Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud

Here merchants and travellers from as far as Syria and southern India would check into one of many caravanserais inside the city. After a wash and a meal, they would inspect their pack animals to see if they needed to change them for healthy, rested ones, or simply to trade in one type of animal for another more suitable for the next stage of the journey – Bactrian camels were the favourite for this stretch of the Silk Road: they could sniff out subterranean springs and predict sandstorms; if they bunched together and buried their mouths in the sand, you knew one was coming. In the bustling bazaars the travellers would sell their goods, buy local specialities and stock up on food and supplies. If they had completed a profitable deal, they could go into one of the many taverns. Gorgeous women from Kucha, the next oasis, and even from as far away as Samarkand, entertained them with whirlwind dances and melodious songs, as they filled their glasses with the delicious Gaochang wine made from ‘mare’s teat’ grapes.

Gaochang, like all oasis kingdoms on the Silk Road, depended on levies from the caravans passing through. On entering the city gate, everyone was asked to show their passes issued in their country of origin. Then the merchants would be charged on the spot by their animal loads and then again when they sold their goods in the bazaars. A camel could carry an average of three hundred pounds, and a horse or a donkey half of that. Caravans could be as small as a dozen travellers or as big as several thousands – the bigger, the safer because the merchants could afford to pay for protection. An annual customs report of Gaochang from Xuanzang’s time recorded buoyant trade in large quantities: a man selling five hundred and seventy-two pounds of spices, another eighty pounds of raw silk and a third eight pounds of silver. The list goes on, giving us the most direct evidence of how the oasis kingdoms like Gaochang earned their income. The wealth of Gaochang was such that when China conquered it in the first century BC, its annual revenues could finance the defence and running costs of the entire Western Region.

After lunch we set out for Bezeklik. ‘The locals call it “the place with paintings”,’ Fat Ma said. It is one of the biggest Buddhist cave complexes in the Western Region, dating from the fifth century to the thirteenth century when Islam became the dominant religion in the area. Originally built by monks for meditating in a quiet valley, it soon became a famous centre of worship for lay followers, and the travellers of the Silk Road, who would pray for a safe journey by making offerings to the images of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Xuanzang did not mention it in his record but Fat Ma was absolutely certain that he visited it. ‘It was just over twenty kilometres from Gaochang city,’ he said, ‘and it would have taken only an hour or two on horseback. The king was so keen to impress Xuanzang, I’m sure he would grab any opportunity to persuade the monk to stay. Judging from the pictures of the murals, it must have been a splendid place.’

I also had seen pictures of the Bezeklik murals and they looked spectacular. Larger than life-size, they were painted in meticulous detail and exuberant colours and seemed as if they had been finished yesterday. Kings and queens, princes and princesses, Indian monks, Persian and Roman traders stood piously in their best costumes on the side walls, facing the altar where the image of the Buddha would be. Their names were written by their heads: they were the donors who had paid for the caves and the splendid paintings. Those murals were mostly painted after Xuanzang’s time, but a Tang dynasty record of Gaochang gives us a vivid account of Bezeklik, which it called Ningrong Cave Monastery. This is undoubtedly the Bezeklik Xuanzang would have seen. ‘Everywhere you look, there are mountains. Long, open corridors connect the monastery and the caves, with a clear stream running rapidly down below. Tall trees, morning mist and clouds make them invisible at first sight. This monastery has been known for a long time.’

We reached the valley quickly. The mountain is stark, barren and bald. I could hear the sound of water gushing at the bottom of the gully although I could not see it. We were picking our way over a rocky road more suitable for goats than cars when suddenly it opened up to a wide space where half a dozen cars were parked. I rushed to get out; Fat Ma made no move.

‘I think I’ll wait for you here,’ he said. ‘The thing with Bezeklik is: if you don’t see it, you will regret it; after you’ve seen it, you’ll regret it even more. Go and find out for yourself.’

The caves were indeed a terrible letdown, even with Fat Ma’s warning. Gone were the fantastic murals, the pictures of which I so loved. The majority of the fifty-odd caves were barred over, like a zoo without animals; the ‘good’ ones were virtually bare, just here and there a faint trace of a mural, a featureless Buddha, or a broken flower petal. All I could see clearly were the chisel marks made by the German explorer Albert von Le Coq and his colleagues as they divested the caves of their treasures to take them back to Europe.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century Bezeklik and other treasures of Xinjiang became the target of frenzied international exploration. This was the age of adventure. As one scholar put it, ‘No heroes stood taller in the Victorian pantheon than explorers. These explorers were the dashing film stars of the imperial era. Tinting unknown lands on a nation’s map became the embodiment of cultural virility. Plants, animals, falls, rivers, and even entire mountain ranges were named for these peerless travellers. Museums and galleries vied to display their collections. Readers never seemed to have enough books about these far-flung places.’

In Xinjiang, it all started as part of a broader geo-political rivalry between the British in India and Russia’s ambitions to the east. But no big power wanted to be left out of the glory, so for almost half a century, adventurers and explorers – Russian, British, Swedish, German, French, Japanese and American – raced against each other to unearth the antiquities of a lost and immensely rich civilization, buried under the sands of the Taklamakan Desert and untouched for more than a millennium. The chase, often with Xuanzang’s record as their guide, was all the more intense because of the Greco-Roman origins of many of the treasures – almost as if that made them theirs to despoil. And they were not disappointed. Their finds, measured in tons and thousands of camel loads, have filled major museums around the world and reveal the glorious past of Buddhist history.

The Germans carved out Turfan, Karashar, Kucha and Tumshuq, the major oases on the northern route of the Silk Road, as their sphere of influence. Their man was Albert von Le Coq, who spoke several oriental languages and worked for the Berlin Ethnographic Museum. He and his assistant spent two years from 1904 to 1906 combing through all the ancient sites of Turfan, which were mostly ruins or buried by sand. They heard about Bezeklik from a shepherd and found the caves filled to the ceiling with sand. They were overcome by the murals once they removed the sand: ‘If we could secure these pictures,’ Le Coq wrote in Buried Treasures of Chinese Turkestan, the record of his explorations, ‘the success of the expedition was assured.’ With a hammer, a chisel, a knife and a fox-tail saw, he and his assistant managed to remove all the best-preserved murals of Bezeklik, which filled 103 huge trunks, each weighing well over a hundred kilograms. After twenty months of travelling they arrived safely in Berlin, where they occupied an entire room of the museum. ‘This is one of the few temples whose sum-total of paintings has been brought to Berlin,’ he wrote with a great deal of satisfaction. Moreover, he thought he was doing the Chinese a favour by his crude archaeological theft. ‘It cannot be too often emphasized that it is solely due to European archaeologists that any of the Buddhist treasures of Turkestan have been saved.’ He would never have suspected the Berlin Ethnographic Museum would be the graveyard for these precious objects. After surviving for more than 1,500 years in the desert, most of the murals were reduced to ashes in the bombing of Berlin in 1945. Only photographs remain.

I was in and out of the caves in twenty minutes. I was not the only unhappy visitor. A woman in high-heeled shoes and a long black velvet dress was blaming her partner loudly: ‘I’m baking hot. It’s all your fault. I told you we should have gone to the bazaar …’ When I got back to the car, I was complaining to Fat Ma about the destruction by the barbarians.

‘It wasn’t just the Germans,’ he said, ‘a friend of mine did his bit too.’

‘What? Your friends helped the Germans?’

‘No, it is a different story.’

There were still a few murals in some of the caves a decade ago. His friend and five other amateur archaeologists were told to clean them with soap and water. After the grime and mud were washed away, his friend saw a lovely face of the Buddha. He worked very hard for several days to clean the rest of the murals, Fat Ma explained, his voice falling almost to a whisper, as if he were afraid he would be overheard. But in a few days the cleaned murals began to crack and disintegrate; in no time they were gone. The cleaning had washed away the glue that held the pigments together. What had stood for so long and survived various depredations was finally destroyed by the ignorance of good intentions.

It was a sad story, and it matched my disappointment with the caves. Fat Ma tried to cheer me up. ‘Come on, lighten up. You’re going to see something really interesting. Promise.’

Barely two hundred yards from the caves, by the side of the narrow road, stood a grinning monkey, bright yellow and made of clay, and a pantheon of other characters from the novel – the gluttonous piggy, the novice, a red demon, a crab, a fox and of course the venerable Xuanzang on his white horse. They were crudely made and painted in day-glo colours. I had not noticed them before because I was looking for the water I could hear but not see. There was a terracotta dome in the background and on top of it the Islamic symbol of the crescent moon, presumably to appeal to the local Muslim population as well as tourists. The backdrop of the whole site was the red rock of the Flaming Mountain. ‘This theme park is for visitors so they can relive the myths of The Monkey King,’ said Fat Ma enviously, no doubt regretting that he had not come up with this enterprising idea. Two young men seemed to be enjoying themselves: for 30 pence each, they put their faces through cardboard versions of the Monkey King and Xuanzang, and then had their photos taken. For a pound, they could be the monkey, putting on a mask and a bright yellow martial-arts costume, with a walking stick for his cudgel. If the pilgrim himself took their fancy, they could put on a monk’s robe and get up on a real white horse.

I stood surveying the scene, a little shocked that the government had given permission for a theme park to be built so close to a grade-one listed ancient site. Turfan is not exactly crowded – it is as big as Ireland – and most of it is desert. They could have built this garish entertainment anywhere. But Fat Ma said, ‘I would have chosen this spot too. It’s near the famous site, many people come this way. And after the disappointing caves, why not have some fun?’

‘They have the Flaming Mountain,’ I said.

‘That’s where we are going next,’ he replied.

In The Monkey King, the Flaming Mountain bars Xuanzang’s way: for hundreds of miles around it everything is on fire and nothing can grow. To cross it, he has to borrow the magic fan from the princess of the Iron Fan. Waved once, the fan puts out fire; twice, it raises a wind; and the third time, it brings on rain and makes everything flourish. The local people have to sacrifice a child every year to appease the evil princess and borrow her fan for planting and watering their crops. Naturally the princess will not lend it to the monk. So the monkey uses his magic and turns himself into a tiny insect, gets into her stomach and makes trouble there. She is forced to give him a fan, but it is a fake one which shoots up flames almost engulfing the sky. He then pretends to be her husband and takes the fan from their marital bed, but without the right spell. A whirlwind blows him ten thousand miles away like a fallen leaf. He is lucky the third time, with the help of a host of celestial spirits. He puts out the fire and returns the fan to the princess, who now promises to use it for everyone’s good. The monkey gathers their packs, saddles the white horse for Xuanzang, and they cross the Flaming Mountain without flames.

The real Xuanzang could not have avoided the Flaming Mountain when he was in Gaochang. It was the most striking feature of this oasis kingdom and it was right on the Silk Road. Just as Fat Ma and I were discussing it, I saw spiky rocks on the horizon. They grew taller, rising inexorably. They almost seemed to throb with their curious red as we drove nearer. I had read about the Flaming Mountain so many times and seen many pictures of it, but still I was amazed at its grandeur. The steep sides are criss-crossed with deep gullies of dark red stone; the mountain-tops make hectic zigzags against the blue sky. Under the blazing sun, it really does seem ready to burst into flames. It made me realize why it was the perfect backdrop for one of the most dramatic episodes in The Monkey King, firing the author’s imagination, mine and that of everyone who has read the novel throughout the centuries.

I decided to have my photo taken with the Flaming Mountain in the background. I could not return empty-handed from the land of my childhood dream that had been burning in my head for the past thirty years. But Fat Ma said no. I thought he did not want to get out of the jeep in the scorching sun, so we drove on. After another fifteen minutes, we left the main road, cruising on the gravel towards the foot of the mountain. Suddenly we screeched to a stop. ‘Photo time now!’ he declared proudly. ‘I have searched the whole mountain from end to end: this is the ideal spot.’ I thought it was very considerate of him to do it just for me but it turned out to be a more serious business matter. In Turfan as in the rest of China in the reform era, everything is about money. Fat Ma said they were having a Flaming Mountain fever right now – half a million people had visited Turfan the year before. ‘We should put a billboard on the road, saying “Ideal Photo Spot for the Flaming Mountain”,’ he said excitedly. ‘We will have a guard and charge fifty pence per photo. We will make a fortune.’ He seemed to be intoxicated by his dream of riches – or maybe it was just the heat.

Before I read Xuanzang’s biography the only thing I knew of him in Turfan was the Flaming Mountain story – and this is still true for most Chinese. I had no idea that it was here in Turfan that the real Xuanzang, by his courage and determination, gave his pilgrimage a solid chance of success. He arrived here penniless, with a warrant over his head, far from certain that he could survive the journey. Now he could carry on with every hope of fulfilling his dream. The king of Gaochang provided him with everything he would need: clothes to suit all weathers, one hundred ounces of gold and three piles of silver pieces, and five hundred rolls of satin and taffeta as donations to major monasteries. He was also given thirty horses, twenty-four servants and five monks to look after him as far as India and back. But most important of all, the king wrote state letters to be presented to the twenty-four different kingdoms along the way. In particular, he asked the Great Khan of the Western Turks, who controlled the whole of Central Asia at the time, to protect the Chinese monk. Xuanzang wrote these words that expressed all the elegance of his mind and his depth of feeling:

For all these favours, I feel ashamed of myself and do not know how to express my gratitude. Even the overflow of the Jiaohe River does not compare with your kindness, and your favour is weightier than the Pamir Mountains. Now I have no more worries for my journey … If I succeed in my purpose, to what shall I owe my achievements? To nothing but the king’s favour.

The contrast between fiction and reality could not be greater.

The Monkey King has hidden the real Xuanzang, but the fiction has an important role to play. Life for most people in China had always been oppressive. They were subjugated by hardship and tyranny and The Monkey King was cathartic, not just as a rich and colourful fantasy world, but as the story of a maverick spirit who symbolized what we could only dream of: rebellion. It was sheer magic. The thrill of reading it for the first time is still with me.

But it had another significance: it carried any number of Buddhist messages. I remember Grandmother trying to explain some of them to me. She said although the monkey could fly up to Heaven and dive into hell, slay dragons and subdue demons, he could also be arrogant, jealous, angry, greedy, selfish and harmful. That was why Guanyin gave him another name, Wukong, meaning ‘Understanding Emptiness’. Guanyin hoped the monkey would come to appreciate the limits of his power and the vanity of life. We even had a saying: ‘Mighty the monkey may be, but even with his 180,000-league jump, he can never escape from the palm of the Buddha.’ The monk, on the other hand, was kind, loving, selfless and compassionate. He had the Way – that was the secret of his power over the mighty monkey whom he kept under control simply by reciting the Heart Sutra. It did not make sense to me at the time. Now I can see what Grandmother meant. In fact, the last sentences of The Monkey King