Retracing the Old Silk Road to meet the Uygurs in Kashgar

In the summer of 2015, I left the United States after living there for most of my adult life.

After growing up in Taiwan and New Zealand, I went to America to study, attending Yale University and Columbia Law School. Then I practised law in New York City.

But between the arcane American immigration system and my ineptitude in office politics, I was unable to secure my permanent residency through a Green Card.

As the prospect of my banishment drew nearer, I correspondingly grew fascinated with a story I heard even as a child - in AD97, during the Eastern Han dynasty, China sent an explorer and envoy westward along the Silk Road to locate and to make contact with the Roman Empire.

His name was Gan Ying. He had been a veteran of China's wars against the Huns under the famous General Ban Chao. And he almost - not quite - succeeded in meeting the Romans. Had the Chinese and Roman Empires developed relations at the height of their respective powers, world history might have turned out very differently.

He was an Asian man who almost reached the heart of the ancient Western world, Rome. I am an Asian man who almost got to stay in the heart of the modern Western world, New York City. Perhaps that was why I grew interested in him at that precise juncture, on the eve of my exile.

I conceived of the idea to travel along Gan Ying's path, as recorded in that ancient text of Chinese history, the Hou Han Shu. I studied where he might have gone.

I momentarily turned cowardly upon realising that this plan would take me to Afghanistan, where my only weapon would be my wits. But then I remembered that American expression: "Go big or go home."

I began in Hong Kong. The journey then took me through parts of China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, and finally to Greece and Italy: from the Great Wall of China to the waters of the Mediterranean.

The journey took place over the second half of 2015. In calendar years, this was not very long ago. But the world felt very different then.

Barack Obama was still president of the United States. As I travelled through Iran, I caught on local television news of the nuclear agreement with the US, an agreement the administration of Donald Trump has since abrogated. None of us regular folks yet realised that Russia could hack a US presidential election. And the rest of the world could still look upon America, warts and all, and believe in its fundamental decency in spite of everything else.

With my departure from the US, where I had lived for many years, my own life had reached a turning point. I just didn't realise yet that I faced not only a new beginning for myself, but also the precipice of a new and troubling era.

The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming book I wrote about that journey.

General Ban Chao, astride a horse, was the commander of Gan Ying - a veteran of China's wars against the Huns, and the inspiration for Han's journey. Photo: William Han

I stopped in Hotan on my way to Kashgar.

The overall tenor of Hotan was one of futility. China's attempt to subjugate its people seemed clearly futile. Very few of the Uygurs spoke Mandarin, and cab drivers didn't even understand street names given in that alien but dominant tongue. The local population simply went about its business each day and ignored the Chinese presence as much as possible. They were like Western travellers testing out a Chinese public toilet, holding their noses and hurrying to get their business done.

At the same time, separatist sentiments seemed equally futile against the armoured personnel carriers lined up on the town thoroughfare and the riot police sporting submachine guns.

Analogously futile were Hotan's efforts at cleaning itself. Given the city's location amid a desert, dust perpetually covered everything from beers in the fridge to dashboards in cars. You smacked your lips and realised that you were chewing sand. Yet in the morning you saw sanitation workers sweeping the dust in the car park into miniature sand dunes. As soon as the wind blew the sand dispersed again.

I had been to Kashgar once before, some eight years earlier. Even then the Silk Road already exerted its pull on me. It's the westernmost city in China, closer to Damascus than to Beijing.

This time around the famed old town was not what it used to be. A small section of it lay to the west of the Id Kah Mosque, spruced up and commercialised but not with an overabundance of bad taste as was so often the case in China, with new facades and wooden signs at street corners directing visitors in Chinese, Uygur, Russian, and Japanese. Here Han Chinese tourists could come and find the ethnic minstrelsy that they liked so much in minority peoples.

The rest of the old town, with its mud-thatched roofs and winding streets that I remembered, lay in an enclosed section to the east, half condemned. It was the centre of Uygur culture and remained proudly conscious of its own importance.

I stayed at the historic hotel that was once the Russian consulate. Its status as a relic of the Great Game came with corresponding decor. Pink and green motifs like Faberge eggs, in the style of the era of perhaps Tsar Nicholas II, decorated the walls.

An Uygur family riding past a picture showing China's President Xi Jinping joining hands with a group of Uygur elders at the Unity New Village in Hotan. Photo: AP

The building was in diplomatic service from about 1890 to 1960, when the Sino-Soviet split forced the Soviet diplomats to leave. So Tsarist aristocrats and their Bolshevik adversaries had both occupied these halls.

All the old splendour had faded by now, like so much that was Russian, that was Russia. Bas-reliefs carved in the plaster walls, reminiscent of the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, still looked down upon the weary traveller, but the overall impression was that of luxury in decrepitude. A once-beautiful babushka still wearing her debutante dress, with poignant effect.

I hired a driver with a couple of backpackers I met - Theo, a young American, and Nik from Switzerland - to visit Shipton's Arch. A natural rock formation, it was originally recorded in the 1940s by Eric Shipton, the last British consul general in Kashgar.

Somehow National Geographic had to "rediscover" it in 2000. Both times, obviously, all that anyone had to do to find it was to ask the local villagers - "you know, that mountain with a big hole at the top?"

Our driver was a kindly and loquacious Uygur man named Tayakuli who spoke a smattering of English and somewhat better Mandarin. He and I conversed haltingly in a potpourri of English, Mandarin, and such Uygur as I could figure out.

I asked Tayakuli about his life. He said he served in the army between 1985 and 1990, driving a jeep, where he had to learn Mandarin because all his orders came in that dominant language, and all the meetings were held in it. I asked him where he served. He said he was a prison guard at a triptych of laogai or "re-education through labour" camps by the Tarim River, the largest prison complex of its kind in the area.

"500 prisoners in each of the three prisons, and 36 of us guards," he said. "Prisoners sent down from Beijing." His time in the army, I thought, meant that he might well have met some student leaders from Tiananmen Square in 1989, "sent down from Beijing". I asked him if the laogai camps were still there. "Oh, yes, yes, yes," he nodded emphatically.

Back in Kashgar I fell into conversation with "Yusup". He ran a tour agency, and I had asked him whether he knew of anyone going to Kyrgyzstan with whom I could form a group. He was Uygur, spoke remarkably good English, wrote with beautiful penmanship, and carried himself like a gentleman. We sat on the couch in the lobby of my hotel. I prompted him to tell me about the history of the area.

Yusup first recalled the Great Game. "Yakub Beg", the Amir of Kashgaria, "fought the Russians and then the British and Chinese in this area" in the 19th century. "Then Zuo Zongtang came," he said - that would be General Tso to Americans, the man who reconquered Xinjiang. People in the region say the British helped Zuo succeed as repayment for taking Hong Kong in the Opium war, according to Yusup.

Fast forward another few decades, and the Chinese Nationalist Party or Kuomintang, my grandparents' colleagues, were in charge. "The Kuomintang," he said, "they were better than the Communists. At least they didn't interfere with religion. The older people around here remember a lot of this better than I would."

Yusup was in his 40s, with deep crow's feet lining the corners of his eyes, which had the effect of emphasising the benevolence in his eyes. "They remember when Stalin died, and a whole lot of people cried in the streets. Like when Mao died. People cried then, too."

I asked him about the here and now and the current state interference in religious matters.

"Yes, it upsets me," he said. "I was stopped two times, recently, by police. They took the SIM card out of my phone. To see what communications I've had.

"I hear Uygur people say that Chinese people are bad, because of these things. But no, people are not bad, people are all the same. It's the system. But now things are very bad. Even 20 years ago Han and Uygur living in the same village would have helped each other when someone was in need. Not any more.

"My father, who was the imam, used to resolve disputes over lunch. He would tell the parties that unless they stopped fighting, he would refuse to do their ... what's the word?" He meant religious rites. "Now you call the police, and bribe the police, and they arrest who they want, and it's a big mess."

Yusup talked about food safety, very much on the minds of the Chinese. "Chinese baby milk formula, not safe," he said. "I have a six-month-old. So we buy foreign baby milk formula. But it costs three times as much as the Chinese brand. We can't afford this.

"Uygurs say," he smiled wanly at the thought and perhaps the irony of it, tugging at his crow's feet, "that our children will be safe when they get to America. Only then."

But there was little to do about these difficulties. "I tell people in my village," he said, "when you have a problem with a Han neighbour, write a petition to the county government, and everyone sign it. Maybe someone will care and do something."

I asked: "And what happened?"

Men in the Kashgar Livestock Market tug and pull cattle into the traditional marketplace. Photo: William Han

"When we tried to petition, no one did anything." Yusup sighed. "In Islam, it says, if you see something bad, you should fix it with your own hands. If you can't, then you should persuade others to fix it with your voice. If you can't do that either, then you should walk away and not look at the injustice, but keep that hatred of the bad thing in your heart. But you're not a very good Muslim then."

Islamic culture was fraying. "My father was the imam. Six sons. He didn't choose any of us to become the imam. Other imams, if they have four sons, they choose the worst one to be the imam. The one who is not so smart, maybe with one eye or missing a leg. The smart one, the best son, he goes into business. So now no one listens to the imams. They are not so knowledgeable."

"You should write about this," Yusup said as our conversation neared its end. "Tell the outside world what is happening here in Xinjiang. Just don't use my name."

I went to the Kashgar Sunday livestock market with Nik and Theo.

Men with faces seared and aged by the sun, under the same hats and clothes that their fathers and grandfathers might have worn, tugged and pulled and dragged their cattle into the traditional market.

Sheep stood tied together by their necks like bundles of hay. Oxen got pushed and dragged and beaten until they jumped in the backs of pickup trucks, only to wait for their fellows to join them until the truck was fully packed.

I wandered through the crowd of cattle and spotted one or two yaks amid the more common animals, looking surprised with their companions and incongruous in the heat under their thick coats.

Beneath wooden scaffoldings, sweaty traders stopped to eat chunks of the same animals they were buying and selling and to sip that Uygur drink made from chipped blocks of ice, wrapped with blankets to keep cool.

Police patrolling in a night food market in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Photo: AFP

It seemed the way it had been for centuries, except for us gawking at them in both fascination and disgust, snapping photos and getting in the way of men and beasts alike, constantly at risk of getting stomped on by one bovine or another.

In one corner, a young man wielding a butcher's knife was cutting up a sheep that he had just slaughtered. I watched him work, at once mesmerised and horrified.

He had cut the animal's throat a minute earlier. Blood drained from the gash in its neck out into a steel basin the size of a high-school cafeteria tray, but some of it got onto the ground as well, congealing in the dust and blackening it like chocolate. The sheep's eyes were lifeless now, dead round things like marbles that kids might play with, staring into nothing. It seemed almost ridiculous, almost inconceivable, that a moment ago, before the fatal slash of the knife, there was in them that indefinable quality that we call life.

The young man had cut off one of the sheep's forelegs and given it to a little boy standing behind him while he worked on the rest of the dead animal, slicing away its skin and fur. Another sheep, presumably next, was tied up behind the boy and jumping and squealing and kicking against the wooden post in panic, confronted in the starkest way with the fate that was about to befall it.

The boy began shoving the lifeless leg of its fellow in its face with the sort of cruelty in which children so naturally excel. The sheep, now crazed with fear, squealed and kicked and pulled and jumped and writhed with all its strength, but to no avail. The phrase "like sheep to the slaughter" seemed not to apply.

There was one last fight in this animal. It would make no difference, not against man and his ingenuity, his knife and his rope. But no matter. The fight was there to be fought, so the sheep fought it, in the face of certain defeat and death. One might call it courage or honour.

When the fall was all that remained, it mattered very much how one fell. It was as true for a sheep as it was for human beings. I watched until I could watch no more.

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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