Khotan is the last of the great Uighur towns, solitary on the desert’s edge in
a vast, intricately watered oasis. Now that the railway has reached its
sister-city, Kashgar, and the Chinese are pouring in, Khotan has become the
stronghold and retreat of Uighur purity. As you approach it, and a pale sun
comes out, the poplars line the road ten deep against the sand. Here and
there, among the mud-built suburbs, a grander house shades its courtyard
with a wooden portico, and mosques with slim-towered gates and crenellated
walls stand in the orchards.
In the town centre, the broad Chinese streets soon taper away, and the world
belongs to farmers and traders, to women glittering in gold-threaded silk,
to gangs of half-employed youths, and cart-drivers with roses behind their
ears. Long two-tiered arcades totter above the bazaars, their bright paint
fading.
Yet Khotan was once a kingdom. More than 2,000 years ago, after it was settled
from northwest India, it grew into a luxuriant and sophisticated city-state,
famous for its silks, jade and paper. Its citizens were connoisseurs of
dance and music, elaborately courteous, and cunning. Chinese travellers
wrote with astonishment how they greeted each other by touching one knee to
the ground, and whenever they received a letter would hold it to their
forehead in respect. Their women wore girdles and trousers and rode horses
like the men; and an unveiled openness, with rumours of promiscuity, touches
them still.
This sensuous and tolerant city was a Buddhist paradise. The monk Xuanzang in
the seventh century described its oasis gleaming with scores of monasteries,
and rife with miracle. Hermits radiated light from its forests, and statues
of the Buddha flew magically by night. In the clefts of the Kun Lun
mountains, holy men meditated so intensely that they turned almost to
corpses; but their hair kept growing, and they were shaved by visiting
shamans.
I found the site of all this ardour and ceremony far from the modern city,
deep in the oasis, deserted. Only a huge, shallow depression marked its
confines, where nothing was left. A morning mist drifted over the
rice-fields above it, stilling the mud-banks and water-channels in a soft,
unreal light, while all around the horizon was closed by an amphitheatre of
poplar trees, as if in memorial. Swarms of tiny frogs teemed at the pool
edges. The distance echoed with cuckoos. Here and there some shards of brown
pottery had been eased up by the flowing water, and lingered in its runnels.
Only hardy fragments survived: pottery seals and figurines, and the thousands
of flakes of leaf-gold which had covered palaces and temples. But these
leftovers were startling in their diversity: engraved wind-deities and
sun-chariots, griffins and coins bearing Indian symbols on one side, Chinese
on the other. Hellenised Buddhist statues mingled with signs of Nestorian
Christianity and Zoroaster. Mustachioed Indian heads were washed up
alongside Roman intaglios. Strangest, perhaps, were the hordes of lewd
little terracotta monkeys — real monkeys were unknown here — which mimicked
human activity in all its domestic variety.
But now this strained and sifted earth was at last at peace. The mist never
lifted, but hung as if painted, over a painted desolation. It was impossible
to tell the limits of the city. But somewhere under my feet, in a 14-day
ceremony, monastic floats like rolling temples had once carried their carved
Buddhas and devas suspended in gold and silver, and the king and his women
had emerged barefoot from the city gate to meet them, and prostrated
themselves, and strewed the earth with flowers.
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Perhaps it was the city’s disappearance, mulched by the oasis waters, which
turned my mind to the preserving desert. But I knew that, a day’s march into
the sands, a lonely relic of the kingdom had survived: a great Buddhist
stupa discovered by Aurel Stein over a century ago. I found a jobless guide
who had once been there, a Uighur woman who knew where to hire a Land Rover
and camels. Gul had once been handsome, and even now, in middle age, her
eyes glittered vivid under strong brows, and she dressed for the desert as
if for a party.
For an hour we drove over grasslands, until we came to brushwood shelters
disintegrating round a well. No one was in sight. A misted sun lit up the
desert beyond. Then, from far away, out of the scrub-speckled dunes, a
herdsman came driving camels — huge, moulted beasts — and an hour later we
were swaying through the May heat into a purer wilderness. Ahead of me the
camel-driver rode in silence, and Gul, under a white sunhat sashed in
muslin, her skirts overlapping leather boots, sat her beast delicately and
fanned herself with a lilac handkerchief.
Around us was utter silence. The camels’ plate-like feet went noiseless over
the sand. Only the saddle-packs beneath us creaked in uneasy rhythm with
their stride. All about us the dunes were scored with concentric ripples and
flowed together in a sculptural peace. But here and there, where water lay
deep underground, a red willow blew, or a tamarisk tree sent up a tangle of
startling green, clotted by hawks’ nests, and over the lifeless-seeming
sands a snake or lizard had left its feathery track. Into this wilderness
the camels pushed easily, as if padding back into prehistory.
Suddenly the camel-driver pointed — “Rawak!” — and we all squinted into the
glare. A mile away, perhaps, paler than the pale sands around it, a building
shone in isolation. The tributary that nourished it had long ago gone
underground, and its oasis disappeared, leaving this champagne-coloured
sanctuary to disrupt the desert with its tiers of etiolated brick. Even in
decay, it was gracefully simple: a circular shrine mounted on a star-shaped
base, ascended on four sides by tapering stairways.
As we drew close, a broken drum rose from the debris of its terraces, its
cupola crashed in, and the rectangle of an enclosing rampart undulated over
the sand. We passed the brushwood hut of its watchman, who had gone, and our
camels slumped to their knees.
We walked through the walls by a vanished gate. The whole enceinte was
half-drowned under the dunes, which overflowed the ramparts or poured
through their breaches. Above me the stupa too was blurred by coagulated
sand, and its stairways crumbled; but its upper tiers shook clear in
bulwarks of creamy brick, and pushed their bright, domeless cylinder into
the sky.
It was along the half-buried courtyard, in 1901, that Stein uncovered more
than 90 giant statues. In this stoneless land they had been moulded of
stucco around wooden frames: Buddhas and Bodhisattvas looming over life-size
from the walls, their heavy heads — many had fallen — gazing downward
through sleepy, almond eyes. The drip of their robes, moulded to the bodies’
contours, betrayed the Greek heritage that had emanated out from the upper
Indus, conquered by Alexander 600 years before.
But the wood inside them had rotted away; they were thinned to shells,
impossible to transport. Reluctantly Stein covered them over again — it was
eerily like a human burial, he wrote — but within a few years they had been
disinterred and smashed by Chinese jade-diggers, seeking treasure. Since
then the dunes had shifted and re-formed, burying whatever artefacts
remained.
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As I scrambled beneath the northeast wall, where traces of a parapet eased
clear, I glimpsed patches of the white-painted stucco which had once coated
the whole shrine; and here against the smoothed rampart I uncovered, with
trembling hands, the gutted torso of a statue. Gul and the herdsman were
resting near the camels, and nobody shared with me this furtive violation.
The figure was startlingly vulnerable. The sand fell from it at my touch,
and I saw that its head had gone. It was a curved and fluted husk, in red
clay, painted pale pink. I could feel with my fingers the rough descent of
its lower robes under the dune’s surface. Then I covered it up again, and
heaped sand even over my footprints. The day had cooled. A wind was droning
in the stupa’s crevices, and the desert now shimmering with a veil of
floating sand.
When I returned to Gul, she was anxious to start back. The camels were busy
chewing the thatch from the watchman’s hut. Their prehistoric heads on bald
necks, and their long double-eyelashes, proof against sandstorms, gave them
the look of seductive reptiles. As we mounted, they stooped forward with
odd, whimpering honks, then lurched angrily to their feet. Their poorly
trussed packs slithered askew and first the herdsman then Gul were thrown to
the ground. For a minute Gul lay doubled up, groaning. I clambered down and
stood uncertainly above her. Something soft landed on my shoulder — a gob of
green cud spat by her camel — as I bent down to hold her. She breathed, “I’m
all right, I’m all right.” She was not hurt, but frightened. And the next
moment she had shaken herself free of the sand, ashamed, and was upbraiding
the camel.
Gingerly, after tightening girths, we started home through the weakening
sunlight, following our own tracks. Behind us the stupa glimmered back into
the desert, as if we had imagined it. An hour later the sun had set, and
some suffocated stars came out. The wind sharpened and stirred the sand
along the dune-crests, and by the time we had returned, all traces of our
coming were smoothed away.
Need to know
Extracted from Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron, published by
Chatto & Windus at £20. To buy it for the reduced price of £18, with
free p&p in the UK, call The Sunday Times Books First on 0870 165 8585
Travel details: this off-the-beaten-track region of China is
best tackled using the expertise of a specialist tour operator, such as
Steppes East (01285 880980, www.steppestravel.co.uk), which offers a 10-day
trip, visiting Bishkek, Kashgar, the Turpan Depression, Jiayuguan and Xian,
from £2,630pp. Or try CTS Horizons (020 7836 9911, www.ctshorizons.com),
Audley Travel (01869 276217, www.audleytravel.com), or Silk Road and Beyond
(020 7371 3131, www.silkroadandbeyond.co.uk).
Hear the great writer himself read the extended version of this
extract in the second in our series of Thubron podcasts
