Curious Chinese truck driver leaning in through the van’s window: ‘Where you fwom?’
Colin: ‘England.’
Chinese truck driver. Large smile: ‘Ah, jingle-land!’
Colin: ‘No England’
Chinese truck driver: ‘yes… JIN-GALL-land!!’
Colin: ‘Ok, I from jingle-land’. Long pause: ‘Where are you fwom?’
Chinese truck driver: ‘Pigeon’
Colin: ‘Pigeon?’
Chinese truck driver: ‘yes Pigeon’
Colin: ‘where’?
Other Chinese truck driver: ‘Peking…Bei-jing’
Chinese truck driver: ‘Yes, Pigeon!’
Colin: ‘oh Beijing… I get it?’
I can’t describe how privileged I feel to have travelled thousands of miles from one end of the ‘Silk Road’ to the other. Like hundreds of travelers before us we have crossed ferociously hot deserts; snaked our way over numerous mountain passes; learnt about dozens of religions and ancient empires; reaped countless acts of human kindness and witnessed the aftermath and horrors of human conflict. These unique experiences have provided us with a glimpse of what it must have been like to risk life and limb to transport goods from east to west along the ancient Silk Road.
In days gone by it would have been far easier for traders to head north towards Siberia where it would have been much cooler and flatter for the heavily laden caravans. However, marauding horseman tribes set on ambushing the precious loads, soon stopped that option. To the south, tropical diseases, more marauding tribes and dense forest left the terrifyingly hot deserts and treacherous mountain passes as the only possible option. The prospect of setting out into land that was quiet literary thought of as the end of civilization must have seemed absurd at the time. In modern days terms it would be like going on the BBC’s Dragons Den and trying to persuade a millionaire to part with his cash to fund a nudist theme park for Eskimos in the middle of the Sahara desert. In short, setting out on sections of the Silk Road must have seemed destined to fail from the very start. For those pioneers who risked their lives they may never have known that their journey was going to create a highway where valuable goods, technology, education and religion would travel along for hundreds of generations.
Testament of this fact occurred a day after arriving in Kashgar. That morning, whilst we watched the sun rise over the main square in Kashgar I was amazed at how the warmth of the sun was stifled by a thin dust cloud that had enveloped the whole city for days. In the cool orangey morning air we watched thousands of men swarm into the square and line up row after row. Standing shoulder to shoulder, three generations of men from the same family rolled out their prayer mats that had been tucked under their arms, kicked off their shoes and stood expectantly on their colorfully embroidered mats. The Chinese city of Kashgar lies 200 kilometers away from the Irkeshtam Pass, which we bumped over the day before. Despite having arrived in the city at midnight we were still on a high after completing the most challenging section on our route and could now laugh about all the near misses and breakdown. Moreover, we could see that the Irkeshtam pass’s destiny lay in the hands of the Chinese as they hurriedly laid a tarmac snake over the 2000 year-old pass, so we felt incredibly privileged to complete it before it changed forever.
The next morning I didn’t think we were about to witness a religious ceremony of such enormous magnitude. Ignorantly, I hadn’t expected there to be such as vast community of Muslims in the north west of China. By 9am an eerie hush had fallen over the sea of men and my perception of Kashgar had changed completely. As fate would have it we had arrived on the final day of Ramadan and the ancient ceremony began as a prayer rang out from the mosque that the lines of men now faced. Moments later the same hush fell over the crowd and the high pitch flutter from the wings of startled pigeons was the only sound to break the silence. Seconds later a rumble that sounded like it came from the depths of the earth moved over the crowd like a wave as the men replied to the prayer. The tone was so low it seemed to pass right through me. In union, the sea of men then bowed into the praying position and a gush of air seemed to be expelled from the crowd. Another prayer rang out from the mosque and in reply the men leaned forwards so that their heads touched the ground and again they replied in unison. 20 minutes later the ceremony was finished and within seconds the prayer mats disappeared under tightly squeezed armpits and the men dispersed into the streets surrounding the square. It was the single largest religious ceremony that I have ever witnessed and I was hard not to be impressed with how powerful human faith can be when it comes to religious belief. This experience made me imagine how a trader on the ‘ancient silk road’ could have quiet easily become mesmerized by a foreign religion and brought their new beliefs back with them on their return journey.
As we joined the crowd to exit the square I have to be honest and say that it was nerve-racking. Just like sheep in a race, we were all of a sudden surrounded by hundreds of men all heading in the same direction. We were bunched in so close to each other that the toes of one man would knock the heels of the person in front. For me, being at bum level was neither fun nor pretty but there was no avenue to escape this sea of people. I’m sorry to say that due to misguided western media influences, my mind filled with images of the crowd around me exploding into a chaotic mess as a suicide bomber detonated his load.
My mind was brought back to reality as we shuffled past several disabled and ill people who had been loaded into wheelbarrow sized karts. Their legs, that were doubled up under them, were draped in a blankets and I noticed one lady’s complexion was a mottled grey color and there was barely any sign of life in her face. Beside them stood women - who I guessed were their mothers – who were wearing hijab and were weeping silently. As we passed by the karts, I noticed a pile of paper money and coins that had been tossed on top of the blankets by the tide of people. It dawned on me that one of the ‘Five Pillars of Islam’ is the Zakah, which is the obligatory alms giving, given according to a persons accumulated wealth (roughly around 2.5% of their income) and this was the reason for the outpouring of generosity to less fortunate people who we had just passed. It also struck me that this must have been the reason why so many Muslims tried to give me a hand out whilst we travelled through Central Asia.
I later wondered whether this generous giving of wealth was the only income that the disabled people and their families received on an annual basis. As my thoughts continued I imagined that if I was born in Xinjiang province of China and I broke my neck, that I could have been bundled into a wheel barrow with my mum weeping next to me right now. Guiltily, I was struck again - as I have been many times before - by the thought that ‘No matter how tough one thinks their life is, there is always someone worse off than you’.
As it turns out Kashgar, which is a historic trading town on the Silk Road, is home to the Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim minority. Unfortunately, it seems that their identity is being diluted faster than the appearance of the ancient city, as prefabricated concrete buildings with neon Chinese writing seems to be going up everywhere. One source told us that the Uighur people have been seeking independence from China for years. Instead of granting this wish to them, the Chinese government has built roads and railroads to Kashgar and as a result there has been a major influx of the entrepreneurial Han people seeking economic wealth. The good jobs go to the Han even if there is an equal Uighur candidate. All of this means that you can really sense the tension between the Uighur and Han people.
An example of this happened when we went to get Miranda’s damaged undercarriage inspected– which although it had been temporarily fixed by the lorry drivers at the Irkehstam border, still needed a seeing to by some local mechanics. Whilst we were there, the Uighur mechanic totally ignored our Han guide’s questions and barely recognized the fact that he was even there. Luckily, they were able to weld up our broken bracket that had taken most of the impact from the hidden rock days previously in no-mans land, however, the tension in the air was obvious.
Throughout our journey on the Silk Road we’ve read time after time how ancient empires (which include Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, the Russians, the British and the Chinese) have forcefully acquired civilizations against the will of the people who occupied that land. Observing the Uighur situation in Kashgar gave us the smallest of insights into how it must have felt to have been a defeated community under the rule of a foreign power in ancient times. However, I can imagine that this is just a glimpse into the full impact of the situation.
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