To the Ends of the Earth

In this shallow green valley in the desert, in which all the water came from underground, there were no Chinese high-rises, and most of the houses were small and square. There were grape arbors suspended over most of the streets—for the shade and also for the prettiness of them. This valley is the chief source of Chinese grapes—there is even a winery in Turfan—and thirty varieties of melon grow in the area. That intensifies the relief on having come from one of the wildest deserts in the world. Turfan is the opposite of everything that lies around it, with its water and its shade and its fresh fruit.

In Turfan I bought the local raisins made from white grapes—the best in China—and apricots. And I sat in my room, eating that stuff and drinking my Dragon Well green tea and writing my notes, until Fang and the driver had had their fill of gruel, and then we set off down the dusty roads.

Turfan was often a furnace. But on overcast mornings it was pleasant, with low clouds and temperatures only in the nineties. I liked the town. It was the least Chinese place I had seen so far, and it was one of the smallest and prettiest. There were very few motor vehicles, and it was quiet and completely horizontal.

It was a Uighur town, with a few Chinese. There were also Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Tadzhiks, and Tungus around the place, bowlegged and in high boots, in the Mongolian fashion. They were leathery-faced, and some looked like Slavs and some like gypsies, and most of them looked like people who had lost their way and were just stopping briefly in this oasis before moving on. Half the women at the Turfan bazaar had the features of fortunetellers, and the others looked like Mediterranean peasants-dramatically different from anyone else in China. These brown-haired, gray-eyed, gypsy-featured women in velvet dresses—and very buxom, some of them—were quite attractive in a way that was the opposite to the oriental. You would not be surprised to learn that they were Italians or Armenians. You see those same faces in Palermo and Watertown, Massachusetts.

Their gazes lingered, too. And some women came close and reached into the velvet and withdrew rolls of bills from between their breasts and said, “Shansh marnie?”

They put this Chinese money into my hand—the money still warm from having been in their deep bosoms—and they offered me four to one. They had gold teeth, and some looked like foxes, and they hissed at me when I said no.

It was wonderful, that market in Turfan, just what you would expect of a bazaar in Central Asia. They sold embroidered saddlebags, and leather holsters, and homemade jackknives, and baskets and belts. The meat market dealt exclusively in lamb and mutton—no pigs in this Islamic place; and there were stalls selling shish kebab. Much of the produce was the fresh fruit for which Turfan is well known—watermelons and Hami melons and tangerines. And there were about twenty varieties of dried fruit. I bought raisins and apricots, almonds and walnuts: it struck me that dried fruit and nuts were caravan food.

There were tumblers and fire eaters at the Turfan market, too, and a man doing card tricks on an overturned wheelbarrow. There was something medieval about the market—the dust and the tents, the merchandise and the entertainers, and the people who had gathered there, the men in skullcaps, the women in shawls, the shrieking children with wild hair and dirty feet.

NOTHING PUTS HUMAN EFFORT INTO BETTER PERSPECTIVE THAN a ruined city. “This was once a great capital,” people say, pointing to fallen walls and broken streets and dust. Then you stand in the silence of the lifeless place and think of Ozymandias, King of Kings, covered by a sand dune and forgotten. It is very thrilling for an American to consider such a place, because we don’t yet have anything that qualifies—only ghost towns and fairly insignificant small cities, but nothing like the monumental corpses of once-great cities that are known in the rest of the world. Probably American optimism arises from the fact that we don’t have any devastated cities. There is something wearying and demoralizing about a lost city, but it can also give you a healthy disregard for real estate.