In Xanadu (44 page)

It took another whole day of travel before we reached the plains. As we pulled into the Kashgar bus station we made a vow never to visit Turkestan again. But within a day of reaching Chini Bagh. the old British consulate, we were already beginning to reconsider our decision.

SEVEN

In
the early years of this century Chini Bagh was distinguished by its lavatory. It was a 'Victory' model with a sturdy mahogany seat, the only flushing thunderbox for two thousand miles. As if this were not enough to secure its place in legend, between its arrival in 1913 and the consulate's demise in 1949, it graced such distinguished bottoms as Sir Aurel Stein and Peter Fleming. The Victory' was brought by Sir George Macartney, the British consul who was sent to Kashgar in 1890 to keep a watch on the Russians. Over the final years of the nineteenth century the armies of the Tsar had rolled relentlessly across Turkestan adding Bokhara, Khiva and Kokand to the Russian Enpire. The government of India suspected that Sinkiang would be the next province to fall. Not only did this put the Russians in an excellent position to move eastwards into western China, it also threatened the safety of the Pamir passes into British India. This was something Britain could never allow. Macartney, then only twenty-four, was packed off to Kashgar to raise the only Union Jack between India and the North Pole.

The Manchu authorities furnished him with a large but primitive house at Chini Bagh (Chinese garden), and there Macartney lived for twenty-eight years, surviving the conspiracies of the Russians, the elusive behaviour of the Chinese
Taotai,
the daily trials of life in Asia and, at first, the extreme loneliness. Apart from a defrocked Dutch priest and a couple of gloomy Swedish missionaries, the Russians were the only other Europeans in Sinkiang, and with them Macartney was forced to maintain cool relations. His humourless Russian adversary, Nikolai Petrovsky, was determined to turn the rivalry of the two empires into a Victorian Cold War. and he strained relations between the two countries whenever possible. An evening visit by the explorer Younghusband to the Russian consulate was construed as a deliberate insult. In diplomatic circles the proper time for a call was the morning, and as a result relations were broken off for some weeks. Later, a copy of
Punch
sent to the Russian consulate in an exchange of newspapers was found to contain a caricature of the Tsar kicking the Jews out of Russia. Petrovsky refused to believe that the
Punch
had been sent accidently, and between November 1899 and June 1902 he did not address a single word to Macartney.

But Petrovsky was a subtle politician. He nearly succeeded in persuading his superiors to annex portions of Sinkiang, either by directly forcing the Chinese to redraw their borders, or by provoking the Chinese to violence and then occupying territory to 'protect Russian interests'. His threats were backed up by the consulate guard of seventy-five ferocious Cossacks, a force which could at any moment be supplemented by a whole regiment waiting only a few miles away on the Oxus, the Russian border. Against this were ranged a degenerate, opium-sodden Chinese garrison (whom one English traveller described as being 'good at gardening') and the consulate staff consisting of Sattur, 'a gnome-like little man, perfectly honest but with the mind of a boy of twelve', Isa, the dairyman who liked to sing his cows to sleep, and Daoud the gardener, who used to have conversations with his plants. After Macartney married in 1898, the anti-Tsarist forces in Kashgar were supplemented by the consul's formidable wife. Catharine, and Miss Cresswell, the no less formidable nanny, who used to go to bed armed with a large carving knife, so as to be 'prepared for all eventualities'.

Catherine had never left Scotland when her fiance turned up unannounced at her house in Dumfriesshire. He told her that he had only limited leave and that she had one week to get married and set off for Kashgar. Used to the genteel ways of rural Galloway, she was unimpressed with the Uigurs she found around Chini Bagh. The natives are essentially docile and easily managed,' she wrote, 'with no strong characteristics either good or bad. Nearly all of them have venereal diseases—' The younger Kashgaris also came in for censure. 'The babies and small children go
naked
in warm weather.

They become brown like little niggers. Much more to her taste was competing with the Russian ladies at the tennis club which was formed after Petrovsky retired and relations between the two consulates began to thaw: 'We ladies took it in turns to supply tea twice a week, and we vied with each other as to who could produce the best cakes, ices, or strawberries and cream.' She was very much the Victorian memsahib, but there was a certain heroism in the way she made the best of her lonely posting, making Chini Bagh civilized, keeping it warm and homely, and creating the beautiful garden which so impressed visitors.

She would be heartbroken to see it now. The rooms have been divided up into dormitories, the stables turned into rows of stinking squatter loos, the garden left to run riot. The plaster walls are peeling and only nail holes remain where the British coat of arms used to hang. The Russian consulate, christened HOTEL SEMEN: Joint Hotil With Civilation', is now an expensive lodging house for foreign tourists. Chini Bagh is more down-market. It is used as an overnight stop for long-distance truck drivers, mainly Pakistanis. In the evenings they lounge around their rooms or build little fires in the courtyard on which to cook their
dal
and rice. Money changers after rupees and dollars flit from group to group. Drying
charwal chemise
hang from clothes lines.

If Chini Bagh has lost some of its romance since the days of the Great Game, then so has Kashgar as a whole. A gloomy dust haze hangs over the town like a shroud. The old city walls have been pulled down and only fragments remain. Large open streets have been punched through the bazaars, with separate lanes for cars, buses, bicycles and pedestrians. There are no cars vet in Kashgar. there is a five-year waiting list for bicycles, and few of the buses are ever in working order (Sinkiang gets them second-hand after they are too old to ply the streets of Peking), but the Chinese want to give the impression that Kashgar is looking forward to the next century. For this reason the streets are now lined with charmless totalitarian buildings and in the centre of the principal boulevard stands an outsized statue of Mao, hand raised in benediction towards the empty expanses of People's Park. Muslim Kashgar is under assault from Marxist Peking, and the town still bears the scars of the Great Proletarian Revolution of the late Sixties. The Uigurs, the only people in Asia who did not bother resisting Ghengis Khan, have stood by as Manchu armies of occupation were replaced by Maoist armies of occupation. In the last two decades, they have continued to watch while Red Guards burned down their mosques, banned the Koran, imprisoned their mullahs and closed the schools, bazaars and
medresse.
The Uigurs have many fine qualities, but they are not a gallant race.

They do, however, possess a certain knack of survival. Our first afternoon in Kashgar we explored beyond the modern streets and soon found the remains of the old city. In the back-street bazaars, newly rebuilt after the destruction of the mediaeval town, we stumbled across a world very different from the regimented drabness of the modem communist town. The traditional ways of the Uigurs had gone to ground for a few years, then quietly reasserted themselves when it was safe to do so again. Wandering past low mud houses through dusty lanes, we suddenly came across a wider space. On either side of the road lean-to shacks had been erected, and in the centre a long tarpaulin had been hung over a brick dais. Under this, and in and around the shacks, sat vendors arranged in groups according to produce. First we came to the hat sellers, then the wood turners, ironmongers and knife makers. Beyond lay a range of
cay
stalls, an expanse of carpets partitioned into separate cubicles by canvas slats. On the far side was the fruit and vegetable market. The road was blocked by a gaggle of donkey carts piled high with figs, grapes, apples and apricots. Squawking chickens dangled from handlebars. One escaped from a coup and hopped off over a crowd of carts pursued by the owner. Donkey carts reversed into stalls, collapsing tarpaulins on squatting groups of tea drinkers. Little boys poked sitting dromedaries, who got up and disturbed herds of sheep. The sheep scattered over crowds of cross-legged fruit sellers. Runaway donkeys sent old men flying; little children got their feet stood on; stall-holder mothers were tripped up by nasty boys in flat caps playing hide and seek. There was a ringing of bicycle bells and camel bells and a smell of dust and charcoal and spicy cooking. It was a far cry from the days of the Cultural Revolution when a boy selling peanuts could be arrested as a capitalist. We had seen finer bazaars in the East, but none so unexpected. Coming to it from the wide empty streets of the Chinese town was like discovering some rare animal thought long extinct.

It was the human variety that was the most exciting thing about the bazaar. There were a few diminutive, nervous-looking Han Chinese in fatigues or Mao outfits; nearby sat turbaned Tadjiks and Kazakhs with high foreheads, coarse skin and twisting cavalier moustaches. There were Uzbecks with big ears and pork-pie hats, Uigurs in homespun cotton shirts, bell-shaped coats and knee-length leather boots. There were little boys in dirty trousers who cracked sunflower seeds and swarmed around the side alleys like urchins escaped from a Dickens novel.

It seemed that there was nothing that these people did not have: plough shares or dried ginseng, bamboo tree trunks or small boiled sweets, donkey-cart axles, millstones, white carrots, even crystalline sugar lumps two and a half feet long. Nothing, that is, except perhaps a competent dentist. The entire population of the market could not have had a complete set of teeth between them. Smiling faces revealed cavernous holes punctuated in exceptional cases with a solitary surviving incisor. This situation worried me as I could feel my own false front tooth beginning to wobble, and I did not give much for my chances of finding someone who could stick it in again. The last time it had come loose was in 1984 in Leh, the capital of Ladakh. There I discovered that there was but one dentist. It was the town mechanic and he used the same spanner for both his jobs.

Our room at Chini Bagh was cosy and comfortable. It was rectangular with a low ceiling and large windows. Inside the furniture was arranged symmetrically with two beds and two desks placed against the side walls, and a charcoal-burning stove (with no charcoal) and a steel wash-stand (with no water) in the centre of the room. There was only one problem: Madam Curd. Our first morning Madam Curd appeared at the quite reasonable hour of nine o'clock, knocked politely at the door, and sold us two bowls of thick creamy yoghurt. We ate them with sesame rolls, and before we went to bed that night we placed the bowls outside the door. The next morning Madam Curd appeared at eight. The third morning she was outside our door just before six. There was a quiet knocking. Then a pause. Then came a louder knocking, and finally an hysterical shaking of the door. I got out of bed, shouted at Madam Curd, and foolishly bought some more yoghurt.

Madam Curd was unusual among Uigur women in that she wore no
chador,
and had the bearing of a person of some power and importance. In build she was small and squat, but she had a magnificent nose and a proud chin which was covered in a shadow of sharp stubble. She spoke with a fearsome, piercing voice and was held in great respect by the other yoghurt-women. Under her direction these women were distributed around the corridors of Chini Bagh peddling their wares. We, however, were her exclusive property. She remained remarkably unmoved by my tirade, and set about explaining herself in a rattle of loud, guttural Turki. Madam Curd appeared to be a subscriber to the theory (often thought to be exclusively British) that to be understood by a foreigner she had merely to speak louder than he. Having tired of explaining she sidestepped into the room and wandered over to Louisa's bed to inspect its contents. Louisa was still asleep and only a few strands of her blond hair could be seen above the quilt. At these Madam Curd tugged with a surprising forcefulness. Louisa emerged from beneath her bed clothes like a snail from its shell. Slightly less than half awake, she stared at Madam Curd with a mixture of fury and bemusement. Madam Curd stared adoringly back. She lifted her hand and began running her finger; through Louisa's locks. She beamed. She had never seen blond hair before.