Its walls and fortifications were mostly gone, but the ones that still stood made it seem a remarkable citadel. It had been an ancient capital of this region, and then a Tang city, and then a Uighur city, and at last the Mongols had captured it. The Uighurs didn't want the place destroyed, so they had surrendered without a struggle and let the Mongols take charge, as they had over the rest of China. It was the period of Mongol rule, the Yuan Empire of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when the first Westerners began traveling widely in China — among them, Marco Polo.
By then Gaocheng was Muslim. It had previously been Buddhist. It had also been a center of heretics — first Manichaean, then Nestorian. It is impossible to consider these heresies without reaching the conclusion that they make a certain amount of sense. The Manichaeans, followers of the Persian prophet Manes, believed that there is good and evil in all humans, and that life is a struggle between these interdependent opposites, the light and the dark, the spirit and the flesh. The Nestorians were Christians who had been declared heretics for their belief that there were two separate persons in the incarnate Christ, denying that Christ was in one person both God and man. They went on to argue that Mary was either the mother of God or the mother of the man Jesus; but she couldn't have it both ways. For this the Nestorians were persecuted and exiled, after the Council of Ephesus (in 431, in present-day Turkey), and they ended up in the seventh century, at the last stage of the Silk Road, deep in China, where the first Nestorian church was founded in 638, in Changan — Xian.
What made this all the more fascinating to me was that there was nothing left — no church, no heretics, no books, no pictures, no city. There was only the sun beating down on the mud bricks and the broken walls, and all the religion, trade, warfare, art, money, government and civilization had turned to dust. But there was something magnificent in the immensity of this dumb ruin. I kept on seeing this desert as a place where an ocean had been, a gigantic foreshore of smooth stones and seaside rubble; and this city of Gaocheng was quite in key with that, looking like a sand castle that the tide had mostly floated away.
The only live things here were goats. The frescoes and statues had been stolen — and sold or else removed to museums. Farmers had dismantled many of the buildings so that they could use the bricks, and when the local people found pots or vases or amphoras (and they were good ones, for there was both Greek and Roman influence at Gaocheng), they used them in their kitchens, so that they wouldn't have to buy new ones.
I went to a nearby village of Uighurs and asked them whether they knew anything about Gaocheng. "It is an old city," they said. The people I asked were brown-faced hawk-nosed men whose village was shady and totally off the map. They had donkeys, they had a mosque and a small market, but they didn't speak Chinese or any language other than Uighur. The place was called Flaming Mountain Commune, but that was merely a euphemism. The village had gone to sleep. The women watched me through the folds in their black shawls, and I saw one who looked exactly like my Italian grandmother.
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.