The large area outside the eastern gate of the city is completely packed. There are more than 20,000 camels carrying heavy bags full of rare and precious treasures, more than 10,000 fine horses of the Western Regions, along with thousands of rare birds and strange creatures that cannot be found in the Central Plains. There are 60,000 plus soldiers; 5,000 plus cavalry; and thousands of musicians, dancers, female entertainers, craftsmen. When you look at the sight, the space is so densely packed that only the tip of the cone can be inserted1. Bai Zhen leads the Kuchan royal family and court officials who are standing in front of the gate to see Lu Guang off. Pusysdeva stands behind him, [mind] too occupied to exchange pleasantries with the Di people, so he sets his sight on Rajiva and me instead.
1 立锥之地 (lì zhuī zhī dì): chengyu, lit. ‘the space for [a] cone to stand’, describing a very small space.
Last night, he and Xiao Xuan brought the children to say goodbye. Everyone cried. The two brothers hugged each other for the first time in their lives, but sadly it was at the time of parting. The Pusysdeva couple packed a lot of clothing and money for us, filling up an entire carriage.
Bai Zhen is politely bidding goodbye to Lu Guang when all of a sudden, a group of monks squeezes through the sending-off crowd with bags slung on their shoulders and rushes towards Rajiva.
“Teacher, please take us with you!” Hundreds of monks cry out towards Rajiva.
Actually, they are not the only monks who wanted to follow Rajiva. A few days ago, monks kept coming to the palace from Tsio-li Temple, Cakuri Temple, ‘Strange’ Monastery1, and other temples from outside Kucha, begging Rajiva to bring them with him—there were as many as thousands [of monks]. Rajiva asked Lu Guang for permission but was rejected. It was easy to guess Lu Guang’s mind. He does not believe in Buddha so bringing the monks along is worthless and would only waste rations. Furthermore, so many monks listening to Rajiva only, if anything was to happen along the way, it would only create trouble for Lu Guang. The reason why he is bringing Rajiva along is because he has yet to ascertain Fu Jian’s situation. If Fu Jian can overcome the calamity and return to power, he would offer Rajiva as a gift to Fu Jian.
1 referring to Ascharya Monastery [T/N: See Ch.13 for the tale behind the monastery’s name]
Rajiva naturally understands Lu Guang’s thoughts so he had to assuage the monks every single day leading up to departure. We thought it would be enough to make them give up and did not expect there to be so many persistent monks still. Seeing the discontentment in Lu Guang’s eyes, Rajiva hurriedly steps forward to dissuade them. At last, the monks left with tears in their eyes.
The sound of a horse whip rings out; the front convoy begins to move, and the crowd sending us off bursts into tears. Rajiva’s face turns a little pale; he takes my hand and says goodbye to Pusysdeva’s family. He then takes a deep breath and looks up at the blue sky of Kucha, as if he wants to engrave this land into memory. Seeing the melancholy and longing in his eyes, my heart saddens. I squat down and scoop up a handkerchief-full of soil and give it to him.
“This is the soil of Kucha. Take it with you, and it will be like seeing your hometown.”
Rajiva takes it and gazes at the soil for a while, before wrapping it up solemnly and puts it inside his robes. After that, we step inside the carriage. Once the wheels begin to turn, I pull the curtains aside. Together, we gaze back at Pusysdeva, who looks lost standing in the spring wind of early March. The folds of his clothes billow up in the wind, swishing against each other. The tall figure turns smaller and smaller in our vision before becoming one with the other black dots, no longer distinguishable. My sight is blurry with tears.
Farewell, Pusysdeva. I will always remember you. Thank you…
Rajiva’s warm chest receives me from behind. He wraps his arms around my waist; even his eyes are a little bit glassy. I turn around and embrace him, letting his last tears for his hometown and relatives fall and stay in my arms. The carriage is taking us towards the land of pain and chaos caused by ceaseless conflicts. From now on, our destiny will be closely linked to the Central Plains.
National Highway 314 (G314)
In ancient times, if you travel in a horse-drawn carriage, you can average about thirty kilometers [18.6 mi] a day. However, our team is too large: There are 20,000 camels and more than 60,000 infantrymen, so the travelling speed is only fifteen kilometers [9.3 mi] per day. No wonder it will take us half a year to reach Guzang. The road we travelling on is the southern section of the Silk Road, along the edge of the Tarim Basin. This road continues to exist in modern times, now known as National Highway 314 [G314]. It goes from Toksun County to the Khunjerab Pass on the border with Pakistan, and finally to India. This is the road Xuanzang took to go west.
大漠孤烟直.
长河落日圆。
On the great desert, a lone column of smoke straight up;
Over the long river the setting sun is round.*
* these are lines from the poem《使至塞上》or “My Mission to the Frontier” by Wang Wei (699–759 CE), who is a famous poet, painter and politician from the Tang Dynasty. This English translation of the poem was quoted in a 1996 article by Richard Lim in The Sunday Times titled “My kind of hero- from the Tang dynasty” (archived link to the article as reposted on his webpage). [T/N: It is unclear whose translation it is as Lim stated in the article that he “can read little Chinese”. This English translation matches up with the Vietnamese so I am leaving it for now, but will try to find a more credible translation later.]
Aerial view of Dunhuang Yardang National Geopark, China (Credit: AirPano LLC)
Along the way, I get to witness sceneries that are characteristic of western China, such as the endless1 Gobi Desert and the different shapes of the yadan2 landforms. It is currently shallow-water season, so the rivers along the road are mostly dry. Because the river soil is full of minerals, the salt flats become a colourful expanse of irregular colours and textures, which dazzle under the sunlight and create a scene so beautiful it takes one’s breath away. The outline of the Tian Shan range covers the horizon like a never-ending line. Above the sand dunes of the Gobi Desert are clusters of drought-tolerant plants such as sea buckthorn and [Chinese] tamarisk. From time to time, we would spot wild camels, donkeys or horses gazing at leisure. In modern times, ever since oil and natural gas have been detected, everywhere on this desert would be filled with oil drills and natural gas harvesters blazing, pumping smoke into the air. When I went to [modern] Kucha to do research, we drove along the National Highway 314 and in our field of vision, the drills and machines never stopped working. In the afterglow of sunset, it was a breathless sight.
1 无边无际 (wú biān wú jì): chengyu, lit. ‘no edge, no border’
2 more commonly known in English as ‘yardang’, from the Turkic word meaning ‘steep bank’, whereas the Chinese word is Uyghur in origin (Source: Wiki). A yardang is a “large area of soft, poorly consolidated rock and bedrock surfaces that have been extensively grooved, fluted, and pitted by wind erosion” (Source: Britannica).
After arriving in Luntai, we travel in the middle of a poplar forest for several days. This is one of the biggest poplar forests in Xinjiang. Every year in October, this poplar forest would dye this entire land and sky into a golden colour. At Luntai, I get to see the ancient forts and watchtowers that were built in the Han Dynasty, where troops were garrisoned to open up land and to stand guard. When the expedition army passed by here during Western Han [202 BCE–9 CE], to solve the problem of long-term food supply, the soldiers had to farm and become self-sufficient. The farms later became more and more advanced, aiding the spread of the Han’s military might across the Western Regions. The ancient city of Kugelake, the ancient city of Zorkut, and the city of Wulei were all part of the tuntian1 system in the Han Dynasty. The capital of Luntou, a kingdom situated at the outpost of Kucha, was completely destroyed by Li Guangli’s two expeditions against the country of Dayuan2, who when passing through Luntou, “attacked for several days and massacred it”. We stay at the ancient city of Luntou for a night. There are only a few dilapidated villages around. The massacre happened more than four hundred years ago, but this small country is still not restored, which clearly shows just how utterly tragic the massacre was.
1 屯田 (tún tián): lit. ‘to station [soldiers] to farm’, referring to the aforementioned military farming.
2 Li Guangli (?-88 BCE) was a Chinese general and brother to a favoured concubine of Emperor of Wu of Han. The two expeditions referred to are part of the War of the Heavenly Horses or Han-Dayuan War (104-102 BCE). Dayuan was a country that existed in Ferghana valley in Central Asia, whose people had Caucasian features and shared customs with Greco-Bactrians. (Source: Wiki).
In the modern times, Luntai is the starting point of the Tarim Desert Highway, which was built to facilitate the transportation of oil for the petroleum industry in the Taklamakan Desert. This highway was considered a major breakthrough in the world’s history of architecture, with a length of over 500 kilometres [552 km to be exact (343 mi)], 450 kilometres of which was built on shifting sand dunes, making it the longest highway built on sand dunes in the 21st century. The vast sand dunes that we are seeing in the distance from the carriage—that is the Taklamakan Desert. With no vegetation in sight, the Taklamakan Desert is known as the place where “once you get in, you can’t get out of”.
I giddily tell Rajiva that in order to experience the highway that crosses China’s largest and the world’s second largest desert, I spent four hours crossing this “sea of death”. That of course made him dumbfounded and in disbelief. With pride, I told him that in order to block wind and sand, a water pump is stationed every five hundred metres [0.3 mi], pumping water through thin pipes along the highway to water the vegetation. As long as there is water, there is grass. Every few steps, there would be reed fences laid in a criss-crossed pattern to block the sand from overflowing. Along this highway of over 500 kilometres, the only striking features are the series of water pump houses, the green grass growing around the water pipes, and tall columns of sand dunes covering the sky. It takes more than six hours of this monotonous scene before you can cross the Tarim River and see the poplar forest.
Tarim Desert Highway. Photographer: George Steinmetz
Ever since he learned of my identity as a person from the future, Rajiva has often asked me about societal landscape and knowledge of a thousand years later. His high IQ, high comprehension ability, and trust in me made me unable to hide anything from him. That is why, even though the journey is long, we never get tired or bored thanks to all the discussions we have every day. Let us make up for the lost time of the past decades by telling all the stories we can. I talk to him about the basic geography, physics, history, meteorology and other knowledge about the special features of the Gobi Desert as we come across them, which often surprise him, either in admiration or in puzzlement. I completely open up my heart to him, except the cost of my time jump…
It takes us a month to reach Yanqi1. The first point of entry is Tiemen Pass [Iron Gate Pass], the most outpost in Yanqi. The pass was built by the Han on the western bank of the Kongque River [Peacock River]. Zhang Jian was sent here twice when he was an envoy to the Western Regions, and Ban Chao also passed by here once, stopping to let his horses drink water by the Kongque River, so the Kongque River is also known as the Yinma River [Drinking Horse River]. Kongque River starts from Lake Bosten, ends in Lop Nur, and does not connect to any other rivers. This strange river was the birthplace of an ancient civilization—the Kingdom of Krorän (Loulan).
1 also known as Ārśi in Tocharian, an ancient town on the Silk Road, now the capital of Yanqi Hui Autonomous County in the Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture, Xinjiang.
In Rajiva’s time, Loulan has already become ruins. About ten years from now, Faxian, the eminent monk from Eastern Jin Dynasty, would journey west to learn scriptures and when passing by Loulan, would recount: “There is not a bird to be seen in the air above, nor an animal on the ground below. Though you look all round most earnestly to find where you can cross, you know not where to make your choice, the only mark and indication being the dry bones of the dead (left upon the sand).”1 I ask Rajiva, who shakes his head and sighs. He says that when he was a child, he heard people talk about Loulan and how the river changing course resulted in less water and an accumulation of salt. The abnormal weather pattern2 caused rampant plagues and most of the people died. The ones who survived were forced to move, and the thousand-year-old Kingdom of Loulan got lost in the turbidity…
1 English translation of the passage quoted here is by James Legge (1886). Fa-Hien’s Record Of Buddistic Kingdoms. Oxford University Press Warehouse. pp. 12–15.
2 The Kongque River continues to have a major effect on the surrounding environment and per many studies, a factor in climate change in the region today (Source: Wiki).
We continue north of Yanqi, travelling along the Kongque River. The river water is akin to a jade belt and the waves are clear. One cannot discern where the downstream of the river is. About a few hundred kilometres from here is the ancient Loulan, buried under the endless white sand. During this time, aside from Tiemen Pass, there are no other big cities. But by the time of the 21st century, this will become Korla, a major industrial city built for the Tarim oil fields.
Less than a hundred li away from the capital of Yanqi, under the afterglow of the sun, we enter a narrow valley. Lu Guang orders everyone to stop and set camp. Looking at the people who are busy setting up camp, I realize with dawning horror that a tragedy is about to unfold here…
The large area outside the eastern gate of the city is completely packed. There are more than 20,000 camels carrying heavy bags full of rare and precious treasures, more than 10,000 fine horses of the Western Regions, along with thousands of rare birds and strange creatures that cannot be found in the Central Plains. There are 60,000 plus soldiers; 5,000 plus cavalry; and thousands of musicians, dancers, female entertainers, craftsmen. When you look at the sight, the space is so densely packed that only the tip of the cone can be inserted1. Bai Zhen leads the Kuchan royal family and court officials who are standing in front of the gate to see Lu Guang off. Pusysdeva stands behind him, [mind] too occupied to exchange pleasantries with the Di people, so he sets his sight on Rajiva and me instead.
1 立锥之地 (lì zhuī zhī dì): chengyu, lit. ‘the space for [a] cone to stand’, describing a very small space.
Last night, he and Xiao Xuan brought the children to say goodbye. Everyone cried. The two brothers hugged each other for the first time in their lives, but sadly it was at the time of parting. The Pusysdeva couple packed a lot of clothing and money for us, filling up an entire carriage.
Bai Zhen is politely bidding goodbye to Lu Guang when all of a sudden, a group of monks squeezes through the sending-off crowd with bags slung on their shoulders and rushes towards Rajiva.
“Teacher, please take us with you!” Hundreds of monks cry out towards Rajiva.
Actually, they are not the only monks who wanted to follow Rajiva. A few days ago, monks kept coming to the palace from Tsio-li Temple, Cakuri Temple, ‘Strange’ Monastery1, and other temples from outside Kucha, begging Rajiva to bring them with him—there were as many as thousands [of monks]. Rajiva asked Lu Guang for permission but was rejected. It was easy to guess Lu Guang’s mind. He does not believe in Buddha so bringing the monks along is worthless and would only waste rations. Furthermore, so many monks listening to Rajiva only, if anything was to happen along the way, it would only create trouble for Lu Guang. The reason why he is bringing Rajiva along is because he has yet to ascertain Fu Jian’s situation. If Fu Jian can overcome the calamity and return to power, he would offer Rajiva as a gift to Fu Jian.
1 referring to Ascharya Monastery [T/N: See Ch.13 for the tale behind the monastery’s name]
Rajiva naturally understands Lu Guang’s thoughts so he had to assuage the monks every single day leading up to departure. We thought it would be enough to make them give up and did not expect there to be so many persistent monks still. Seeing the discontentment in Lu Guang’s eyes, Rajiva hurriedly steps forward to dissuade them. At last, the monks left with tears in their eyes.
The sound of a horse whip rings out; the front convoy begins to move, and the crowd sending us off bursts into tears. Rajiva’s face turns a little pale; he takes my hand and says goodbye to Pusysdeva’s family. He then takes a deep breath and looks up at the blue sky of Kucha, as if he wants to engrave this land into memory. Seeing the melancholy and longing in his eyes, my heart saddens. I squat down and scoop up a handkerchief-full of soil and give it to him.
“This is the soil of Kucha. Take it with you, and it will be like seeing your hometown.”
Rajiva takes it and gazes at the soil for a while, before wrapping it up solemnly and puts it inside his robes. After that, we step inside the carriage. Once the wheels begin to turn, I pull the curtains aside. Together, we gaze back at Pusysdeva, who looks lost standing in the spring wind of early March. The folds of his clothes billow up in the wind, swishing against each other. The tall figure turns smaller and smaller in our vision before becoming one with the other black dots, no longer distinguishable. My sight is blurry with tears.
Farewell, Pusysdeva. I will always remember you. Thank you…
Rajiva’s warm chest receives me from behind. He wraps his arms around my waist; even his eyes are a little bit glassy. I turn around and embrace him, letting his last tears for his hometown and relatives fall and stay in my arms. The carriage is taking us towards the land of pain and chaos caused by ceaseless conflicts. From now on, our destiny will be closely linked to the Central Plains.
National Highway 314 (G314)
In ancient times, if you travel in a horse-drawn carriage, you can average about thirty kilometers [18.6 mi] a day. However, our team is too large: There are 20,000 camels and more than 60,000 infantrymen, so the travelling speed is only fifteen kilometers [9.3 mi] per day. No wonder it will take us half a year to reach Guzang. The road we travelling on is the southern section of the Silk Road, along the edge of the Tarim Basin. This road continues to exist in modern times, now known as National Highway 314 [G314]. It goes from Toksun County to the Khunjerab Pass on the border with Pakistan, and finally to India. This is the road Xuanzang took to go west.
大漠孤烟直.
长河落日圆。
On the great desert, a lone column of smoke straight up;
Over the long river the setting sun is round.*
* these are lines from the poem《使至塞上》or “My Mission to the Frontier” by Wang Wei (699–759 CE), who is a famous poet, painter and politician from the Tang Dynasty. This English translation of the poem was quoted in a 1996 article by Richard Lim in The Sunday Times titled “My kind of hero- from the Tang dynasty” (archived link to the article as reposted on his webpage). [T/N: It is unclear whose translation it is as Lim stated in the article that he “can read little Chinese”. This English translation matches up with the Vietnamese so I am leaving it for now, but will try to find a more credible translation later.]
Aerial view of Dunhuang Yardang National Geopark, China (Credit: AirPano LLC)
Along the way, I get to witness sceneries that are characteristic of western China, such as the endless1 Gobi Desert and the different shapes of the yadan2 landforms. It is currently shallow-water season, so the rivers along the road are mostly dry. Because the river soil is full of minerals, the salt flats become a colourful expanse of irregular colours and textures, which dazzle under the sunlight and create a scene so beautiful it takes one’s breath away. The outline of the Tian Shan range covers the horizon like a never-ending line. Above the sand dunes of the Gobi Desert are clusters of drought-tolerant plants such as sea buckthorn and [Chinese] tamarisk. From time to time, we would spot wild camels, donkeys or horses gazing at leisure. In modern times, ever since oil and natural gas have been detected, everywhere on this desert would be filled with oil drills and natural gas harvesters blazing, pumping smoke into the air. When I went to [modern] Kucha to do research, we drove along the National Highway 314 and in our field of vision, the drills and machines never stopped working. In the afterglow of sunset, it was a breathless sight.
1 无边无际 (wú biān wú jì): chengyu, lit. ‘no edge, no border’
2 more commonly known in English as ‘yardang’, from the Turkic word meaning ‘steep bank’, whereas the Chinese word is Uyghur in origin (Source: Wiki). A yardang is a “large area of soft, poorly consolidated rock and bedrock surfaces that have been extensively grooved, fluted, and pitted by wind erosion” (Source: Britannica).
After arriving in Luntai, we travel in the middle of a poplar forest for several days. This is one of the biggest poplar forests in Xinjiang. Every year in October, this poplar forest would dye this entire land and sky into a golden colour. At Luntai, I get to see the ancient forts and watchtowers that were built in the Han Dynasty, where troops were garrisoned to open up land and to stand guard. When the expedition army passed by here during Western Han [202 BCE–9 CE], to solve the problem of long-term food supply, the soldiers had to farm and become self-sufficient. The farms later became more and more advanced, aiding the spread of the Han’s military might across the Western Regions. The ancient city of Kugelake, the ancient city of Zorkut, and the city of Wulei were all part of the tuntian1 system in the Han Dynasty. The capital of Luntou, a kingdom situated at the outpost of Kucha, was completely destroyed by Li Guangli’s two expeditions against the country of Dayuan2, who when passing through Luntou, “attacked for several days and massacred it”. We stay at the ancient city of Luntou for a night. There are only a few dilapidated villages around. The massacre happened more than four hundred years ago, but this small country is still not restored, which clearly shows just how utterly tragic the massacre was.
1 屯田 (tún tián): lit. ‘to station [soldiers] to farm’, referring to the aforementioned military farming.
2 Li Guangli (?-88 BCE) was a Chinese general and brother to a favoured concubine of Emperor of Wu of Han. The two expeditions referred to are part of the War of the Heavenly Horses or Han-Dayuan War (104-102 BCE). Dayuan was a country that existed in Ferghana valley in Central Asia, whose people had Caucasian features and shared customs with Greco-Bactrians. (Source: Wiki).
In the modern times, Luntai is the starting point of the Tarim Desert Highway, which was built to facilitate the transportation of oil for the petroleum industry in the Taklamakan Desert. This highway was considered a major breakthrough in the world’s history of architecture, with a length of over 500 kilometres [552 km to be exact (343 mi)], 450 kilometres of which was built on shifting sand dunes, making it the longest highway built on sand dunes in the 21st century. The vast sand dunes that we are seeing in the distance from the carriage—that is the Taklamakan Desert. With no vegetation in sight, the Taklamakan Desert is known as the place where “once you get in, you can’t get out of”.
I giddily tell Rajiva that in order to experience the highway that crosses China’s largest and the world’s second largest desert, I spent four hours crossing this “sea of death”. That of course made him dumbfounded and in disbelief. With pride, I told him that in order to block wind and sand, a water pump is stationed every five hundred metres [0.3 mi], pumping water through thin pipes along the highway to water the vegetation. As long as there is water, there is grass. Every few steps, there would be reed fences laid in a criss-crossed pattern to block the sand from overflowing. Along this highway of over 500 kilometres, the only striking features are the series of water pump houses, the green grass growing around the water pipes, and tall columns of sand dunes covering the sky. It takes more than six hours of this monotonous scene before you can cross the Tarim River and see the poplar forest.
Tarim Desert Highway. Photographer: George Steinmetz
Ever since he learned of my identity as a person from the future, Rajiva has often asked me about societal landscape and knowledge of a thousand years later. His high IQ, high comprehension ability, and trust in me made me unable to hide anything from him. That is why, even though the journey is long, we never get tired or bored thanks to all the discussions we have every day. Let us make up for the lost time of the past decades by telling all the stories we can. I talk to him about the basic geography, physics, history, meteorology and other knowledge about the special features of the Gobi Desert as we come across them, which often surprise him, either in admiration or in puzzlement. I completely open up my heart to him, except the cost of my time jump…
It takes us a month to reach Yanqi1. The first point of entry is Tiemen Pass [Iron Gate Pass], the most outpost in Yanqi. The pass was built by the Han on the western bank of the Kongque River [Peacock River]. Zhang Jian was sent here twice when he was an envoy to the Western Regions, and Ban Chao also passed by here once, stopping to let his horses drink water by the Kongque River, so the Kongque River is also known as the Yinma River [Drinking Horse River]. Kongque River starts from Lake Bosten, ends in Lop Nur, and does not connect to any other rivers. This strange river was the birthplace of an ancient civilization—the Kingdom of Krorän (Loulan).
1 also known as Ārśi in Tocharian, an ancient town on the Silk Road, now the capital of Yanqi Hui Autonomous County in the Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture, Xinjiang.
In Rajiva’s time, Loulan has already become ruins. About ten years from now, Faxian, the eminent monk from Eastern Jin Dynasty, would journey west to learn scriptures and when passing by Loulan, would recount: “There is not a bird to be seen in the air above, nor an animal on the ground below. Though you look all round most earnestly to find where you can cross, you know not where to make your choice, the only mark and indication being the dry bones of the dead (left upon the sand).”1 I ask Rajiva, who shakes his head and sighs. He says that when he was a child, he heard people talk about Loulan and how the river changing course resulted in less water and an accumulation of salt. The abnormal weather pattern2 caused rampant plagues and most of the people died. The ones who survived were forced to move, and the thousand-year-old Kingdom of Loulan got lost in the turbidity…
1 English translation of the passage quoted here is by James Legge (1886). Fa-Hien’s Record Of Buddistic Kingdoms. Oxford University Press Warehouse. pp. 12–15.
2 The Kongque River continues to have a major effect on the surrounding environment and per many studies, a factor in climate change in the region today (Source: Wiki).
We continue north of Yanqi, travelling along the Kongque River. The river water is akin to a jade belt and the waves are clear. One cannot discern where the downstream of the river is. About a few hundred kilometres from here is the ancient Loulan, buried under the endless white sand. During this time, aside from Tiemen Pass, there are no other big cities. But by the time of the 21st century, this will become Korla, a major industrial city built for the Tarim oil fields.
Less than a hundred li away from the capital of Yanqi, under the afterglow of the sun, we enter a narrow valley. Lu Guang orders everyone to stop and set camp. Looking at the people who are busy setting up camp, I realize with dawning horror that a tragedy is about to unfold here…
