Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 8, 1995 TAG: 9501070078
SECTION: TRAVEL PAGE: G-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SUZANNE MUCHNIC LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: WUPU, CHINA LENGTH: Long
Next came the dancers - a troupe of little girls, 6 or 8 years old, with winsome smiles, velvety brown eyes and shiny pigtails. Dressed in a blaze of mismatched patterns, bright leggings, clunky white tennis shoes and embroidered square caps, or ``dopas,'' they repeated a mystifying litany of arm movements as they danced from the front of Wupu's City Hall down a street lined three or four deep with villagers.
The entire population of Wupu seemed to have turned out to welcome us. Maybe there wasn't much else to do on Sunday in this remote bit of Chinese Turkestan. Maybe our international group of 50 art conservators, scientists and journalists looked as exotic to the citizens of Wupu as they appeared to us. Or maybe the Getty Conservation Institute, which had organized our tour of ancient cultural sites along the fabled Silk Road, had pulled a few strings to provide us with a heartwarming spectacle.
All three possibilities turned out to be true.
Everywhere we looked, there were friendly, open faces and photogenic costumes. Old men with goatees wore long coats, heavy leather boots and ``dopas''; younger men and boys had on wide-billed caps and woolen sweaters; women covered their heads with bright kerchiefs and their legs with thick brown cotton stockings; young girls turned up in Western-style warm-up suits in red, fuchsia and turquoise.
We had arrived in Xinjiang (shin-JAHNG), a vast area of western China that became a Chinese province in 1884 and was declared the Xinjiang-Uygur Autonomous Region in 1955, making the area an independent state. And we had come face-to-face with the Uygurs (oo-ee-GOORS), Turkic-speaking Muslims who constitute the largest ethnic minority in a region bordered by Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Tibet.
We had signed up for a professional, six-day tour of cultural monuments along a northern segment of the Silk Road, from Dunhuang to Urumqi (oo-room-CHEE). We would feast our curiosity on contemporary life as well as ancient wonders.
The Silk Road is the seductive modern name given to a network of trade routes which, from the third century B.C. to the 14th century, linked Xi'an (CHEE-AHN), the historic capital of China, with the Mediterranean. Our journey started at Dunhuang, where we had attended a conference on the conservation of the Mogao Grottoes, a spectacular complex of 492 caves filled with Buddhist art.
Located on the southwestern edge of the Gobi Desert, 1,200 miles west of Beijing, Dunhuang isn't exactly a garden spot, but it seemed comparatively lush as we left it behind and forged northwest into Xinjiang. The landscape soon deteriorated into a gray crust, sliced by a recently paved, two-lane highway used almost exclusively by overloaded trucks.
Hami was dispiriting. Like the brand-new Hami Hotel, where a glitzy lobby is a front for dirty, dysfunctional guest rooms, the city seemed to pride itself on shoddy new construction.
Only an hour's drive from Hami, we were in a tranquil old adobe village with a spirit of generosity. Primitive as it is, Wupu is a model of architectural integrity, built to accommodate people who live in a climate that ranges from well below zero to more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit and gets less than an inch of rain each year. Throughout the region, water is channeled underground from mountains to lowland agricultural areas where fruits and vegetables are grown and later dried. In sharp contrast to high-rise apartment buildings that are sprouting up around cities, traditional homes are one-story, thick-walled structures with underground storage rooms for produce.
The children of Wupu bade us a noisy farewell as we boarded the bus back to Hami. On our approach to the city we stopped to see a complex of tombs built for kings who reigned over Hami from 1697 to 1930. Mixing Islamic and Chinese design, the royal tombs are adjacent to the 300-year-old Great Mosque of Adker, where crowds gather on Islamic holy days.
After another night at the Hami Hotel, we set off for Turpan, the most appealing of the three major cities we visited. Stretching out over a large, flat area that lies below sea-level, it's a peaceful town of about 100,000 people where grape arbors cover sidewalks and hand-painted billboards lend splashes of color to major thoroughfares. Ancient men in great coats mingle with women in dark dresses and heavy brown stockings in Turpan's marketplaces, while children wear Western-style warm-up suits. Despite such evidence of change, the people live simply. Walking around the city early one morning, I saw sleepy residents emerging from tiny mud-brick buildings that double as shops and living quarters. With little space inside, they brushed their teeth and ate their porridge outdoors, where they would later sell produce.
Serving as a base for bus tours to several major ancient monuments and home to a regional museum, Turpan offers a satisfying mix of history and modern culture. Two monuments that bring archeologists and art conservators to Turpan are remains of 2,000-year-old adobe cities on the outskirts of town. In a wetter climate, the buildings would have long since disintegrated. But here, where rain is rare and dust a constant, large sections of the structures are intact.
Jiaohe, the larger of the two ruined cities, was established during the Han dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 220) to protect the Silk Road. At its peak in the ninth century, it was home to more than 6,000 people, but was abandoned during the 13th century as a result of war, a lack of water or both. Most of the remains date from the Tang dynasty (618-907).
Also near Turpan, in a breathtaking setting, is a complex of Buddhist caves known as the Bezekelik Grottoes.
Situated in a valley near red sandstone hills (known as the Flaming Mountains) Bezekelik has all the natural beauty a desert-weary traveler could desire. Majestic sand dunes rise behind the caves, a river runs through a lush oasis below them, and the air is refreshingly crisp. About 100 caves constructed of adobe bricks and cut into one side of a long, curving cliff are striking as well.
Most of the Buddhist wall paintings that once filled these caves have been removed by German archeologists and taken to Berlin - where about half of them were destroyed by bombs during World War II - and the remaining frescoes have been defaced by Muslim zealots. Unlike the Mogao Grottoes, which remain a magnificent cache of Buddhist art despite damage caused by the elements, pollution, vandals and losses to foreign museums, Bezekelik's artistic glory can only be divined from photographs and in fragments of frescoes at the caves and in Berlin's Museum of Indian Art.
Depressed by thoughts of these cultural atrocities, we returned to Turpan and cheered ourselves up with the spectacle of its street life.
Our final stop was Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. This bustling, traffic-snarled urban center seems to be gripped by an urge to obliterate everything old and replace it with something big and ugly. Our temporary home, the Friendship Hotel, was not new, but it was big and ugly. Inconveniently located on the southern edge of town, the hotel had the look of a Communist retreat that had outlived its usefulness.
Urumqi's urbanity has its rewards. One of them is the Xinjiang Museum, which has a 30,000-piece collection of regional artworks, artifacts and costumes, as well as cultural relics dating back to the Stone Age.
We had already seen an impressive array of ceramic tomb figures and textiles from the Astana burial ground at the Turpan Museum. The larger showcase at Urumqi displays even more treasures from Astana - small figurines depicting ethnic minorities, statues of male acrobats, paintings of women playing chess and serving food and brocade footwear.
The last day of our journey took us to Heavenly Lake, a mountain retreat where Khazak people live in yurts and offer tourists horseback rides and short boat trips. Colorful signs offered lodging in a yurt, local dishes and pictures ``fine and cheap,'' but we contented ourselves with hikes and views of the alpine scenery.
As we flew out of Urumqi the following morning, the desert swallowed up all the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures of Xinjiang. Chinese Turkestan was already a dream. Now, as I leaf through a small mountain of tour books, museum catalogs, notebooks and photographs, searching for ways to put an adventure into words, I remember Xinjiang.
It's a little girl inviting me to dance, women in kerchiefs and heavy brown stockings, goateed men in great coats. It's the haunting remains of Jiaohe, Gaochang and Bezekelik. It's the modern Asian crossroads that has replaced the historic Silk Road.
by CNB