– Chapter 2 –

To Urumchi

To Suchow in three days was good going. We had averaged 150 miles a day until a halt here of four days spoilt our average and checked my rising admiration for the Chinese Postal Service. However, a stay of four days at ‘The Spring of Wine’, as Suchow is known, should have sounded gratefully in the ears of anyone but an anchorite; but the poetical extravagance of Chinese place-names was for me already suspect and the drab appearance of the town did nothing to allay that suspicion.

Having been rebuilt on a new site after the destruction of the old town during the Tungan (Chinese Moslem) rebellion of 1860, it lacked the old houses, temples, and trees of a place like Kanchow which had successfully resisted the rebels. The rebuilding had evidently been in the hands of a barbarian town planner, for it was laid out in the convenient but dull criss-cross style. ‘The Spring of Wine’, which is outside the present walls, proved to be as pleasant as its name. I found it a large walled garden, so informal as to be almost a wilderness, with reed-filled ponds and melancholy willows, moss-grown temples, grottos, and paths, all surrounding a stone basin in which a limpid spring was bubbling. In a shady arbour by the spring were stone seats where one could sit and drink tea.

Marco Polo once passed through Suchow; as had Benedict Goez, the lay Jesuit traveller, ‘who had sought Cathay and found heaven’. Leaving the court of Akbar in 1603 Benedict Goez went by the upper Oxus and over the Pamirs to Yarkand and Khotan, and finally to Suchow where in 1607, after being detained for sixteen months, he died of disease and privation just as aid reached him. Marco Polo dismisses Suchow in half a page and wastes little more on Kanchow where he spent a whole year. But a first journey, like a first ascent, needs no embellishment; the thing either speaks for itself or there is so much to be told that there is neither room nor need for digression. Subsequent travellers, on the contrary, to make amends for any lack of novelty must needs digress often at the risk of losing their reader’s attention; just as the climber on a hackneyed crag seeks for novelty at more serious hazard.

When the driver dropped me and my kit in the Post Office compound and advised me to ‘scram’, I was at a loss. The best of prospects is improved by an inn, but here was neither prospect nor inn. I looked at one and recoiled in dismay at the thought of spending four nights there—an example of ‘the initiate fear which wants hard use’ and which was later to be got at the inns of Hami and other places. Very reluctantly I billeted myself upon two American ladies of the C.I.M. who kindly took me in, although their house, which was being rebuilt, was all at sixes and sevens.

According to Stevenson, a taste for general information, not promptly checked, had sapped Uncle Joseph’s manhood. Air and bus travel were sapping mine; hoping to restore it I tramped the uninteresting, flat countryside where I could walk abroad without becoming a public portent. Shod in climbing boots I walked far and fast, taking my lunch of steamed bread with meagre date-filling off the last barrow-boy’s pitch without the city wall. Poor anaemic stuff it was, too, not to be compared with the rough Turki bread obtainable further west. That the confines of China were not far off was evident, for Tibetans were occasionally to be seen in the streets, and the black tents of nomads with their yaks and camels outside the walls.

Although Urumchi was still 700 miles away I managed to speak by telephone with Mr Paxton the American Consul with whom Shipton would be staying. A long-distance telephone call always impresses me as something of an achievement both by myself and by Alexander Graham Bell, and this last feat pleased and astonished me. There is no reason, of course, why the noise a Chinese makes should not be as acceptable to a telephone instrument as any of the more recognised forms of speech; but I am still puzzled as to how telegrams are handled in a language that has no alphabet.

A compulsory visit to the police station in accordance with the Suchow immigration bylaws led to my meeting a young student who had some English. He asked me to dine and I gladly accepted, for restaurants had no terror for me when accompanied by an habitué. We went to the upstairs room of a place chosen with some care. It had not struck me before, but there were degrees of dirtiness in the restaurant world of Kansu and my companion was more fastidious than I. It would not have been in Dr Johnson’s opinion a dinner to ask a man to. It consisted of spaghetti laced with bean sauce or red pepper according to choice, which is the common eating-house dish called ‘kua mien’. The equipment is equally simple, a bowl, a saucer for the sauce, chopsticks; and to wipe the latter in case they had not been washed, the proprietor provided, regardless of expense, two bits of paper. Fans could be borrowed gratis and one could spit on the floor if one wished—Liberty Hall, in fact. To finish we had what sounded to me like ‘champagne’ tea which implied the most expensive kind. It was heavily flavoured and since the ordinary tea was not flavoured at all, in future I always asked for ‘champagne’.

The bus did not leave until the fifth day, but partially made up for lost time with a run of 170 miles to Anhsi. At a place called Chia-yu-Kuan (Barrier of the Pleasant Valley) just west of Suchow the road passes through the remains of the western extremity of the Great Wall. This was the western limit of the old Middle Kingdom, China ‘Within the Wall’. The wall here is of puddled clay about twelve feet thick and twenty high. The late Sir Aurel Stein has shown that west of Suchow there were in fact two walls. One dating from the second century b.c. continued westwards to Tunhuang beyond Anhsi; its purpose being to protect the narrow line of oases strung along the foot of the Nan Shan (the South Mountains) which were indispensable as a means of commercial and political advance into Central Asia. The second wall, of far more recent construction, was built for the opposite purpose, to close the Central Asian route at a time when China was on the defensive.

In the early afternoon we reached Yu-men-hsien, the ‘Town of the Jade Gate’. We remained here until 6 p.m. to avoid the heat of the desert lying between us and Anhsi. This section of desert, by the way, provided the best running of the day. In two fat, fascinating volumes, Ruins of Desert Cathay, Sir Aurel Stein describes how he found the ruins of the west wall of Tunhuang and how having first dug up a reference to ‘Jade Gate’, at length located the actual fort in the neighbourhood of Tunhuang.

Among our first finds [he writes] was a label evidently once tied to a bag, referring to a hundred bronze arrowheads and naming a certain company of ‘Yu-men’. So at last I had found the name of that famous Jade Gate which I had thought from the first was to be located somewhere along this westernmost part of the ‘limes’. Again and again in the course of subsequent excavations I felt grateful for the amor scribendi which seems to have prompted these ancient ‘military Babus’—like those whom one now meets in queer corners of the fortified posts scattered along the Indian North-West Frontier—to beguile their ennui and demonstrate their own importance by a constant flow of reports, store statements, and other documents so familiar to soldiering men in most regions.

And later he goes on:

The thinnest layer of gravel sufficed to preserve in absolute freshness even such perishable objects as shreds of clothing, wooden tablets, arrow-shafts, straw, and chips. Whatever objects had once passed under this protection were practically safe in a soil which had seen but extremely scanty rainfall for the last two thousand years, was far removed from any chance of irrigation or other interference by human agency, and had suffered on its flat surface but rarely even from wind erosion. Often a mere scraping with my boot-heel sufficed to disclose where the detachments holding the posts had been accustomed to throw their refuse. With all the reports, statements, and enquiries which a fully developed and, no doubt, scribe-ridden military organization had kept moving along this chain of border watch-stations for more than two thousand years, was it wonderful that I soon grew accustomed to picking up records of the time of Christ or before, almost on the surface?

We did not reach Anhsi, the ‘West-protecting’, until late at night and though we left again at 5 a.m. it was no hardship for me who had to pass the short night on the Post Office counter. Nor would the tourist have missed anything, for crumbling city walls and one wide dilapidated street made up the sum total of Anhsi. And here I must enter a protest at the mutability of Chinese place-names, attributable sometimes to change of government and sometimes to change of mind on the part of scholars. How is one to travel to the right place or even write about it when Anhsi may be Ngan-hsi or Anhsichow; Kanchow equally Chang-yeh; and Suchow Chin-chu’an? Most flagrant of all is Peiping for what most of us go on calling Peking. This was one of the far-reaching reforms carried out in 1928 when the Nationalist armies took the place and transferred the capital to Nanking. Nor was this the only change made. Practically every street in Shanghai, and there are a good many, was renamed, but the old names had been in use so long that to this day a street map is provided with a key showing the original names. This itch to efface old memories is a habit that has derived, with many other bad habits, from the French Revolution. It is high time some...