Central Asia is the most romantic place on earth. It fascinated Western explorers and the ancient Chinese in equal measure. What more evocative names are there in the annals of travel than Kashgar, Samarkand or Tashkent?
Victorian adventurers couldn't have enough of its fabulous cities buried under the sand, and the Chinese continue to venerate a "fragrant concubine" from Xinjiang who combined all possible erotic charms. Today the Silk Road continues to mesmerize travelers, and innumerable films capitalize on the allure of a wild life among the dunes.
This new book on China's Xinjiang Province is advertised as the first account of the area for the general reader. It may be the case. Lonely Planet has covered it for the traveler (notably in Central Asia, second edition, 2000), but in pre-Communist times this was a well-trodden area for ambitious Westerners and many books resulted. Peter Fleming's News from Tartary (1936) is considered a classic of travel writing, but there were also books describing the Taklamakan Desert (said to be the most inhospitable on earth), the ancient mummies of Urumchi, and a people who genetically have little in common with their Chinese masters.
And now of course, post Sept. 11, the whole world is focused on the problems of outraged Muslim sensibilities anywhere from Indonesia to the Middle East. What, then, about Xinjiang, home of China's largest Muslim minority, the Uighurs?
"The world is only too aware of what the Chinese are up to in Tibet," writes Peter Hopkirk, author of The Great Game (1990), in an endorsement of this book. "But few know of the sufferings of neighboring Xinjiang."
Here we read of the "Baby General," Ma Zhongying, the Muslim warlord of the 1930s who became a commander at 15 and subsequently took over the leadership of the Turki revolt. He fashioned himself on Alexander, was the champion athlete in an army composed entirely of athletes and rode at the head of troops mounted on white, brown and black horses (in three separate sections), their flags fluttering in the desert air.
And then there was Yang Zengxin, governor of Xinjiang from 1911 to 1928 and widely cited at the time as the world's most absolute ruler. He had two ministers beheaded as they sat comfortably at a banquet in 1916 and was himself shot dead during student graduation festivities 12 years later. This was an era when China could barely control its own heartland, yet alone far-flung Xinjiang (almost half-way to Europe, Western explorers were fond of saying). But Yang had ruled it with a rod of iron, on what he claimed were strictly Confucian principles.
Many recognizable modern motifs are here -- the controversial imposition of Sharia law, Islamists armed only with antique rifles causing the world's major powers to tremble, the ambivalent attitudes of Russia. In addition, much of the narrative reads like a story from the gold-digging American wild west of 150 years ago. Attempts to link the area with Moscow by telegraph over the Tian Shan range, for instance, foundered when bears tore down the poles, mistaking the humming in the wires for bees.
There is almost an excess of local color. There are minor potentates living in tents, drinking the best French champagne, walking on the finest carpets in Central Asia, but refusing to be photographed. Peacocks shriek in gardens ablaze with flowers in the hot, dry air, and the Baby General is described as galloping in person down the main street of newly conquered towns, standing between the saddles of two horses, and shooting at targets specially set up along the way.
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