Travels in Chinese Turkestan

Journal Entry for Sunday 23 August 1987

“About 4 we can see a dust storm brewing from the north, off the desert, there is a stiff breeze, but no dust. It comes closer and closer. My throat springs up sore. Mr. Chen arrives with 2 letters… The dust storm hits. We close the windows, rather warm.”

My journal entry is rather spare, but my memory of the dust storm is rather more dramatic. We had arrived the day before in Shihezi, where we had arranged to teach English. Our apartment wasn’t ready, so we were housed in the only proper hotel in town, the Shihezi Guest House. Our room was on an upper floor, with wide windows facing north. Four o’clock is, of course, Beijing time, so the local time was more like 2pm. I remember a wall of yellow dust coming closer and closer, a scary sight as there was no dust where we were, no obscuring the approaching wall. When the storm hit, the dust rushed into the room, while we hastily closed the windows, grit seeping into teeth and eyes. The sky drew dark and the sun disappeared. As the temperature in the room rose, the temptation to open the windows grew stronger and stronger. Sweat mixed with yellow grit. Within a few hours the storm had abated as the journal notes that dinner was at 8:30 in the dining room.

I didn’t know it then, but I had experienced my first of many storms in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Welcome to Chinese Turkestan! My description is much like those of other travelers to the region, and this was a mild storm, ridden out in a hotel room. The wall of dust would have been scary if I had been outside, riding a camel across the desert dunes. It could have been fatal if I had lost my way, run out of food and water. My later encounters with the ‘buran’ were more troublesome, but never fatal.

My first trip to Xinjiang did not last long, less than three months, and when I returned to the US, I took a trip to the local Santa Cruz County Library. It was there I discovered the literature on travels in Chinese Turkestan. Someone had been a collector of travel books on the region and had subsequently donated the lot to the library. While recognizing that I was not the first traveler, I was sucked into the accounts of years before. I was introduced to Sven Hedin, a Swedish explorer and geographer who discovered innumerable ‘lost cities’ in the Taklamakan Desert and almost died doing it. An early 19th century contemporary was Aurel Stein, a Hungarian who became an Englishman, and the thief of the Dunhuang treasures. He also dug up some of the ancient lost cities; he being one of the few archeologists. Among the more
unusual written works were those of Mildred Cable and the French sisters, British missionaries in China in the 1920’s and 1930’s who felt the call to preach to the Muslims of Chinese Turkestan. Among the more extraordinary journeys of the chaotic 1930’s was that of Peter Fleming and Ella Maillart, who traveled through the high deserts of Tibet on their Beijing to New Delhi journey. Two Roosevelts, sons of President Teddy Roosevelt, hunted wild animals of Central Asia for the Chicago Museum of Natural History. It was really just an excuse for another adventure in wild places. Owen and Eleanor Lattimore each wrote of their honeymoon journey through the mountains and deserts of Chinese Turkestan. Eleanor’s seventeen-day journey across the frozen forests of Siberia struck me as alternately foolhardy and adventurous; I envied her as well as thought she was a fool. Mrs. Macartney’s memoirs of 17 years as the wife of the British consul of Kashgar was inspiring. I had seen some of the places described and I thought, for example, that the Sunday Market at Kashgar was as unchanged as possible for it to be.

That November, I had felt reluctant to leave, the college, my students, new found friends, the exotic markets, the incredible scenery. And now, in the books from the library, I had found that others felt the same; there was a deep interest, a fascination, a pull to go farther, deeper, to find out more about the people who lived there now and in the past.

I longed to return, and did, seven more times, the most recent in 2018.