We were out of luck in the seat department, so I sat in the back of the bus with Don standing next to me. About forty-five minutes into the trip, I casually looked up at him. “So, where did you put the passports?” A slight look of alarm crossed his face. “I thought you got them back from the hotel front desk.” Panic ensued. We tried to get off the bus, but someone who spoke English persuaded us not to do so. He promised to call the hotel at the next rest stop as we still had the receipt with name and number. Our savior said that they could just put them on the next bus. We endured the hot crowded bus, and I tried to keep my breakfast down as many others lost theirs. We also had the worry of two missing US passports and the wild ideas of who might steal them.

At the end of the bus trip, we went to the next cheap hotel and persuaded them that we actually had passports and that they were expected momentarily at the bus station. Don undertook the many trips to the station asking any bus that arrived if the driver or ticket taker had our passports. The next day, still no documents, so we found a travel agent who promised to help. He explained that the phone lines had been down for 24 hours, but were currently up and running again. Our savior from the day before couldn’t have contacted the hotel. By that time, we had lost the receipt for the hotel and couldn’t remember the name. “But it’s right across the street from the station!” The agent also said that because of the rivalry between bus companies, only the company whose bus we had been on would be willing to help. That meant that asking every bus that had arrived would be useless. We went to the market and bought a watermelon, putting it into the fridge in the lounge to cool. We went to the beach. Too hot. Back to our room. Too hot. Eat watermelon. Someone had stolen it. We went back to the travel agency. Someone else was there and knew nothing about passports.

By the next day, we were making plans to go to Ankara and visit the American Embassy. We fretted, Don went to the station and met yet more busses. After dinner, he said he was heading out again. “By now, they all know me and want to have conversations. Do you know what kind of men hang around bus stations? One asked me, ‘In America, is it true? That a man can go with a woman – for FREE?” I locked the door behind him. A loud banging woke me after midnight. Don grinned as he held up two green passports with eagles on them. “The bus was two hours late and everyone was snappish. I waited until everyone got off the bus, then leaned in to ask the driver, ‘Passports?’ He took one look at the red beard and reached forward, picking up the passports that had been sitting on the dashboard. He opened one, then the other. He handed them to me.”

The casualness of the loss, and return, of these vital documents has had a lasting effect on me. Ask me and I can put my hand on my passport within ten seconds, whether out and about or at home. I can be positively paranoid about separation from this little pamphlet. I’ve never let my passport expire and have saved every one I have gotten, except the first one. That was kept by the US Government when I was issued with my next one. And of course, they don’t belong to you, they are the property of the government.

No traveler comes to Kashgar and misses the Sunday Market. I had walked in the Forum and the Colosseum in Rome, gingerly negotiated the smooth stones in the Khan el Khalili Market in Cairo, traversed the Cardo of Jerusalem, now under the street level, and had marveled at the tiny shops in the Covered Market in Istanbul. But this market had not yet met the twentieth century. The men wore clothes similar to the ones their fathers and grandfathers had worn, they flocked to the horse show and the camel market as their forebears had done. They listened to the shouts of the sellers in the same language that had been used for centuries. I had wandered into a time warp and I knew it. There was a thrill to the whole day, to the entire place. Tens of thousands of people gathered as they had for centuries. This was not a place for tourists from New York or London or Paris, but a living market where peasants from the countryside came to trade their goods.

I first went to the Sunday Market in November 1987. It had started as a cool day and I had worn many clothes. At noon I was down to the last layer, a black, long-sleeved turtleneck and I longed to take it off. The sun was bright and I wondered at the clothes worn by the locals. All of them, except for the young men, wore many layers of traditional clothes. I ran into a few foreigners, including a couple from our hotel, but the thousands of people were here on business, or maybe to have a break. Nick Danzinger, who was the “first outsider to enter China over the Karakoram in thirty-five years” in 1984, described the approach to the market. “One could hardly move for the traffic, and there must have been thousands and thousands of people milling and shoving while avoiding the flow of carts. Drivers stood up and constantly shouted: ‘Posh! Posh! – get out of the way!’ as they nudged their carts forward to the river bank where the ‘car park’ was – hundreds of carts in ordered rows, their shafts all pointing heavenwards like the barrels of field guns.” He continues on at length to describe baking bread, what people wore, and the organization of the market. He described the section where cloth was sold, where clothes were sold, and hats from various ethnic groups were displayed. There was a section for produce, fruits, vegetables, bundled and loose. An entire street was lined with kitchens making fried, boiled and baked snacks and were fronted with tiny stools and benches for customers to sit. Also, the fact that as far as he knew, he was the only foreigner In Kashgar, besides a Chinese-American tourist on an escorted visit.

Kashgar has been a crossroads for over two thousand years and as such, has always had a market. Emperor Wu sent an envoy, Zhang Qian, who commented on the prosperous market. Kashgar was a mainstay on the ‘Silk Road’ and so most travelers passed through. More likely, they came to sell their goods, both from the east and from the west, as almost no one was a through traveler. Marco Polo was an exception, although he never made it to Kashgar, as he took a more northerly route. No one has been sure exactly where the market was, but by the late twentieth century, the site of the Sunday Market was east of the Tumen River at a place called Aizilaitie Lu. It was a vast area, and each kind of product had its own section. We in the twentieth century think that Costco or Target offers variety, but because most products are hand-made or home grown, there is an incredible variety and each hat maker, gardener or raiser of sheep can show his own handiwork.

Although the market’s history has been lost in time, by 1993, it had become an every day market. The livestock had been moved to a different location, to keep the smells and dust away. Early travelers, those in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, did not mention this vast and exciting place, but it would have been ‘as expected.’ Markets in Asia and the Middle East would have been similar and so, this place would not be an attraction. And of course, the population would have been much less. Estimates in the late twentieth century vary from 100,000 to 150,000 on a Sunday. Presumably, having an every day market would have taken the pressure off the crowding. At some point, the Chinese built fences, gates and a large administration building with a monumental gate.

Every time I visited Kashgar, I made sure to be there on a Sunday and took in the market. The last time I was there, in 2018, my companions were less than enthusiastic and only wanted to see and get out as soon as possible. The smell of the animals was disgusting, the cooked meals unappetizing and unhygienic, rows and rows of stalls with cheap cotton cloth uninteresting. But I craved the experience. I bought a number of ‘doppas’, traditional embroidered Uyhgur hats and at the animal market, a whip made from leather and bone, probably a sheep leg bone.

Since that last visit, I have found out that the building has been torn down, and the rows of rickety shops cleared away for new clean stalls and shops. A twenty-first century market will emerge. Tourists will presumably enjoy this market more, not having to push their way through the 100,000 other patrons, not negotiate the pushing donkey carts, not hear the raucous cries of ‘Posh, posh.’ And these new visitors will have no need to watch where feet step and can go to the market every day of the week. But I will remember when…

Bonavia, Judy, 1999. The Silk Road: Xi’an to Kashgar. Odyssey.

Danzinger, Nick, 1987. Danzinger’s Travels, Beyond Forbidden Frontiers. Flamingo.

Tredinick, Jeremy, 2012. Xinjiang, China’s Central Asia. Odyssey.

The book was East of the Sun, West of the Moon, copyright 1926. The brothers, sons of Theodore Roosevelt, had written alternate chapters. The title comes from a Norwegian fairy story and refers to a place that is so far away as to be unknowable. I think it is a lovely name for a story of adventure to a place that, even today, seems to be far away and largely unknown. The brothers had undertaken the trip to hunt for animals to be displayed in a Central Asian part of the Chicago Natural History Museum. They wanted to take back horns and hides from a variety of sheep and antelope from the region. They were middle-aged men who wanted to play at being explorers like their famous father. Theodore had run for Governor of New York and had been defeated, and so, was at loose ends and able to take an extended vacation. He had recruited his brother and approached the Museum for funding and sponsorship. He also persuaded a couple of friends to join them as collectors of birds and smaller animals. They sailed in April from the US to England, onto Paris for last minute shopping, and then from Marseille to India. By the middle of May they were in Srinagar and on their way over the Zoji La. By now, they had run out of wheeled transport and were on foot with pack ponies or occasionally riding. They decided to take the path through Leh and over five monumental passes to the Takla Makan desert at Yarkand. Even though these passes were all over 16,000 feet, the highest being the Karakoram at over 18,000 feet, this route was at least well-travelled and there were campsites and other travelers. Having been to Leh and trekked through these mountains, and also penetrated a few miles into the Himalayas further east to Pulu just up from Keriya, I have great respect for anyone willing to push forward through these mountains. They were well supplied, including four hunting hounds.

This route has been traversed for many years as it is part of the Silk Road. It is perhaps the most direct route from India to China, even though wild and difficult. As the Roosevelts went higher into the mountains, they passed dead animals and carcasses all along the route. They also stumbled upon bales of goods that had been abandoned the year before as ponies had died and the rest couldn’t carry the loads. There was apparently a code of honor among the merchants on this age-old route. The loads were not to be touched and were left for collection the next time the traders came this way. As many of these bundles were dried marijuana, the temptation must have been great to wriggle a few joints worth of weed out of a bundle. Who would notice?

By July, they were at the Takla Makan and journeyed to Kashgar via Yarkand. They had, among their supplies, top hats and cutaway coats, and they donned these when visiting dignitaries along the route. There is a photo of the brothers, mounted on horses, bow ties, white shirts, top hats and heavily bearded, latter day Abraham Lincolns. From Kashgar they headed north to Aksu On the first of August, they left the desert behind and headed to the Tian Shan where they expected to do most of their hunting. The Muzart River flows south out of the great Muzart Glacier and caused them many problems in the numerous fords. They had some local camels to help them cross the river as the camels had longer legs and could take heavier loads. Numerous stories of men and ponies being washed away sprinkle the accounts of crossing rivers. The Muzart, like the Karakorum Pass, has been used for centuries and at this point of time, the Chinese had organized a couple of outposts staffed with helpers. These helpers cut ice steps on the southern side of the pass, through the glacier. On the other side, they organized ponies and campsites. Again, the accounts of carcasses lining the route must have given all pause.

This route has been abandoned now. Longer routes that cut through lower passes bypass this treacherous glacier. But in the past, the maintenance of the pass was hit or miss, depending on the political climate. Another explorer in Chinese Turkistan was Baron Mannerheim, who crossed this way in 1906 on his way from Kashgar to the Ili Valley. Carl Mannerheim was a Finnish aristocrat who served in the Russian military. He maintained that the most exciting event of his life was to take part in the coronation of Emperor Nicholas II in 1896. By the first decade of the twentieth century, he had separated from his wife and was at loose ends. He undertook a mission from the czar to become a spy in China, to seek out possible routes for an invasion and to judge the local tribes’ sentiment towards the Han Chinese, their current overlords. He traveled from Turkestan to Beijing for two years, posing as an ethnographic collector. He teamed up with the French archeologist Paul Pelliot, but they were unsuitable companions and split up when Pelliot found lucrative digging in abandoned Buddhist ruins. He must have been an excellent spy as Macartney, the British consul in Kashgar, never mentioned the Baron as being anything other than what he outwardly pretended to be. Macartney had a reputation as being a very astute judge of character and a long history of being at the center of the Great Game between Britain and Russia. Mannerheim traveled through the Tian Shan with a small team of locals, camping out at local camping spots, and occasionally stopping to do a bit of shooting of the local fauna. He described the snow, the locals and the exhaustion that he and his fellow travelers endured crossing the pass.

One hundred years after Mannerheim made his trip, a Canadian-Finn, Eric Enno Tamm, attempted to retrace his journey. One part which he was unable to do was to go over the Muzart Pass, which by the late twentieth century, had been abandoned. Tamm reluctantly went by comfortable transport around the Tian Shan.

One year after the Roosevelts crossed the mountains where I spent the night, another intrepid couple came this way. Owen Lattimore was an American who had grown up in China, where his parents had business. He was shipped off to England during the First World War where he attended school. At the end of his time, he qualified for a place at university, but his parents were unable to afford the fees, so he returned to China. He had learned Chinese from his parents’ servants and now began to study the language and culture in a more systematic way as a traveling businessman. If there was a long, dangerous journey to be made with the company he worked for, he volunteered to undertake it. By the mid 1920’s, he had determined to one day travel along the Silk Road. Eleanor Holgate, avid hiker and Rocky Mountain explorer, world traveler and teacher in China, met Owen in Peking and they married in 1925. They had planned a honeymoon that would take them from Peking to Delhi through Chinese Turkestan. However, they did not plan on the ‘warlords’ of China in the 1920’s and 30’s. After months of waiting, Owen finally found a place on a camel train, one of the last of its kind, traveling to Urumqi through Mongolia. It was a rough trip and he knew that it would be dangerous for Eleanor, as a woman, to go this way. They made plans to meet in Russia, near the border in a few months’ time. (This is a story for another time.)

By the summer of 1927, they were in the Tian Shan mountains, making their way south to Kashgar. They followed the Tekes River up from Gulja, and then entered the mountains, wandering for weeks in the wilderness. They were always accompanied by local guides, often ones foisted upon them by the local Han Chinese. All through their travels, the locals were impressed by Lattimore’s ability in Chinese, and the fact that he had brought his wife with him. His real wife, not a ‘traveling wife’. But the Kirghiz and Kazaks of the mountains were less impressed with the Lattimores’ status as wealthy Western travelers. They followed the same route as the Roosevelts and encountered many who had met the “Dukes of America.” As there was no way of describing the American lack of titles for someone so important as the sons of a president, the locals called them “Dukes”. The dukes had better tents, more ponies, more food, wine in bottles, and they brought their own servants, including special servants for their dogs! They spread around bigger tips. But as Owen noted in his book High Tartary, “The appearance of our typewriters caused much chatter in the yurts of the High Tian Shan, and a slight fall in the ducal reputation. It seemed a pity that dukes should have had to write their books by hand.”

They approached the Muzart Pass with only slight trepidation, as by this point in their travels, they were weary and not inclined to worry much about the difficulty or the danger. After all, people had crossed this way for centuries. Mist, rain and snow marked their crossing. Lattimore noted that the pass was a gateway and they were leaving the world of horse-riding nomads behind. Avalanches could be heard all around them as they warmed themselves by a small fire in a cave. He noted the government-imposed helpers on either side of the pass. Within days, they were down from the mountains and faced the Takla Makan.

The night I spent in the Tekes Valley was one of restlessness due to the wind and my own thoughts. I got up as soon as I heard the door being unlocked in the dim light of dawn, and scurried off to the outhouse. As I opened the door to the outside, I was met with silence, the profound silence of snow. A few inches of soft white new snow lay over everything. I had hoped to make another trip to the Nalata Highlands, where I had been the day before. I wanted another chance to see the wide green meadows, the high mountains, and maybe get another photo of the eagle. But the snow would make the winding road dangerous. It had been scary the day before, but now with snow, water and mud, I knew the driver would not chance it. My photo with the Kirghiz eagle would be the last I would see of these highlands.

Notes:

Lattimore, Owen. 1930, High Tartary, Kodansha International

Lattimore, Eleanor Holgate. 1934, Turkestan Reunion, Kodansha International

Roosevelt, Theodore and Kermit. 1926, East of the Sun and West of the Moon, Charles Scribner’s Sons

Tamm, Eric Enno. 2011, The Horse That Leaps though Clouds, Counterpoint

In March 1988, I saw the wall paintings, the frescos, brought back to India by Aurel Stein. They were in three rooms of the Central Asian Antiquities Museum in New Delhi. In my diary, I said they were from Turfan, but in fact, they were Buddhist frescoes taken from the ruins of Miran. I noted that the glass that covered the tall fascinating paintings was dirty or perhaps from a too humid atmosphere. More likely, the fragile frescoes, levered off the walls of stupas and temples by Stein’s workers and laboriously carried back to India on the backs of camels, horses, donkeys and yaks, had mildewed. Centuries of dry air and then being buried in dry sand, had kept the paint fresh for the eyes and the camera lens of Stein and company. But now, the delicate frescoes were in bad shape.

Marco Polo had been to Miran, or rather, passed by in 1273 on his way to meet Kublai Khan. It would have been a ruin in his day. But Polo did write about Charkilik and mentioned crossing the Great Salt Desert of Lop. Miran sits on the edge of this desert, and in its heyday, about 1000 years before the explorer passed this way, would have been a ‘must stop’ for all travelers on the Southern Silk Road. Polo noted that the great city at the end of the desert is called Lop and noted that travelers needed a week to refresh themselves and camels before the crossing eastward, which took a month. The desert was formidable. (More about this in another blog.)

An earlier traveler, Xuan Zang, a Chinese Buddhist monk who had traveled from China to India to retrieve Buddhist scriptures, passed this way on his return in 645. He undoubtedly stopped here, as it had been and presumably still was, a large Buddhist site, full of monks, monasteries and stupas. He went on to Loulan, to the north, but his journey home (to China) was now finished and he had little to say about Charkilik, Miran or Loulan, or the crossing of this perilous salt desert.

Aurel Stein had much to say about Miran. He probably felt as though he ‘owned’ it in the sense that he was the one who systematically collected artifacts, mapped it and ‘saved’ it from further looting. He visited and excavated over the years 1900-1916, in which he made three extensive trips to Chinese Turkestan. His inspiration was Xuan Zang and he carried a copy of the book that the monk wrote about his travels to India and back. It was Stein’s collection of frescos I saw in New Delhi, as he had worked for the Indian Archaeological Survey, and naturally his loot went to his employer.

One of the most engaging travel accounts of getting to Miran is by Christa Paula. A graduate student, she was working on her PhD thesis about Miran and was desperate to visit the ruins, to see for herself and to answer some questions about Stein’s excavations and maps. Her biggest problem was timing. In the late 1980’s, when I first went to Chinese Turkestan, only a few cities and roads were open for tourists. She dutifully saw Kashgar, Urumqi, Turpan and visited the ruins available to her. But she wanted, needed, to go to Miran. In her book, The Road to Miran, she filled the pages with adventures of trying to get permission, being thwarted, trying again, and experiencing wretched accommodations in out of the way places. Finally, she made a desperate clandestine dash with a local who had friends in the lonely outposts that dotted the road. Her visit to Miran, while thrilling for her, was only for a few hours and couldn’t have revealed much in the way of archeological finds. “It had taken me three months to get to Miran, and I had one day to explore the site.” As she crept among the ditches and ruins, she noted, “Below us lay a vast and desolate expanse, interrupted only by sand-covered mounds, bobbing like buoys on the grey Atlantic.” She managed to identify Stein’s mounds and even find some of Stein’s ‘outhouses’.

The town, or city, of Loulan had first been identified by Sven Hedin in 1900. And the serendipitous finding of this amazing site will have to wait for another telling. But Stein knew about the ruins of Loulan and also knew other sites were dotted about. Of course, the locals knew where they were. And Stein carried a copy of Xuan Zang’s journal (his ‘bible’), so he knew about the bustling city of Charkalik, now only a small outpost on the edge of the desert. Stein wrote, “In a region where all is dead and waste, spiritual emanations from those who have passed by centuries ago, seem to cling much longer to the conspicuous landmarks than in parts where life is still bustling.”

In December 1906 and January 1907, Stein dug in the ruins of Miran, located fifty miles northeast of Charkilik, called Ruoqiang by the Chinese. He had hired a guide, a Loplik by the name of Tokta Akhun, who knew the area well. Detailed descriptions are given in his many books about his first sight, his diggings and other activities carried on over the years.

It was of great interest to him to speculate on the climate and how it had changed over the years. A large monastery complex, with hundreds or thousands of monks, must have had sources of food and water. Xuan Zang and Marco Polo noted that on the other side of the great Salt Desert of Lop, one month’s difficult journey away, lay the Oasis of Dunhaung. But his corner of the Takla Makan was fed by mountain streams from the Altun Shan Mountains in the south, which separate this area from Tibet. This region also received some water, if not continuously, from the Tarim River. The Tarim arises in the mountains that border the Takla Makan and flows in a great eastward arc, eventually emptying into a wide inland salt sea. Over the centuries, this shallow sea dried up, leaving a few corridors of water and a vast salt desert. Today, there is no longer any water from the Tarim River, and only a wide salt plain.

But when Stein encountered Miran, water still flowed to the inhabited area, fifty miles away, but no longer to here at the ruined city. As Stein dug in those early years, he was excited and astonished by a number of things. The first were the manuscripts, their age, their astounding preservation, their variety of languages and topics and their sheer volume. He unearthed hoard after hoard, written on wood and parchment and often kept in sealed envelopes of wood. These helped him date the various houses, monasteries and refuse pits. The second were the frescoes, the ones I had seen in the museum in Delhi. Many of them had been destroyed by the weather, by looters or were just too delicate to survive the assault of a modern archeological digging team. Although the weather is dry and the air exceedingly so, rain and wind managed to damage anything close to the surface. Looters had figured out that the Buddhists of a thousand years before had used gold leaf on their statues and paintings. Burrowing into ruined stupas could reward the intrepid thieves with precious objects, or they could scrape the gold off the frescos and statutes. Often, they smashed the statues looking for treasure in the hollow insides. The third memorable thing were the refuse pits where many manuscripts were to be found. Ancient feces retains its stench and Stein, as well as Paula, reeled from the odors that rose from the refuse piles. The question of why the storage of manuscripts and toilets were one and the same place was never answered. A fourth discovery delighted Stein, but no longer seems amazing to us. The statues and frescos exhibited signs of classical Greek art, the Gandharan style of Buddhist art. Alexander the Great brought Greek styles to the places he conquered, but this out of the way place is far, far away from Greece.

My trip to Miran in the summer of 1992 was marred by bureaucratic delays, car troubles and disappointment in what was left of the once extensive city. We drove out of Charkilik to the edge of the desert and pulled up at a small outpost with an office whose sign read ‘State Farm #36.’ From the journal, “we pick up an old toothless man for a guide. Out to the edge of the farm, locked gate, no one there. We opt to walk. It’s hard core sand desert. We’re pointing north, there are mountains to our right converging with the little jeep trail we’re on. Lop Nor is about 100 miles ahead. A brick chorten, mostly ruined, bits of pottery, other structural remains, mostly 5 to 7 feet high. (About every 100 yards). Ahead, there is a sort of a fort on a rock outcrop. The jeeps have now gotten through and join us with a young Uyghur man who is the guardian of the ruins. He doesn’t know how old it is or who lived here. Our guidebook says its Tang, probably from the time of the Tibetan occupation.”

I have no more of a memory than this diary entry. The views of lumps of stupas in the desert landscape are all that remain in my mind. The romantic in me wants the toothless old man to be the son or nephew of Tokta Akhun.

There is now a rail line from Dunhuang to Korla that stops at Ruoxiang. A modern iron horse that crosses the mighty Lop Nor Desert in 12 hours compares favorably with the month that Marco Polo took.

References:

Bergreen, Laurence, 2007, Marco Polo, From Venice to Xanadu, Alfred Knopf, New York

Paula, Christa, 1994, The Road to Miran: Travels in the Forbidden Zone of Xinjiang, Harper Collins, London

Polo, Marco, 1958, The Travels, Penguin Classics

Prejevalsky, Nicolai, 1879, From Kulja, Across the Tian Shan to Lob-nor, Sampson, London

Stein, Aurel, 1964, On Ancient Central Asian Tracks, Random House, New York

Photo: Panoramic view of the sand blown landscape of the city of Miran, in 2018 (Photograph Yunxiao Liu).

Although the inhabitants of nearby villages knew about the arch, in fact it is visible from the plains less than 20 miles away, no one seems to have actually been there. It must be a clear day, and those are few and far between, to see Tushuk Tash (Hole Mountain in Uyhgur), but it mysteriously disappears as one draws closer. Eric Shipton, famous mountaineer and British consul assigned to Kashgar, had seen the arch in 1942 as he was leaving his assignment for the first time. It wasn’t until his second turn as consul, starting in 1946, that he determined to find the arch. It took four attempts (his wife counts five, one being the breakdown of their vehicle and subsequent abort of the mission) before he actually got close to it. From then on, it has become known in the English-speaking world as Shipton’s Arch.

In 2018, shortly before the ill-fated camel encounter (See blog Camel), I booked a taxi from Kashgar, sharing the expense with a French couple staying at the same hotel. We started off at a decent hour and soon found ourselves on an almost deserted road heading west and north out of Kashgar. I soon realized that it was a new highway and that I would never be given a visa to visit the neighboring country at the border crossing. Such is the way of Central Asian countries. In about an hour we came to an enormous and mostly empty parking lot and an echoing and equally empty tourist reception area. The toilets were particularly disgusting. We bought tickets and asked how to get to the ‘Gate of Heaven’ as the Chinese had dubbed it. (Could we have a more creative name?) A helpful young man explained with a wave of his hand, “Just follow the trail.” “But where is the trail?” Another wave of the hand indicated a dry river bed sporting jeep tire tracks wending their way up river. A few Chinese tourists were beginning to walk on the trail. We followed.

Shipton knew approximately where the arch was, as he had seen it, but as one gets closer, the arch mysteriously disappears within the folds of the mountains. These mountains rise very steeply and are composed of conglomerate. Conglomerate is a sedimentary rock made up of rounded pieces of rock surrounded by a finer-grained matrix of sand, silt, or clay and is easily eroded by wind and water. It also crumbles easily, and is not the kind of rock favored by rock climbers. I would call it scary. Few plants and almost no trees grow here as the climate is incredibly dry. Shipton first attempted to approach the arch by starting from the nearest point due south. He was foiled in this attempt and retreated back to Kashgar. His second attempt was no more successful. For his third attempt, Shipton thought that local knowledge may be more successful. He went to the small village called Min-yol, not far from a town called Artush. He was surrounded by locals who all knew what he was talking about, but no one had ever been there. One man, Usman Akhun, presented himself as a guide. Shipton was impressed with his energy, assurance and ‘splendid physique.’ They, Shipton, his wife, numerous consular staff and Usman Akhun, set off.

Shipton set a pace that was hard to keep up with, and his wife and one of the less fit of the consular staff, dropped back. All day, Shipton and his companions scrambled up cliffs, reconnoitered from the flat tops of the terraces and made no headway. Once more, he gave up.

His next serious attempt was to try to find a way from the north. Khirgiz nomads who traversed the area had no idea what he was talking about as the arch cannot be seen from this direction. But this time, Shipton lucked out. They selected a ravine that seemed to be as near as they could guess to the arch and set off. The climbing, or rather walking, was considerably easier, only a few short blockages, easily ascended, blocked the way. The ravine continued to narrow and then suddenly ’emerging from one of these clefts, we were confronted with a sight that made us gasp with surprise and excitement. The gorge widened into a valley which ended a quarter of a mile away in a grassy slope leading to a U-shaped col. Above and beyond the col, stood a curtain of rock, pierced by a graceful arch.’

The current trail that I followed, eventually quite easily as there was nowhere else to go, was the one that Shipton took. In my diary, I wrote, ‘Then we’re in a riverbed, stairs through some really narrow spaces, steeper, more stairs, steeper. The hillsides have goats, birds, bees, flies, crows and are pockmarked. Higher, steep streambed, then we can see the arch. A long wooden staircase brings us to the viewing platform.’ Shipton writes, ‘Through the arch, we could see nothing but the clouds of a stormy sky. This sudden end to our search was almost an anticlimax.’ He had no way of measuring the hole, but estimated that it was at least 1000 feet high and 150 feet across.

This was the last the Western world knew of the arch for over fifty years. Chinese Turkestan was rocked with political uncertainty and foreigners were seldom given permission to explore the area. But in 1999, a team from National Geographic set out to rediscover the arch and hopefully measure it. In December 2000, an article appeared in the magazine, giving an account of the latest expedition. Strangely, the team attempted a southern route, only to be disappointed. They went back to the village where Shipton had met Usman Akhun and encountered a nephew of his. The man had become a legend, but did not fare well during the Cultural Revolution and subsequent years, as he had been branded for his help to Shipton. The team finally realized that Shipton had left them very clear instructions. They went up the river, from the north side, and easily found the arch. The next goal was to measure it. Before the advent of sophisticated tools to measure something as weird as the elliptical arch, they eyeballed it. They climbed to the top and lowered a climber down, instructing him to measure the vast hole. He ran out of rope, more was lowered down to him. The wind picked up, as it does so frequently in this part of the world, and he began to swing, back and forth, like a pendulum. The team did as well as they could, but the measurements of the great Arch are still contested. Wikipedia declines to name Shipton’s Arch the highest arch in the world and ends with the note that it is about 1500 feet high and 180 feet wide. Because of its shape, it is extraordinarily difficult to be precise, but it is estimated that the Empire State Building would fit within the arch.

I made it to the viewing platform, where I lingered for about 45 minutes. The Chinese women, who passed me so easily on the way up, sang and danced with joy. My companions also made it and we sat on the wooden bench and marveled at the huge arch. I felt exhausted and out of shape, embarrassed that all the rest of my companions had so much energy. Later, I discovered that the arch is located at an altitude of 2,973 meters (9,754 ft). No wonder I huffed and puffed.

Although many other travelers have duplicated the trip I made, the arch has not lost grandeur. And though calling it Shipton’s Arch smacks of colonialism and Western arrogance, I am not sure that the Chinese term, Gate of Heaven, is any more evocative. Let’s let the Uyghur name, Tushuk Tash (Hole Mountain) have its day.

References:

Schmidt, Jeremy (Dec 2000), Journey to Shipton’s Lost Arch, National Geographic Magazine

Shipton, Diana, (1987), The Antique Land, Oxford University Press

Shipton, Eric, (1950), The Mountains of Tartary, Diadem Books

Wikipedia, Shipton’s Arch, last edited 18 December 2024

I never hesitate to ride a camel. Noble but irritating beasts, camels have captured the imagination and have become synonymous with the Silk Road. My map of Chinese Turkestan designates the Silk Road routes through the deserts and mountains with a tiny camel caravan logo. Fa-Hsien, Marco Polo and countless other travelers rode or accompanied camels through the desert wastes. The monumental statue that sits just outside the West Gate of Xi’an is a depiction of a camel caravan that denotes the beginning of the Silk Road in China. If one wanted to add a sound track, it would be of honking, grunting camels and the rhythmic clanging of their bells.

Since my first ride, I have never declined an opportunity to ride, however short a distance, on one of these impressive beasts. Although my first ride was on a Dromedary, my very last one was on a Bactrian. (Neophytes take note. The one-humped variety can be remembered by turning its capital letter, D, on its back; the two humped species, likewise, a B on its back has two humps.) Dromedaries are taller, more slender, have less hair, but are just as contrary. Riding a Bactrian camel is slightly easier as one takes her place between the humps and hangs on to the copious hair. Otherwise the mounting and riding are similar.

My last camel ride was in the Takla Makan Desert not far from Hotan, along the southern branch of the Silk Road. Three foreign ladies had agreed to take a one-night camping trip to the desert, to experience what a camel safari would be like. Our local Uyhgur guide, along with some local camel owners, arranged the trip. As we headed out into the dunes, we quickly lost sight of civilization as we lurched up and down the sand hills. We found a deep pit to build a fire and pitch our tents. The bed was hard, the food burnt or inadequate and the night short. A young man, who had come with the camel handler, had to round up the camels in the morning as they had been let loose to graze overnight. Packing went quickly and as my camel sat loaded, ready to go, I decided to get on without waiting for the camel boy. As soon as I had thrown my right leg up to get into the saddle, my camel lurched to its feet. I screamed as I watched my feet and legs arch over my head and screamed again as I hit the hard sand.

Becoming lost and close to death is a trope among explorers, but perhaps the best known story of situations like this is Sven Hedin’s ill-fated 1895 attempt to cross part of the Takla Makan. In late winter “I left Kashgar and began a journey which proved to be one of the most difficult I ever undertook in Asia.” (p.105) In Maralbashi, an old man “told me that when a traveler is lost in the desert, he hears voices calling his name, he becomes bewitched, follows the voices, and is lured deeper and deeper into the desert, only to expire from thirst.” (p.106). The small caravan set off with eight ‘splendid’ camels, all males, seven Bactrian and one Dromedary. He also hired some local men, one he called Yolchi, or guide. He had four iron tanks and six goatskins for water. In a fatal mistake, Hedin failed to recheck to see that the iron tanks were full as they left their last source of water. Yolchi swore it was only four days to the river. More than four days later, when it became apparent that water was becoming extraordinarily scarce and no river appeared in sight, Hedin again made a fateful decision to continue east towards the Hotan Daria instead of the more cautious choice of turning back.

Quotes from Hedin’s diary and from his books contain the harrowing account of running out of water, slogging through the desert, finally alone, all the others, including the camels, left behind. Night fell, and he felt sure that this was his last on earth. “Suddenly, I started, and stopped short. A water bird, a wild duck or goose, rose on whirring wings and I heard a splash. The next moment, I stood on the edge of a pool.” (p. 132) He drank deeply, then filled his waterproof boots and returned to his last fallen comrade. The guide, Yolchi, who had failed to completely fill the tanks and who had insisted the river was near, had disappeared with the one-humped camel. Eventually three of the four men who had accompanied Hedin survived, as well as one large white camel. Eventually, Hedin recovered his dairies, but most of his geological equipment had disappeared. He never again left a campsite without personally checking supplies, most critically, the water supply.

Owen Lattimore made a journey starting in 1926, that took him and his bride from Peking to Delhi, along old trading routes. In the first part of his journey, alone with a family servant, he joined a camel train. For two thousand years, trade had stretched from China to Europe through Chinese Turkestan along a series of trade routes dubbed much later, the Silk Road. Lattimore was motivated by adventure, but brought immense curiosity, language skills and patience to the year and a half long endeavor. The first part of his journey was chronicled in a book ‘The Desert Road to Turkestan’ in which he tells of his many adventures. The camel caravan became a moving village with diverse actors. The caravan was in fact a convoy, made up of an amalgam of traders, their servants and camels. Hundreds of camels stretched for miles and each night the unloading and the reverse in the morning could take hours. Camels made horrendous noises, fought with each other and their handlers and fouled the air with their stench. Being fluent in Chinese, both formal and informal (Lattimore could swear like a stevedore or a camel puller), he had insights into the way of camels, the caravan, the merchants and all those they met along the way, officials, bandits and locals.

In 1999, Alexandra Tolstoy, the great granddaughter of the famous Leo Tolstoy, with three of her girlfriends, made an impressive trip “to retrace this historic route on horse and camel” (p.3) from Merv in Turkmenistan to Xi’an, China. The first part of the journey was on horseback, but the group was met at the Chinese border, the Torugart Pass, with camels. “The dreaded moment came to mount the camels.” (p. 109) This first day left them stiff and sore and a conversation with a fellow traveler in Kashgar with a foreboding of the desert terrain ahead. “All desert, no trees, no bushes, no life…which turned out to be all too accurate.” (p. 111) After months on the road, the last section, with camels was fraught with boredom, screaming fits at the Chinese staff and a lot of walking. Their arrival in Xi’an was met with members of the press who insisted on photos with the girls on their camels. Their camel handlers found a permanent home for the camels outside of Xi’an. “It was very sad to see the camels being led away. Their long-lashed eyes looked more doleful than ever as they lumbered slowly off, obedient to the last.”(p. 209)

Part of this route had been followed by Charles Blackmore in 1993. A British army man, he had previously tried to recreate T.E. Lawrence’s trip around Jordan and present-day Israel. After this, not done with challenges, he was determined to cross the ‘Desert of Death’, the Takla Makan, from one end to the other. The main form of transportation was the camel, with back up by specialized trucks. In the fall, he traveled with a motley crew of local Uyghurs, Chinese ‘handlers’, thirty camels and a collection of foreign adventurers. In two months, they managed to cross the desert in heat, cold, wind, illness, and infighting, surrounded by the sheer cussedness of expeditions. Chapter One begins with the only death they experienced, the mercy killing of the largest of their camels, who had broken his neck the day before. They had had no water for the camels in three days, the desert temperatures were dropping and they were all tired and at the end of their reserves. It was at dawn and the camel had been tugged and dragged until its head faced Mecca. The oldest of the camel handlers was chosen. The sharpened knife cut, blood spurted, the old camel gasped and sighed. “I turned away with a heavy heart and contemplated the outline of the sand hills to the east. There was no obvious route through them, ugly and distorted, cruel and forbidding, they appeared to laugh over the death of our camel and deliberately mocked our challenge.” (p.5)

My ill-fated attempt to climb onto the camel ended in a series of comedies. There was a rescue by motorbike across the dunes, a childish whimpering ride to the city to find a hospital, a curse-laden series of errors in the hospital trying to find a doctor, and then the x-ray room. And then there was the final insult. The cigarette-smoking doctor wiped the ash off the x-ray as he gave it to me. “Nothing broken.” (But it still hurt.) I swore that my animal riding days had expired at the age of 69.

I will give the great explorer of Chinese Turkestan, Hedin, the last word. In his autobiography, written in 1925, long before he stopped his travels, he gives this eulogy to the camel. “Finally, I remember with sadness the faithful camels that without complaining carried us and our loads across the endless spaces, so many of which are lying forever on the long, weary road across the Gobi Desert.” (p. vii)

Sources:

Blackmore, Charles (2008) Conquering the Desert of Death, Taurus Parke Publications, London

Hedin, Sven (1932) Across the Gobi Desert, E.P. Dutton, New Yok and London

Hedin, Sven, (2003), My Life as an Explorer, National Geographic Classics, Washington D.C.

Lattimore, Charles (1995) The Desert Road to Turkestan, Kodansha International, New York

Tolstoy, Alexandra (2003) The Last Secrets of the Silk Road, Profile Books, London

Even before I ever made it to Turkestan, traveling in Tibet made me recognize the position of minorities in China. Although the founding principles of the People’s Republic was that it was made up of many equal nationalities, the reality is far, far different. Being of the Han nationality and speaking Mandarin comfortably puts a person in a higher status than those of other nationalities or language groups. This higher and lower status is replicated all over the world, by language, skin color, religion and ethnicity.

Why was I surprised at the treatment of Tibetans by the Han Chinese? Not only had the Chinese driven the Tibetan leader from his home and taken over the land, the day to day interactions between the obviously wealthier Han and poorer Tibetans was disturbing. I often heard harsh words directed at young Tibetan women by Han men, saw children shooed away from begging at restaurants and saw an older woman ejected from a seat on the bus. The Han man might have had a reserved seat, but the discourtesy shown made me angry.

When we arrived at the college we had signed on to teach at in the fall of 1987, we quickly learned the best street food was ‘minority’ food, shish kebab, cooked on open coal fires. The slices of meat were interspersed with fat pieces threaded on recycled bicycle spokes, and sprinkled with a delicate and distinctive mix of spices. Even now, almost forty years after I first tasted this spice mix, I can identity it as quintessentially the Uyghur shish kebab spice.

When I tried to tell my Han colleague that in America we have many ‘minority’ restaurants, including Chinese restaurants, he was unable to understand the joke. For him, food, fan (rice) had variety enough. It perhaps didn’t occur to him that food in other parts of the world could encompass Uyghur and Chinese food on an equal footing, as ‘minority’ cuisine.

But it was the stark reality in the classroom that made me remark in my diary on the status of minorities. Thirty percent of our agricultural college were minority students, six percent of the faculty. There were no minorities in my English classes. In Urumqi I met a foreigner staying next door in a hotel and fell into conversation. “She was in Turfan last week and visited two middle schools, one minority, the other Han. They taught Chinese as a foreign language in the minority school, English in the Han. An example of how the Chinese are controlling the minorities, keeping them from learning English, the gateway to other knowledge, going outside the country for further education, etc.” (Wed Sept 30, 1987)

This control of the population, or attempted control, was also noted by earlier travelers. Lady Macartney, the wife of the British consul in Kashgar in the early twentieth century, wrote of her many experiences. “Chinese Turkestan, as the name implies, belongs to China, and is governed by the Chinese. To them, the natives, or Turkis, are aliens, just as the Indians  are to us in India.” Later, she remarks on the philosophy of the Chinese and method of control of the locals. “…Keep the shepherds pleased, and never mind about the sheep, because they are dumb.” Her replacement at Chini Bagh, the consulate in Kashgar, was the sister of the new consul, Ella Sykes. She and her brother published a book in which they described their experiences. They said of the Chinese who they found there, “The province is a backwater of the Chinese Empire” in “which they looked upon as a land of temporary exile.” (In 1987, my students felt the same way. Even though they had been born in the province, they claimed origins in ‘China.’)

The last consul’s wife in Kashgar also wrote of her experiences. In 1946, Diana Shipton embarked on a two year stay in Kashgar. She understood that some of her duties were to entertain the local dignitaries. She suffered through boring officials’ parties, until she decided to give a ‘purdah party’ which the local Muslim women only would attend. “There was no stiff silence and restraint.” “Certainly, I was not impressed by the Turki women. Their main interests were entertainment and new clothes.” “Although I counted the ashtrays to see if any were missing, I enjoyed the unaffected hearty atmosphere of my purdah parties far more than the stiff embarrassed parties of men.” And she also noted her true enjoyment and affection for the locals’ way of life.

Nick Danzinger in 1986, described the influence of local groups and “…partly because of them, the modernizing influence of Urumqi still only goes skin deep.” He also quoted a government official in Urumqi who described the governance of more rural areas. “Under the Mao cap, there’s still a Muslim skullcap.”

One might ask why, in 2024, I choose the term Chinese Turkestan for this place. My answer is that, at heart, it is still Turkestan and the veneer of Chinese ‘rule’ is just that, a thin covering.

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.

But the idea is older than mankind. Animals explore, sniffing and padding and climbing and flying where they have no knowledge. This leads me to think that exploring is innate, part of animal and human make-up.

But surely, exploring for humans must be different than that for animals, which rely on instinct and training more than conscious cognition. Can we say that dogs dig under a fence to escape and explore their environments? It is more likely to be hunger or the age-old sex drive that motivate animals to break out and explore the world.

Humans are, in soul and spirit, animals. We ignore instinct and primal urges at our peril. To pretend we have no animal nature deprives us of the strong pull and push for basic survival. Some of us are willing to risk our lives for the thrill or pull of exploration, whereas others are more cautious. I do not think culture or upbringing has as much to do with the urge of exploration as those personality traits that exert influence towards striking out into the unknown.

I have often been struck by the bragging rights that some will go to say, “I was the first.” The desire to be the first seems to be a motivator that often overcomes the reality that one may be the first to perish on the selected exploration. Mountaineers, deep sea divers, and extreme sports enthusiasts say they acknowledge the dangers, but believe they will never become a casualty. Or if a friend or family member dies on the mountains or the trek, they can shrug and say, “He died doing what he wanted to do.”

In India once, I met a man who introduced himself as ‘Number Thirteen.’ He had been the thirteenth Indian to succeed in climbing Everest and this was forever to be his claim to fame. As he was a policeman, perhaps it helped him his career, or later as a businessman, he would sell more of whatever by advertising his product using his unique claim to notoriety. He survived where others perished, or perhaps worse, failed.

We can claim that bravado or lust for adventure is a young person’s mindset. But Shackleton was forty when he set out on his ill-fated attempt in Antarctica. Hadn’t he had enough adventure, and failures, in his life so far? Sven Hedin was dashing about the Takla Makan desert when he approached 70. And he often pushed himself and his companions, to risk their health and lives to make just one more bid, one more attempt, to cross just one more sand dune. He had made mistakes in his youth and often miscalculated as a mature man. But he ignored warnings and common sense to push on.

Why? Why do we risk, why do we search, why do we ignore warnings, why do we think we will succeed where others failed? Ida Pfeiffer said she needed money from her next book to live, so she pursued ever more exciting and dangerous adventures. The conquistadores in South America were motivated by greed, for gold or for favor from the king. Many had little to lose, but much to gain. The sailors who signed up to explore oceans beyond their knowledge or experience, most likely had little to lose. After all, we all die, eventually, and perhaps fate, or God, has it all planned out.

I am not sure I would call myself an explorer; I don’t think I have ever been ‘the first’ anywhere, but I am fascinated with those who have. I eagerly follow the news of those who bicycle, walk, fly and explore beyond their lives and knowledge. I may think they are crazy, but I eagerly await their stories and follow along their paths of exploration.

1. Very’s mother is deceased, but she appears often in this book. On page 3, Very deals with her mother’s chair, putting it away in the disused bedroom. Why did she act this way? On this day? Is there anger at her mother that is unresolved?

2. In Chapter Two, Very deals with the melancholy of the suitcase. How do we process disappointment, betrayal and loss? Very originally buried the suitcase and its contents, now (p. 8) she digs it up. Do you think Very reacts naturally?

3. Very expects to finally lay to rest the question of Frankie’s betrayal, but finds out that the body in the orchard is someone else (p. 60). How does she react? If there hadn’t been a ticket in the pocket to make Very believe it could be Frankie, would this revelation be different for her? How does this knowledge affect her and her subsequent actions? Is ignorance always bliss?

4. Very ‘disapproves of’ Darrell making notes in the book (p.74). He defends himself by saying that it is his book and he can make notes if he wants. Very is a librarian who must have a reverence for books. How does a professional view the tools of the trade? Would you make notes in a library book? Your own book? How does reading a book in an ebook format change the dynamics of notetaking?

5. Very has an explanation for her name that is well-rehearsed (p. 103). What is her relationship with her own name? Why? On page 158, there is the discussion of Cassandra’s name and the disappointment of a mother who chose a ‘big beautiful’ name for her daughter. How do we choose names for our children? How do we feel if they reject these gems?

6. Very meets a couple of Darrell’s colleagues (p. 186) and feels rejected as a potential member of their profession, but that they might accept her as a secretary. Although she is aware of the views of many in Bakersfield, she seems to shrug this off, both personally and professionally. Why doesn’t she want to fight back? Do you think there may be some history in her reactions?

7. Joey calls Very out for her revelation to Cassandra (p. 167). Very accepts the criticism, admitting her selfishness. Was this difficult for Very? Do we accept criticism easily? From whom?

8. On page 170, Joey hints that Very has a new man in her life. Is Joey being facetious, an inveterate matchmaker, or just nosy? What do you think Very feels about this supposed romance?

9. On page 172-3, Very has a revelation that she needs to do this investigation herself. What internal thoughts have brought this on? What are the consequences?

10. Very stands at the edge of the bluff looking down at the area where the homeless encampments are (p.203). She has been warned to ‘take someone’ with her, if she goes to find Curly below. But she goes alone. Why? What are the consequences? Have you ever done something similar?

11. In the end, Very still does not know where Frankie Monroe is or what may have happened to him. Are you unsatisfied with this ending? Are you angry with the author for not telling you? Or are you willing to wait until the next installment? What is the role of the author in ‘wrapping it all up’ as opposed to leave open ends?