In Xanadu (45 page)

BOOK: In Xanadu

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Madam Curd was not our only morning visitor, though she was invariably our earliest. Hot on her heels, usually around nine, there would come a further invasion, this time of the moneychangers. Historically, Uigurs have always been the usurers of the East, and during the golden age of the Tang they had a monopoly on moneylending at Ch'ang-an, the great eastern terminus of the Silk Road. The moneychanging of the Uigurs today is a less glamorous affair. Its object is to buy FECs (Foreign Exchange Certificates), the Mickey-Mouse money given to foreigners entering China, and to exchange it for normal Chinese currency. The foreigner ends up with a large quantity of Chinese money while the Uigur gets some FECs with which he can buy luxury Western items on the black market. Because the transaction benefits both parties the moneychangers assume that Europeans are longing to enter into negotiations at any time of the day, and the earlier the better. They charge into hotel rooms without knocking and comer the occupant, scribbling offers on dirty scraps of paper. Whether or not the foreigner is enthusiastic about the invasion (ami at nine in the morning he is generally unenthusiastic) the moneychangers tend to regard themselves as honoured guests and assume an open invitation to sit down and sort through the foreigner's rucksack. Sony Walkmen, picture books, brightly coloured pills and digital watches will all be brought out and offered in exchange for flat caps, bowls of yoghurt, Mao suits and pieces of fruit. Other moneychangers take the opportunity to practise their English. One man sat on my bed for an hour and a half reciting a curious litany presumably learned from an eccentric English textbook: 'I have a dog; Mr Brown has an umbrella; I have a dog...

We had one other visitor, although he rarely appeared before mid-afternoon. Mick was a tall, languid hippy with a spindly body and a baffled expression. He had long locks which were held in place by a headband. He played early Bob Dylan songs on an old guitar and nursed an enormous lump of hashish the shape of a loaf of Hovis. It lived on a breadboard on the desk in his room, and when he came to visit us he would carve off a sliver and bring it through. He smoked reefers the size of Havana cigars. Occasionally he would speak.

'Kashgar is... amazing,' he said one afternoon. We were sitting on the flat roof of the consulate. Below you could see the red headscarves of the women gleaning the fields by the river. Mick had his guitar with him and while he talked he strummed a few chords. Then he put down the guitar and relit an old joint.

'In Rishikesh in the old days we used to smoke a lot to help us reach
...
to help us meditate. Now I just smoke.' 'You don't believe in meditation anymore?' 'Hare Krishna and all that crap?'

'It's not crap. Edward was into Hare Krishna after he left Winchester.' 'Who's Edward?' 'My boyfriend.' 'What about fatso here?'

'We're just friends,' said Louisa. 'But you were saying?' 'What was I saying?' 'You were saying about Hare Krishna.' Oh yeah,' said Mick. 'Hare Krishna . . . Cosmic Consciousness: bunch of transcendental bullshit, in my opinion.'

One afternoon Mick summoned up the energy to take us on a tour of Kashgar. He said he knew the least spoilt quarters of the town. He had travelled to Asia in the great days of over-landing in the late Sixties, and had lived for a year in an ashram on the Ganges. Then he moved to Kabul with his girlfriend Lynn. She had taught English, he had written poetry, (stream-of-consciousness stuff. Basically about makin' love'). They had got out in
'79,
before the invasion, and moved to Goa. Goa was amazing too. But they had been thrown out when the Indian Government started refusing residents' permits in 1985, and Mick had been in Chini Bagh ever since.

We followed Mick into the old town below Chini Bagh. He lolloped along leading us deeper into a maze of side alleys. Here the houses had latticed windows, and inside you could see rooms dimly lit by flickering oil lamps. In some streets he took us into tiny mosques hidden behind mud-brick walls. The
mihrab
were whitewashed and the roofs were supported by wooden pillars with stalactite capitals. We came across street acrobats, a dancing bear, some magicians and a mullah in tiding boots, jodhpurs and frock coat. We passed barbers who shaved the beards and the heads of their customers, and tribal doctors who examined their patients' palms and prescribed shaman remedies: bats wings and powdered antler. But most intriguing of all were the noodle makers. Never for a moment did I imagine the skill involved in making normal, everyday Chinese noodles. A lump of dough was rolled, squeezed and bounced on a table top until it was soft, oozy and supple. Then the noodle maker rolled it out into a long sausage. He held it up and pulled and twisted it into a plaited pigtail. He brought the two ends together and repeated the process. Slowly the sausage grew in length. It was subjected to further ordeals of rolling, slapping and dismembering until it became thin and thread-like. Then, in a final show of dexterity, the threads were tortured into a cat's cradle and dropped neatly into a cauldron of boiling water. It was a fascinating sight and we watched hypnotized.

I left the others near the town centre and went to sit in the Id Gah mosque. You enter through a great domed portal and immediately the Peace of Islam is upon you. The Id Gah is the largest mosque in China and has room for eight thousand worshippers. It was partially burned down in the Cultural Revolution but has since been renovated; it now looks a little gaudy with its bright yellow-ochre brick. The facade follows the standard Persian model: an arcade of arches flanked by two pepperpoi minarets, centring on the great
ivan.
But inside, lying the far side of a grove of lime trees, the architecture breaks away from the orthodox. The main prayer area
is
not a basilica but an open-fronted pavilion in the manner of the Chihil Sutan in Isfahan. Raised on a platform, a forest of octagonal wooden pillars supports a flat, gabled roof and gives onto a prayer wall lined with niches. The facade projects in the centre which serves to emphasize the tile-covered central mihrab. The arrangement is ingenious and extremely beautiful. When the
muezzin
called for evening prayers and the Uigurs trooped in from the bazaar and lined up in between the trees and the pillars, the effect was like holding a prayer meeting in a pavilioned pleasure garden.

I spent an idle evening in the Id Gah pretending to work. After the prayers a young Uigur came up and watched me writing. He was wearing a faded blue Mao jacket and a green embroidered skullcap. I was about to write some nonsense about old and new in perfect harmony, when the boy began speaking to me in fluent if idiosyncratic English.

'You like Islam?'

'I like many Muslims,' I replied.

'I am a Muslim,' he said. 'An educated Muslim.'

Salindi told me that he was a student at Urumchi University. There Islam was discouraged, as was the Uigur language. All teach ing was in Mandarin, and the Uigur students were taught to despise their tongue and their Islamic culture. Many of his friends had dropped their faith and he now found himself in a difficult position. He was over-educated for the taste of most Muslims, but considered old-fashioned and backward by his contemporaries at university. Recently he had applied for permission to go on
Hajji,
and had been refused. No one between the ages of ten and sixty was allowed to leave the country.

Mecca is so beautiful.' he told me. 'I have seen pictures. The buildings .
..
the crowds.. ..'

I told him I would like to see it too, but was also unable to get permission. No non-Muslim was allowed into the Holy City.

'Do you believe?' he asked.

‘Yes. I think I do.'

‘In Allah?'

‘In the Christian God. It probably comes to much the same thing in the end.' His face darkened. 'No. I do not think so.' 'What do you mean?'

'If the Christian God were as mighty as Allah the West would not be like it is. In Europe you have no morals.' 'How do you know what the West is like?' He blushed. 'I have seen James Bond films.' 'Here?'

'Yes. We now get many European films in Sinkiang. Also books.'

"What sort of books do you get?'

'I am reading a book about Britain at the moment. Would you like to see it?'

I followed him to the gatehouse where he had left his bag. The book was an English language textbook entitled
A Survey
of Great Britain,
written by a certain Zhang Guo Yung and examined and approved by Huang Hong Xu. It turned out to be a remarkable work. Its findings included the following: the five biggest mass organizations in the country are the TUC, the CBI, the NUS, CND and the Society of Anglo-Chinese Understanding. To send a boy to public school costs 'very much -about £90'. The Conservative and Labour parties both represent the landowning and capitalist class and the only difference between them is that 'the Labour Party likes to argue about theories, for example the theory of Socialism, but the Conservatives do not'. As for newspapers: 'The
Guardian
has made progress among intelligent people', while the
News of the World
'specializes in court cases'. London meanwhile is a city beset by pollution problems. These are due, so it says, to a combination of marsh mists sweeping in from the east and the 'citizen's love of open smoke fires', the combination of which means that the Londoner can seldom see a yard in front of him.