rev82006
The Silk Road: Making
Connections
August 1999
Dick
Heimovics
Levitt Professor of Human Relations
The Bloch School of Business and Public Administration
University of Missouri-Kansas City
Kansas City, MO 64110
O: 816-235-2345
H: 913-722-6275
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Preface
April 24- May 12, 1999, the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) Edgar Snow Memorial Fund travel delegation traveled innermost Asia, on the Silk Road, Xian to Kashgar. Hosted by the Chinese Friendship Society, our delegation is led by Nancy Wilson, an artist from Phoenix who paints with love for everything Chinese. Nancy is an exceptional artist. She interprets one culture through the eyes of another; she's a connector. Our leader emeritus is E. Grey Diamond, retired and first Dean of the UMKC School of Medicine. Diamond led many of the previous Snow delegations. He co-lead a US-Chinese medical in 1973. Dr. Diamond has been helping connect UMKC friends and faculty to China for over 25 years including arrangements for my first visit in 1984 as a lecturer at Heilongjang University and Medical School #2 in Harbin. Grey joins us late in the trip after a extended train trip across India, west to east, quite an achievement for an 80 year old. Grey is a hardy, engaging man who founded the Snow Fund. He and I walk the compound of our hotel in Kashgar one morning as he reminisces about his lifelong fascination with China, this his eighteenth visit. I’m a novice China traveler by comparison; this, my third trip. Grey talks of the Silk Road and another, connector, Aurel Stein. Our morning stroll is a special walk back though time. This is the story about how I learned to make connections in my life traveling the Silk Road. It begins with the story of Aurel Stein and his connection, I learn, with my Dad and his Hungarian heritage.
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Aurel Stein and My Dad
The travels of Sir Aurel Stein, according to Grey Diamond, is a tale of one of the dauntless Victorian, English explorers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Stein, I learn, was a native Hungarian like my Dad. Both Dad and Stein emigrated from Budapest coincidently at age 8, my Dad later became American through and through, and Stein similarly became a consummate Englishman.
Dad
told me nothing about his childhood in Hungary. I always assumed he had fully
repressed or forgotten all he knew about Hungary. When I find out,
surprisingly, from Grey, that the language and folk culture of the Uighur people
of Western China are similar to Dad’s original Hungarian, I'm fascinated. I
discover that maybe my distant cousins may have come from these parts or
migrated to these parts.
The origin of the Hungarian language is one of the several mysteries that
surround the early history of the Magyars. Recent linguists now believe that a
strand of Hungarian is related to Turkic of Central Asia.
I wonder if I'm off to learn something new, things my father never told me or
things he never knew. I’m floored by this incredible connection to my past.
According to Grey, Stein's favored bailiwick was this vast stretch of Central
Asia, specifically the Silk Road, which in many ways Stein "rediscovered" for
Westerners. Stein traveled by camel criss-crossing a vast ocean of sand known
as the Taklimakan desert. On the map of modern China, the Taklimakan desert is
a enormous oval blank (286,400
square miles)
in the heart of what is now officially termed “Xinjiang Province”. In Turki,
Taklimakan means “go in and you won’t come out”. Xinjiang is China’s
westernmost and largest province, covering a sixth of the country. It borders
what was for most of this century, Soviet Central Asia, including many of the “stans,”
e.g. Kazakhstan,
Uzbekistan,
Turkmenistan,
Tajikistan, and
Kyrgyzstan,
et. al. Historically, Xinjiang belonged neither to Russia, nor
China nor even to Central Asia; it was never Mogul nor Persian territory.
Mountain ranges walled it off from the farthest reaches of the Ottoman Empire
and protected it from aggrandizement by the hordes from the north and east.
The Taklimakan stood alone, a devilishly hot and forbidden place.
It is unimaginable how Stein or any of the early travelers traveled across this
terrible desert. It contains some of the harshest and most isolated terrain on
earth. Geologically an anomaly, it is a huge desolate massif surrounded on four sides
by huge natural barriers,
the size of Texas and Oklahoma
combined. To the north rise the majestic T'ien Shan Mountains.
To the west lie the Pamir--"The Roof of the World" and the few treacherous
passes into Persia. The massive Karakoram range, stretches to the southwest. Due
south, the Altun Shan and Kunlun Shan Mountains are buttressed by the huge
Tibetan plateau. Only the east is free of mountains. But here also are other
great barriers, two more great deserts, the Lop and the Gobi, which obstruct
access.
The Silk Road cuts a few swaths through these desert barriers and then stretches across the outer parameter of the Taklimakan for a thousand miles. In earlier times, it took months to cross this stretch of the Silk Road. The trip inspired dread among travelers but guaranteed vast fortunes for those who survived its hardships. We cross the Taklimakan in a few days in a cool all-night “soft sleeper” train. A third day, we travel in a comfortable air-conditioned bus. I’m mesmerized by the desert’s enigmatic beauty.
We
reach Turpan. This scorched, isolated, and godforsaken desert is accentuated by
oases, which breathe life into the sand and rocks and long ago gave pause to the
early Silk Road travelers. A diversion to one of them, Turpan, takes us 500
feet below sea level. Turpan is the hottest and lowest, place in China. But it
is a surprisingly green place, with centuries-withered orchards and
rows of poplars, surrounded by dust, sand, and rock.
Turpan provides comfort today as it has centuries of travelers before. Trade caravans
rested here under shade over 1000 years ago.
Here’s why it is green. Amazingly, life giving waters, crisp and fesh, flow to
it in centuries old, man-made underground tunnels. The water comes from
mountains to the far north through irrigation systems similar to those designed
by the Persians in 900AD. This is an extraordinary solution to the water
problem, built by extraordinary people who traded in both goods and amazing
ideas. Connectors they are, these early inhabitants of the Taklimakan.
Beyond the outskirts of Turpan stand majestic ruins dating from the Middle Ages when Turpan thrived on Silk Road trade and was the region's most important center of civilization. We eat delicious sweat cakes, dates, dried raisins, a pause that refreshes.
A century before the birth of Christ, an adventurous young Chinese traveler, Chang Ch'ien, set out across China on a secret mission to this then remote and mysterious region of the West. Although his immediate purpose ended in a failure, it proved to be one of the most important journeys in history, for it was to lead to China's discovery of Europe and the birth of the Silk Road, the first major connection between the East and the West. As is the historic case of most such geographic connections, trade soon followed. Silk was exchanged for the bigger, faster "heavenly horses" from the high steppes of Central Asia. Later, the horses allowed emperor Wu to build his cavalry and solidify his hold on China. By 400 AD, Romans of all stripes wore silk from China traded for with dyes and other goods of the west. Tang artists later immortalized these “heavenly horses”. Excellent examples are in our Nelson Gallery of Art, Kansas City. The best, rightfully, I found at the start of our journey in the Shangxi Museum, Xian.
The idea of "connections" must come under close scrutiny if I am to make clear what I learn on the Silk Road. For Stein, perhaps his most important connection to the past came from a discovery of a fabulous trove of Buddhist manuscripts found in a hidden corner of one of the frescoed caves at Dunhuang, at the eastern edge of the Taklimakan. Dunhuang means "blazing beacon" as it was the last caravan halt in China proper for travelers setting out for the first of the Silk Road oases. By 1907, Dunhuang's "great art gallery in the desert,’’ was forgotten and depopulated, saved from mold by the intense dryness of the desert. I have a chance to peer inside the very cave where Stein made his great discovery. With incredulity, I speculate about what must have been going on in his mind's eye when he first saw this amazing link to the past. Stein painstakingly brought the caves and their Greco-Buddhist history back into our collective memory, connecting the past to his, and now, our present.
To gain access to the caves, Stein had to hoodwink their slightly mad, self-appointed guardian Wang Yuan-lu, a subterfuge for which the Chinese haven't forgiven him; Stein is still referred to as an "archeological pirate'' in China and most likely, rightly so. (Peter Hopkirk's Foreign Devils on the Silk Road: The Search for the Lost Cities and Treasures of Chinese Central Asia, U. of Mass Press, 1980, chronicles this remarkable story of adventure, high stakes, and greed. It is a great read.)
Stein's discovery of one walled-off cave found, among much else, the world's oldest printed book, a copy of the Diamond Sutra, dated 868 AD, now on exhibit at the British Museum. This discovery has been compared to the unearthing of Tutankhamen's tomb in Egypt in 1922, 15 years later. Stein's unearthed texts, I remind my egocentric Western self, preceded by many centuries the first printed books of the West. This is very old stuff indeed. These sacred words originated in India and later found a place in the collective consciousness of the Chinese. The scriptures trace the time worn transition of ideas from Hindu India to Buddhist China that took place along the Road, a religious connection of major magnitude. The cultural mix is captured in the Diamond Sutra. It is a printed text that changed forever how man communicates and learns; it linked the collective memory of one time and place to another, India to China. I wish to someday read it. It is a great connector across time, place, and cultures.
The Diamond Sutra and thousands of books from Dunhuang are now stored "safely" (and contentiously) in boxes in the British Museum, and other museums of Europe, accessible mostly for Western eyes. They are procured fragments of Central Asia's lost culture, secure now in London, along side other booty the English took from the ancient worlds. These books have become China's parallel to the Greek claim on the Elgin Marbles.
The idea of "theft" cuts both ways here, neither evenly, or in the same ways. The haunting and beautiful faces of the Buddhas of the Dunhuang caves are essentially Greco-Roman. Who can blame the Chinese for "borrowing" this esthetic sensibility found during their trips to the Mediterranean? What the Chinese give back to Westerners are exquisite works of art. East connects with the West in the balanced symmetry of these faces, the peaceful smiles and subtle glances, one worldview radiating and connecting through the eyes of another, a blending of cultures and art forms that the Silk Road, the greatest connector of all, produces.
The British Museum has not given much back to the Chinese. I'm grateful to see most of these Dunhuang Buddhas are still here in China, in their original place, some standing (or most sitting) since AD 400. Sadly, there are voids in a few caves where the Buddhas were uprooted and now reside in the galleries of London.
The carving of the Dunhuang mountainside into rock temples and chapels began in AD 366. According to record, there were more than 1000 caves constructed and decorated by the end of the Tang dynasty (AD 907). In each subsequent century, new caves were carved out of the mountainside and decorated by successive generations of artists. Artistic interpretations of the Buddha were made on the bases of prior interpretations, as these visions and interpretations of the Buddha became deeper, richer, and more beautiful over time. Today, 492 caves survive natural collapses and man-made destruction. There remain 45,000 square meters of paintings and 2000 sculptures. It is one of the biggest "art museums" in the world. The sweep and grander of Chinese art unfolds in these caves, highlighted by the narrow beam of my flashlight.
I discover that if I keep my eyes open, I can see mysterious images glancing back at me in the dark, connecting across centuries and cultures. It is an incredible place. After a tour of these caves, I’ll never see China, a buddha, or Chinese art the same way again.
Learning about Stein, traveling the Silk Road, touring Dunhuang and experiencing this vast Taklimakan desert provide many important new ways of thinking and seeing. The adventure of the proud, Eurocentric-Hungarian-turned-Englishman Stein, changed the mental maps of the early 20th century. And now the Silk Road has changed my mental map. Stein's find, and his life's work--and the work of a number of other dauntless explorers of his time--changed "the modern paradigm of the West.'' West did not just meet East. Rather East and West synthesized along the Silk Road. The intense cross-pollinating, connection of ideas that Stein found traces of on the Silk Road showed conclusively that it was the East that first ventured out to the West, not the other way around as we Westerners usually assume. The great discoverers and keepers of memory were the Chinese, most of them engaged in trade or simply curious wanderers-about in Central Asia and later Persia. This insight reminds me once again of my American-Euro-ethnocentrism. This was a bracing idea, one that happened to me as I found my world in an "about face." Maybe my ancestors did come from this place, after all.
Here’s another way to put it. Most connections are consequential. Connections link ideas and points in space. But the absence of connections is also important. When one stands in the middle of the Taklimakan without a reference point, everything looks the same. There are no roads, no links, no here-to-there. It is just a barren (but beautiful) space. If there were a road, it would connect. But there are very few roads, mostly on the outer perimeter; it is mostly just measureless space.
A road, the Silk Road, is a "what for,” a connector that gives direction, reference. Roads provide definition and hence, meaning. They take us from here to there. Roads make connections. And making connections is a very Western notion. For the West, things relate and must connect. In order to "know" anything, one idea must be understood in relationship to another. By contrast and for the Buddhist, the things that really matter just "are”. We know best by the gestalt, only by letting go can we know the whole. This is a very new way of thinking for me. We must disconnect in order to fully know. To understand the Buddha, one must gain full release, connections freed from all other connections. The Taklimakan, I believe, can only be understood from the Buddhist point of view. This great desert just "is." When one stands mesmerized by the midday sun, one senses that a "just is" definition explains all. There is no other way to understand this alluringly, hypnotic, beautiful, deadly and disconnected place, with few roads, but with all the many infinitely possible connections that visitors to the desert can never make.
We arrive finally at the Silk Road terminus on the western edge of the desert at the crossroads oasis town known as Kashgar. It is a medieval bastion of the Turkic-Uighur (ponounced WEE-gur) people who are mostly Muslims. Marco Polo reputedly stopped off here on his epic journey to the Chinese imperial court.
We stroll its main event, Sunday Bazaar, which dates back 2,000 years. The Western looking, Kazakh and Uighur faces around us looked as if they had been transplanted from the plains of Anatolia to this desert oasis in north-west China. It was easy to forget we were in China or for that matter, this is the late 20th century.
In Kashgar, much is similar to when Stein re-supplied his caravan here. The Bazaar endures, the place travelers, who have survived the desert transit, restocked for the grueling and dangerous passage on west through the Pamir Mountains, on to Persia, and ultimately to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean with trade goods destined for Rome. A Sunday in Kashgar remains a melee of 25,000 Kazakhs and Uighurs from surrounding villages. In the dust kicked up by legions of goats, donkeys, carts and customers, we find row after row of stands where villagers buy and sell spices and clothes, honey and piles of dried figs, huge piles of dumplings and radishes, sheep and goats--slaughtered in parts or whole on hoof. There are pots and door hinges, and round hard freshly baked rolls with a hole in the middle. We buy lots of these breads and agree they look like, taste like and therefore must really be bagels. In any case, they are nothing like the soft sweet breads of eastern China.
Larry Jones, DDS, of our party finds a colleague, a storefront Uighur dentist, who will pull a molar if one does not mind his dirty finger nails and are willing to take a seat in what looks like an executioner's chair. The more we see of the market, the more exhilarating we find this different time and place.
The earthen courtyard houses of the Uighurs on the outskirts of the market stand in harsh contrast to a few new, starkly contrasting, immense polished white-tiled, buildings, that are springing up in a concentric circle around the market, harbingers of the fresher, modern China. The new buildings are filled by an influx of Han Chinese migrants who are connecting Kashgar to the “new economy” of China's overcrowded east.
We learn these Han Chinese live on Beijing time. The Uighur keep an unofficial clock, two hours earlier, reflecting Kashgar’s location—closer to Baghdad than Beijing. (But methinks, any gradual erosion of the Uighur culture could turn out to be more of a problem and more of a loss than the Chinese Government imagines.)
I watch in the market a sale of a pony with bids made by wild hand gestures from potential buyers. One buyer becomes more prominent than the others. He struts, shouts and gurgles, and interrupts the responses of the seller and others by tugging and pulling violently on the pony’s mane, causing the little fellow to buck and whine. When this potential buyer isn’t yelling, he paces about the pony pounding on its hind quarter and looking under its tail. An obvious impasse is fashioned when the buyer walks away in a pout. The seller chases after followed by a growing audience of market watchers, out for some Sunday’s entertainment. Suddenly the buyer turns abruptly, grabs the reins and hops aboard the pony and gallops off, his feet dragging in the dust. He rides off on in a wide arc, the audience scrambling to get out of the way. My first thoughts were I had just witnessed a heist and I might be called before a medieval Ughur judicial court to tell them what I saw. But the seller smiles as the buyer returns with the pony and a handful of bills. I knew I had just witnessed a centuries old trading ritual. Meanwhile hundreds of modern computer trades were beginning to happen in those dull distasteful, white-tiled buildings growing up around the market, as the present loses its connection to its vivid and colorful past. By contrast how dull these new buildings.
Which Way Is Home?
The dustbins of my brain are unsettled by my Silk Road experience. As I head back home from the place of my distant cousins, new connections and a new found understanding of life’s disconnections begin to stir the backwash of memories. How do I make sense of this experience? What do I know of before that helps me understand the new things I have seen and learned? T.S. Eliot had a paradoxical answer to these questions when he suggested we often set out on journeys to find our homes for the first time. I think he is right, in a very special way. Was this far off place, the home of the Uighur, actually my ancestor’s home as well? It couldn’t be. Or could it? Could I have far-off blood relatives in Kashgar, Hungarians who were once Uighur? Or vive-versa? Was I leaving or had I actually come home?
A Mind Jolting Return to the Present
Abruptly, we are jolted by a numbing present reality. Moments of uncertainty are accentuated by the shocking news that American bombs dropped in the latest Balkan War, leveled the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three innocent Chinese journalists. They were there, we learn, simply to tell innocently their stories of the war. Long after midnight, waiting for our behind-schedule-return plane, a droning Chinese TV in the airport lobby reports the gruesome details from Belgrade and the violent reactions in China. Our guide and who is also our TV translator walks away to be alone in a far corner of the lobby. I too felt very alone. The bombing makes a real mess of things and the brutally brings us back to the hard realities of the present. We fend off furious Chinese, also waiting for our delayed plane, who spar verbally with us about the bombings as we await the return flight to Beijing. Our conflicted translator explains to them we are “Edgar Snow friends of China” and the enraged Chinese back off. The bombing is a troublesome ending to our "goodwill" tour and leaves us with a very sad, disconnected feeling. Edgar Snow to the rescue.
On the return flight home to Vancouver, I try unsuccessfully to write a thank you note to our gracious friends Hui Chen and his wife Xiuxia who hosted us during our first pass through Beijing before the bombing. Most of Chen’s diplomatic career was spent representing the Chinese government and people to the rest of the world. Few Chinese love their country more. My words of thanks won't come. I'm too angry and dismayed by the bombing. I decide to write them later. I struggle to make some connections in my mind about what happened but fail. I try to just let things be but that doesn’t work either. There are some things in life that no one can explain very well by either Eastern or Western ways of knowing. Man’s brutality against fellow man defies understanding.
I arrive home a few days later and the place does not look at all the same.
Postscript
I wrote these thoughts three months after my return from the Silk Road. I showed them to my wife Cathy, and asked if she would like to read them.
“What’s it for?” she replied in her usual probing way, which I’m now able to understand top be a very Western way of asking questions. It’s a “what-for-question”, assuming everything is connected, a cause for every effect.
“Nothing special," I answered, " I just wanted to write about my trip to China.”
“Humph, “and she replied, “how can I understand anything if I don’t know what it’s for.”
“Very Western,” I say under my breath so she can not hear me. “It has no real purpose," I assured her. "Besides, since learning more about the Buddhists, I’m having fewer thoughts about things needing to be ‘what fors' these days. I used to think making connections among things was a good thing. I’m not sure of that idea any more. Anyway, I’m becoming much more interested in things just as they 'are'. Let me tell you about what the Buddhist might say about doing things just for their own sake, and about this incredible desert in Western China, and about horse trading in Kashgar.”
She looks at me like we had never met before. She would not let me continue. “Sometimes I really don’t understand you at all. And just because you went to China doesn’t mean you have license to become a Buddhist and engage in all these strange ideas. Besides, you have been compulsive all your life and can never let things be, except for the brush pile in the backyard,” as she tried to change the subject. “I’ve been waiting for you to return home and clean it up.”
“It sure has been left-to-be“ I whisper again under my breath so she can’t hear. She continues, “Besides, if you stopped 'doing things' and just let things be, you'd drive me crazy unless, of course you didn’t go crazy first yourself." She was really intense and, as usual, made her own kind of sense.
I gave up and started to walk away. With no audience for my essay, my thoughts turned elsewhere.
"Guess I'll go outside," I said, "and clean up the brush pile in the backyard. Now that's got a purpose." I murmured my thoughts with lovingly, husbandly disdain, words one more time quietly hushed under my breath.
I stared at the brush pile for a long time. It was as if I was seeing it for the first time. I know it began growing larger over a year ago after a wild summer storm ripped the big oak of all its dead limbs. There it was, a brush pile in my backyard as big as life, a colossal ugly pile of yard trash. Strange, I thought, that I didn't see it so clearly this way before I left for China. Maybe T. S. Eliot is on to something.
I found my work gloves and started to bag up the mess.
Over my shoulder I notice that she was watching.
"About time you picked it up " I’m sure she was saying, "it's been there a long time and I have to look at it every day from the kitchen bay window."
A blast of Kansas’s summer heat lashed at me with the same intensity as her words. I wondered if I really wanted to pick up the brush pile after all. “If you had to pick up messes like these you’d learn not to see them anymore like I do, " I whispered back at her, afraid she might hear me.
"You are driving me crazy," I imagined she said, although this time I was not listening very carefully either to myself or to her, trying desperately to let things be.
I decided the brush pile didn't look so bad after all and walked away to let it be alone, Buddhist style, and go talk to our cat. We talk by staring at each other. Our cat is always a good listener; quiet like my wife was when I first met her, before I started to make her crazy. I knew in a few days I’d stop seeing the brush pile anyway.
So here is what I think was happening. Finally home, I rediscover a huge ugly pile of brush in my backyard. It’s a metaphor for my learning. The brush looked odd as if it had been there a long time but had not been there at all, a strange haunting paradoxical memory of a distant past, prior to the Silk Road, thrust into the present, but connected to nothing.
I now look into the blackholes of my memory and all things seem unsettled, disconnected. I wonder about all that I have forgotten and all that I may someday consider again as the amazing recollections of the Silk Road flow through undercurrent course of a clouded consciousness. Thoughts fade in and out, connected first, and then disconnected from time and place.
I think I may be beginning to understand some things I have never understood before. But then, as I try to make sense of it all, I feel suspended somewhere between knowing and not knowing, connected and disconnected at the same time. East meets the West on the Silk Road and the two struggled to become reconciled.
As for the brush pile? I’ll hire someone to remove it.
Dick Heimovics Fairway, Kansas August 23, 1999