Riding the Iron Rooster

It is almost impossible to find any traveler offering a kind word for Urumchi. What began as a Han outpost on the Silk Road, developed into a Tang trading center and then was captured by Huns and finally Mongols. It became the capital of Chinese Turkestan, but with a strong Russian flavor. For most early travelers it was the first stop in China and something of a disappointment ("no one leaves the town with regret"), because it was lacking in any cultural interest. The treasures, the tombs, the lost cities—all the good places to loot—lay farther east. Urumchi was merely political. Here were the offices, the interrogation centers, the jails, the bureaucrats, the spies. That was the case at the turn of the century, and at the time of the Russian Revolution, and it is pretty much the case now.

Still it had a certain ugly charm, this city of a million and a half people, very few of whom were Han Chinese. It was surrounded by big brown mountains, and it had wide streets and shish kebab parlors. Many shops had rare animals strung up outside. It was very hot in the daytime, and one of the popular recreations was playing pool and billiards under the trees—there were pool tables all over Urumchi, in the open air.

Mr. Fang disappeared when we reached the hotel, but his place was taken by Mr. Yang, who—when I asked about Russians—said there was a large Russian community here which dated from the 1930s. I had just missed their Easter celebration—the Chinese government had given them permission to hold it for the first time since Liberation.

There were so many different ethnic groups in Urumchi I wondered what the Cultural Revolution had been like.

"It was very bad here," Mr. Yang said. "But the minorities were not interested. They did not participate in the Cultural Revolution. Very few of them were Red Guards."

"If they didn't participate, then they must have been persecuted," I said.

"Oh, yes," Mr. Yang said, readily agreeing. "They were persecuted! Islamic religion was declared illegal. Praying was illegal. Mosques were considered bad. The Red Guards went in and smashed up the mosques. And people were punished."

"How did they punish the Muslims?"

"They made them raise pigs."

Typical, I thought; and perfect in its way. It was always said that the Chinese under Mao were a forgiving bunch—believers in redemption and reeducation. But it seemed to me uniquely vindictive to make physicists assemble crappy radios, and to force literature teachers to hoe cabbages or shovel chicken shit, and to put Muslims to work in pigsties. That was on the same order as putting hysterical schoolkids in charge of the middle schools; the result was easily predictable, and in the event the little brats persecuted their teachers and passed in blank examination papers to prove they were good Maoist anti-intellectuals.

"I'll bet the minorities didn't like that very much," I said.

Mr. Yang shrieked with laughter. It was the Chinese laugh that means You said it!

He said, 'They wanted to protest, but they didn't dare. They wanted to have a counterrevolution!"

"Do they want to have a counterrevolution now?" It was a delicate question, because there were always rumors of Uighur discontent; and anyone who saw these frowning, disapproving and uncooperative Uighur faces all over Xinjiang could easily reach the conclusion that here were people who were not entirely sold on the aims of the People's Republic.

Mr. Yang laughed again, a slower warning honk that meant: Do not ask that question. But that particular laugh was also a noise I interpreted as a complex yes.

But I was stuck with Mr. Yang. He asked me what I wanted to see in Urumchi.

I said, "Something memorable."

We drove to Nanshan, the South Mountain Pasture. It was only twenty minutes out of Urumchi but it looked like western Uganda, a great green plain with the "Mountains of the Moon" rising out of it, several snowcapped peaks. What distinguishes these mountainsides from others in China are the spruce forests, tall, cool and blackish-green. On some of the meadows there were goatherds and shepherds with their flocks, and Kazakhs living in mud-smeared huts and log cabins. There were yurts, too, and near them men wearing fur hats with earflaps, and boots and riding breeches; and there were women in shawls and dresses and thick socks. They looked like Russian babushkas, and unlike the Chinese, these women were long nosed and potbellied. They tended vegetable gardens near their cabins, and they had donkeys and cranky dogs and snotty-nosed kids who, because of the cold, also had bright red cheeks.

To avoid talking to Mr. Yang for a while, I walked fast up the slope and found a waterfall. Beneath it, in the stream, there was ice—big yellow crusts of it, and solid thick shelves of it frozen to the rocks. Twenty minutes down the road the townsfolk of Urumchi were perspiring and playing pool under the trees, and here it was freezing.