Shadow of the Silk Road (7 page)

Then the shadow-waves of mountains came pouring to the plain. Our road twisted into green foothills. The air was limpid, as if after rain. China had become beautiful. As we entered the Pass to the West, imagined exiles and merchants rode past us the other way. Suddenly Peter said: ‘There’s Da Qin!’

The pagoda was leaning against the mountain mists. Wheat-sown hills curved in green terraces around it, and poplars made faint brush-strokes in the valleys. It was utterly still: a willow-pattern dream of rural China. This pagoda was all that was left, Peter said. Its seven creamy tiers, their roofs limned with grass, tapered to a ribbed pinnacle. It kept a lonely grace. Thirteen centuries had pushed it aslant to the wind.

But as we drew near, it loomed into harder focus. What had appeared frail in the hills’ spaces was in fact formidably solid and ninety foot high. It dwarfed everything beneath it: a rustic shrine, two farmhouses. A lone survivor from the Tang–a monastery library, perhaps–it betrayed some once-opulent community.

I wandered the rutted ground beneath it for a long time. A Buddhist monk and nun had guarded the place for years. Now she lay under its earth–her tombstone put her age at 116–while he tended her grave, but had gone mad. But if Da Qin had been Buddhist, Peter said, its temples would have probably aligned north–south, whereas this plateau ran east–west. It was covered by a weft of yellow flowers shifting with black butterflies; there was an orchard of kiwi fruit, and the monk had planted some garlic. East of the pagoda, perhaps, the Nestorian dead had awaited in their graves Christ’s coming from the sunrise. On its other side, the church may have lain. But even the excavator’s spade might unearth no conclusion. Long after Christianity was suppressed in 845, Buddhists had spread their own temple here. In 1556 an earthquake had emptied the site of its last inhabitants. Now a caretaker kept the few fragments come to light: some clay tracery painted chrome green; a torn stone wing.

The doors of the pagoda were blocked. Earthquake and repair alike had sealed it. The corn-coloured plaster was flaking off its
brick. But someone stretched a huge ladder against one wall for me, reaching to the third storey, and on this I climbed shakily in. Through the window’s tunnel, its stone smooth and dry under my hands, I crawled into a high chamber. The light faded away. Pigeons were moaning somewhere. In front of me, against the walls’ angle and startlingly pale in the semi-darkness, a ten-foot-high plaster statue was splashed against the brick. In a double mandorla of foliage and mountains, its figure had been reduced to a pair of mysteriously reclining legs. Where the plaster had been torn away, wisps of straw still showed in the clay, and a wooden peg jutted empty. The upper body had left no outline there. Only the legs–an outstretched calf and a bent knee–rested in formal eloquence. They were dressed in wide trousers caught up under the knee in the Persian fashion, and the hem of a short tunic survived above.

Who this figure was–overarched by a froth of Taoist hills–was still unknown. The Sinologist believes it is the Virgin Mary, reclining in Byzantine posture beside her Child. You may even imagine the shadow of a draped arm in the plaster, holding something. Or perhaps it is the Buddhist saviour Guanyin, lounging in this pose named ‘royal ease’, resting her right arm before her in consolation. Or perhaps it is neither.

Peter had crept in beside me, and we clambered by wooden stairs to upper storeys. On the floor above, a surge of sculptured plaster enshrined a figure in repose, more ruined than the other. Higher again, around the topmost tier, a dense cloud of pollen floated in the still air. In one window the Qinling mountains rose, and birdsong sounded; in another, wedged on its own tree-clouded hill, was the Taoist monastery of Lou Guan Tai which had ushered in this region’s holiness.

In the years of tolerance, I imagined, the Taoists must have gazed across at the Christians, mystified. The Nestorians, it seems, never adapted to Chinese taste the death and resurrection of their complicated god. But they shared with Taoism a belief in the innate purity of the soul. They were egalitarian and rather ascetic, vegetarian, refusing slaves. Every dawn they gathered to the clang of their wooden semantra, and periodically indulged in their
mysterious Eucharist: for ‘every seven days we have an audience with heaven’.

Peter found Christianity deeply alien, he said, although he worked for the Christian Sinologist. Crouched beside me in the topmost window, he wondered at its miracle-laden history and theological maze. Sometimes the lines of his forehead gathered between his eyes in a questing knot, and he took on an eager student’s concentration. This was the weapon he kept sharp: the mind which had bettered him. ‘My mother was a Buddhist,’ he said, ‘but my father was an official in our village. He was always a little cool, a little sceptical.’ He touched his chest. ‘Like me.’

But he pointed out to me, on three separate bricks, a trace of spidery writing, still untranslated. It was raised in the surface–a mason’s mark, perhaps–and might have been a name in broken Syriac, the liturgical language of the Church of the East. In time, I thought, this web-like clue might unravel the whole pagoda. Peter would not guess who had inscribed it. It had simply been left behind: a tiny, teasing signature.

In 845 Nestorianism was banished from China. As its lifeline to Persia shrank, it contracted westward along the Silk Road, fortifying itself in the oases of the Taklamakan desert, and proselytising the Mongols. By the thirteenth century, in the reign of Kublai Khan, it revived once more, only to dwindle away with the collapse of his dynasty. Centuries later Jesuit missionaries found in China a few estranged people who unthinkingly made the sign of the cross over their meals.

You climb a cobbled way under trees shaking with cicadas. It is almost dark. Nothing tells you that you are entering the Vatican of a once great faith. Behind you the Da Qin pagoda has returned to its lonely frailty against the mountains. In front is the Taoist sanctuary of Lou Guan Tai, which the parvenu Tang emperors, whose blood was more barbarian than Chinese, adopted as their ancestral shrine, covering the surrounding hills with chapels.

Soon you are lost among its courts and altars. Worn steps climb and descend through circular moon-gates to grey-walled terraces. The air is awash with incense. There is a whiff of dereliction. The
roofs are sloughing their tiles, and rubbish drifts along the paths. Inside the halls preside monstrous fairytale divinities. They repel all thought, all meaning. Lao-tzu himself, ‘Old Sage’–in legend the sixth-century
BC
founder of Taoism–sits huge and high-coloured behind his altar, a white waterfall of beard forking to his waist. He may have been less a man, in fact, than the name for a compendium of wisdom: a mystic pantheism, the faith of the recluse.

But his way became lost. The monks live casually in wood-latticed cells along the courts. They are sallow and young. Their hair is bunched into shiny knots on their heads, and their chins wisped in sleek beards. Dressed in black with white gaiters, they seem a race apart: slight men with shifting eyes.

Peter despises them. ‘The religion has sunk very low. It’s not like Buddhism or even Christianity here. There are only ten thousand of these monks in all China. Some of them are criminals, I think. They join the sect to escape the law. They make some kind of living, then disappear again.’

So the vision of Lao-tzu has sunk to this. Around its unworldly philosophy–the Tao was both spiritual path and transcendent knowledge–it had always been rife with magic and outlandish deities, and was obsessed with immortality. Even here a fortune-teller murmurs over an astrological chart, and the monks keep a hexagonal stone–when struck, it sings like metal–which the goddess Nuwa gave to Lao-tzu while she mended the sky.

Beneath the temple of the Queen Mother of the West, who keeps the peaches of immortality in the Kun Lun mountains where I was going, I stare up at a giantess in painted plaster. Her altar is jumbled with paper flowers, some old bottles and a bag of steamed buns. She brandishes a peach in one hand, a half-moon in the other, and her pinprick mouth is drowned in double chins.

Peter says: ‘This is strange to me too. I don’t know what she is.’

He starts to wonder aloud what hallmark identifies this religion–in Christianity it is love; in Islam, perhaps, justice–then his brows curdle and he does not guess. What is it, then, to a secular countryman of Confucius? I wonder. The Queen Mother’s neutered gaze fixes us through her curtained canopy. At last he says: ‘Integrity.’

It was for lack of integrity in the world, it seems, that Lao-tzu–if he existed–mounted a black buffalo and prepared to shake the dust of China from his hoofs. The corruption of court life, it is said, had sickened him. Here in the Pass to the West, two and a half millennia ago, a watchman saw him coming–a moon-gate in grey brick enshrines the view–and persuaded him to stop. For a single night the sage distilled his doctrine for posterity in the
Tao Te Ching
, the Taoist bible. Then he remounted his black buffalo and disappeared into the west.

But perhaps this was a metaphor for death.

Thereafter, for many centuries, when new faiths arrived along the Silk Road, people wondered if in fact they were foreign creeds at all, or if they were not the ancient wisdom of China returning home.

As my train eased westward out of Xian, following the vanished caravans along the Wei river, the brick and tile villages were misted in pear blossom and the high mauve flowering of the foxglove trees, or were circled by concentric lines of vegetables protected beneath plastic, so that half the fields looked under snow. All around us, the labyrinthine earth had been sculpted by the wind-blown sands of Mongolia, pouring southward over the ages. For hours we twisted and tunnelled through their plateaux. Terraces of wheat and rapeseed billowed into ravines, or overhung us in ledges of brilliant green.

It took us fifteen hours to cover 450 miles. In the ‘hard seat’ carriages of China’s poor, the farmers sat wedged together among stacked luggage, dozing on each other’s shoulders, munching picnics, sipping jars of green tea. Where years before the aisles had been rinks of ash-clogged spittle and prostrate bodies, they were now strewn only with rubbish and the trussed bags of peasants and travelling salesmen. The shouting, the spitting, the smoking, even staring at the foreigner, had subtly abated. Instead, among students and families on holiday, the plump babies of the One Child policy sat in majesty, gurgling and urinating into hand-held potties.

But as we veered north into the corridor of Gansu, curving toward Xinjiang, the emptiness of inner Asia filled the land with its premonition. The villages seemed to disintegrate as we approached them, their brick walls changed to mud. They looked near-deserted. Their dead lay under mounds in their fields.
Everything seemed half constructed, or in decay. Slowly the fields thinned and the hills turned to unclothed dust. Their spurs crowded the canyons in compacted staircases, until we were winding among ziggurats. Sometimes cave-villages appeared, their terraces sown with early wheat above them, and a few trees stubbled the heights. Then everything–villages, canyons, fields–turned to the monochrome brown of the wind-borne loess. The earth was carved like soft cake. Beneath us the river was liquid loam, the colour of milk chocolate, roiling between cliffs split by rain into bitter gullies. Over this drama the dark descended suddenly, and our train became a snake glimmering through emptiness.

At Lanzhou, stiff from sleeplessness, I stepped off the train into the China I remembered. A swarm of louche, swarthy men came hovering round me–the underclass of which Huang had warned–and the crowds marching the pavements looked rougher, poorer. I saw no other foreigner. I was walking the most polluted streets in China. For Lanzhou was an industrial Gehenna built up after the Communist victory to breathe economic life into the north-west. Now its three million inhabitants sprawled for fifteen miles along the Yellow River among oil refineries, textile and chemical plants, under mine-blackened hills. The longer streets disappeared into smog as if over a precipice. The cars gorged petrol at thirty pence a litre. Everyone coughed and retched.

Twenty years ago a young schoolteacher had befriended me here, and I wanted to see him again. In those days Mouli was filled by a dogged sadness. He had been born a peasant on the fringes of Inner Mongolia, and in his youth during the Cultural Revolution, when millions of bourgeoisie were banished to the villages, he had become attached to the daughter of an exiled official.

It has been said that the Chinese do not love. Observers of their family hierarchies have written that the only true tenderness exists between mother and son. Others have insisted that even the word for love in Chinese does not exist. And it is true that neither the blanket
ai
nor the benevolent
ren
translates into any unconditional passion.

But Mouli, in his peasant ignorance, fell deeply, violently in love. Into his grim village the official’s pale daughter, who suffered from a weak heart, arrived like a chaste spirit. And she gently reciprocated. After the Revolution ebbed, and her parents took her back weeping to the east, nobody replaced her in his slow heart. The social immobility of China in those years fatally separated them. She became a secondary school teacher in Tangshan, while he struggled into language college and started to better himself.

After I first met him he wrote me a bittersweet letter. He had decided, at the late age of thirty-three, to bow to family pressure and get married. When I saw him the following year I found his bride, a rosy twenty-six-year-old nurse, sottishly devoted. But he treated her like a servant, regretting her rural coarseness, and sometimes, he confided, dreamed helplessly of the other.

All this was long ago, and now, when I arrived at his college, I had no idea what I might find. He was waiting for me at its gate. In the split second before recognition I saw a squat, sturdy stranger, whose fiercely bushing hair and thick brows and lips belonged, I thought, to a northern Chinese type. But the next moment, to my transient bewilderment, this substantial figure had coalesced with the young man I remembered, and Mouli was smiling at me.

Our old friendship enveloped us. The humorous irony I remembered still interrupted his talk with pursed lips and mordant silences, over a tide of warm feeling. Only he had eased into a subtle authority–he had become associate dean of his faculty–and his hair was sprinkled grey. ‘Come home,’ he said.

I had last seen him in a narrow room monopolised by a stark marriage bed–the symbol for double happiness still dangling above it. Now he occupied a four-room apartment where his wife came shyly to meet me. A big television sat unwatched in his sitting room, and the walls were hung with calligraphic scrolls and framed prints of the English countryside.

She kept the dark glow he had once despised. Her features were stamped mask-like and regular on a broad face, yet she was handsome in her way, with a full mouth and tender eyes and hair swept back now in a glistening sheath. Her old slavery had eased
away. She was studying law. Their teenage daughter, absent at school, wanted to look like her mother, Mouli laughed, and drew a deprecating hand down his own peasant face. She made him put on a waistcoat before he went out–his cardigan had gone at the elbows–and their eyes met in something like affection. Before, he had never looked at her.

We walked through a university transformed from the drab buildings I remembered. The student intake had tripled, and big new blocks had gone up beside sports fields and a park. With his thick hands and rugged body, Mouli looked cursed with a harsher blood or history than those around him. ‘The students are quite different now. They even ask questions in class! We never dared do that!’ They passed us with deferential smiles: gangling, long-haired youths and soft-faced girls. They walked in tracksuits and sometimes held hands. ‘And they all know standard Chinese,’ Mouli said. ‘That’s the real change. They learn it on television, and even on the internet. In regions like my old village the dialects were utterly remote. Thirty years ago, I remember, when officials arrived there, we couldn’t understand a word each other said.’

Now his office was twice the size of his old bedsitter, scattered with a suite of armchairs and a planetary desk, topped by two computers. Only the concrete floor maintained that this was China, with a washstand in one corner and a view of the Yellow River sunk among suburbs. He occupied this space with some pride, and a tinge of impermanence. The post of dean itself had lain open for nearly three years, because the college’s Party Secretary had blocked its occupancy. But Mouli’s colleagues already talked of him as ‘our dean’, and he was loved by the younger teachers, I sensed, because of his ingrained irreverence.

Yet his current obsession betrayed a deep conservatism. For what he–an English teacher–most feared was the spread of English. To teachers in every faculty, he said, even in maths and Chinese history, a knowledge of English had become mandatory. And this was happening all over China. ‘We might as well adopt America wholesale! The president and all his senators! Get them over here! And what would they do for us? Nothing. Because our
minds are different, shaped in a different language. And it won’t change.’ He was staring out of his office window. ‘Already China’s one big reconstruction site!’ All along the river the white buildings were going up, each one topped by a crane. ‘The trouble is this,’ he said. ‘You can’t relate Chinese life in English language. Because nothing really translates. Not culture, politics or even the everyday. The words don’t fit. The concepts aren’t there.’ He was writing a hefty article on this–it would make him enemies–in the university magazine called
Silk Road
. ‘The foundation of language is thought. How can we think in English?’

As he spoke I was remembering, with dim amazement, the university I had strayed into twenty years ago. Then it was still reeling from the Cultural Revolution, when teachers had been persecuted for owning an English novel, a tape of Western music, a letter from abroad. Where, I wondered, was the old professor condemned to ten years as the college dustman for possessing a bible?

Above all I remembered the gentle Yu, professor of English literature, whose body had been broken for crimes he never knew. I had come with a collapsible white stick for his daughter. They were both going blind: she from a childhood cancer, he from detached retinas caused by his battering in the Revolution. In parting he had predicted to me a better future for his people, born of exhaustion and a new sanity. Now that future had arrived, and its unpredictable power was spreading through the nation. Even then he had been frail, murmuring farewell beneath a hanging of his favourite poem: a verse by Li Bai which he could no longer read. I did not ask now what had become of him.

I had supper with Mouli’s colleagues that night, in a rather grand restaurant. It was heartening to see him in his semi-public role, his face still crumpling in humorous collusion, his chopsticks
whirring. Long ago in writing about him, I had displaced him, for his protection, to another city. Now he was no longer at risk. He presided over the banquet like a benevolent king, distributing its delicacies, proposing toasts. Beside me his wife was dressed in a becoming green jacket and jester’s shoes. She still gazed at him from time to time, as if from some speechless exile, but I was no longer tempted to ask him about the past, or the pale teacher in Tangshan–if she was still there, or if he knew. He was content now, I thought, and it did not always do to remember. His journey from passion to stability had been China’s own.

On my other side he had placed a young teacher, as if to illustrate the new uprootedness of China. She was almost European to look at, with her long frizzed hair and surgically rounded eyes. Her family were in a far city. She was flushed with rice wine. All through the meal she tossed me giddy proposals and intimacies. Once the traditional restraints were gone, it seemed, nothing remained. Her fingers travelled my shoulders, ribs. ‘You are going to Yongchang? I love to travel…It’s hard to find a decent guy…Maybe I can come with you? Take me to Yongchang!’ She was serious, maudlin with confidences. ‘I’d prefer to be a child, you know. Things become too complicated afterwards. I don’t want choice. I want to go backwards…take me with you!’

‘I already have a partner.’

‘But she is not here. What are you doing after this? Maybe we can go somewhere…’

At last our party got to its feet with that Chinese abruptness when the banquet is over. As we clasped each other in parting, Mouli and his wife thrust a gift into my arms: a shirt from the Eternal New Fashion Co.–the label said–made from ‘the finest selected European fabric, designed to meet today’s fashion criteria’.

Then I remembered, with a shock of long-past time, how years ago, before I travelled north in winter, Mouli and she had bought me one of the stiff quilted overcoats worn through the upheavals of the early Revolution. It had warmed me through my bitter journey to the end of the Great Wall, and it still hung gathering
moths in my London flat, like a fragment of Chinese history, of crueller, more disruptive times, and of Mouli’s sorrow.

My hotel was a gaunt leftover from the sixties, with a Sunday dance-floor where couples waltzed unisexually under wan lights to sweet music. From my veranda on its twenty-first storey Lanzhou receded through a yellowing smog where skyscrapers and chimneys poked like drowning ships. A few car horns sounded weak and lost below. The sun stalled overhead like a sickly orange, and far away the scarred mountains along the Yellow River locked the horizon in.

The hotel sucked in newly mobile workers and small businessmen. The local prostitutes were so persistent that I unsportingly disconnected my phone. Policemen lounged on guard in the lobby, and a chart on my table warned about the cost of damaging the hotel fittings, from destroying a double bed to chipping a mirror. This meticulous list turned vandalism into recreation. Wallpaper stains could cost you $5 per square foot, and carpet stains $10 (cleanable), $50 (serious). I could not help imagining some peasant bull in this flimsy china shop, pocketing a basin plug ($5) and defacing some pictures (I sympathised, $3–$8), then losing control and hanging on the luggage rack ($80) and breaking down the door ($120) before smashing the lavatory ($200) and surrendering to the police in the lobby.

My only visitor here–a chance contact from England–took me to his home instead. Hongming lived in a rickety block put up in the fifties. In the city their cracked white tiles and splintered window-frames loomed everywhere, entered by fetid stairways which spiralled past iron doors and peepholes. Hongming had been married for twenty years, but his wide-open face was still a boy’s. He made documentary films, and his flat was bursting with technology. But alongside his DVD player, the laptop and the fax machine, the shelves were strange with Lamaist artefacts. Stone inscriptions lay alongside ceremonial horns. They were mementoes of a love affair, for Hongming had fallen for Tibet. He spoke about this–and everything–with restless ebullience, as if on the edge of some internal anarchy. ‘Will you see my film?’