Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Starting Out
Ever since we humans first began to walk, we have worn paths to our neighbor's house and to the next village and beyond. And ever since we discovered the wheel and learned to tame four-footed beasts, some of our trails have become roads. Among the more monumental examples are the hewn rock ramparts of ancient Rome's Appian Way and the poured concrete cloverleafs of the LA freeways. A much older, much longer, and at the same time less tangible example of our peripatetic nature is the Silk Road.
During its heyday, this will-o'-the-wisp highway carried bolts of silk from the Yangtze delta towns of Suchou and Hangchou across all of Asia to the shores of the Mediterranean, where it was exchanged for its weight in gold. But silk was only one of the road's important commodities. The Chinese spent just as much on incense and precious stones coming the other way. The road also brought many of the items still associated with China: musical instruments and forms of dance and art and religion — things we think of as integral to Chinese culture. For their part, the Chinese never called it the Silk Road. That honor goes to the nineteenth-century German scholar Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen — the uncle of Snoopy's nemesis, Manfred von Richthofen. The Chinese knew it only as the Road to the West. And traveling it was one of the most dangerous missions a person could undertake. It was a road through swirling sand and searing heat, past demons and apparitions, into lands that only the demented, exiled, or simply foolhardy dared venture. I wasn't sure to which category I belonged, but in the fall of 1992 I decided to travel this road, from China all the way to Pakistan. Because it was going to be a long and an arduous trip, I decided not to travel alone. I asked my friend Finn Wilcox to join me. Finn made his living planting trees and doing yard work. Fall was the beginning of his slack season, and so he signed on.
The Silk Road wasn't what a person would normally think of as a road. Until recently, there was no actual road, simply a trail of bones and animal dung left by the most recent caravan. A passing dust storm, and the road was gone, until the next caravan found its way across one of the world's more barren landscapes to the next oasis.
Exactly when or how this trade route developed, or who was responsible for its creation, remains a matter for archaeologists to work out. The migratory routes of nomads who lived in the grasslands of Central Asia crisscrossed this region, and certain groups stayed behind to settle lowlying pastures and oases. And when some found it more profitable to carry goods between these oases than herd their flocks, they provided the string that linked these islands of green together. But it wasn't until the time of Julius Caesar that this string turned to silk.
As I began to get ready, I considered what to take. Since I wasn't joining an organized tour that took care of baggage and transport problems, a suitcase was out of the question. And since I wasn't planning any sorties into the wilderness, so was a backpack. The problem with a backpack was that if the frame didn't break when someone threw something heavy on it, it got in the way trying to squeeze onto a bus or trying to work one's way down a train corridor. What I needed was a rucksack, in other words, a pack with shoulder straps but without a frame. And I just happened to have one. It was my old Forest Service rucksack. It repelled water and pickpockets, up to a point, and while it was only half as big as most backpacks, it held all that I needed.
First, I needed something to keep the whiskey in. Bottles were out of the question, and metal flasks weighed too much. I opted for a pint-size plastic bottle, one whose top screwed on securely. I couldn't afford to waste a drop. The Silk Road was littered with the bones of those who couldn't make it to the next oasis. Once I had the pack and the whiskey out of the way, the rest was easy: a couple changes of clothes, long johns in case it turned cold, a cashmere vest for stepping out at night, and a lightweight jacket, a wool hat and gloves, just to make sure. And I never forget pictures of friends and family and earplugs and a flashlight and spare batteries and toilet paper. That was all I needed, that and a thermos. Finn's pack was pretty much the same.
Once we were packed, it was time to begin our big adventure. But where to begin? Since my plan was to travel westward as far as Pakistan, the most natural place to begin was at the Silk Road's eastern terminus in China. But it turns out that during the many dynasties that ruled China over the past few thousand years, the capital, and thus the eastern end of the Silk Road, varied. Sometimes it was in Loyang, and sometimes it was in Kaifeng. Sometimes it was even in Beijing. Usually, though, the road ended at the gates of Ch'ang-an, or Sian, as it's now known. So that was where we headed.
Since we were entering China from Hong Kong, we could have taken the weekly direct flight from the Crown Colony. But there was also a daily flight from Kuangchou, and flights from Kuangchou, being domestic flights, were 50 percent cheaper. So we headed for Kuangchou. Unfortunately, the day we began our trip was August 29, which turned out to be the beginning of Hong Kong's four-day Liberation Day weekend, which celebrated Hong Kong's liberation from Japanese occupation during World War II. Train tickets to Kuangchou had been sold out for weeks, so we had no choice but to take the subway to Lo Wu and walk across the border to Shenchen. Easier said than done. Despite getting an early start, by the time we arrived at Lo Wu, half of Hong Kong was in line. There we were just starting out, and already we were beginning the weight-loss program that was part of every trip to China. The temperature was in the nineties. We felt the ounces rolling off as we shuffled slowly forward toward the oldest bureaucracy in the world — which China introduced to the West, you guessed it, via the Silk Road. Still, it was a bureaucracy that worked, and we finally made it through immigration and customs. But when we came out the other side, we found ourselves part of a mob. There were at least 10,000 people milling in front of the Shenchen train station. Like us, they were all trying to get to Kuangchou.
We had tickets on the evening flight to Sian waiting for us at the Kuangchou office of China Youth Travel Service. But we had to get there before the office closed. We walked inside the station, but one look at the lines sent us back outside, where taxis quoted their usual absurd prices. After asking around, we got lucky, or so we thought. We found a minivan bound for the city Westerners used to call Canton. It was a brand-new minivan, too, and the fare was only 80RMB, or 80 Hong Kong dollars, take your pick. Since the RMB exchange rate at the time was five to the US dollar, and the Hong Kong rate was eight, we naturally paid in Hong Kong currency. We boarded, threw our bags up by the driver and sat down. A few minutes later, four other passengers boarded. Since the van was now full, the driver pulled out of the train station parking lot. We were off. And out came the cards.
A man put his briefcase on his lap and laid out three cards faceup: the three, the seven, and the queen of hearts. Then he turned them facedown and moved them around and asked the other passengers to bet on the location of the queen. The man who was running the game lifted up the edge of one of the cards so that Finn and I could see it. It was the queen. He said, "Come on. Here's your chance to make some easy money." Another player had already thrown down a thousand Hong Kong dollar bill on one of the other cards. It was the equivalent of 120 US dollars, and we could have used the money. It was going to be a long trip. But the hands of Lady Luck have usually turned out to be too slick for the likes of us, and our money stayed in our pockets.
The game continued without us, as two other passengers plunked down their money. We just smiled and watched, as did the other passengers. After a while, just as we reached the outskirts of Shenchen, the man running the game asked the driver to stop. He got off, as did the three "passengers" who had been betting. The only money in their pockets was the money they had when they got on. As we pulled away, everybody laughed.
In the border town of Shenchen, a fool and his money are soon parted. Apparently, the economic boom had attracted every crook and con artist around. If you're ever passing through Shenchen, keep that in mind. You might think you know where the queen is, but you can be sure the moment you put your money down, she'll turn up somewhere else.
Shenchen, though, wasn't quite finished with us. Not long after leaving the outskirts, our driver pulled over and announced he had engine trouble. He ordered us out and flagged down an old ramshackle regular-sized bus that was also headed for Kuangchou. He paid the bus driver one-fourth of what we had paid him, and we lumbered on in far less comfort thinking: "So long, Karl Marx. Hello, Groucho."
Still, at least we were lumbering, and four hours later we finally arrived in Kuangchou and picked up our plane tickets at the China Youth Travel Service office. As soon as the lid was lifted on China's service industry, travel organizations began popping up all over the place. Every province had its own, as did most major cities. Their prices were almost always lower than national organizations, like China Travel or China International Travel, but they weren't always easy to contact. Nor were they usually interested in anything less than a twelve-member group. During several previous trips, I had found China Youth Travel to be among the more reliable at the cheaper end of the spectrum. But times had changed.
In addition to asking them to arrange our plane tickets to Sian, I also asked if they could take care of the other arrangements on our itinerary, all the way to Islamabad. After checking with their Beijing office, China Youth's Hong Kong office told us it would cost us $4,000 apiece to see what we wanted to see. I may as well tell you right now it didn't cost half that for both of us. Still, China Youth Travel at least got us started with a couple of hard–to-get Liberation Day tickets to Sian, and our China Northwest Airlines flight left right on time. It reminded us, though, of the bus we had taken earlier from Shenchen — not the brand-new one, but the second, ramshackle one.
Before we took off, the stewardess walked down the aisle and handed out imitation sandalwood fans. At first we thought, "How nice, a gift." But we soon found out there was another reason behind the "gift." The pilot didn't turn on the plane's air-conditioning until after we were airborne. When the seat-belt light was finally turned off, one of the passengers walked up and looked at the thermometer attached to the plane's bulkhead. The temperature, he announced to all within earshot, was thirty-six degrees centigrade, or ninety-seven degrees Fahrenheit, and we weren't even on the Silk Road yet.
CHAPTER 2
Sian
As our flight landed in Sian, the pilot turned off the plane's air-conditioning, just as he did before we took off in Kuangchou. Apparently, the plane's electrical system couldn't handle the load during takeoff or landing. Two hundred imitation sandalwood fans all rose to the occasion. At least we arrived.
The new Sian airport was farther out of town than the old one. It was a forty-minute drive, and taxi drivers wanted 70RMB. We opted for the airport bus, which was 5RMB and which left as soon as everyone collected their bags and climbed aboard. An hour later, we checked into our hotel.
Since my first visit to Sian in 1989, a dozen high-end hotels had opened, but we chose the good old Victory. It was just outside the city's Hoping Gate, and a double without a bath was still only $8 a night. After dropping our bags in our cement-walled room, we walked back through the gate to Boss Wang's Three Star Restaurant. It was Boss Wang who'd kept me and Steve Johnson from being deported or imprisoned two years earlier. That was when Steve and I got caught inside a restricted area in the mountains south of town where the poet Wang Wei once lived but where nuclear warheads were now being manufactured. Boss Wang gained our release by entertaining the local foreign affairs police for two nights.
Wang and the Three Star were still going strong, and he feted us with all the cold beer we could drink. Wang said the police still stopped by to ask about Steve and me. I told him to say hello but suggested he not mention the book I had finally published based on my earlier trip. Somehow a photograph of the weapons factory's high-capacity heat sink got slipped in. Just before they'd arrested us coming down the mountain, we spotted them before they spotted us, and Steve put his exposed film in his socks and new film in his camera. It was our own version of the shell game. So where was the queen of hearts?
Finally, in a manner of speaking, we were on the Silk Road. In ancient times, Sian, or Ch'angan, as it was called, served as the capital during China's most glorious periods, the Han and the T'ang dynasties. In the city's new History Museum, visitors can see statues of foreign travelers who arrived during its heyday. The bearded merchants on whom those statues were based wouldn't have been hard to find. Ch'ang-an, after all, was the eastern terminus of the Silk Road. Still, unless they did so at imperial request, foreigners weren't allowed to spend the night inside the city. They could enter during the day, but they had to be outside the city's West Gate by nightfall. That was where deals were made, where foreign merchants bought their silk, and where they divested themselves of their own goods, including incense and colored glass from India, precious stones from Arabia, and medicinal plant and animal products from as far away as East Africa.
Nowadays, the area around the West Gate has been taken over by factories and apartment buildings, and the foreigners have moved to downtown hotels. Over the past decade, Sian has become a major stop on every foreigner's travel itinerary. After all, who visits China without seeing the Underground Army? Certainly, not us.
So the next morning, we boarded a local bus bound for the nearby town of Lintung and transferred to an even more local bus that took us the rest of the way to where the Terracotta Warriors were unearthed. The army was located in a huge single-story building that looked like an aircraft hangar. The price of admission for foreign visitors was $8, which made it the most expensive admission ticket in China. Not that it wasn't worth it, but that brings me to another subject: how to get in for less, a lot less. The solution is the old fake ID, which allows a foreign visitor to get in for the same price Chinese pay. The best ID's are those for students or teachers. Ours said we taught mechanical engineering at Sian's Northwest Engineering College. They cost us 100RMB apiece, and I reckon they saved us ten times that during our Silk Road trip alone. Not only could they be used for admission tickets, they could also be used for accommodations and even train tickets.
Of course, a fake ID is a fake ID; that is, it's illegal. Which brings up the question of breaking the law. I have always tried my best to respect the laws of countries through which I have traveled. But I make an exception in the case of laws or practices that discriminate against travelers by charging them double, triple, even ten times what locals pay for the same goods or services. My response to such discrimination is the fake ID. Naturally, I would never advise anyone to follow my example. But fake ID's are available wherever foreign travelers and local entrepreneurs meet. The cafes and hostels in Yangshuo and Dali, for example, do a booming business in this sort of discrimination equalizer.
Meanwhile, back to the Underground Army. When the ticket puncher wondered how we managed to buy tickets that were normally only issued to Chinese visitors, we just shrugged, said we were teachers, and walked through the big door and past the souvenir shop and suddenly found ourselves inside the building that enclosed the excavated pit. It was as big as a large cemetery. But in this case, the skeletons had been replaced by clay soldiers buried here more than two thousand years ago.
Their mission was to protect the eternal repose of the First Emperor, who, himself, was buried in 209 BC in a copper palace less than a kilometer to the west. The First Emperor was credited with establishing control for the first time over all of what we still call China. In fact, the name China was derived from his short-lived Ch'in dynasty. The soldiers of his guardian army were first discovered by farmers who were digging a well in 1974. Because the underground roofs had collapsed over time, their terracotta likenesses had been reduced to rubble. But more than a thousand of them had been carefully reconstructed and repositioned in their original battle formation. The result is one of the most impressive sights in China. Next to the Great Wall and the Forbidden City, this is the most visited sight in the Middle Kingdom, although not the most photographed. Visitors had to pay a special fee to take pictures, and guards were posted to make sure everyone complied. This restriction has since been changed, but at the time of our visit, our cameras stayed in our arm bags, and our arm bags had to be checked before we could enter.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Silk Road"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Bill Porter.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
