In August 1992, my wife, Caroline, and I organized a trip to post-Tiananmen China. It was back in the days when the London China Travel office was in Cambridge Circus, opposite the Palace Theater on Charing Cross Road. It took me at least twenty books, a late-night Japanese TV series, and several months to plan and organize the trip from what was then our base in Balham, south London. In those days, you could arrange your visit through China Travel and then, as long as you submitted your itinerary in advance, you could travel completely independently. Everything was prepaid, but when we left we had no confirmed tickets or reservations other than plane tickets in and out of Beijing. As always, I kept a journal of the trip, which was over fifty pages long. A few years later, I condensed the experience onto two sides of A4, ignoring the rules of grammar and syntax, and produced the following ride, a perhaps poetic impression of nearly a month of travel.
Ex-London as the Sun dissected Michael Jackson’s nose and praised Boardman’s gold medal-winning sirenless bicycle. Air China to Beijing, where taxis cost more than the Lonely Planet predicts. An itinerary in Chinese characters from one Tim Han of China Travel as his co-workers drool over agile African-American sprinters televised at the Olympics. Then to the one that is no longer the Forbidden City. Lots of local tourists to bargain with.
Four hours from Xinjiang Airlines to Urumqi. Chinese and Russian plus Uyghur signs written in Arabic script (a recent innovation). Landlines in Inner Mongolia. Why and how so straight? Urumqi of multiple peaks. Piles of coal, dilapidated skyscrapers, snow-covered Bogda Shen at the end of the street. Pavement fortunetellers, merchants. Food stalls. Women washing sheep stomachs in a stream, tripe skewers. Uyghur city now Han Chinese, populated by the overflow of Shanghai, more than 2000 miles from ‘home’. The second long gear.
Uyghur breakfast. Hot Sheep’s Milk, Chinese Tea, Tomato Flatbread, Sweetened Tomato and Cucumber, Pickled Cabbage, Thin Congee, Sheep’s Milk Butter, Two Jumbo Lumps of Sugar. Uyghur market. Fruits in the middle of a forest of hanging lambs. Chinese market. Live meats and vegetables. Tank overflowing with energy eels (unit price). Spaghetti that knots itself.
Woman loses her gold watch in an illegal ‘find the lady’. Police watching. Tears when the loss comes home. Renmin Park for rocket noodles and hot sauce. Cut bags with knives for rings on a crowded bus. Necessary care.
Car to Turpan. fertile valleys. barren mountains. Occasional snow. Plowed road. Kazakh yurts. Half-sunken rammed-earth Uyghur villages cast shadows, invisible from a distance except for smoke from chimneys. Steep downhill gorge, spectacular river, rocks, white water and slate gray hills. In the Turfan Depression, a snow-covered expanse surrounding a gray stone pit 100 miles wide. 42 degrees at its base, 200 meters below sea level. Car ahead leaving traces on the melted road. A strong drop of the conductor irrigates. Gobi means stones. a lot here. And then green. An oasis. A giant mirage?
Turpan. Vines to shade the street. Hanging grapes. 15 yuan fine for casual collection. Hotel tea in galvanized buckets. Turkish style dance and music. The rammed earth cities of Goachang and Jiaohe were sacked by Genghiz. Painted tombs and brick minarets. Flaming mountains. Karez underground irrigation system. 3000 kilometers of canals. 1500 years old, fed by gravity from the mountains on the edge of the depression. The greatest feat of Uyghur culture, and fully operational.
Bus to Daheyan. Two hours on bumpy stones to the edge of the depression. Landfill of a railway town. Coal heaps, box buildings, vacant lots. Two women at war on the station forecourt. Hit the victim’s head on the ground. Blood. Spectators. In action. A tense town of resentful seasons.
500 miles to Liuyuan in Gansu. Flat featureless gray shale stone. Spectacularly unique. Snowy mountains to the north. Completely empty except for smoldering coal cities. 40 above in summer, 30 below in winter. Night on the train. Dawn reveals the same massive scene, now in brown.
Liuyuan arrives. Daheyan writes similar. 120 miles south through the desert (black at first!), past the remnants of the Great Wall of the Han Dynasty. Camels and dunes of Taklimakan, the largest sand desert in the world. Near the oasis of Dunhuang blooms again. Sand and stony suddenly harvest and plant trees. Feitian Hotel, with complimentary toiletries labeled Sham Poo and Foam Poo. Lunch. Fourteen plates. Duck, foo-yong, cucumber, cabbage, oyster mushroom chicken, coriander pork, steamed buns, steamed bun, rice, beef broth and noodles, pork and green beans, pork and sweet chili, chicken and pumpkin, noodles simple, watermelon Then to look for the essential torch for the caves. Houses huddled together. Wooden shutters for winter stacked on top. See through roofs like a pile of junk. Claustrophobic stoneware maze at ground level.
Cave day. Mogao Buddhist Caves: Closed from 12 to 2, it takes a full day to enjoy perhaps the most impressive sight in the world. 400 ‘caves’ (some the size of cathedrals) in a sandstone gorge, between 400 AD and 1100 AD Completely dry, always dark, perfectly preserved. All painted. Complex and colorful Tang period. A world of scenes by torchlight. Reclining, sitting, standing, posing Buddhas. Thirty meter seated figure with thousands of unsmoked cigarettes and coins in his lap as offerings. Clash of the cave renovated by Qing with Taoist figures. Ghoulish, contorted features, and a face on the snout. 40 caves seen in the day, archaeologist as personal guide. Impressive. Fourteen courses for dinner.
Desert bus back to Liuyuan. Always a fight for seats. Three dusty hours. Train to Lanzhou. 800 miles along the Gansu-Qinghai mountainous border. More black desert, then yellow earth. Jaiyaguan Fort on the edge of the Ming Empire. Night on the train. Country changed. Mountain pass, green hills and terraced fields. Wheat harvest in. Straw dolls as children in assembly. Houses still made of rammed earth. Lanzhou has a prosperous industrial city. Thirty hours of travel. Walk along the Yellow River.
Fish in the hotel restaurant tank all dead. Expensive Lanzhou bus. 50 fen per trip. Radios and fabric prohibited. Han dynasty flying horse and bronze warriors. Steamed carp with rapeseed on the menu. Fish comes first. Train to Xian through the country of yellow loess. Deep grooves and grooves. All flat land cultivated. 500 night miles.
Terracotta warriors facing east to guard Qin Shihuang’s tomb. Made in parts. Assembled on site. Partially excavated section where heaps of dismembered limbs emerge from the ground. New Terracotta Warriors for sale in the factory behind the museum. Exact replicas of the originals. He gasps at the thought that the whole thing is a farce for the tourist trade.
Xian, like all Chinese cities, a square. Straight roads, always intersected at right angles. Old walled center, reconstructed Ming. Exquisite old mosque. Near Xianyang, with 7th century Qian tombs, museum with another 3,000 terracotta Han like a football crowd. Train to Beijing. 800 miles, 26 hours. Houses often collapse on the valley side. Later huge flat land, corn everywhere.
Temple of Heaven, Tiantan and then Beijing Opera. Beer break at the roadside stall. Served by a trainee stockbroker! Amazing breakfast pickle, like a four year old camembert out of a shotgun. Take your head off. Big Wall. Very touristy, but still impressive. Like climbing a giant ladder in some places. “I climbed the Great Wall” t-shirts, prices go down the higher you go. It must be the air. Ming tombs ruled out by guide. Incorrect. Incredible barrel vaulted rooms nine stories below ground. Jade doors, carved thrones, marble, marble, wonder. Reminiscent of Renaissance Italy. Eternal bricks engraved with the names of their creators. Souvenir jade ship for £55,000.
White curtains over erotic statues in the Tibetan Lama Temple. Same bestial content in wall paintings. 24-meter golden Buddha through the incense stain. No smoking signs everywhere.
Mao’s Maosoleum the tomb of an emperor. Lines for tails painted throughout the square. Feet pointing north towards Tiananmen Gate, reverse feng shui. It is shiny, waxy and painted on the face. The moving lines go through both sides. No breaks. Outside, stalls with Mao T-shirts, Mao key chains, stuffed animals, postcards, magic lantern shows. Mao Zedong’s cotton candy by strokes. Then Great Hall of the People. Diner for 5000. Now fast food for tourists. Great Hall chopsticks, cigarettes, T-shirts. Stuffed Animals Great Hall of the People.
2,500 miles. Three and a half weeks. 5 destinations. 50 warehouses. 6,000 terracotta warriors. 1 each Great Wall, Forbidden City, Peking Opera, Mao Zedong. Hundreds of tombs, temples, pagodas, parks, bendi-buses and bicycles. 3 silk shirts on the Silk Road. An incredible trip.