Xinjiang & the Silk Road

Recently I had the pleasure of reading An English Lady in Chinese Turkestan, an account by Lady Catherine Macartney of her years in Kashgar as the wife of Sir George Macartney, the British Indian Government’s first official there. George Macartney first arrived in Kashgar with then Captain Francis Younghusband (Remember the massacre of Tibetans near Gyantse, Tibet? See blog of 10/6 for more) in 1890 to be a British Agent; later in 1910 he became Consul-General in Kashgar until he retired at the end of WWI in 1918. Kashgar, along the Silk Road, was a confluence of trade routes considered to be a vital listening-post in the region’s Great Game between Britain and Russia. Macartney’s role, according to his wife, was twofold: to look after the British traders and to keep an eye on the activities of the Russians near the Kashmir border.

Lady Macartney’s memoir of this place depicts a small community of Chinese, foreigners (of which the Swedes and Russians played a large role for her) and locals in a small outpost, and her few travels to and fro inspire respect and imagination. It took six weeks to travel from London to Kashgar, via overland train to Osh (in the south of what is now Kyrgyzstan), then overland first by horse, then by camel, and then with yaks over the Tian Shan Mountain range to Kashgar. And she later did it with two small children!!! It seems that some things are universal to humans: the joys and frustrations of living in a new place (aka “culture shock”), the desire for some small things or improvements from home (…” When I arrived in 1898 the Europeanizing had already begun. Glass was almost unknown in Kashgar, and oiled paper was used for windows; and they were an improvement on the skylights….. One great day, soon after my arrival, a Russian merchant came with a caravan of window glass, which we Europeans bought up eagerly. P.35) and our human need to reach out across languages to make friends ("We all danced around the Tree and sang Christmas hymns in our own language… (and) at the supper table eight different languages were being spoken – Russian, English, Swedish, French, Chinese, Turki, Hindustani and Persian." p. 50).

Our family travelled to Kashgar (Ka shi in Mandarin) in October of 2006, during Ramadan of all things! While Lady Macartney’s former residence is now totally changed and transformed into the unremarkable Chini Bagh Hotel, the old town of Kashgar still echoes some of her earlier descriptions of small, winding alleys with shops and markets. Sunday is market day in Kashgar, wherein the men bargain back and forth for various animals. I found it interesting, although my vegetarian daughter was disturbed by what she saw as a livestock food market! And the Aba Khoja Mausoleum really is a beautiful example of Islamic architecture and is supposedly the burial place for the famous “fragrant concubine” Xiangfei.

Later, on a daytrip from Kashgar, we drove up, up and up along the Karakoram Highway into the mountains of the Karakoram Range, where we rested beside Lake Karakul and looked up at snow-covered peaks over 7000-8000 m. high (K2 is in this range at 8, 611 m, but I don’t think we could see it from the lake). The highway was built in the 1970s to link China and Pakistan, and follows an old caravan route – maybe like the one described by Lady Macartney!

"We were all suffering from mountain sickness, and it was a great effort to do anything, even to move…. We all wore dark goggles, and protected our faces as much as possible, but all the same we got very blistered and burnt… At last, with a final effort, we gained the summit, and found that it was almost as sharp as a knife. A pony could hardly get all four feet on the actual point. But what a vision opened out before us! As far as the eye could see there were snow mountains; the sun making their peaks glitter, and sparkle, and turning their glaciers into mirrors; while down their sloping sides it cast patches of wonderful blue shadow… " p. 24) (Photo: Lake Karakul)

From Kashgar our family drove southeast, following an old Silk route skirting the Taklamakhan Desert to the old oasis town of Yarkand. Of course it, like many historical places, is filled with (ugly) new Chinese hotels and stores and restaurants, but there is still a lively market where one can taste local foods and one can also visit the Altyn Mosque and the tomb of Aman Isa Khan (1526-60), the wife of a local Khan and poet in her own right.

Continuing to skirt the southwest edge of the Taklamakan Desert we came to Khotan (in Mandarin, Hetian – the characters for peace and land). Khotan is famous in China for three things: jade, silk and carpets. The jade from Khotan is called in Mandarin “sheep’s fat jade” because it is a somewhat oily-feeling white jade. Don’t get turned off – this was and is famous! The jade market is a curious one. Men congregate and bargain over small hand-held pieces of jade, hoping to make a killing on the jade market. Sadly, technology is ruining the river, as industrial diggers scoop up earth to sift through rocks for precious jade. We ourselves spent an hour with local urchins looking over rocks on the river for small pieces of jade. We failed, but had fun nonetheless. Of course, we explored and learned about the other famous goods, too. We visited a silk factory to see the process of making silk, from boiling silk cacoons to spinning thread to dying thread to weaving silk fabric. We also visited a carpet factory (hand-weaving), a small felt making workshop, and a household still following a traditional method of making paper from mulberry bushes. (Photo: Boiling cacoons and spinning silk thread, Khotan, Xinjiang)

Flying to Urumqi, we passed a day in that Sinified city, enough time to go to the Xinjiang Provincial Museum to see 1) the Western-looking mummies found in the desert and 2) to note the “gap” in the exhibits, excluding periods when the region was under Uighur and not Han jurisdiction! We then turned south to Turpan, home of 1) an ancient irrigation system still used to this day and 2) the Imin Ta, an old minaret designed in the Iranian-style in 1778 and, on the outskirts of town, 3) the ancient ruins of Jiaohe, an old Chinese garrison town of the 6th century, abandoned in the Yuan dynasty (experts think they ran out of water). Jiaohe literally means “intersection of rivers” and when our two kids were grumbling about yet another boriiiiiing place their parents had dragged them to, I asked them, How do you think screenwriters get ideas for Tatooine in Star Wars or that high cliff place in Lord of the Rings??? It’s by visiting places like THIS. After this, the two went on ahead of us subdued, until we heard them talking about OTHER cool places they’d visited that could be such and such in X and Y stories. Hooray for parental travel influences! (Photo: The ancient town of Jiaohe)

I personally love Xinjiang. It’s a lot of long and bumpy travelling between places, but take heart and remember Lady Macartney’s experiences! There’s a lot more to see in Xinjiang and I hope to have a chance to do so someday.

(NOTE: If you, like me, enjoy reading old travel memoirs, you might be interested in reading Parrot Pie for Breakfast: An Anthology of Women Pioneers by Jane Robinson. Robinson gathered first person accounts from old letters, journals and the like to give a picture of women pioneers spanning the age of Empire from the early 17th c. to the early 20c. Half are settlers in North America and Canada, a quarter in Africa, many in Australasia and India, and the rest are flung from Samoa to Sarawak, Egypt to Jamaica and various points in-between. And Robinson arranges her chapters along the lines of a culture shock progression: from Taking Leave, to Settling In, to Matters Domestic, to Danger & Desperation until Staying On. I have never laughed or cried or felt so much empathy as when reading this book of my sister pioneers. I hope you enjoy it as well.)