(Dunhuang, China; part 1 of 3)...I first saw the word Dunhuang, many years ago, at an exhibition in the British Museum in London. The museum has approximately 15,000 items from this Chinese city in its collection, and most likely all of them were whisked out of China during the United Kingdom’s empire-building adventures of the 19th century. Most of them came from Dunhuang’s Magao Caves, which house some of the world’s largest statues of Buddha. The city’s name stuck with me amid a whirl of fantastic stories of the legendary Silk Road, on which it lies. This is the 5,000-mile Silk Road of Marco Polo; the Syrian Assassins (where the word “hashish” comes from, by the way) loyal to the Old Man of the Mountains; the great trading cities of Bukhara, Tashkent and Samarkand; the great Arabic university cities of Baghdad and Damascus; The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night (as it is correctly known as) by mad, bad, multilingual Richard Burton; and the terra cotta warriors of Xi’an. Try and go to Dunhuang and not feel part—an infinitesimally minute part—of all that history and folklore, sandwiched as you are between the Chinese provinces of Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, which is predominantly Muslim in culture and religion.
Sand is what you first notice. It creeps into the city’s small but modern airport, fills the eye holes of your shoes before you’ve even got comfortable in your taxi and lies in huge quantities to both sides of the road. At meal times, an occasional grain of it will crack in your teeth, an experience known, no doubt, to anyone eating sandwiches on the beach. To that extent, it is nothing short of miraculous that the streets of Dunhuang, announced by an imperial-style Chinese arch, seem mostly cleared of the stuff. Piles of vegetables, fruits and chilies survive being placed in stands in the market and residents do not need to cover their eyes and mouths with bandanas.
Dunhuang, approximately 1,500 miles west of Beijing, always has been an important stopping-off point for traders on the Silk Road, a place to stock up on provisions, hear the gossip from other traders and receive warnings of the dangers that might lurk ahead. Such places were known as caravanserai. One was needed at Dunhuang perhaps more than at other places for one reason: To the west lay the immense, dry, dangerous Gobi Desert, which is mainly a rocky expanse, rather than a sandy one. Next to the Gobi, and on the traders’ Silk Road route, is a sandy desert, called the Taklamakan. Its name sounds better in the local language, as its loose translation into English is “the desert from which no one returns.” If I saw that on my 13th-century map, I might be persuaded to spend a little more time in Dunhuang, too.
Dunhuang’s airport is nine miles east of the city, and the drive between the two already provides a notion of what the desert looks like. Mostly it is not the desert of Hollywood images of Lawrence of Arabia but an expansive, flat area of nothing—gray-yellow sand and small rocks. Once in a while a low ridge of sandstone cliffs breaks the beautiful monotony.
The first thing a visitor sees on driving beneath Dunhuang’s entrance arch is the 251-room Dunhuang Hotel, which has rooms to both sides of the road and a restaurant and conference space to the left. Upstairs is a theater in which dancing troupes perform regional dances of graceful choreography and synchronized movement. The Chinese restaurant is no different from the vast majority of restaurants in this country—noisy. (I was watching the TV broadcast a game of Ping Pong, which needs no language skills to be understood and followed, so it was a little bit of a mystery to me why a waiter smiled at me and changed channels to a news broadcast in Chinese. Maybe he just didn’t like me?)
A few hundred feet down the road is a statue comprising four camels—of the two-hump Bactrian species that has always lived in the area—that stands in front of the Dunhuang Museum. The museum feels a little institutionalized, but its exhibits are interesting enough, with artifacts chronicling the rise and fall of several Chinese dynasties, the people of which all, despite being forgotten in the mists of time, left evidence of their arrivals. Behind the museum, as the city begins to peter out in a series of dusty side roads, is a small park with another statue, this time of a fierce warrior. Around the park’s edge were Mongolian yurt tents. It looked like a temporary fair had set up shop, but this was not the case. These were homes and food stalls. The largest statue in the city is the one in the middle of its one traffic circle, a huge statue of a Chinese beauty playing a guitar behind her head, sort of like Jim Hendrix used to do, if you will excuse the crass analogy.
My favorite activity in Dunhuang was visiting the market. During the day, Muslim Chinese operate food stalls, while in the evening, things are lit up and stallholders sell an amazingly broad range of relative nontouristy knick-knacks. I found a small pot with a lid that dated to the early 20th century (or at least I was told this by someone at the hotel). They were made for mass consumption, and many (but not mine) depict erotic scenes. I searched all around the market for another example but found no other. The evening market, known as the Shazhou Night Market, stretches the whole length of one street. At one end are stalls selling delicious kebobs of grilled lamb, grapes and a single piece of lamb fat. All is rubbed in chili, and my mouth is watering now just writing about them.