More History

We arrived in Kucha late last night, after an extended, but fairly pleasant ride on the train from Kashgar. Today, we get down to the real business of seeing the sights. First up is the "Grand Canyon", followed by the Cave of a Thousand Buddhas.

It is an hour and a half to the canyon, so along the way, we get the story of the area. It's happening as I type, and I am interested to see how it shapes up. Kucha is so small a town (only 500,000 people) that there is no English-speaking guide. As a result, our guide from Beijing will translate the Mandarin for us.

I have found many guides in China have marginal English, at best. As a result, their stories are rather unintelligible. Pronouns get mixed up, time loses all meaning, and antecedents become as lost as the original text of the tale itself. The communicative competence (as my ELL training says) of the guides is nil. I wonder, given the excellent, fluent English that our Beijing guide speaks, if the information will be more meaningful.

Kucha means "intersection" in Uyghur. My first impression is of a one stoplight town, and in many ways, it is. But while in America at means small and backwater, in this part of the globe it is a big deal. When everything is small and backwater, and has been since the beginning of recorded history (and probably longer than that), a stoplight is a big deal. This town was not just an oasis along the road, it was a place where two different roads crossed. That is a big deal and means big, important city.

It was also the seat of (the Chinese) government, so anyone passing along the Silk Road was required to stop and show their passport-like papers and get approval (or something). OK, some ideas are still lost in translation.

There are two big construction projects in China (and the way he rattled them off, it sounds like this is a well-known governmental policy): "Moving the water from the south to the north" and "moving the gas from the west to the east." Kucha is along the gas pipeline, so gas is its main energy supply.

Kucha is also (at some point in its long and storied history) the place of a City of Women. A traveler came to the area and found it inhabited entirely by women! Holy crap! Well, he was a bit mistaken, but it was definitely a matriarchal society where all the guarding and fighting and ruling were done by the woman while the men were kept quiet in the homes. What we are not told is any sort of context: who these people were, when they were, or what happened to their kingdom.

We are driving (slowly) along a wooded road. On either side are well-tended fields and orchards. Unique sheep, with black heads and white bodies, Dottie landscape. Monoculture has not seemed to have hit the region yet. Because Xinjiang has the longest season of sunlight, it is a huge agricultural area. Although rain water is scarce and it borders the second largest desert in the world, glacier-fed rivers bring life to many oases in the area. It is known for cotton (although the fabric you find in the markets is horrible polyester nastiness with skanky prints and largely overpriced — but I digress), melons, and apricots.

On one side are some large cooling towers. Some of the tour members ask our guide if it's a nuclear plant. No, he replied, it's an electricity plant. Uh... That didn't really answer the question. We let it lie.

Then suddenly, the agriculture gives way to industry. Out one window are factories belching out smoke, and out the other are huge piles of red against a grim, beige backdrop of sand. We can see that the red are divided into smaller piles, some even lain in neat, geometric lines reminiscent of those designs in Peru you can only see from space. Our guide tells us they are chilis, but they are not hot and wonders if we can guess what they are used for. (They are just lying out on the bare ground, so I hope it involves cleaning, whatever it is.) He quickly tells us we will never guess, because he himself was surprised: they are dried and ground and the pigment is used to make lipstick.

Another five minutes down the road, and the industry gives way to nothing. We are driving across what was once (thousands to millions of years ago) the bottom of the ocean. I can see the layers of sediment along with places where there has been uplift. The horizontal bands are no longer horizontal.

We then slow down to a stop. I see a police station on our left and a toll booth ahead. Our guide tells us to not take any pictures of the police and says, without emotion, that it's a security check. Having had one run-in with the authorities already, I put away both my camera and my iPad. But it comes to nothing. The policeman talks to the guide and we go on our way. I never even see the man's face.

The landscape has changed again. The land has grown more mountainous and has taken on a more bulbous look. The locals call it a ghost town because when the wind blows you can hear moaning coming from all the holes in the rocks. (I think our guide's translation of the local guide's Chinese is far better than a mediocre English-speaker's spiel.)

After a few more minutes, we pulled off the highway "to take pictures of the beautiful landscape". There has been many lovely places to stop along the way, but we stopped in front of a tunnel, a random sign, and a concrete-lined hole in the ground. We all agreed it was the ugliest place to stop, so we hammed it up with some Chinese poses.

Our guided wanted to make sure we knew that we were still an hour away from our destination. Poor thing. He was worried we thought this was it. Sarcasm in all its forms (including taking a billion goofy photos of the ugliest scenic point on the route) is so often lost on the Chinese.

Then TC3 and I took a detour to go to the bathroom. We figured we could find some sheltered spot behind a rise of land to pop a squat. Sure enough, I found a spot — the same spot many before me had found judging from the piles of tissue and smooshed poo. As I was choosing my particular location, I noticed TC3 was still standing roadside as a Chinese woman and her teenaged daughter were walking towards me.

Have I mentioned the Chinese have no sense of personal space? I knew they would keep coming and impinge upon my private moment, which they did. Mom grinned at me (as I squatted there with my ass hanging out), and I had little choice but to smile back while railing against her in my mind. I was here first, and I was going to pee and no Chinese woman would out me off. Nor would her daughter, standing there snapping photos of the landscape (which I can only pray do not end up on Weibo with the caption of how lily-white my big Western bum is).

TC3 finally decided enough was enough, and she too came over the rise. We joked about our two new friends as she continued a bit further up the trail in hopes of finding a bit more privacy.

We continue along our journey and are now driving across flat scrub desert. We pass an occasional dry riverbed. We are in the dry season now, so the rivers have all run dry, but during the rainy season from April to June, the rivers do flood. We are driving north/northeast and along the eastern edge is a mountain range with peaks of maybe 1000-1500 meters. But I'm guessing here. I'm not sure what the range is. If I could only get a wireless Internet connection, I could look it up on a map.

And then, it is more of the same.

- Do you really care this was posted using BlogPress from my iPad?

Location:Kucha, Xinjiang Autonomous Region, China