The Emperor Far Away (10 page)

6

Three Borders

When Lin Lin returned to Beijing, I had no excuse to stay in Kashgar. I decided to make my way south along the Karakoram Highway to Tashkurgan, close to the borders with Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was another exercise in nostalgia; I’d travelled the same route when I departed China in 1988. But Tashkurgan’s proximity to three frontiers was too tempting to pass up, so I caught an early-morning bus and said a bleary-eyed, not very fond, farewell to Kashgar as we edged through the traffic towards its southern suburbs. I knew I wouldn’t miss the city it has become.

Outside Kashgar, the bus ran in between fields of wheat and corn and past fruit farms where watermelons grew in rows and pear and peach trees stood in neat lines. An hour past the small town of Upal and we were on the Karakoram Highway proper, climbing through a valley of towering stone cliffs stretching for mile after mile, along with army trucks, construction vehicles and tour-group jeeps.

There was a police checkpoint at Ghez I didn’t remember from before, and we all trooped off the bus to have our identity cards or passports scrutinised and our names recorded. A fellow passenger told me all Uighurs now need a permit to travel beyond Ghez, unless they live in the Tashkurgan area. They are being kept away from the restive Muslims across the nearby frontiers.

Past Ghez, giant sand dunes rose, and then the magnificent Karakul Lake, ringed by snow-capped peaks and green pasture with yaks and yurts reminiscent of Kyrgyzstan, appeared. The two highest mountains in China outside of Tibet, Kongur Tagh and Mutzagh Ata, look down on the still, glacial lake from above 7,500 metres. So clear is the water that it reflects the surrounding landscape like a giant mirror.

Unlike Kashgar, Tashkurgan had not changed much. It is still an overgrown truck stop, with a large PLA base on its outskirts, despite being the capital of Xinjiang’s Tajik Autonomous County. Ethnic Tajiks make up the majority of the population, along with Uighurs, a small community of civilian Han and the odd Pakistani trader. Soaring, menacing mountains surround the town. Tashkurgan, a collection of grimy, hastily constructed buildings, seems fragile and temporary in their presence, as if it could be blown away by the strong winds that drone down the few streets at night.

At 3,600 metres, it is cold even in September. People were already buying winter fuel at a depot where women with blackened faces wielded sledgehammers to smash up boulder-sized lumps of coal, before shovelling it into sacks. Every other shop sold the thick green PLA overcoats that are the winter uniform of farmers and migrant workers in the parts of China where the mercury plunges. In another month, Tashkurgan would become a place to hibernate in until spring arrived.

Tajikistan’s easternmost province, Gorno-Badakhshan, is just sixty-five kilometres away by rough road, close enough for China to have contested the borderline until 2002. Travel to it is not encouraged by Beijing. The frontier is closed to foreigners and only a couple of buses a month run there. Eastern Tajikistan is almost as lawless a place as Afghanistan, which borders the south of Gorno-Badakhshan. It is home to its own band of Islamic groups fighting for a separate state, while the heroin ferried out of Afghanistan north to Russia and Europe passes through the region as well.

Despite their radical relatives across the border, there is none of the tension between Tajiks and Han that characterises the Chinese–Uighur relationship. Nor, unusually, are the Tajiks resented by the Uighurs. With just 41,000 people in Xinjiang, they are too small a presence for the Uighurs to feel challenged. They have assimilated a little too. Among themselves the Tajiks speak Sarikoli, a Persian-based dialect, but most can also understand Uighur.

They are easy to spot with their sharp, Caucasian-like features and lighter hair, eyes and skin than most Uighurs, although everyone in Tashkurgan has the wind-burned face and red-spotted cheeks that come with living at altitude. The women wear black pillbox hats, with elaborate pink or red patterns around the sides and a veil pinned back to reveal their faces, along with black skirts over long leggings. Ismaili Muslims, they owe their allegiance to the Aga Khan, like their cousins in Gorno-Badakhshan, the Afghans in the Wakhan Corridor to the south and the people of Pakistan’s Hunza Valley.

While crossing into Tajikistan is difficult, it is impossible to travel from China into the Wakhan Corridor and Badakhshan Province in the far north-east of Afghanistan. The border was closed after the communist takeover in 1949 and has remained shut. Just seventy-five kilometres long, it is the shortest of China’s frontiers and the most remote. Like a crooked finger pointing east, the Corridor is sandwiched between both mountain ranges and countries. To the north are the Pamirs and Tajikistan, in the south the Hindu Kush Mountains separate it from Pakistan, while at its eastern end the 4,900-metre Wakhjir Pass leads into China.

Long ago, the Wakhan Corridor was part of the southern Silk Road route that connected the Middle Kingdom to India. Marco Polo is said to have entered China via the Corridor, if he came at all. For 2,000 years, the mule trains braved the snow and ice as they struggled over the high, desolate mountain passes on their way to Tashkurgan. From there, they headed east to Yarkand, where camels replaced the mules, to begin the long pull across the southern fringes of the Taklamakan Desert towards Gansu Province and Jiayuguan. Then it was a short journey south to Xi’an, the ancient capital of China and the beginning and end of the Silk Road.

With Afghanistan and Tajikistan all but closed, Tashkurgan is now a transit point for people travelling to and from Pakistan. South of town, the Karakoram Highway leads up to the 4,700-metre Khunjerab Pass and the highest paved road border crossing in the world. I travelled that way in 1988, hitching rides on trucks and tractors to Karakul Lake and on to Tashkurgan before catching a bus to Sost in the Hunza Valley.

Back then I managed to cross the frontier without a Pakistani visa. The Chinese guards didn’t bother to check if I had one and once in Sost, a five-hour drive from the actual border, I apologised profusely to the Pakistani officials for flouting the rules so flagrantly. Over a leisurely cup of tea, they agreed finally to give me ten days to get to Islamabad where I could rectify my mistake.

Security is much less lackadaisical now. Before I could even leave Tashkurgan, I had to stop at the army base and buy a permit just to get me to the Khunjerab Pass. I was with Lao Yu, a Han migrant from Sichuan Province eager for extra cash. He quoted an outrageous price to drive me to the border and back, but accepted half with good grace and we set off towards the end of China in the far west.

Apart from a few Pakistani and Chinese trucks moving slowly up towards the frontier, we had the road to ourselves. On our right, the dull grey, jagged peaks of the Pamir Mountains rose above the snow-laden clouds and separated us from Tajikistan, a natural barrier far more formidable than any border fence. Tiny settlements of box-like houses, grazing yaks and sheep and the odd Tajik farmer trotting slowly along on a horse were the only signs of life.

An hour beyond Tashkurgan, we came to the largest village we would pass through. Lao Yu pointed to the mountains on our right. ‘Afghanistan is over there,’ he said. Until very recently, the border and the Wakhjir Pass were accessible only by a dirt track and the soldiers posted there patrolled on horseback. When winter closed in, they could not be relieved till the following spring.

So isolated is the frontier that, even when it was open, just a handful of westerners journeyed across it. Francis Younghusband went through on Great Game business after his stay in Kashgar. An 1873 agreement resulted in the British and Russians designating the Wakhan Corridor as the dividing line between their empires. Both sides monitored the Corridor to make sure there were no unauthorised incursions.

The last westerner known to have crossed the border was the Briton H. W. Tilman. A much decorated soldier in both world wars, Tilman was born too late for the Great Game but was still a character out of a
Boy’s Own
annual. A noted mountain climber, often in the company of Eric Shipton, the last of Britain’s Kashgar consuls, he was the sort of man who shinned up 7,000-metre peaks in a Norfolk jacket and a pair of stout walking boots. In 1947, after a failed attempt on Mutzagh Ata, Tilman travelled alone into the Wakhan Corridor via the Wakhjir Pass in search of the source of the Oxus River.

Reading about Tilman’s exploits had induced romantic visions of me following in his footsteps, ghosting up the track disguised as a local and slipping past the PLA guards to reach the frontier. I knew that wasn’t actually possible, but I still wanted to see how far I could travel along the track, or at least get close enough to know where it began. Lao Yu, though, wouldn’t even consider it.

‘I’ll be in trouble and so will you. The army are building a new road to the border and there are checkpoints and cameras now,’ he said. I pondered the irony of the fact that the Chinese–Afghan frontier has been all but ignored by Beijing since 1949, yet I’d arrived just at the time when they had decided to take an interest in it. That sudden surge in activity has been prompted by the presence of NATO soldiers in Badakhshan Province. The new road will enable the Chinese side of the border to be reinforced speedily, and in strength, should they decide to march east to Xinjiang.

Gazing at the seemingly impenetrable crags which shielded the new road from view was the closest I got to Afghanistan. We carried on towards the mountains in front of us, which mark the beginning of the Karakoram Range. Somewhere over 4,000 metres, we reached the snowline and my ears started to pop. From then on, Lao Yu negotiated a series of switchback curves as we ascended the last few hundred metres to the Khunjerab Pass.

Another checkpoint and then we were at the frontier. A double line of barbed wire rose above the snow lying knee-deep on either side of the road, and there was a giant arch which hadn’t been there in 1988. On the far side of it were two Chinese, one PLA officer and a Wu Jing soldier, and a bearded Pakistani in mirrored sunglasses and camouflage. I strolled up and asked if I was in Pakistan now. They nodded in assent.

We shared cigarettes and I fielded the inevitable questions about where I was from and what I was doing. The officer told me the soldiers did one month at the pass and then one back in Tashkurgan, even when the border closed for winter. He was the chattiest PLA man I have ever encountered, at least while on duty, and spoke good English. ‘I have to – that’s how we communicate with the Pakistanis,’ he said. But I didn’t envy him his posting. It was frigid, even in the midday sun, and I was shivering in three layers of summer clothes.

On the way back, Lao Yu gave me the benefit of his thoughts on the Uighurs. Five years of working in Tashkurgan had enriched his pocket, while leaving him severely prejudiced against the natives. He had no problem with the ethnic Tajiks. ‘They’re fine, they don’t cause trouble.’ Instead, it was the Uighurs he disliked. For Lao Yu, they were
jiade
, or fake, Chinese people. I thought most Uighurs would agree with that, except they would qualify it by saying they were also unwilling Chinese citizens.

Lao Yu was just getting started.
Meiyou wenhua
was the phrase he repeated over and over again in connection with the Uighurs. It literally translates as ‘having no education’, but has a wider meaning implying that the person, or people, lacks civilisation and culture. ‘They think they can be like the Kuomintang and have their own state like Taiwan, that’s how stupid the Uighurs are,’ he said with a nasty sneer.

‘You know why they’re so stupid? You know the person we call an uncle? For a Uighur, that’s their elder brother not their uncle. They all marry their brothers, sisters and cousins and that’s why they are so stupid.’ I didn’t know how to respond. During my time in China, I’d listened to many Han complaints about the Uighurs. How they are lazy, prone to petty crime, unwilling or unable to learn Mandarin, ate too much lamb and are overly religious. But Lao Yu’s theory that the Uighurs are incestuous was new to me.

In the evening I played pool with Majid, a Uighur art student from Kashgar who was in Tashkurgan to sketch the Pamirs, and wondered if I should broach the subject with him. I decided against it. Majid was sparky and inquisitive and didn’t look or sound inbred to me. We were in one of Tashkurgan’s pool halls, essentially a shop holding a few tables with rock-hard cushions and patched baize. In all small towns in rural Xinjiang, as in many other parts of country China, pool is the only entertainment option outside of drinking beer in a restaurant.

I have lost at pool all across China. Once, I shot a few frames in Beijing with a giggly sixteen-year-old farmer’s daughter from Henan Province who had just been crowned the World Nine-Ball Pool Champion. She was barely taller than her cue, but thrashed me off the table. Majid wasn’t in her league, but he still beat me while a crowd of young Tajik and Uighur lads looked on smiling and offering advice.

Majid wanted to be an art teacher, preferably abroad. ‘I’d like to go to London,’ he said with a cheeky grin. I told him he should try. ‘It’s hard enough to get a permit to come here. It’s almost impossible to get a passport,’ replied Majid. He was right. Most Uighurs under the age of fifty have as much chance of obtaining a passport as they do of winning one of China’s lotteries. Old people with relatives overseas can travel, but a twenty-three-year-old like Majid would need both connections at home and a powerful sponsor in his destination country to leave.

He spoke English, which is perhaps why he felt he could be outspoken despite the audience watching us play. I didn’t have to ask leading questions to get Majid to talk about the situation in his homeland. ‘Most Uighurs want independence, but Xinjiang has too much oil and gas for the Chinese to let that happen. It’s cruel, because if we were independent then all our resources would enable us to develop very quickly. We could sell them and use the money to raise our living standards. But there’s no hope of that. Uighurs have tried to be independent many times and it has never worked,’ he said.