Turfan was often a furnace. But on overcast mornings it was pleasant, with low clouds and temperatures only in the nineties. I liked the town. It was the least Chinese place I had seen so far, and it was one of the smallest and prettiest. There were very few motor vehicles, and it was quiet and completely horizontal.
It was a Uighur town, with a few Chinese. There were also Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Tadzhiks, and Tungus around the place, bowlegged and in high boots, in the Mongolian fashion. They were leathery-faced, and some looked like Slavs and some like gypsies, and most of them looked like people who had lost their way and were just stopping briefly in this oasis before moving on. Half the women at the Turfan bazaar had the features of fortunetellers, and the others looked like Mediterranean peasants-dramatically different from anyone else in China. These brown-haired, gray-eyed, gypsy-featured women in velvet dresses — and very buxom, some of them — were quite attractive in a way that was the opposite to the oriental. You would not be surprised to learn that they were Italians or Armenians. You see those same faces in Palermo and Watertown, Massachusetts.
Their gazes lingered, too. And some women came close and reached into the velvet and withdrew rolls of bills from between their breasts and said, “Shansh marnie?”
They put this Chinese money into my hand — the money still warm from having been in their deep bosoms — and they offered me four to one. They had gold teeth, and some looked like foxes, and they hissed at me when I said no.
It was wonderful, that market in Turfan, just what you would expect of a bazaar in Central Asia. They sold embroidered saddlebags, and leather holsters, and homemade jackknives, and baskets and belts. The meat market dealt exclusively in lamb and mutton — no pigs in this Islamic place; and there were stalls selling shish kebab. Much of the produce was the fresh fruit for which Turfan is well known — watermelons and Hami melons and tangerines. And there were about twenty varieties of dried fruit. I bought raisins and apricots, almonds and walnuts: it struck me that dried fruit and nuts were caravan food.
There were tumblers and fire eaters at the Turfan market, too, and a man doing card tricks on an overturned wheelbarrow. There was something medieval about the market — the dust and the tents, the merchandise and the entertainers, and the people who had gathered there, the men in skullcaps, the women in shawls, the shrieking children with wild hair and dirty feet.
NOTHING PUTS HUMAN EFFORT INTO BETTER PERSPECTIVE THAN a ruined city. “This was once a great capital,” people say, pointing to fallen walls and broken streets and dust. Then you stand in the silence of the lifeless place and think of Ozymandias, King of Kings, covered by a sand dune and forgotten. It is very thrilling for an American to consider such a place, because we don’t yet have anything that qualifies — only ghost towns and fairly insignificant small cities, but nothing like the monumental corpses of once-great cities that are known in the rest of the world. Probably American optimism arises from the fact that we don’t have any devastated cities. There is something wearying and demoralizing about a lost city, but it can also give you a healthy disregard for real estate.
Gaocheng was perfect in its ruin and decrepitude. It had been a renowned city for well over a thousand years, and now it was a pile of dust and crumbling mud. So far it had been spared the final insult — tourists — but one day, when the Iron Rooster turned into a streamlined train, they would find even this place, east of Turfan, twenty-five miles into the desert. It had had half a dozen different names — Karakhoja, Khocho, Dakianus (from the Roman Emperor Decius), Apsus (Ephesus), Idikut-Shahri (King Idikut’s Town), and Erbu (Second Stop). Gaocheng had come to be its accepted name, but it hardly mattered, because there was not much left of it. Yet enough remained for anyone to see that it really had been an enormous place, a city on a grand scale, which was why it looked so sad. It had the melancholy emptiness of all great ruins.
Its walls and fortifications were mostly gone, but the ones that still stood made it seem a remarkable citadel. It had been an ancient capital of this region, and then a Tang city, and then a Uighur city, and at last the Mongols had captured it. The Uighurs didn’t want the place destroyed, so they had surrendered without a struggle and let the Mongols take charge, as they had over the rest of China. It was the period of Mongol rule, the Yuan Empire of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when the first Westerners began traveling widely in China — among them, Marco Polo.
By then Gaocheng was Muslim. It had previously been Buddhist. It had also been a center of heretics — first Manichaean, then Nestorian. It is impossible to consider these heresies without reaching the conclusion that they make a certain amount of sense. The Manichaeans, followers of the Persian prophet Manes, believed that there is good and evil in all humans, and that life is a struggle between these interdependent opposites, the light and the dark, the spirit and the flesh. The Nestorians were Christians who had been declared heretics for their belief that there were two separate persons in the incarnate Christ, denying that Christ was in one person both God and man. They went on to argue that Mary was either the mother of God or the mother of the man Jesus, but she couldn’t have it both ways. For this the Nestorians were persecuted and exiled, after the Council of Ephesus (in 431, in present-day Turkey), and they ended up in the seventh century, at the last stage of the Silk Road, deep in China, where the first Nestorian church was founded in 638, in Ch’ang-an (Xian).
What made this all the more fascinating to me was that there was nothing left — no church, no heretics, no books, no pictures, no city. There was only the sun beating down on the mud bricks and the broken walls, and all the religion, trade, warfare, art, money, government, and civilization had turned to dust. But there was something magnificent in the immensity of this dumb ruin. I kept on seeing this desert as a place where an ocean had been, a gigantic foreshore of smooth stones and seaside rubble; and this city of Gaocheng was quite in key with that, looking like a sandcastle that the tide had mostly floated away.
The only live things here were goats. The frescoes and statues had been stolen — and sold or else removed to museums. Farmers had dismantled many of the buildings so that they could use the bricks, and when the local people found pots or vases or amphoras (and they were good ones, for there was both Greek and Roman influence at Gaocheng), they used them in their kitchens, so that they wouldn’t have to buy new ones.
I went to a nearby village of Uighurs and asked them whether they knew anything about Gaocheng. “It is an old city,” they said. The people I asked were brown-faced, hawk-nosed men whose village was shady and totally off the map. They had donkeys, they had a mosque and a small market, but they didn’t speak Chinese or any language other than Uighur. The place was called Flaming Mountain Commune, but that was merely a euphemism. The village had gone to sleep. The women watched me through the folds in their black shawls, and I saw one who looked exactly like my Italian grandmother.
Mr. Liu, my guide, did not speak Uighur, though he had lived not far away for twenty years. I had the impression that these desert-dwelling Uighurs did not take the Han Chinese very seriously. When we started away, there was a thump against the side of the car, and the driver slammed on the brakes and chased after the laughing kids. He made a fuss, but no one came to help — no one even listened. And then, a further insult. He stopped to ask directions to an ancient burying ground, the necropolis at Astana, and when he put his head out of the car window, two children stuck feathery reeds into his ears and tickled him. They ran away, as he got out and raged at them.