The autumn wind enters through the window, The gauze curtain starts to flutter and fly. I raise my head and look at the bright moon, And send my feelings a thousand miles in its light. –Listed as anonymous Yue Fu (乐府, folk songs) If you look at a geological map, the Loess Plateau ends at the Yellow River and Lanzhou marks the beginning of the Tibetan Plateau. The Hexi-corridor offers passage through the mountains to the west, traversing arid wastelands. This turbulent ground has been fought over throughout history by powers seeking to control the Silk Road and the easy crossing of the Yellow River at Lanzhou.
Armies swarmed, occupied, intermarried. Brought their culture with them. The fortified crossing flourished, attracted new conquerors, which in turn were then conquered. Genghis Khan died near Lanzhou, at the age of 66, in a battle for the nearby Xixia Kingdom, after having conquered most of the known world. Legends say he was secretly buried in a Buddhist temple in Gansu Province, or in the Ordish highlands and lay undisturbed until the Japanese invaded in 1937, when his remains were moved to the northwestern Qinghai Province, then later transferred to a mausoleum in Inner Mongolia. No one really knows for sure, but his ghost, along with untold other conquerors, their victims, armies, gently haunt the nights and back alleys of Lanzhou. You can feel them sometimes when the wind shifts, carrying fragrances of sand and coal and cumin, street-side barbecued mutton, and the metallic tang of gunpowder. It rises in colors of stirring silk, clings like algae, hangs like a forgotten moon. You can taste it everywhere in the spices introduced through Silk Road commerce that was enthusiatically adapted to local cuisine. Toss in hand pulled noodles, fiery broth, prickly ash, albino leeks, chicken, and fresh cilantro. Lanzhou truly has multilingual food: Baihe Tao is freshly washed lily stuffed with bean paste and served with white sugar sauce. Jincheng Babao is melon carved and fashioned into a bowl, then filled with white mushrooms, cherry, waxberry, longan (a close relative of lychee), pineapple and secret spices. Silk Road Camel Hoof is still available and made up of the whole hoof, with tendons, a nutritious and tasty dish that probably kept whole legions of Silk Road travelers alive. Quick Fried Camel Hump is a prized and tasty dish that has a history of over 1,500 years. Niang pi zi is flour paste is steamed for 4 minutes then cut into strips, served with garlic, mustard, sesame butter, chili oil, vinegar, and soy sauce. Fried Sheep Tail, despite its colorful name, is actually made of egg, bean paste and starch, after which it is fried into a crispy, heavenly delight. Then come the animal parts, washed or stuffed, de-feathered, naked, peering out from glass enclosed shields or spread across a vendor’s table, the heads leering or grinning or grimacing in their bodiless vulnerability, the rest carved into meaty blobs unidentifiable to the uninitiated, all routinely purchased, devoured, savored. And of course, the legendary Lanzhou Beef Noodles, fresh and hand stretched, having five main properties: clear broth, red pepper, white radish, green caraway and yellow noodles either wide or slim. There have been whole treatises written on who prefers each noodle width and why, and stereotypes exist as to who eats which kind and why. It’s all part of the Lanzhou stew. Then, there are the faces in this crossroads city. Multi-flavored ethnicity. Arabian nights in Chinese grottoes. Tibetan/Han liaisons. Travelers meet locals when the river is too high or wild to cross. The spoils of warlord garrisons, the comings and goings, the matings and couplings, all reflected like the light of mingling suns, attracted and dispersed . . . legacy lingers about the mouth, in the broad brow, chin shape, skin tone, height, temperament, mythology, waves of DNA fluctuations, possibilities . . . endless, boundless, all reflected in the wondrous variety of a lunch hour crowd on any street; so many faces, so many stories. Who does anyone belong to? Their unknown and undisclosed lineage? Their charted ancestry? Their geo-location? Ideologies? The Olduvai Gorge? The unmarked seas that we crawled out of? The expanding universe? The collective unconsciousness? Or do we all just belong to us all? Something wonders. Something remembers. Mountains of memory. Shafts to be mined. Triggering dreams, déjà vu flashbacks, singing songs in your head when you are least expecting it. Why does it call you and what is to be learned? We grope, we discover. The best things don’t come from clever marketing. They are hard won or lost in apathy. We all decide. Everyday. The songs continue, regardless. For me, the Silk Road whispers timeless riddles on the wind, composes ancient nomad wind melodies, rises in mist above the Yellow River, mourns in 2 a.m. silence, resurrects itself in spice-caused mouth fire, beckons out in the blind empty spaces, lights itself in sunset crags of shadow and rose, issues checks it cannot pay on accounts I didn’t know I had, cuts my meat with a phantom scimitar, cools me down with broadcasts from the desert night, sends me Marco Polo thoughts written on the inside of Ronzoni boxes, waves for me to follow along the arc, the crest, on the wing, down the throat, to abandon myself and surf the tsunami of time, Space Odyssey style, arriving back where I began . . . a clear-eyed, smooth, naked, laughing, all-knowing star-baby. And my imaginary Silk Road caravan moves on, one camel step at a time, creating divots in the soft desert sand, through the dusky, enduring, ageless, electro-cognizant twilight.
1 Comment
moonmadman
10/25/2012 11:54:09 pm
a pleasure to read this entry; I am imagining a visit to Hexi and a history lesson....
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