Mr. Liu, my guide, did not speak Uighur, though he had lived not far away for twenty years. I had the impression that these desert-dwelling Uighurs did not take the Han Chinese very seriously. When we started away there was a thump against the side of the car, and the driver slammed on the brakes and chased after the laughing kids. He made a fuss, but no one came to help—no one even listened. And then, a further insult. He stopped to ask directions to an ancient burying ground, the necropolis at Astana, and when he put his head out of the car window, two children stuck feathery reeds into his ears and tickled him. They ran away, as he got out and raged at them.
'They are very bad boys," Mr. Liu said, and he glowered at me when he saw that I was laughing.
The corpses in the underground tombs at Astana were 600 years old, but perfectly preserved, grinning, lying side by side on a decorated slab.
"You want to take a picture of the dead people?" the caretaker asked me.
"I don't have a camera."
She paid no attention to that. She said, 'Ten yuan. One picture."
Mr. Liu said, "I hate looking at dead bodies," and hurried up the stone stairs, fleeing the burial chamber.
When he was gone, the caretaker said, "Shansh marnie?"
I hated to leave Turfan. It was the first town I had seen in China that didn't look Chinese, and I wondered why this was so. It was the hottest place I had been, the lowest, the strangest, in the middle of nowhere, with sulky old men and rapacious women and stone-throwing kids. I didn't find any of it threatening—in fact I liked seeing people resisting Chinese dullness, and setting their faces against humorless and canting politicians. It was unusual that such a place had managed to keep its pride and its culture intact, even if its culture was little more than melons and tambourines and Islamic prostrations. It was a green island in lifeless wilderness: very exciting to arrive at on a train, and even better that it was on a gasping, drooling steam train.
I took that same train out of Turfan, Mr. Fang by my side, and headed west through the desert towards Urumchi, which everyone called "Woolamoochie." It is only a hundred miles or so from Turfan, but the trip is slow because of the circuitous passage through the Tian Shan—The Heavenly Mountains. The series of intersecting valleys contain some of China's most beautiful scenery—cliffs, mountain streams, boulder-strewn gullies and deep gorges. The train labors through each of the twelve tunnels and then bursts into one of these valleys in the blinding Xinjiang sunshine, and the rushing water of the Baiyang River drowns out the gasps of the locomotive.
At one point a black and white crane, five feet tall, gathered itself up and leaped out of the suds of the fast river, folded its legs and neck and beat itself slowly towards the cliffs. After several hours of these brilliantly lit valleys and bouncing clouds, the tracks straightened and we headed across brown desert to the large smoking city of Urumchi, the last place in China that is reachable by train. The next big town west of this is Alma-Ata, in the Soviet Union Republic of Kazakhstan. Horsemen and nomads don't recognize national frontiers. There are plenty of Kazakhs in Urumchi, along with Tatars, Uzbeks, Tazhiks and Mongols; but more than a third of the city's population is Uighur, and the railway station is in the Uighur style, the station sign in the Uighur script.
It is almost impossible to find any traveler offering a kind word for Urumchi. What began as a Han outpost on the Silk Road, developed into a Tang trading center and then was captured by Huns and finally Mongols. It became the capital of Chinese Turkestan, but with a strong Russian flavor. For most early travelers it was the first stop in China and something of a disappointment ("no one leaves the town with regret"), because it was lacking in any cultural interest. The treasures, the tombs, the lost cities—all the good places to loot—lay farther east. Urumchi was merely political. Here were the offices, the interrogation centers, the jails, the bureaucrats, the spies. That was the case at the turn of the century, and at the time of the Russian Revolution, and it is pretty much the case now.
Still it had a certain ugly charm, this city of a million and a half people, very few of whom were Han Chinese. It was surrounded by big brown mountains, and it had wide streets and shish kebab parlors. Many shops had rare animals strung up outside. It was very hot in the daytime, and one of the popular recreations was playing pool and billiards under the trees—there were pool tables all over Urumchi, in the open air.
Mr. Fang disappeared when we reached the hotel, but his place was taken by Mr. Yang, who—when I asked about Russians—said there was a large Russian community here which dated from the 1930s. I had just missed their Easter celebration—the Chinese government had given them permission to hold it for the first time since Liberation.
There were so many different ethnic groups in Urumchi I wondered what the Cultural Revolution had been like.
"It was very bad here," Mr. Yang said. "But the minorities were not interested. They did not participate in the Cultural Revolution. Very few of them were Red Guards."
"If they didn't participate, then they must have been persecuted," I said.
"Oh, yes," Mr. Yang said, readily agreeing. "They were persecuted! Islamic religion was declared illegal. Praying was illegal. Mosques were considered bad. The Red Guards went in and smashed up the mosques. And people were punished."
"How did they punish the Muslims?"
"They made them raise pigs."
Typical, I thought; and perfect in its way. It was always said that the Chinese under Mao were a forgiving bunch—believers in redemption and reeducation. But it seemed to me uniquely vindictive to make physicists assemble crappy radios, and to force literature teachers to hoe cabbages or shovel chicken shit, and to put Muslims to work in pigsties. That was on the same order as putting hysterical schoolkids in charge of the middle schools; the result was easily predictable, and in the event the little brats persecuted their teachers and passed in blank examination papers to prove they were good Maoist anti-intellectuals.
"I'll bet the minorities didn't like that very much," I said.
Mr. Yang shrieked with laughter. It was the Chinese laugh that means You said it!
He said, 'They wanted to protest, but they didn't dare. They wanted to have a counterrevolution!"
"Do they want to have a counterrevolution now?" It was a delicate question, because there were always rumors of Uighur discontent; and anyone who saw these frowning, disapproving and uncooperative Uighur faces all over Xinjiang could easily reach the conclusion that here were people who were not entirely sold on the aims of the People's Republic.
Mr. Yang laughed again, a slower warning honk that meant: Do not ask that question. But that particular laugh was also a noise I interpreted as a complex yes.
But I was stuck with Mr. Yang. He asked me what I wanted to see in Urumchi.
I said, "Something memorable."
We drove to Nanshan, the South Mountain Pasture. It was only twenty minutes out of Urumchi but it looked like western Uganda, a great green plain with the "Mountains of the Moon" rising out of it, several snowcapped peaks. What distinguishes these mountainsides from others in China are the spruce forests, tall, cool and blackish-green. On some of the meadows there were goatherds and shepherds with their flocks, and Kazakhs living in mud-smeared huts and log cabins. There were yurts, too, and near them men wearing fur hats with earflaps, and boots and riding breeches; and there were women in shawls and dresses and thick socks. They looked like Russian babushkas, and unlike the Chinese, these women were long nosed and potbellied. They tended vegetable gardens near their cabins, and they had donkeys and cranky dogs and snotty-nosed kids who, because of the cold, also had bright red cheeks.