The Emperor Far Away (11 page)

Neighbouring countries like Kazakhstan are resource-rich too, but also extremely corrupt, so that little money trickles down from the government to the people. Majid brushed that fact aside, as easily as he pocketed balls. ‘Maybe, but we’d still rather be like them,’ he said. ‘You know why Uighurs are jealous of the ethnic Kazakhs and the Kyrgyz and even the Tajiks? It’s because if they have a problem here, they can always go to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan. We don’t have that option. If there was a Uighurstan, none of us would be here.’

7

Uighurstan

Talking to Majid reinforced how frustrating it must be not to have a homeland, while living alongside people with their own countries next door. It had been easier for the Uighurs before 1991 and the break-up of the USSR, when central Asia was still subsumed within the Soviet empire. Now, there are five ’stans, three of which border Xinjiang, and they are a permanent reminder to the Uighurs of what they lack the most.

The closest thing to a Uighurstan lies in the far south of Xinjiang, where the former oases of the southern Silk Road are strung along the edge of the Taklamakan in a long slow curve. Those towns are the Uighur heartland, the places with the fewest Chinese migrants. Exploring them would be my long goodbye to Xinjiang, as I travelled back towards Han China along a route dating back thousands of years.

I spent a disappointing time in Yarkand, searching vainly for an echo of the trade terminus it once was. Most of the city’s historic buildings were knocked down in the 1960s and 1970s during the Cultural Revolution, with even the so-called old town no more than a cluster of rebuilt alleys. Only the Altun Mosque, a smaller version of the Id Kah in Kashgar, and the mausoleums of Yarkand royalty survived the Red Guards’ fury. They sat in a square, overlooked by restaurants and carpet shops.

Yarkand was important not just as a Silk Road stop, but because it is where Xinjiang starts to bleed into India and Tibet. Until 1949, when the Chinese closed the border with India which lies some 300 kilometres south of Yarkand, caravans of Buddhist traders from Leh in Ladakh were regular visitors, along with Hindu merchants. Now much of what was formerly north-east Ladakh is a disputed no man’s land, occupied by China but claimed by India as part of its territory.

Known as Aksai Chin, it is a region where high-altitude desert, saltwater lakes and untouched peaks combine in a landscape that could be a science-fiction writer’s dream of a far-off planet. Barely inhabited, save for PLA soldiers, and barred to foreigners, Aksai Chin can be reached only via Highway 219, which snakes south from Xinjiang for almost 2,100 kilometres, across passes as high as 5,400 metres, before it reaches Lhatse in Tibet.

The construction of 219 caused a war. The Chinese started building a road linking Xinjiang with Tibet in the early 1950s. Only after it had been completed in 1957 did New Delhi discover it passed through Aksai Chin, which India regards as belonging to its state of Jammu and Kashmir. The tensions that arose out of 219 running through contested territory played a major part in setting off the 1962 Sino-Indian War.

Soon after leaving Yarkand, I passed the turn-off for 219. My road south to Hotan was not nearly as rugged as that highway, but all around me was the unnerving country that makes up southern Xinjiang. The few villages here are merely tolerated by the desert, which in turn is watched over by brutal, elemental rock formations. Through the dust-caked right-hand window of the bus, the Kunlun Mountains, which form a natural barrier between Xinjiang and Tibet, were barely visible in the far distance. But the Taklamakan was everywhere, a vast sand sea stretching away towards each compass point.

A stiff wind picked up grains of sand, lifting them over the new railway line, linking Kashgar to Hotan, which runs alongside the highway, and blowing them across the road in steady waves. Skinny poplar trees, ubiquitous to every oasis in southern Xinjiang, rose ahead at infrequent intervals to indicate we were approaching a small settlement, the only relief from the harshness of the land surrounding us until the outskirts of Hotan appeared.

Hotan will never be the spiritual home of the Uighurs; that honour is Kashgar’s alone. There is no equivalent of the Id Kah Mosque, or of Kashgar’s vanishing old town. Yet Hotan has a far better claim to be the capital of Xinjiang than either Kashgar or Urumqi, because its population is still overwhelmingly Uighur. The railway’s arrival will inevitably change that, but for now the Han remain a tiny minority. Their smooth pale faces are an anomaly in a city where men flout the CCP’s ‘no beards’ policy and many women shield their faces from view.

Far fewer people understood Mandarin in Hotan than anywhere else I’d been in Xinjiang. It made getting around difficult, as not only did the taxi drivers fail to understand what I was saying, but they couldn’t read an address either. Most ignored or didn’t know the Chinese names given to the streets anyway. They navigated around the city via landmarks like the Juma Mosque and the nearby main market, which spilled out of its allocated space in the north-east of town on to the surrounding streets.

Every inch of the pavements around the bazaar was occupied by someone selling something. Piles of vegetables and fruit, clothes hurled on to carts which the women customers stood three deep in front of as they rooted through them, and everywhere mobile food stalls. There were giant vats of
polo
, baby chickens turning slowly brown in primitive rotisseries, kebabs and lamb on the bone, as well as the sticky walnut cake beloved by the sweet-toothed Uighurs.

If food determines a city’s status, then Hotan is the heart of Uighurstan, the undisputed culinary capital of Xinjiang. Much of what is on the menu is unique to the south, like the
gosh kurdah
, a big pastry filled with lamb and potato reminiscent of a Cornish pasty. Best of all are the rough hunks of lamb cooked slowly on a hook in a
tonur
, so the flesh comes apart with a gentle pull of the fingers. Served with a fresh
naan
embedded with thin strips of red onion, they combine to create a delicious and unexpected local version of a roast-lamb sandwich.

On Sundays, the residents of Hotan and the surrounding area gravitate to the market as if they are being summoned to the mosque. Early in the morning, the roads leading to it are a mêlée of motorbikes carrying whole families, donkey carts and the three-wheeled electric vehicles with rug-covered benches in the back that serve as buses in the outlying villages. By the afternoon, such is the press of people packed tightly together in the bazaar’s alleys that moving in any direction becomes a struggle.

What is on offer gives a clue to Uighur life in southern Xinjiang. Tools, used washing machines and spare parts for carts and bikes mingle with butchers’ stalls where sheep dangle from hooks. Luxury items like silk and gold jewellery are sold from hole-in-the-wall shops. Medicine men stand on the back of their carts, armed with a microphone, extolling the virtues of herbal cures and ageing pharmaceutical products.

There are none of the tour groups, either Chinese or western, which have turned the Sunday market in Kashgar into a mere attraction. Instead, the white skullcaps worn by devout Muslims bobbed along in front of me as I inched through the crowds. They were more numerous than the
doppa
, a hat which indicates Uighur identity rather than faith in Islam. Most of the women were covered up in both the bright colours I’d seen elsewhere in Xinjiang and the more fundamentalist all-black. When the call to prayer wailed out from the nearby Juma Mosque, everyone dropped to their knees and turned west towards Mecca.

Unlike deracinated Kashgar, daily life in Hotan recalled the Xinjiang I experienced in 1988. The Han have only a toehold here, and I was elated by that after seeing the Uighurs shunted to the fringes of their traditional capital. I strolled around town with a smile on my face, stroking my moustache like a pantomime villain and gorging myself on street food at every opportunity.

Of course, I was dreaming. The new railway line alone is evidence of Beijing’s vision of a Hotan that will be far less Uighur-dominated. One afternoon, I was snapped out of my reverie as I returned from a trip to the country. On the eastern outskirts of Hotan, close to the Jade Dragon River, my taxi became snarled up in a chaotic traffic jam. Cars were pointing in opposite directions on the same side of the road and backed up all the way to the other side of the river.

Ahead, police prevented anyone moving. We sat immobile for an hour until the first of a convoy of more than fifty PLA vehicles appeared. The soldiers wore steel helmets and stared out at us from the back of the trucks with expressionless faces. Their officers gestured and shouted at anyone who came too close. We were being held up to let them pass, and the Uighurs waited in silence as what looked more like an occupying force than the people’s army went by.

I realised then that Hotan isn’t just the unofficial capital of Uighurstan; it is the current front line in Beijing’s battle to subjugate all Xinjiang. Not long after my visit, eighteen people died when the police station close to the bazaar was stormed by a group of Uighurs armed with petrol bombs and knives. They tore down the Chinese flag and raised a black one with a red crescent on it, before being killed or taken prisoner.

Uighurs said the attack was prompted by the city government trying to stop women from wearing all-black robes and especially veils, an ongoing campaign by the Chinese across all Xinjiang. They claimed, too, that men were being forced to shave their beards. The Xinjiang government said the assault was an act of terrorism and that the attackers had called for a jihad. But no evidence was produced to demonstrate any tangible link between Uighur nationalists and the militant Islamic groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan and central Asia.

Beijing, though, reveals little substantive information about the separatist groups it claims are operating in Xinjiang. Over the years, their names have mutated – the East Turkestan Islamic Organisation, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, the Turkestan Islamic Party – as if their very existence is in question. Every so often, the Chinese media run a report saying a remote training camp has been overrun, or weapons confiscated. But no proof is ever offered of those raids, no captured rifles displayed.

Undoubtedly, there are Uighurs fighting for independence with bombs and guns and some have received guerrilla training in Pakistan or Uzbekistan. Yet their numbers are tiny. Nor have the restrictions imposed by the CCP on the Uighurs’ practice of their faith spurred a rush to embrace radical Islam. Many are now more determined to demonstrate their loyalty to their religion. But growing a beard or wearing a veil is hardly akin to the extremist beliefs which provide Al-Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups with their motivation.

Going in search of the source of the Uighurs’ religious identity took me further into the desert than I’d ever been before. After Hotan, there are no more cities. From here on, southern Xinjiang is a collection of tiny towns clinging to the edge of the Taklamakan and populated overwhelmingly by Uighur farmers. Niya was the first of them, a dusty one-camel settlement whose inhabitants are so sleepy not even the presence of a foreigner arouses much excitement.

Ninety kilometres north of Niya is Mazar Iman Jafar Sadiq, the holiest shrine in all Xinjiang, the Mecca of East Turkestan. Isolated out in the desert, far from the corrupting power of civilisation, it was a Buddhist pilgrimage site long before the Uighurs converted to Islam. Like Glastonbury in Britain, it straddles the ley lines and transmits a mystical charge, one that transcends mere religions.

No buses travel there so I asked Mahmut, a local Uighur, to drive me. Just outside town, we ran into a checkpoint. I was told I needed police permission to visit the shrine. We reversed down the road and Mahmut made a couple of calls. ‘You can pay 300 yuan for the police permit, or give me an extra fifty and I’ll go round the checkpoint,’ he said. I chose to line Mahmut’s pocket rather than those of the local authorities.

Jolting down a dirt track brought us into a field running parallel with the road we had been turned back from. After crawling through giant ruts of mud, Mahmut spun the steering wheel left and we regained the road with the checkpoint out of sight behind us. For the next few kilometres, we both kept checking the mirror to see if our unauthorised manoeuvre had been spotted.

Not far on, we joined the Tarim Desert Highway, which runs through the middle of the Taklamakan, linking the north of Xinjiang with the south. It was built in 1995, to ease access to the oil that lies beneath the sand all around here, as well as to enable the PLA to move swiftly south in the event of a Uighur uprising. A smooth two-lane road, it is flanked by reeds and scrub bushes, planted in an effort to stop the desert encroaching. Beyond them, sand dunes rose up in the distance till they seemed to touch the few clouds floating in the blue sky.

The Taklamakan has been described as the worst desert on earth, home just to the ruins of a few scattered cities that were once the capitals of long-forgotten mini-states populated by the Uighurs’ forebears. They crumbled back into the sand when the rivers which flowed into the region started to retreat towards their sources in the Kunlun Mountains. Even here, on a modern highway still close to Niya, there were no people or animals to break the monotony of the endless dunes.

Only a few oases exist in the desert proper and we arrived in one of them soon after turning off the highway. Kapakaskan is a farming village surrounded by irrigation channels, its mudbrick houses dotted along a poplar-lined road that leads to Mazar Imam Jafar Sadiq. A makeshift barrier blocked our way and we went in search of the shrine’s gatekeeper. He was a fiftysomething farmer with a
doppa
on his head, short and unshaven and slow in his movements and speech.