China | Xinjiang Province | Khotan | Melikawat

On his way back from India to China the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang passed through Kashmir and then entered the Pamir Mountains. He would have went right by 24,388-foot Muztagh-Ata, the second highest peak in the Pamirs. In 1999 I traced his path from Muztagh-Ata to Kashgar.

24,388-foot Muztagh-Ata

Xuanzang claimed that there was a stupa on the top of Muztagh-Ata built in memory of an arhat who had lived in a trance since the time of the Buddha. This was almost certainly a legend only.

The River Gez where it debouches into the Tarim Basin

From the plateau around Muztagh-Ata he dropped down into the Tarim Basin via the canyon of the Gez River and moved on to Kashgar, where at that time, in 644 A.D., there were still hundreds of monasteries, most of them followers of the Hinayana school.

The Pamirs from the road to Kashgar

Two weeks after leaving Kashgar by camel he arrived in Khotan. Xuanzang:

This country is renowned for its music; the men love the song and dance. Few of them wear garments of skin and wool; most wear taffeta and white linen. Their external behavior is full of urbanity; their customs are properly regulated. Their written characters and their mode of forming their sentences resemble the Indian model; the forms of the letters differ somewhat; the differences, however, are slight. The spoken language also differs from that of other countries. They greatly esteem the law of the Buddha. There are about a hundred sangharamas with some 5000 followers, who all study the doctrince of the Great Vehicle.

Xuanzang mentions that about 10 li south of the city there was a monastery built in honor of Vairochana. In Xuanzang’s time the city of Khotan itself was located at a place now known as Yoktan, about ten kilometers south of the current city. This old city is now completely covered with cultivated fields and no ruins remain. About 25 kilometers south of the modern city are found the ruins of a monastery now known to Uighurs as Melikawat. Thus is it possible that Melikawat are the ruins of the monastery mentioned by Xuanzang. Although I was warned that only a few broken down walls remained of the Melikawat monastery I hired a cab and went out to take a look. The dirt road follows the Khotan, or White Jade River, as it is also known, south. The Khotan River begins in the Kun Lun Mountains on the border between Tibet and Xinjiang and flows north across the Taklamakan Desert to the Tarim River, although it often dries up completely before actually reaching the Tarim. The river supplies most of the water for the very extensive irrigation system around the Khotan oasis (some water comes from wells).

People have been searching for jade in the Khotan River for at the very least the last two thousand years and continue to do so today. Reportedly only a few kilos of top-quality jewelry-grade jade are found a year, although low grade jade, not good enough for jewelry, is sold rather cheaply. I bought two hen’s egg-sized chunks of jade, one black and one white, from jade hunters on the river bank for ten yuan a piece.

The Khotan River can just be seen on the upper left hand corner of the photo. To the right can be seen the spoil from 2000 years of digging through the river gravels in the search for jade.

Jade hunter on the Khotan River
Ruins of Melikawat Monastery

Ruins of Melikawat Monastery

Ruins of Melikawat Monastery

The monastery was probably destroyed around 980-1000 A.D. when the area was invaded by Turkish Moslems.

See More Photos of Melikawat and a brief History of Buddhism in Khotan

China | Xinjiang Province | Khotan | Carpet Factory

After my visit to the silk factory I decided to have lunch. Right near my hotel was a small restaurant which seemed to be doing a lot of business. I went in, took a seat, and when the waitress came I ordered laghman, perhaps of the most famous dish in the Uighur culinary repertoire. Laghman consists of long spaghetti-like hand-pulled noodles, usually made on the premises, covered with a thick tomato-based stew of vegetables and mutton. I always order laghman because it is like ordering a hamburger in the States. Any ordinary restaurant is bound to have it. After the waitress took my order and left for the kitchen a woman sitting at a table across the room starting talking to me in Uighur, which I did not understand, but I did recognize the word “American.” Then she asked me in Chinese if I was an American. I said I was, and she then announced this in a loud voice to the whole room. When the waitress came out of the kitchen she also told her that I was American. The waitress had a pot of tea in her hand, presumably for me, but instead of serving it just glared at me and sat the pot on another table. So I was left without tea, usually something you are served automatically in Uighur restaurants. Some people came in, sat down near me, and also ordered laghman. The waitress went into the kitchen and brought out their orders of laghman immediately. After about ten minutes I called her over and asked, “laghman?” She just glared at me and walked away. Another group came in and ordered laghman. Again the waitress went into the kitchen and immediately brought them out their orders. I sat for another twenty minutes, during which time I was studiously ignored by all the other diners, and still I got no laghman. Obviously I was not going to be served, not even tea, so I got up and left.

A hundred yards down the road was another small restaurant. I went in and sat down and a big, beefy Uighur guy with a shaved head and skullcap came over and sat down a pot of tea. Again I ordered laghman. He gave me a hard stare and asked in Chinese where I was from. I said America. He shouted, “America? Bush! Pakistan! Bush! Pakistan! Bush! Pakistan!” Every time he said the word “Bush” he made a cutting gesture across his throat. Finally he shouted something and pointed to the door. He was clearly ordered me out of his restaurant.

Here I must backtrack a little. When I had arrived at the airport I went outside and got a taxi driven by a local Uighur man. It was clear he did not speak any English, but I indicated by sign language—the universal rubbing of fingers together to indicate “how much?” that I wanted to know the fare and he answered in what I thought was the Chinese sign language for ten. That seemed reasonable, as it was only about four or five kilometers to town. As soon was we pulled away from the curb he started talking in Uighur but when I did not answer switched to Chinese. He named a couple of European countries, and then America, clearing asking where I was from. I said America. He started shouting “Bush! Pakistan! Bush! Pakistan” over and over again. Each time he said the word “Bush” he also made a cutting gesture across his throat. He got more and more irate and for a moment I thought he was going to dump me off by the side of the road. Finally we got to my hotel. I handed him a ten yuan note. He shouted something at me and tried to grab a hundred yuan note out of my wallet. He clearly wanted a hundred yuan for the 10 minute trip into town. This was an outrage. I handed him a twenty yuan note and started to walk away. He jumped in front of me and started shouting again. I handed him another ten, for a total of thirty yuan, and brushed by, leaving him ranting and hopping mad in front of the hotel. I later found out that the correct fare for a trip from the airport to my hotel was in fact ten or at most fifteen yuan .

So now I was in this restaurant and again a guy was yelling ”Bush! Pakistan!” over and over again. Since he was clearly showing me the door I left. Nearby was a small stand selling hot Uighur flat bread—nan—for half a yuan a piece. I bought two of these and went back to my hotel and had a lunch of nan and Dragon Well green tea which I had had the foresight to bring from Beijing.

So what, I wondered, was the deal with Pakistan? I could understand the local Uighurs, who are after all Moslems, ranting about Bush, but why where they singling out Pakistan and not the more obvious targets of Iraq and Afghanistan? I put this mystery out of my mind for the moment and headed for the carpet factory.

Here, it was clear, I was just a potential paying customer, my nationality not an issue. A friendly Uighur woman who spoke a little bit of English explained to me what was going on. Although they made the silk carpets here for which Khotan is so famous, at the moment they were making only wool carpets. They use both Chinese and Uighur designs. A 1.2 x 1.8 meter wool carpet takes two people two months to make. A 3.3 x 4 meter carpet takes five people two months to make. A mammoth 15 by 20 meter (50 by 65 feet) carpet, one of the largest ever made here, and now on the wall of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, took fifteen people four months to make. In the sales room (where, curiously, photography was not allowed) I was shown a 4.3 by 6.8 meter (14 by 22 feet) carpet selling for 20,000 yuan ($2400). This was wool of course. Silk carpets are much, much more expensive. A four-by-six-foot silk carpet could easily sell for $6000-$8000 even here in the factory. Back in Urumqi, in the carpet store at the Provincial Museum, I was shown a 14 by 22 inch rug (that’s inches, mind you) that was selling for a whopping 48,000 yuan $5800). This was a 1200 knots per inch—the highest quality—with a very special design. Obviously this small piece was intended as a wall hanging, a work of art, and not a carpet to be trod on; it was barely big enough to serve as a door mat.

Women working in the carpet factory

Women working in the carpet factory

Woman working in the carpet factory

Woman working in the carpet factory

Even back in Beijing I had been informed by knowledgeable people that the women in Khotan are renowned all over Xinjiang for their beauty. My friend, a Uighur from Ili, in northern Xinjiang, could not keep a note of envy, even jealousy, out of her voice when talking about the women of Khotan. Such eyes! Like amber and obsidian! Such hair! Like Khotanese silk (of course)! Such eyebrows! Like young willow leaves! Such straight noses! Like carved from jade! Such lips! Like ripe pomegranates! Such breasts! Like Hami melons! she kept raving. All Xinjiang men want a woman from Khotan, she claimed. Xuanzang, the Chinese monk who visited here in 644, was noticeably silent on this issue, however. Marco Polo also visited Khotan, in the thirteenth century, and although he had much to say about the women of Hami—another town in Xinjiang—who were renowned for their unbridled sensuality, if not necessarily for their beauty, apparently none in Khotan caught his fancy, or at least none that he cared to write about. Hami is now more famous for its legendarily sweet, succulent, breast-like melons.

Khotanese beauty working in the carpet factory. Note the young-willow-leaf-like eyebrows and carved-from-jade-like nose.

Another Khotanese beauty working in the carpet factory. Note the amber-and-obsidian-like eyes.

China | Xinjiang Province | Khotan | Silk Factory

See Enlargement of Map

From Urumqi I winged southward across the Taklamakan Desert to Khotan, on the southern rim of the huge Tarim Basin. The Chinese Buddhist pilgrim and inveterate gadabout Xuanzang visited Khotan in 644 A.D. during his 15-or-so-year sojourn from China to India and back and left the following account of what was then the kingdom of Khotan:

This country is about 4000 li in circuit; the greater part is nothing but sand and gravel; the arable portion is very contracted. What land there is, is suitable for regular cultivation, and produces an abundance of fruits. The manufactures are carpets, haircloth of the highest quality, and fine-woven silken fabrics. Moreover, it produces white and green jade. The climate is soft and agreeable, but there are tornadoes which bring with them clouds of flying gravel. They [the residents of the country] have a knowledge of politeness and justice. The men are naturally quiet and respectful. They love to study literature and the arts, in whch they make considerable advance. The people live in easy circumstances, and are contented with their lot.

To this day the products of Khotan have not changed much. Silk, carpets, and jade remain the city’s chief attractions. First I checked out the Silk Factory.

Silk worm cocoons.

Now about 40% of the raw silk cocoons are imported from Pakistan. Each cocoon, when unwound, contains about a one-kilometer-long length of silk filament.

Closer view of the silk cocoons.

The cocoons are heated over fires to kill the worm within, and then boiled to loosen the filaments. Then a mass of filaments are gathered together and twisted into one silk thread.

The silk thread runs from through the gadget in the middle to the foot-trundle powered spindle run by the woman on the left.

Spindle of pure silk thread

Pure silk thread

The main product of this factory is so-called atalas silk. The silk is tie-dyed using either chemical dyes or natural dyes made from local plants and minerals and then woven into four-meter-long lengths which can be used to make dresses, etc. The loom above is using chemically dyed thread.

Naturally dyed atalas silk

Silk loom run by resident gray-beard

Huge skeins of dyed silk in the factory showroom. The naturally dyed silk is much more expensive than the chemically dyed version. One four-meter-length of chemically dyed atalas silk costs about 250 yuan ($30), while the naturally dyed version cost about 600 yuan ($72). These are the prices at the factory. Even the stores in Khotan itself charge much more, and in Urumqi the price is typically doubled, although of course hard bargaining can knock the price down considerably.

See More Silk Factory Photos

China | Xinjiang Province | Urumqi

As our plane approached Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang Province, I keep gaping out the window in hopes of seeing glacier-sheathed 17,946-foot Bogdo Ula Peak, part of the Tian Shan Mountains, which provides a dramatic backdrop to the desert-like environs of the city itself. Today I was disappointed; clouds obscured the entire southern skyline. It was 91ºF in Urumqi, with a scorching wind blowing off the tarmac. I took a taxi downtown and was soon ensconced in the brand-spanking-new Taipai Hotel, located on the site of the old Hong Shan Hotel near Hong Shan, the hill which loams above the downtown part of town.

Hong Shan, near the old Hong Shan Hotel

The old Hong Shan, where I had stayed numerous times, was a classic budget travelers’ haunt. On any given night there were probably travelers from fifteen or twenty different countries here, most lugging backpacks, and sitting in the hotel’s breakfast room once could hear reports from the all the great Silk Road cities: Kashgar, Bishkek, Bukhara, Samarkand, Peshawar, and back then even places like Balkh and Bamian in Afghanistan. It was here that I first heard the expression that there are only two paths in Life: the Silk Road and the Milky Way; very roughly speaking, this means the exoteric path and esoteric path. And there was always a few huddled conversations among people trying to figure out how to sneak into Tibet via the then-closed Kashgar-Yecheng-Ali-Kailash route over the Kun Lun Mountains. The steps leading to the hotel lobby were always jammed with young women working for tourist companies who touted various excursions around Xinjiang and arranged for bus and train tickets, many of them students using this summer job as an opportunity to polish their English.

The long-gone-and-sorely-lamented Hong Shan has turned to dust from whence it came, replaced by the Taipei Hotel, actually a three-star businessmen’s hotel but with still fairly reasonable rates since it has just recently opened and does not seem to have a lot of business. The hallways are hushed and lit by discreet indirect track lighting; some vague New Age-ish Silk Road music plays in the background twenty-four hours a day. The rooms have enormous beds with acres of snowy white sheets and free high speed internet via Ethernet. One odd feature is a long narrow window opening from the room itself into the bathroom. This is certainly convenient if you want to watch someone taking a shower, but the toilet is also in clear view, which must appeal only to people with very specialized tastes. There is no curtain on this window and no apparent way to block the view. And finally there’s even a restaurant serving “American” food. For background music they play a tape of American classics, including Patsy Cline’s “Stand By Your Man.” I didn’t have to nerve to try the American food; I stuck with the Chinese buffet.

Street performer near the Taipei Hotel. This guy is standing on the edges of razor-sharp meat cleavers.

As soon as I had fired off a few emails and checked the news for any signs of the imminent arrival of the Apocalypse I caught bus #7 over to the Xinjiang Regional Museum. I had been in the old museum building six years ago, but the last time I was in Urumqi the old building had been torn down and new one not yet completed. Now it turns out that the new building opened the previous October. The half of the first floor was devoted to dioramas and exhibits of all the Xinjiang’s numerous ethnic groups: Uighurs, Mongols, Khazaks, Kyrgyz, Tazhiks, Manchus, Russians, etc. The other half covers Xinjiang from the Paleolithic up to the present-day. There are some excellent manuscripts in both Sogdian, on which the old Uighur vertical script was based, and manuscripts in Uighur itself dated for the twelfth and thirteen centuries. It was of course the Uighur script on which the Mongolian vertical script was based, adopted by Chingis Khan after the capture of the Uighur scribe Tatatunga in the very early thirteenth century, after the defeat of the Naiman.

Must folks hurry through the downstairs displays, however. The museum’s star attractions are upstairs in the Mummy Room. Here the famous Tarim Mummies, three and four thousand year old bodies uncannily well-preserved in the arid conditions of the Taklamakan Desert where they were found. As always, there is a passel of local teenagers in this room, mostly girls, apparently attracted by the ghoulishness factor. The room is like a scene straight out of the movie “The Mummy Returns.” There are a number of mummies from different places in the Taklamakan but three stand: the so-called Cherchen Man, the Loulan Beauty and the Cherchen Baby.

The 3000 year old Cherchen Man, found near Cherchen on the southern rim of the Tarim Basin, is a stunner. He is six feet six inches tall and has blondish-gray hair, a goatee, and decidedly European features. The last time I was here, six or seven years ago, I caused quite a commotion when I was viewing this mummy. At the time I had shoulder-length blonde hair, a hipsterish goatee (yes, I was once hipsterish), with the same thin build as the Cherchen Man, only two inches taller, and the same European (in my case Euro-American) features. There was a large Japanese tour group viewing the mummy. They stared at it, then at me, then started whispering among themselves. Soon the whole group was staring at me wide-eyed. Some even took out cameras and took my photo, although photography is strictly prohibited in this room. It was as if a descendant of the Cherchen Man had suddenly materialized in the Museum; indeed, the Mummy Had Returned.

The mummies are fully-clothed and what immediately strikes the observer is the design and quality of the several thousand-of-years-old material. There are tartans which could easily pass for modern productions. The Cherchen Man is dressed in a robe of finely woven wool exactly the same burgundy color which Mongolian monks wear today. For a detailed account of the fabrics worn by the mummies and much else about them see:

For even more on the mummies see:

So what the hell where these tall, lanky blonde-and-red haired, tartan-wearing proto-Europeans doing in the Tarim Basin three or four thousand years ago? Needless to say, this question has Sparked A Lot Of Controversy.

China | Gansu Province | Lanzhou

From Beijing I winged westward to Xinjiang Province to continue my search for traces of the legendary kingdom of Shambhala.

I planned to visit both Khotan, on the southern rim of the Tarim Basin, and Turpan, on the northern rim of the Basin. First, however, I stopped over in Lanzhou, in Gansu Province, to pay my respects to the peripatetic 7th century Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang (603-664) who had stopped briefly in Lanzhou while on his way to India, an epic 15 year trip during which he visited both Khotan and Turpan. See More Photos of Lanzhou.

Lanzhou, on the Yellow River

Xuanzang (right), with his faithful guide and servant Sandy (left). Although Xuanzang only stayed in Lanzhou one night in 629 A.D. before crossing the Yellow River and heading west the city has immortalized his visit with this statue. Xuanzang’s epic journey served as the inspiration for the immense novel Journey to the West, one of the classics of Chinese literature.

China | Beijing | Yellow Temple

As I mention in my Guidebook, Zanabazar, the First Bogd Gegeen, died, perhaps of illness and perhaps assassinated—at the Yellow Temple in Beijing in 1723. I have never seen the Yellow Temple (Shar Süm) mentioned in any guidebook to Beijing and was under the impression that it no longer existed. Through a stroke of luck, however, I was able to find it. The temple complex is located, logically enough, on Huangsi Daije (Chinese for Yellow Temple Street) in the Andingmen district north of the Forbidden City.

The Yellow Temple Complex was originally built in 1651 as a residence for the 5th Dalai Lama during his visit to the Qing Emperor in Beijing.

The outside of the complex has been impeccably restored and is immaculately maintained; in fact, suspiciously so, given the condition of most temples in Beijing. It turns out that the temple is within the grounds of a military complex and all public access to the interior of the compound and the temple itself is strictly probihited.