevent the recently humiliated from jumping, the Chinese are obsessed with allowing nobody onto the platform when a train is moving. Security guards held us all back at the tunnel exit as a goods train passed slowly through.

Everybody was searched as they boarded the train. Our two large cases posed a problem and the carriage attendant sent us to find our compartment with the promise that we would be searched later. She turned up twenty minutes into the journey when we had given up on her and stowed our cases. Never have I seen anyone go so meticulously through so much dirty laundry. Eventually, satisfied that we were not carrying a knicker-bomb, she left us in peace.

Sharing our four-berth compartment was a well-dressed official. He was clearly a man of some importance as he was travelling soft-sleeper class, but not important enough to use the Kashgar air link. The Chinese are often, sometimes unjustly, accused of being xenophobic. Our official was clearly terrified by two foreigners suddenly arriving to share his billet. He was also intelligent enough to realise that his fear was largely irrational. We watched him grit his teeth and try to carry on as normal. We smiled and tried to give him as much space as possible. He needed it.

The train approaches the Tian Shan Mountains

We spent some time perched on the folding seats in the corridor, which are fine except that you have to move every time somebody wants to walk past. We took pictures during the day and sipped Chinese vodka when it became dark. How I wished for some Bushtits Single Malt Whiskey.

* and, of course, the inspiration for Damon Albarn's Monkey: Journey to the West which premiered in 2007.

The Chinese Silk Road

Introduction: The Silk Road in China
Prelude: Shanghai
Xi'an
Jiayuguan: A Total Eclipse and the Last Fortress under Heaven
Dunhuang: Dunes in the Gobi
Turpan: Ruined Cities of the Silk Road
Kashgar (1): The Sunday Market and the Former British Consulate
Kashgar (2): Upal, Abakh Hoja and the Old Town
Hotan (or Khotan or Hetian): City in the Desert
Urumqi: A By-word for Remoteness
Postscript

Dunhuang, Dunes in the Gobi: The Chinese Silk Road Part 3

02-Aug-2008

China

A gentle three hour drive took us from Jiayuguan to Dunhuang; and yes, Orlando was right, there was nowhere to stop for lunch, indeed there was nowhere.

The motorway towards Urumqi passed through desert and the odd patch of scrub with fine views of the increasingly distant Qilian Mountains. After an hour or so we turned onto a smaller, but still well maintained, road. There had been little traffic on the motorway; there was none on the side road.



The empty motorway towards Urumqi

Approaching Dunhuang, the desert to our left rose into a cliff. Between the cliff and the road were a series of burials, each marked by a small headstone and a metre high cone of earth from which a stick protruded. Each stick, Orlando informed us, had once been covered with paper flowers, which time and the wind had scattered across the Gobi. The first graves appeared maybe twenty kilometres from the town, haphazardly strewn over the long strip of land, their density gradually increasing as we neared habitation.



Beside the road to Dunhuang

Desert towns have a way of appearing suddenly from nowhere; the first sign of Dunhuang was a large tollbooth. Once through, we found ourselves in a small city with the usual wide roads and grid pattern but with remarkably few high-rise buildings, almost nothing over three or four storeys. Life, it seemed, moved slowly here, neither people nor cars exerting themselves under the hot desert sun.

We have just driven from Jiayuguan to Dunhuang, both ringed on the map above

We drove past the hotel we thought we were staying at. ‘It is full,’ Orlando told us, ‘because of the eclipse. You have been rebooked into another hotel, it is better, it is four star.’

This problem was not the quality of the new accommodation, nor the promised views of the dunes, the problem was that it was right by the dunes, four kilometres out of town; a purpose-built luxury ghetto for foreigners.

We parked and Orlando phoned her boss to explain our misgivings. The message was firstly disbelief, then that the town was very full, and finally, in the face of our continued intransigence, that the boss had a cousin who knew somebody who…., I did not listen to the full story. ‘You can see the room if you like,’ Orlando said, clearly expecting we would reject it. ‘Where is it?’ ‘There.’ She pointed out of the window.

It was a bog standard Chinese three star hotel. The room was dingy but clean and had air conditioning and a bathroom. There was no fridge, which was irritating, and the bed was as hard as a board, which was normal, but most importantly it was right by the entrance to Dunhuang night market. It even had a view of the dunes - if you hung out the window a bit. We took it at once.



A view of the dunes from our hotel, Dunhuang



Dunhuang night market covers several city blocks. At dusk, the stalls in the central square are replaced by low tables and comfortable chairs. Food and drink are provided by the restaurants around the edge of the square and a host of portable cookers that appear as if by magic. Although we were now beyond The Great Wall, we were still in Gansu Province and Dunhuang is largely a Han Chinese town. Despite that, and as much by accident as design, we sat down by another Muslim kebab merchant. Had we known what would face us in Xinjiang, our choice might have been different, but lacking the benefit of hindsight, we were happy to eat more kebabs. Beside us a fountain tinkled merrily; on the far side a busker tootled the Titanic theme on a soprano saxophone.



Dunhuang night market

Our kebabs arrived with some cold beers, and we felt pleased with ourselves and our choice of hotel. The busker finished sinking the Titanic, picked up his music and moved across the square. The big ship set sail again.



A few kebabs and a bottle of beer
Dunhuang night market

 Four Chinese lads sat down next to us and ordered beers. After much discussion and some teasing, one of them accepted the dare, turned to us and said ‘Where are you from?’

 ‘We are from England,’ I said, trying to speak slowly and clearly.

‘I am from China,’ he replied earnestly.

There is nothing funnier, particularly after a few beers, then a solemn statement of the blindingly obvious, a fact not lost on his friends. As they slapped their knees and hooted with derision, he covered his face with his hands and blushed a shade of beetroot.

His confusion was covered by a karaoke machine set up where the Titanic man had been. I am not musical, but even I could tell that the singing bore, at best, only a passing resemblance to the tune, or indeed any tune. Then the sax man set himself up by us. I knew what he would play before he lifted his instrument to his lips – he only knew one song. There was nothing for it, we ordered another beer.

03-Aug-2008

Yumenguan, the Jade Fort, is not worth driving 80 km to see. Fortunately, an 80 km trip into the Gobi is worth doing just for itself.

We nearly did not get there at all. At a roadblock near the city centre we were warned that our route was closed. On the edge of the oasis, where green gives way to the grey of the desert, we reached Dunhuang Gucheng - Dunhuang Ancient City - an impressive looking old town which drags the Chinese tourists in by the thousand. Built as a film set in the 1990s for one of the endless torrent of ‘Three Kingdoms Epics’ that flood out of Chinese studios, it held little interest for us, but we were forced to stop at the roadblock at the head of the access road.

We could go no further, the policeman said, the road to Yumenguan was closed and would reopen this afternoon, or maybe tomorrow. Orlando told him we were leaving that afternoon, a white lie. The policeman wavered. She told him that the Olympics were starting and he must be nice to foreign guests. We were on the point of being waved through when a younger, smaller, weasel faced individual came over. He had no uniform and looked more like an angry teenager than the man in charge, but the red triangular armband safety-pinned to his sleeve must have counted for something, as the police officers deferred to him instantly. Our policeman was just a bloke doing a job and, as such, open to a little cajoling. This man looked a different and altogether nastier breed.

Orlando did not back down. The small man’s body language was not encouraging, but she was persuasive. He shook his head and pursed his lips, but still Orlando kept on at him. He waved his arms and made his point with emphatic fingers, but Orlando resisted. Eventually persistence paid off; with a final sneer, he waved us through and we set off into the desert.

At Dunhuang’s eastern edge, the Gobi rises in wave after wave of huge dunes. This may be the popular perception of deserts, but they are rarely like that. Driving west, the dunes dwindled behind us while the Qilian Mountains lined the southern horizon with a blaze of white. We drove down an arrow-straight road over a featureless, monochrome plain. There was little to look at, yet the desert has an austere beauty that somehow commands your attention. After some 40 km we reached what appeared to be a small fort where a chain had been extended across the road. This was the Yumenguan ticket office, and if the road was closed, nobody had told the ticket seller. A kilometre or so later we came across a gang painting white lines. Perhaps the road had been closed for their safety; we saw no other reason. Mr Lu generously decided not to run any of them down.



Two old fools near the Yumenguan ticket office with the Gobi behind
and the white-capped Qillian Mountains in the distance

The road ends at Yumenguan, the stump of a Han dynasty fort standing all alone in the desert. Behind the fort a long, shallow depression is marked by a rare streak of green where an underground river almost struggles to the surface. Birds fluttering through the reeds were the first wildlife we had seen since leaving Dunhuang.



Yumenguan

There was little to see and forbidding iron railings surrounded the remains of the fort, yet it was an eerie and atmospheric place. Seven hundred years ago, soldiers posted to Jiayuguan thought they had been sent to the end of the earth. Over a thousand years earlier, an army lived here, in a place too remote for modern humanity to bother with. Sustained by a patch of green, they taxed the passing caravans and provided first response to marauding bands of barbarians. Given their isolation, if the marauding band was big enough and determined enough that first response would probably involve death.

Back in Dunhuang, Orlando recommended a restaurant perched on the edge of town among the cotton fields.

Designed with tourists in mind, it was built round an atrium where three musicians sat bashing together sticks and clanging cymbals every time a new diner turned up. Suitably serenaded, we were ushered into a private room, but declined in favour of one of the tables round the edge of the atrium.
 

Bashing sticks to serenade new arrivals
Dunhuang

The food was not memorable. In response to our requests, there was a little less, but the spicing was no more marked than in Jiayuguan.

We were halfway through eating when the cymbals clanged to welcome a group of Americans. The cymbals kept on clanging and the Americans kept on coming as several busloads of elderly eclipse spotters trooped past the musicians and disappeared into a private area at the back.

We were still eating when the cymbals announced that the Americans were leaving. Some had already wandered out and were browsing in a gift shop, the others were now being chivvied and chased by a group of Chinese guides, trying to act like sheep dogs but appearing more like yapping Jack Russells. Barely five minutes had elapsed between the last entering and the first leaving; they could have eaten very little.

We put down our chopsticks and Lynne went to the toilet while I sat finishing my beer. The Jack Russells were becoming anxious, running all over the place trying to round up the more independent minded of their charges.

Inevitably, we became involved. A guide approached me; ‘Which bus are you on, sir?’ The politeness of his words disguised neither his anxiety, nor his irritation at my sitting there with the air of a man going nowhere in a hurry. ‘I am not on any bus,’ I told him, just a little too smugly. Lynne, meanwhile, was being treated less politely. She found her way barred. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ she was asked. ‘Somewhere people do not speak to me like that,’ she thought but spoke more graciously. Coming out she was again accosted. ‘Which bus are you on?’

Group travel on an over-tight timetable looked no fun for travellers or guides.

In the afternoon we walked to the Dunhuang museum. It was free because of the Olympics and although it would be unkind to say that was the best feature of the small collection, the scraps of ancient silk and hemp did not delay us long.

We spent some time trying to photograph the city’s symbol, a young lady whose concrete effigy stands on a roundabout in the town centre playing a stringed instrument behind her back. When and why this proto-Hendrix act was deemed necessary we never discovered, but Dunhuang seems proud of her. Given the position of the sun, the tangle of telephone wires and the fussy façade of the post office, finding the right angle proved challenging. We lacked the style of the Chinese family who merely walked out into the traffic and stood in the middle of the road. Nobody seemed to mind, the cars describing slow arcs around the knot of photographers.



Photographing not-Jimi-Hendrix
Dunhuang

Afterwards we found an internet cafe to write home. On the news, we read of trouble in Xinjiang. Several policemen had been killed in an attack on a ‘customs post near Kashgar’. Though regretting the loss of life, we assumed a ‘customs post’ would be out near the Kyrgyz border, and hoped it would not affect our plan to be in Kashgar within the week. With the Olympics almost upon us, the Chinese were anxious that rebellious Xinjiang would not descend into the violence seen earlier in Tibet. We feared the authorities might close the area to foreigners, although I suppose that would have been preferable to actually becoming caught up in a terrorist attack.
 

There's an internet café somewhere on the left
Dunhuang

04-Aug-2008

Breakfast was not exhilarating. The cold buffet offered chopped vegetables - cucumber, tomato, celery - prawn crackers and diamond shaped biscuits like Jacob's crackers. The inevitable steamed buns were grey and unappetizing - even to those who like steamed buns. The prospect of thinly sliced cold liver was a little daunting at that hour, but it went down surprisingly well. While we were at the buffet they poured us coffee - glasses of black, unsweetened Nescafe. Ungratefully, we persuaded them to take it away and bring some tea. A little later a cold fried egg appeared – especially for westerners – and a couple of slices of sweetish bread with generic jam and a blob of unhappy butter.

Like Huashan, Mingsha Shan - The Singing Sand Dunes - provided a real Chinese day out.

Mingsha Shan is one of the few major dune systems in the Gobi desert – and impressive it is, too. Given the Chinese desire to package and sell off natural phenomena, we were not surprised to find a car park, a ticket office and an official entry to Mingsha Shan lurking on the desert’s edge. The Gobi is big and presents an insurmountable problem to anyone daft enough to try to fence it off. I am reliably informed that with a little legwork it is possible to reach the end of the fence and enter the desert ticketless. That is not what we did. We paid our money and entered the Gobi through a turnstile. 

Several dozen camels sat quietly in the sand while a similar number of would be riders milled around. Before acquiring a camel ticket, we needed to hire the necessary equipment. This consisted of bright orange knee length boots, slipped on over our sandals. They looked ridiculous, but everyone else was wearing them so why be left out?



Our tickets assigned us to numbered camels but by the time the Chinese families had sorted themselves out among the trains of five, we found ourselves separated and astride camels with numbers unconnected with our tickets.



Lynne models the orange boots, Dunhuang

 

I have a lot of time for the two-humped Bactrian camel. They are docile yet dignified, and unlike cats, dogs and horses cause no dramatic allergic response in my unnecessarily sensitive eyes. They have an obvious place to sit, which their single humped Arabian cousins conspicuously have not, and they lack their permanent sneer.(For more camel riding see With the Mongolian Nomads)

My camel rose with a mildly alarming lurch and we plodded off into the desert. I found myself riding fourth in line, interrupting a family of four. Mother in front had clocked that there was a foreigner on board and was encouraging teenage daughter behind to practice her English. Suppressing the momentary desire to claim I was a monoglot Frenchmen, I tried to be helpful, but our conversation was limited, not just because neither of us could see the person we were speaking to.
 

Off into the desert

The route may have been well worn, but the dunes were magnificent. Behind and below, the oasis sparkled green in the sun; ahead the hot yellow sand rose in wave upon towering wave. Ahead of us a line of camels traversing a ridge were silhouetted against the sky. They may have been tourists taking nothing more than a glorified donkey ride on the world’s biggest beach but, with a little imagination, they were a merchant caravan battling across the desert on the ancient Silk Road.



A merchant caravan battling across the desert - not really

Given that nature provides a comfortable chair with a well-stuffed back, little by way of a saddle is required, just a blanket and a pair of stirrups. The Chinese, incidentally, invented stirrups in the fourth century AD. It is difficult to believe that Alexander the Great led his legendary charges and the Roman cavalry conquered the known world riding without stirrups, but they did. On the other hand, the heavily armoured mediaeval knights on their mighty warhorses could never have developed without this simple piece of technology. In a sense, the Hundred Year’s War was a product of the Silk Road.

We reached the camel terminus, a natural bowl a kilometre or so into the dunes. I dismounted and waited for Lynne to arrive on a later train, wondering vaguely how long we would be there and whether I was supposed to catch the same camel back, or just bag a random passing ruminant.



Lynne reaches the camel terminus
Dunhuang

A stepladder had been laid up the steep face of the dune on our right, and this was where everybody seemed to be going. Lynne arrived, we paid the small fee and joined them on the long stiff climb that seemed as steep as the ‘Heavenward Ladder’ though through soft sand not over hard rock.

As we struggled higher, I hoped Lynne would not do anything silly, like look down. In places the rungs had sunk into the sand and we had to kick in our feet to make steps. Occasionally we had to use our hands – and discovered the importance of the orange thermal boots. Grabbing a buried rung was one thing, but swift removal of the hand was essential before it fried in the red-hot sand. The climb would have been impossible wearing only sandals.

From the top, the Dunhuang oasis was laid out below us. In Hollywood mythology, an oasis is a circle of palm trees round a small lake. Such oases may exist in the Sahara, but they are unusual even there. Dunhuang oasis covers ten square kilometres and is roughly rectangular with no obvious open water. The town is in the centre, its buildings rising above the trees, and around it are fields of crops, mainly corn and cotton. The town may be hot and dusty, but it is never obvious that you are in an oasis. From the dunes, though, every edge of the green rectangle was visible.
 

The Dunhuang Oasis...

Beyond, as though looking across the sea, the flat grit of the Gobi stretched away until it met a horizon so distant that the land blurred with sky.



...and looking slightly to the right

Having marvelled at the view and taken the obligatory pictures, we considered the problem of descent. The standard method, available on the same ticket as our ascent, was by sledge. It was a long run, and steep enough for Lynne to be unnerved. Watching others, it seemed that it was hard to make the toboggans move at all, but when they went, they whizzed on down.



Ready to descend, the sledges are down to my right

The ladder we had climbed was full of upwardly mobile Chinese, but there was a second ladder, in poorer repair than they first, used by the men who lugged the heavy wooden toboggans, four or five at a time, from the bottom back up to the top. Lynne started down this second ladder on her backside; a safe if undignified descent.

Meanwhile, I climbed aboard a sledge and launched myself off. Nothing happened. Jerking up and down only managed to dig me deeper into the sand. I tried rowing with my hands, but the sand was too hot. Although gravity seemed more concerned with driving me into the sand than down the slope, I did eventually get going and I soon overtook Lynne shuffle-bottoming her way down. Then I stopped.

After more, largely fruitless, effort I was off again, heading straight at the stationary toboggan of a middle-aged woman. I desperately dug in my right hand to change direction, and just as desperately pulled it out before it started to blister. I thumped into the back of her toboggan, which appeared to irritate her, but at least it got her moving again and the only real damage was to my dignity. When we reach the bottom, she gave me the benefit of a few strong words about, I assume, reckless tobogganing. I shrugged and played the idiot foreigner. It is not a difficult part; it may even be the part I was born for.

We have been in direct sun for too long, and at the stall by the camel terminus we haggled for a much needed bottle of water.

Somehow, we found the right camels and roughly the same people we came up with and headed off round the dune in the direction of Yueya Quan - Crescent Moon Lake.



Somehow we found the right camel

The Singing Sand Dunes failed to live up to their name. I detected not the slightest hum – not even the Titanic theme. Crescent Moon Lake, however, does exactly what it says on the tin. Hemmed in by hundred metre high dunes, it is a curving sliver of water maybe fifty metres in length which common sense says should not exist. It is fed by an underground spring, and the shape of the dunes whirls away drifting sand that would otherwise bury it. It looks like it must be a temporary phenomenon, but its existence has been documented for over a thousand years.



Yueya Qua - Crescent Moon Lake, Dunhuang

 

Sadly, the growth of Dunhuang has lowered the water table so the spring now provides far less water than is lost by evaporation. The solution was to build an artificial feeder lake in the adjacent gap in the dunes, thus saving the natural lake by turning it into another artificial lake. Chinese officialdom does not understand irony.

The mock-Ming visitor centre did little to enhance the view, but it did provide a cooling drink. Sim pi shray (or so it sounded) - a local speciality produced from apricots - is cool, clear, brown and sweetly refreshing.

We caught a camel back to the entrance and left the desert through the same turnstile as we had entered.



The end of the camel trek

 

We were hot and had been too long in the sun when we sat down for the third and final meal that Orlando would order for us. It consisted largely of molten lava. The main dish had a little chicken among the chillies; the others were spicier.

I was pleased that Orlando had at last taken us at our word. It was perhaps a touch hotter than is truly enjoyable, but we ate it with relish. A point had been well and truly made.

05-Aug-2008

Next morning we rose in time see the nurses lined up for their morning exercises in the hospital courtyard opposite. They were better than the restaurant staff in Shanghai, but still lacked the military precision of a branch of KFC.

After breakfast, I tried to persuade Lynne to visit the Baima Ta - the White Horse Dagoba. In AD 384 the monk Kumarajiva was busy spreading Buddhism eastward. Near Dunhuang his white horse died and as he turned out to be a Dragon God rather than merely a white horse, it seemed reasonable to build a Dagoba over his tomb. Lynne felt unwell after the previous day’s sun, dehydration and over-exertion, so I went on my own. Outside the hotel I accosted a taxi driver leaning against his cab. 'Baima Ta' I said and he nodded. Once in the car, he asked me where I wanted to go. It is not easy making yourself understood in Mandarin. I showed him the Chinese characters and we set off.

We drove south on the main road, then turned left past the stump of the city wall. The further we went down this rural side road the more I heard Lynne's 'what if' in the back of my mind. ‘What if you get there and can't find a taxi back?’ A kilometre later I thought I would be facing a long trek back to the main road. We turned left again and after another half kilometre duly arrived at the entrance to the Dagoba. I was relieved when the taxi man indicated that he would wait.



The stump of the city wall, Dunhuang

The dagoba was a handsome nine-tiered stupa, the four bells hanging from the top tier chiming merrily in the breeze. I had a good look, walked round it and photographed it from several angles. It was a pleasant spot amid green fields and away from the slow but persistent bustle of the city. It was also, I thought, in remarkably good nick for a building that had been there seventeen hundred years. As I was leaving I read the plaque 'The White Horse Dagoba, rebuilt by Dunhuang City government in 1992’. I felt a tad cheated.



Baima Ta - The White Horse Dagoba - Dunhuang

 

Outside the driver had left the meter running, my time inside had clocked up a princely 2 Yuan (16p) extra.

Back at the hotel Lynne had perked up, so we headed to the market for lunch. We had earlier noticed a stall offering ‘pot noodles’ in cast iron urns. I chose one with meatballs; Lynne chose slices of meat and vegetables. They poured on stock, stuck the pots on a gas brazier and boiled vigorously; then they were delivered to the table still in the cast iron urn. Apart from Lynne's meat turning out to be fish – which did not displease her - they were very good. On the wall was a large photograph of the Crescent Moon Lake in winter, the sand dunes dusted with snow. It was hard to imagine yesterday’s boiling cauldron in the grip of winter cold.

We met Orlando and set off for Mogao, a few kilometres north east of town. Here over a thousand caves have been chiselled into a cliff beside a dried up river. The statues and paintings they contain date from between 400 and 1300 AD and are one of the most important collections of Buddhist art in China.



Outside the Mogao Caves

 

Peter Hopkirk’sremark about the romance of the Silk Road ending the day the first British tourists got off their bus at Mogao, may have been snobbish and wide of the mark, but it unfortunately holds some truth as far as Mogao is concerned.

There were indeed many tourists, and many of them in buses, though they were overwhelmingly Chinese. The pressure from tourists and the need for humidity and temperature control mean that a visit is limited to eight caves, different tours seeing different caves. It is theoretically possible to trace the development in religious art through almost a thousand years, but not when the visit is so limited. We joined the foreigners’ tour, which consisted of four Italians and us. The tour was conducted in English, which we appreciated, despite Italian being the group's majority language. Fortunately, one of the Italians was able to translate for his compatriots.

We started with the cave containing what was, until the Taliban blew up the Bamyan Buddhas in 2001, the world’s fourth largest Buddha. Working from the top, the cliff had been hollowed out to leave a huge seated figure. Some of the brightly coloured painting was original but much had been added more recently. It was breathtaking, but after that our visit went downhill. We were shown several caves in which the murals had been defaced or stolen, and the statues mutilated. We finished in the ‘library cave’, which is the dullest cave in Mogao, being only an empty hole in the rock, but is politically the most important. If you want to see the contents, we were told, go to the British museum, the Louvre and the Hermitage in St Petersberg. We were treated to a general slagging off of the collectors – or looters – who came from Britain, France, Germany, Russia and the USA to cart away China’s heritage. The Italians looked smug, but thousands of Egyptian artefacts found their way to Italy, so innocence here seemed more a matter of chance than intrinsic national virtue.

At the end, I felt a little cheated and left with the belief that we had not seen the best that Mogao had to offer. Maybe I was being paranoid, but I suspect the reason was political.



Lynne and a Flying Apsara outside the Mogao Caves

 

When the Silk Road fell into disuse around 1300, the caves were gradually forgotten and filled with drifting sand. European interest in what was then called Chinese Turkestan awakened at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1900 a wandering monk called Wang Yuan Lu stumbled upon the Mogao Caves and set about restoring them to their former glory. Inevitably this came to the attention of the European collectors.




The landscape in which to the Magao Caves became lost
Mogao, Dunhuang 

Abbot Wang was energetic and devoted, but he was also artistically and archaeologically naïve. He threw out damaged statues and replaced them with replicas; he repaired others as best he could and retouched, even repainted thousand year old murals. He also had no idea of the value of the documents he discovered in the library cave. More than 40 cubic metres of manuscripts, sutras and silk and paper paintings, all over a thousand years old, were tightly compressed and perfectly preserved in the dry desert air. They were in a huge variety of known and several unknown Asian languages; some were even in Greek and Hebrew. Their value was not lost on Sir Aurel Stein a Hungarian born British archaeologist/adventurer who bought a quantity for the British museum. He was only the first of the European collectors to take advantage of Wang Yuan Lu’s dedication.

 During the first two decades of the twentieth century vast quantities of statues, murals and documents from western China migrated to foreign museums. The Chinese would like them back and are focusing on the library cave documents as their ‘Elgin Marbles’.

It is easy to sympathise with the Chinese, but Sir Aurel Stein and the others should be judged by standards of their age and not merely dismissed as looters. If they had not bought the contents of the library cave, the manuscripts may well have ended up as firelighters. In the 1920s the caves were used to house White Russian prisoners, who scrawled graffiti and mutilated statues in the hope of finding jewels secreted in their eye sockets. During the Cultural Revolution only a personal intervention by Zhou Enlai prevented wholesale destruction by the Red Guards – lesser sites were not so lucky. Glossing lightly over the murals Albert von Le Coq took to Berlin and were bombed to pieces by the British in 1944, the Europeans did look after their booty better than the Chinese. But that was then; today the Chinese would undoubtedly be conscientious custodians of their own treasures. Perhaps both sides need to swallow their nationalistic pride, realise that neither has a claim to the moral high ground and find a compromise.

From Mogao we went to the Dunhuang silk carpet factory. We were not yet in the heartland of silk production and it is a small factory where most of the work is outsourced, although two women were operating looms, largely for show. There had some very beautiful carpets, with price tags to match. We bought some small things, then drank tea and chatted to Orlando until it was time to go.
 

With Orlando at the Dunhuang silk carpet factory

Until recently Dunhuang was 100 km from the nearest station on the Lanzhou – Urumqi line, but now a branch line has been built and Dunhuang has been equipped with a shiny new station.

The car park was not yet finished which made wheeling our cases difficult, but the X-ray machine was definitely up and running. Our suitcases had exactly the same contents as at Xi’an, but this time we were told to open up and they confiscated our scissors and knives. Despite protestations, we were told very firmly that it was the rule and it could not be bent, even for foreigners. Perhaps they had been lax at Xi’an or maybe the rules had changed because of the Olympics, or because we were going into Xinjiang, but we never found out. Fortunately, the stallholder had halved our melon – a present from Mr Lu - and we still had our spoons, otherwise our evening would have been spoilt. We tried to ensure the scissors and knives went to Orlando not the officious X-ray machine operator, but as she insisted on accompanying us onto the platform we have no idea if we were successful.

The train left on time and we waved goodbye to Orlando. We soon discovered that not only did we have the four-berth compartment to ourselves; we had the whole of the 'soft sleeper' carriage. After watching the sun set over the barren emptiness of the desert, we ate our melon, drank our bottle of 'Mogao dry red' (not a great wine, but I have tasted worse) and settled down for the night.

The Chinese Silk Road

 

Introduction: The Silk Road in China

Prelude: Shanghai

1 Xi'an

2 Jiayuguan: A Total Eclipse and the Last Fortress under Heaven

3 Dunhuang: Dunes in the Gobi

4 Turpan: Ruined Cities of the Silk Road

5 Kashgar (1):  The Sunday Market and the Former British Consulate

6 Kashgar (2): Upal, Abakh Hoja and the Old Town

7 Hotan (or Khotan or Hetian): City in the Desert

8 Urumqi: A By-word for Remoteness

Postscript