Rebellious Women and Other Demons of the Gobi

If the desert is a hiding place for human crimes, it is also an abyss into which those who shame, disgust, or threaten us may be swept. I had been reading about the Qing dynasty’s annexation of territory to the northwest of China in the 1750s. Throughout Qing rule of that region, which continued intermittently until 1911, tens of thousands of criminals and dissidents were sent to the newly annexed land. The severity of a person’s crime was reflected in the remoteness of their exile: “very near” (one thousand kilometers from the convict’s homeland); “to a nearby frontier” (1,600 kilometers); “to an insalubrious region”; or “to the furthest frontier.” The deserts of the far west, the Gobi and the Taklamakan, being both insalubrious and as distant from centers of population as it was possible to be while remaining in Chinese territory, were reserved for the gravest cases. Those exiled fell into two groups. First, ordinary criminals, who would usually be sent into slavery. This group included the families of those who had been executed for, say, murder, or incest, or treason. The second, smaller group consisted of disgraced government officials, or weifei—“troublemakers”—who had criticized official corruption or had associated with convicted traitors. Convicts on departure would be tattooed on both temples like a double stamp of lading: your crime on the right; on the left your destination. The far west was colonized not only by murderers, thieves, rapists, counterfeiters and sectarians, but by bureaucrats, army generals, eunuchs, and wenzi yu an or “literary cases.” The exiled scholar Ji Yuan, writing to his wife in 1769, described it as “another world.”

The hyper-arid deserts of China have figured in that country’s popular imagination as mere interstices, or collectively as a dread realm entered under duress or to reach the next oasis, even among those who populate the desert’s edge. One of the earliest recorded crossings is that of the Buddhist monk Xuanzang. Born in 602, he became a novice at the age of twelve and was soon recognized by his elders as a student of uncommon brilliance. Aged twenty-seven, sick of the disputing among his fellow monks on matters of dogma, he determined to travel across the great