Like all cities in western China, Shandan is covered with Gobi Desert dust. It gets on your clothes, gets in your hair, makes it a challenge to wear contact lenses, which I foolishly tried. Local women cover their heads with long scarves and hide behind big masks as if they were performing surgery. Still, the dust gets in and covers you with fine grit as if it were trying to rub you out or bury you. The day I spent walking along the wall I like to think I was covered with Great Wall dust. An ancient grit of ruin, particles released that attached to me, sharing collective wind stories of the greatest testament to xenophobia that ever existed, melting now in sad dry puddles back into the desert from which it sprang. There is no escaping the melancholy the corpse of the Great Wall incites. It clings to the wind-carved humps, vibrates in the pockmarked shadows, swells like a timeworn sonnet, cradles you gently like the famous lullaby baby in the treetops just before the bough broke, entering you like—yes, like a poem, a panoptic poem of inclusion and exclusion. I walked the line: was I being kept in or kept out? Even now at its diminished height, the wall is a formidable barrier, but you wonder, what exactly was it keeping out? What was it protecting its people from? Ideas? Change? Racial purity?
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Mogao CavesOn any trip to Dunhuang, the Mogao Caves, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is a must see. The carved out caves feature one of the largest collections of Buddhist paintings and sculptures at a site established in 332 AD that has survived not only the withering effects of time but the actual torching of the caves by nonbelievers, looting by invaders, serving as refugee housing in 1921 for Russian soldiers fleeing the revolution along with the rampant plundering by legions of foreign, allegedly well-meaning, archeologists from Britain, France, Hungary, Japan, among others and a untold years of tourist marauders.
Ancient legends say the area containing the Mingsha or Singing Sand Dunes just south of Dunhuang used to be flat. One day a fierce battle raged there and an army was annihilated, leaving the ground littered with bodies. A Goddess scattered incense ashes over them and from the ground rose up a giant sand mountain to bury the warriors, while the tears of the dead soldiers’ loved ones pooled to form Crescent Lake. Even now, it is said, when the wind comes from a certain direction, military drums rumble, the dunes echo the sounds of battle, the sand blows out sad laments for the fallen and mournful vapors of ghosts, drift. But this day, there was no wind, no battle cries, just sunlight and temperatures in the high 50’s and Xuxiangdong (whose name I shortened to Xu) beckoning me to follow. He led me to the camel ranch and pulled out money to pay for both of us, but I stopped him and paid my own way. I have found this is typical of Chinese generosity. If you are invited, the inviter expects to pay for everything. I guess he thought he had invited me by saying, “follow me, follow me,” and that became the tagline of the day, uttered in an amusing way as one would usher along a clueless child, along with repeating, “good friend, good friend.” I suddenly realized this was the extent of his English. No matter, we were on the same wavelength, everything was making us laugh, everything was blowing us away and we communicated our wonder with double thumbs up, shrieks and whoops of surprise and delight. We were joined by another Chinese tourist straggler and lined up for the camels. The legendary singing sand dunes outside of Dunhuang, China were not singing for me but they were not entirely silent, either. They say the desert sings of lost Silk Road traveler’s ghosts whose lives were taken by bandits or thirst or starvation, though it was mostly by the desert windstorms that rose like waves and extinguished all life that wasn’t smart enough to ride it out, yet all I heard were my own thoughts, desert dry, blooming, beckoning onward over the dunes and into what’s next. |
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