Two Stops Past Siberia

I wrote to you last from Urumqi ( I think) the capital of the once and former Uighurstan. Today it is a modern Chinese city, appearing almost identical to every other Chinese city I’ve seen since. The marvel, of course, is how the Chinese are able to build at the speed that they do, and with such uniformity, in such far flung places. Urumqi sports clean streets and beautiful parks. It also features a 75% ethnically Chinese poplation, effectively drowning out the natives.

The Uighur language is very close to Kyrgyz, and during a mission to track down my laptop (unfortunately now lost forever), I got to speak to many Uighur people. They comiserated my loss, helped me try to track it down, and took the opportunity, for whatever reason, to share their discontent. Perhaps it was the novelty of a white man speaking something like their language, but the stories were unending. China, folks, is a big a complicated place.

(Language side note: The Uighur people I spoke with sprinkled their language liberally with Chinese, just as the Kyrgyz do with Russian. Just one more parallel with the old Soviet Empire…)

But we haven’t just been on a tour of big cities, not at all. My crew and I spent some serious quality time in the city of DunHunag, the plastic-y Disney Land tourist town nearby the spectacular MoGao caves. Once we got over the overwhelming mass of tourists pumped through the caves (an attraction in its own right), we were able to see some of the most extensive Buddhist cave art in the world. The colors were magnificent, and the restoration an abomination. It would have all been for naught had we not also gone to the dramatically less touristed 1,000 Ming West caves, a singificantly smaller find, but absent the tourist hord. In this place, we experienced a quiet ambiance that might have been closer to how the place could have been during its heyday. This plus a riotous night market and a desert oasis (chock full of Chinese tourists all identically clad in knee-highm, bright orange, sand protecting booties) rounded out our desert time in sheer magnificence.

Since then, folks, we dropped by the delightful Lanzhou, for a taste of a pleasant working class city (with more commerce than, perhaps, all of Kyrgyzstan combined) and are now resting peacefully in the city of Xi’an, in China proper. It is this place that houses the unparalled Terracotta Warriors. While my friends check it out themselves (these are old stomping grounds for me) I’m resting from our long train rides, getting over an ear-ache, and waiting to see what my old home, Beijing, has waiting for me, after all these years.