China...

                         

Another group tour … 18 days from Xi’an to Kashgar, largely following one of the old Silk Road routes and taking in beautiful landscapes (bare, stark mountains and sandy deserts), ancient Buddhist grottoes in caves, old walls and forts, encounters with bactrian camels (including a brief camel trek), a day wandering around a massive Buddhist monastery, visits to a few former mosques (including to understand the largely unspoken reason for this ‘former’ status), and dealing with various different aspects of Chinese culture.  Not to mention the Great (fire)Wall, where internet access to the BBC, to Facebook, to my photo storage accounts, to my Yahoo email account, to Google maps, etc is blocked unless you planned ahead and installed a foreign e-Sim or a VPN.  I’m drafting this whilst on my outward flight, and the early parts of the tour really feel as though they were months (if not years) ago.

We – a group of ten mostly English people – started the tour in Xi’an, with a visit to the Terracotta Army.  I did see these when I visited China in 1988, but did not take a single photo of the warriors and only dimly remember the visit, so I was happy to go again.  & trying to find the odd moment to read a book on the history of China, I learnt that these were only (re-) discovered in 1974 as Emperor Qin (221-206BC), who reputedly used some 700,000 convict labourers to build his tomb complex, including the army of terracotta warriors to protect him in the afterlife (over a period of nearly forty years), had the labourers killed as soon as their work was finished in order to protect the secret location and contents of the complex.

In Xi’an we also visited the Great Mosque, one of the oldest and largest mosques in China.  Whilst still in use as a mosque, it is amazingly un-mosque-like.  There is a picture of the Kaaba, and a few words in a Chinese-style of Arabic calligraphy, but this is the minaret!!

Then by bullet train to Lanzhou (for a rather good museum) and bus on to Xiahe where we spent time visiting the Labrang Tibetan Buddhist Monastery.  This includes one of the largest Buddhist monastic universities in the world.  The same (Yellow Hat) school of Tibetan Buddhism that I saw in Ladakh only a few months ago, but this time I was actually able to see some of them wearing their yellow hats as they went into one of their prayer halls.

Our next visit, involving a boat trip along the Yellow Rover through some very nice rocky peak scenery, was to the Bingling Temple Grottoes.  This area contains Buddhist cave niches, stone sculptures, and apparently more than 900 m² of murals, dating back more than 1,500 years.  Then an overnight (sleeper) train to Jiayuguan, for a climb up the ‘Overhanging’ Great Wall.  From there on to Dunhuang, with its beautiful sand dunes and the nearby Mogao Grottoes (aka Thousand Buddha Caves).  The latter actually has some 735 caves, carved out of the cliff face and apparently containing some 2,415 clay sculptures and more than 45,000m² of murals.  Around 25-40 caves are open to the public on any one day, and we visited some together as a group, after which three of us wandered along the cliff spotting other open caves with tour groups already in, that we could sneak into!  You’re not allowed to use flash inside the caves, so most of the beautiful (and in some cases well-preserved) images could not be photographed – but during later free time I explored a monastery very near our hotel, which contained hundreds of modern statues (of Buddha and various ogres) and varying styles of murals which could be photographed – this is a small part of one of the murals which I rather liked!

After an early morning start to see sunrise over the dunes, we continued to Turpan where we visited the 250-year-old Emin Minaret.  Only all of the signs and information boards called it the Sugong Tower.  We were now approaching Xinjiang province, home of the Uyghurs, and this was a sign of things to come.  The information panel contained the following:

- As the first king of Turpan, Emin Khoja was a patriot that emerged from the Uyghur people.  He made important contributions in opposing the separation of nationalities, maintaining national unity, as well as safeguarding the interests of the Chinese nation and the unity of the motherland.

We also visited the ruined city of Jiaohe, founded in the 2nd century BC but abandoned during the 14th century following its destruction by the Mongols.  How I wish I knew more of the history of this part of the world!  One of the other tour group members finished her thick paperback of Chinese history and left it with me, but I have to admit that I have not yet got very far through it.  The next day we went into Xinjiang, where we visited the ruins of Subash dating from the 2nd and 3rd century, another set of ancient caves (the Kizil Thousand Buddha Caves), the oasis city of Aksu (which also fell to the forces of Genghis Khan), and then into the heart of the Taklamakan Desert (which apparently means ‘the desert of death’!).  Here I got my camel fix … a (too short) trek around a few dunes on a Bactrian camel.

& finally, we made it to Kashgar, apparently one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, variously under the rule of the Chinese, Turkic, Mongol and Tibetan empires.  It is around 86% Uyghur (13% Han Chinese), and has been the subject of some unrest, and now there are various measures underway to ‘Sinicize’ the culture, including the demolition and rebuilding (in a different form) of much of the ‘old city’, and the prohibition of prayer gatherings by Muslims, so that prayers are now only allowed at home, not in mosques.  I was an interesting city, and one I really enjoyed spending time in, visiting (what remains of) the old town, some of the (former) mosques, a giant statue of Chairman Mao, and the Sunday livestock market.

We also had a day trip out to see the longest natural stone arch in the world – Shipton’s Arch (discovered by the British consul, Eric Shipton).  It is apparently 500m from the bottom to the top, and was very impressive!