The Chinese phrase ‘mei you’ is literally translated into English as ‘there isn’t any.’ But it is used in Chinese to mean ‘no.’
In 1987 traveling to Tibet and Xinjiang, I was among the first modern travelers to these places in many, many years. Finding a hotel room, food, bus or train tickets frequently met with ‘mei you’ and then a back turned. For someone who didn’t speak the language, who didn’t know what the alternatives might be, who couldn’t fathom the culture, these deadends were frustrating. My traveling companion spent an entire afternoon composing a song he called ‘China’s National Song’ with a refrain of ‘mei you, mei you, mei you’ and verses that reflected the Chinese view of the world, according to his interpretation. (We were not inexperienced travelers, having spent a year in India and 10 months traveling from Cairo to South Africa overland.)
It was his interpretation, but it was echoed by most travelers in the last 150 years. Many travelers have met with restrictions on movement (even including months of incarceration), overpayment for goods and services, blocked access to people and place travelers wanted to go; all these are age-old complaints. There are few, if any, accounts of travel in Xinjiang that do not have long litanies of frustration with local officials. Chinese control of Turkistan has been tenuous for 2000 years, ever since imperial ambitions have tried to claim it. Control has never been complete and at times, seemed more a fantasy than any reality on the ground. The spare population, the climate, difficulty of travel within the area and barriers to travel outside, have all kept this part of the world particularly isolated.
In 1987, the only international border open was the new and fragile road to Pakistan, the Karakorum Highway. The old Silk Road routes to the west were closed. From Tibet we traveled for a week by bus and train to reach our college just a few miles west of Urumqi. We took a roundabout route to the north, the east, then west through the Hexi Corridor. This route was the one most used from ancient times to go from China to Turkistan and then onward via the Silk Road. Diary entries from that week reveal the slow progress made because of the difficulties of transportation. In hindsight, the lack of train seats and overcrowded buses reflected the time of year, late August, when students and others were traveling. The state of underdevelopment of the transportation systems in a country that still struggled to emerge from medieval lifestyles was reflected in this. In fairness, our fellow Chinese and minority passengers had as much difficulty as we did. And a lot more patience.
Fleming and Maillart traveled through western Tibet in incredibly difficult conditions, walking or riding tired out horses, all to avoid Chinese guards in more densely populated territory. Cable and the French sisters traveled by horse carts, frequently at night, to avoid the heat, and bandits. Hedin spent months under house arrest, and subsequently lied to authorities about his planned route and destinations. Aurel Stein was eventually denied permission to enter China because of his transgressions.
Even more modern travelers, who roamed the roads at approximately the same time I did in the 1980’s and 1990’s, had encounters with officials that left them as frustrated and angry as my traveling companion. Christa Paula had to sneak by the site of Lop Nur on a clandestine trip to Miran, to visit a ruined city with little left to view. Danzinger had to lie and hide to make his way as ‘ the first foreigner’ to travel from Pakistan to China on the newly opened Karakorum Highway.
To travel with these explorers along their hard roads and their experiences with the Chinese ‘mei you’ makes me laugh, smile, cry and rail against authorities who try, but often don’t succeed, to put stumbling blocks in the way of exploration.
