Paul Theroux never much likes what he sees -- especially the people he runs into, or places crowded with such people. But, given that limitation, if indeed it's a limitation, he writes wonderfully illuminating, factually detailed, and often very funny books about his travels.
My nephew Denny, his step-daughter Maya, and I are heading for "China" in July. I throw the quotation marks around "China," because we will be trekking on the far western edge of Xinjiang province -- a large province that is de jure Chinese, but geographically and ethnically Central Asian, a province whose population is Muslim and that was historically considered part of the vague geographic area called "Turkestan."
In his 1988 book, Riding the Iron Rooster, Theroux writes about his train travels from London to China, and then throughout China, just about everywhere he could reach by rail. Our trekking in July will be west of Kashgar, in the portion of the Pamir mountains that separate China from Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Theroux did visit Xinjiang, but ventured no farther than Urumchi, the capital of the province, about 830 miles by highway to the northeast. The railroad connecting Xinjiang to the rest of China halts at Urumchi -- or at least it did when Theroux visited.
Although Theroux didn't reach Kashgar, all of Xinjiang is dominated by the culture and language of the Muslim Uighurs -- a Turkic people in constant conflict with China's dominant Han majority. Therefore, I was interested in his impressions of that portion of Xinjiang he was able to observe.
Theroux points out throughout his book that -- for the vast majority of Chinese -- the "real" China never reaches all that far beyond the east coast, the area of high population density and intense cultivation that we in the West mentally picture as "Chinese." Those Chinese regard Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang as barbaric regions, historically serving to buffer the civilized Middle Kingdom from hostile tribes and peoples beyond. Just west of Lanzhou -- which on the map appears to lie in the middle of the country, Theroux found his train
passing a point the Chinese had once called The Gate of Demons because beyond it was the howling wind and wasteland of which they had an acute terror.
The rails led westward into a region of desert, often surrounded by snow-capped mountains.
At Wuwei, the desert is broken briefly by a pleasant region well-watered by mountain run-off. Theroux found himself -- not to the reader's surprise -- delighted by the sparse population of this attractive area.
I was beginning to understand that the empty parts of China are the most beautiful, and some of them -- like these valleys -- very fertile. ... Its utter emptiness was so rare in China that it seemed startling to me, and where there were gardens and trees it was almost lush. Large herds of sheep grazed along the stonier stretches, nibbling at hanks of grass; and there were mules and crows and mud-walled towns. In one place I saw six camels, big and small, placidly watching the train go by.
He liked the Uighurs, many of whom he met aboard his train.
They were a Turkic-speaking people, the remote descendants of nomads whose kingdom existed here 1200 years ago, and many of them looked like Italian peasants. It was no wonder that Marco Polo found them a friendly and fun-loving people.
The Chinese Hans have not found the Uighurs so congenial, and they have resisted assimilation.
Their world was entirely separate: it was Allah, and the Central Asian steppes, a culture of donkey carts and dancing girls. They ate mutton and bread. They were people of the bazaar, who -- familiar with outlandish travelers -- were travelers themselves.
In the town of Turfan, approaching Urumchi by train, he observed that
it was straight out of the Bible, with donkeys and grape arbors and mosques, and people who looked Lebanese, with brown faces and gray eyes.
Theroux hinted at his feelings toward most of China:
I liked the town [Turfan]. It was the least Chinese place I had seen so far, and it was one of the smallest and prettiest.
Theroux confirms that Denny, Maya and I will be visiting not China -- the "real" China -- but Central Asia, just as I visited Central Asia two years ago when I trekked in Tajikistan. In fact, except when visiting Kashgar, we will be spending our days and nights with nomadic Tajiks and Kyrgyz, far more than we will with even Uighurs, let alone Han Chinese.
And Kashgar -- our home base -- is even more remote from Beijing than Urumchi. Although not as irascible as Paul Theroux, I perhaps share (if to a lesser degree) his nervousness with being surrounded day after day by strangers physically crowding up next to me. I'm looking forward to trekking in a part of China where one finds relative solitude, and hospitality from the people one does meet.
Theroux finishes his book with a visit to Tibet -- a non-Han region at least as remote as Xinjiang. He loves Tibet -- its people and its mountains and its religion.
I thought I liked railways until I saw Tibet, and then I realized that I liked wilderness much more.
He loved its supposed inaccessibility.
But the main reason Tibet is so undeveloped and un-Chinese -- and so thoroughly old-fangled and pleasant -- is that it is the one great place in China that the railway has not reached. The Kunlun Range is a guarantee that the railway will never get to Lhasa.
Theroux wrote that prediction in 1988. He was mistaken. Eighteen years later, in 2006, the determined Chinese connected Lhasa to the rest of China by rail.
I hoped Kashgar had escaped this fate (although I knew we would be arriving by air). Travel articles, however, reveal that Kashgar is now a 23½ hour train ride from Urumchi. The world is fast running out of "inaccessible places".
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