In August 1992, my wife, Caroline, and I organized a trip to post-Tiananmen China. It was 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 the visit through China Travel and then, as long as the itinerary was hosted in advance, you could travel absolutely independently. Everything was prepaid, but upon departure, we had no confirmed tickets or reservations other than our Beijing inbound and outbound air tickets. As always, I kept a travel diary, which was over fifty pages long. A few years later, I condensed the experience into two sides of A4, ignoring the rules of grammar and syntax, and produced the following tour, a perhaps poetic impression of almost a month’s journey.
Ex-London while the Sun dissected Michael Jackson’s nose and praised Boardman’s gold medal bike. Air China to Beijing, where taxis cost more than Lonely Planet predicts. An itinerary in Chinese characters by a Tim Han from China Travel as co-workers drool over the agile African-American sprinters televised at the Olympics. Then to the Forbidden City. Lots of local tourists to bargain.
Four hours from Xinjiang Airlines to Urumqi. Signs in Chinese and Russian plus Uighur written in Arabic script (a recent innovation). Land lines through Inner Mongolia. Why and how is it so direct? Multi-peaked Urumqi. Piles of coal, scruffy skyscrapers, Bogda Shen covered in snow at the end of the street. Pavement fortune-tellers, merchants. Food stalls. Women washing sheep stomachs in a stream, tripe skewers. The city of Uyghur is now Han China, populated by the Shanghai overflow, more than 2000 miles from “home.” The second long march.
Uyghur breakfast. Hot sheep’s milk, Chinese tea, flat tomato bread, sweetened tomato and cucumber, pickled cabbage, fine congee, sheep’s milk butter, two giant lumps of sugar. Uyghur Market. Fruits in the middle of a forest of hanging lambs. Chinese market. Live vegetables and meats. Tank overflowing with energetic eels (price per unit). Self-tie spaghetti.
Woman losing her gold watch in an illegal “find the lady”. Police watching. Tears when defeat hits home. Renmin Park for rocket noodles and hot sauce. Bag looters with ring knives on a crowded bus. Necessary care.
Car to Turfan. Fertile valleys. Barren mountains. Occasional snow. Plowed road. Kazak yurts. Uyghur villages of semi-submerged packed earth that create shadows, invisible in the distance except for the smoke from the chimney. Steep downhill gorge, spectacular river, rocks, white water and slate gray hills. In the Turfan Depression, snow-covered distance surrounding the 100-mile-wide gray stone pit. 42 degrees at its base, 200 meters below sea level. Car ahead leaving traces on the road cast. A strong jet of water from the conductor irrigates. Gobi means stones. Much here. And then green. An oasis. A giant mirage?
Turfan. Trellis vines to shade the street. Hanging grapes grapes. 15 yuan fine for casual pickup. Hotel tea in galvanized buckets. Dance and music in the Turkish style. Goachang and Jiaohe cities sacked by Genghiz. Painted tombs and brick minarets. Flaming mountains. Karez underground irrigation system. 3000 kilometers of canals. 1500 years old, gravity fed from the mountains on the edge of the depression. The greatest feat of the Uyghur culture and fully operational.
Bus to Daheyan. Two hours on bumpy rocks to the edge of the depression. Landfill of a railway town. Piles of coal, box buildings, vacant lots. Two women at war on the station esplanade. Hitting the victim’s head on the ground. Blood. Spectators. In action. A city tense with resentful posts.
500 miles to Liuyuan in Gansu. Flat gray shale stone without distinctive features. Spectacularly unique. Snowy mountains to the north. Totally empty, save for the smoky coal towns. 40 up in summer, 30 down in winter. Night by train. Dawn reveals the same massive scene, now in brown.
Liuyuan arrives. Daheyan wrote something similar. 120 miles south through the desert (black at first!), Beyond the remnant walls of the Great-Great Wall of the Han Dynasty. Camels and dunes of Taklimakan, the largest sand desert in the world. Near Dunhuang, the oasis is blooming again. Suddenly, the sand and scree are harvested and form trees. Feitian Hotel, with complimentary toiletries labeled Sham Poo and Foam Poo. Lunch. Fourteen plates. Duck, foo-yong, cucumber, cabbage, chicken with oyster mushrooms, pork with coriander, steamed buns, steamed bread, rice, beef broth and noodles, pork and green beans, pork and sweet chili, chicken and pumpkin, noodles simple, water melon. Then to get the essential torch for the caves. Crowded houses. Wood warehouses for winter stacked on top. See through the rooftops 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 for perhaps the most impressive sight in the world. 400 ‘caves’ (something the size of a cathedral) in a sandstone gorge, between 400 AD to 1100 AD Totally dry, always dark, perfectly preserved. All painted. The Tang period is complex and colorful. A world of scenes by torchlight. Reclining Buddhas, sitting, standing, posing. Thirty meter seated figure with thousands of unsmoked cigarettes and coins on his lap as offerings. Qing Renovated Cave Clash With Taoist Figures. Ghoulish, contorted features and a face in the groin. 40 caves seen in the day, archaeologist as personal guide. Impressive. Fourteen courses for dinner.
Desert bus back to Liuyuan. Always a fight for the 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 by train. Country changed. Mountain pass, green hills and stepped fields. Wheat harvest in. The straw carts as children in the assembly. Houses still of rammed earth. Lanzhou a prosperous industrial city. Thirty hours of travel. Walk along the Yellow River.
Fish in the hotel restaurant tank all dead. Lanzhou expensive bus. 50 fen per trip. Weaving and spokes are prohibited. Han dynasty flying horse and bronze warriors. Steamed carp with rapeseed on the menu. Fish comes first. Train Xian through the country of yellow loess. Deep grooves and ravines. All cultivated flat land. 500 miles overnight.
Terracotta warriors looking east to protect Qin Shihuang’s tomb. Done in pieces. Assembled on site. Partially excavated section where piles of dismembered branches emerge from the earth. New terracotta warriors for sale from the factory behind the museum. Exact replicas of originals. He snorts at the idea that everything is a sham for tourism.
Xian, like all Chinese cities, a square. Straight roads, always crossed at right angles. Old walled center, rebuilt Ming. Exquisite old mosque. Near Xianyang, with Qian tombs from the 7th century, museum with another 3000 Han terracottas like a football crowd. Train to Beijing. 800 miles, 26 hours. The houses are often found in caves on the side of the valley. Later, vast flat land, corn everywhere.
Temple of Heaven, Tiantan and then the Beijing Opera. Pause for a beer at the roadside stand. Served by a moonlighting stockbroker in training! The pickled breakfast is amazing, like a four year old camembert straight out of a shotgun. He takes his 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 discarded by guide. Incorrect. Incredible barrel vaulted rooms nine stories underground. Jade doors, carved thrones, marble, marble, wonder. Reminiscent of Renaissance Italy. Eternal bricks engraved with the names of their manufacturers. Souvenir jade boat for £ 55,000.
White curtains over erotic statues at the Tibetan Lama Temple. Same beastly content in wall paintings. 24-meter golden Buddha through the incense. There are no smoking signs everywhere.
Mao’s Maoleo Tomb of an Emperor. Lines for queues painted along the square. Feet pointing north towards the Tiananmen Gate, upside down feng shui. It is shiny, waxy, and painted on the face. Moving lines pass to both sides. Non stop. Outside, stalls with Mao T-shirts, Mao keychains, stuffed animals, postcards, magic lantern shows. Mao Zedong’s candy floss by the arm. Then, Great Hall of the People. Dining room for 5000. Now fast food for tourists. Chopsticks, cigarettes, Great Hall T-shirts. Cuddly toys Great Hall of the People.
2,500 miles. Three and a half weeks. 5 destinations. 50 wineries. 6000 terracotta warriors. 1 of each Great Wall, Forbidden City, Beijing Opera, Mao Zedong. Hundreds of tombs, temples, pagodas, parks, bendi-buses and bicycles. 3 silk shirts on the Silk Road. An amazing trip.