Wonders of the Silk Road : Adventures in the ‘Far Wet of the Far East,’ where the fabled route through Chinese Turkestan leads to vast ruined cities and ancient art works. : Destination: China

WUPU, China — The music began as we stepped off our bus in the adobe village of Wupu in northwestern China. Barely perceptible at first, a seductive whine gathered force as it welled up in the throats of middle-aged men and reverberated from their long-necked stringed instruments and sheep-skin tambourines.

Next came the dancers--a troupe of little girls, 6 or 8 years old, with winsome smiles, velvety brown eyes and shiny pigtails. Dressed in a blaze of mismatched patterns, bright leggings, clunky white tennis shoes and embroidered square caps, or dopas, they repeated a mystifying litany of arm movements as they danced from the front of Wupu’s City Hall down a street lined three or four deep with villagers.

The entire population of Wupu seemed to have turned out to welcome us. Maybe there wasn’t much else to do on Sunday in this remote bit of Chinese Turkestan. Maybe our international group of 50 art conservators, scientists and journalists looked as exotic to the citizens of Wupu as they appeared to us. Or maybe the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI), which had organized our tour last fall of ancient cultural sites along the fabled Silk Road, had pulled a few strings to provide us with a heartwarming spectacle.

All three possibilities turned out to be true, but we wasted little time speculating. Instead, we did what all red-blooded tourists would do: whipped out our cameras and began snapping pictures.

Everywhere we looked, there were friendly, open faces and photogenic costumes. Old men with goatees wore long coats, heavy leather boots and embroidered dopas ; younger men and boys had on wide-billed caps and woolen sweaters; women covered their heads with bright kerchiefs and their legs with thick brown cotton stockings, which, pulled over pantaloons, gave their legs a lumpy appearance; young girls turned up in Western-style warm-up suits in red, fuchsia and turquoise.

One by one, the dancers approached members of our party and bowed demurely, inviting us to join them. We lumbered into the center of the street, doing our best to emulate the graceful youngsters.

We had arrived in Xinjiang (shin-JAHNG), a vast area of western China that became a Chinese province in 1884 and was declared the Xinjiang-Uygur Autonomous Region in 1955, making the area an independent state. And we had come face-to-face with the Uygurs (oo-ee-GOORS), Turkic-speaking Muslims who constitute the largest ethnic minority in a region bordered by Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Tibet.

“This is the Far West of the Far East,” a friend mused, as we attempted to figure where Chinese Turkestan fit into our concept of geography.

We had signed up for a professional, six-day tour of cultural monuments along a northern segment of the Silk Road, from Dunhuang to Urumqi (oo-room-CHEE). But for the first time in a day and a half of bus travel--through some of the most Godforsaken territory I had ever seen--the journey promised rewards outside the bounds of scholarship. We would feast our curiosity on contemporary life as well as ancient wonders.

The Silk Road is the seductive modern name given to a network of trade routes which, from the 3rd Century BC to the 14th Century AD, linked Xi’an (CHEE-AHN), the historic capital of China, with the Mediterranean. Many tours of the Silk Road begin at Xi’an. Our journey started at Dunhuang, where we had attended a conference on the conservation of the Mogao Grottoes, a spectacular complex of 492 caves filled with Buddhist art.

Located on the southwestern edge of the Gobi Desert, 1,200 miles west of Beijing, Dunhuang isn’t exactly a garden spot, but it seemed comparatively lush as we left it behind and forged northwest into Xinjiang. The landscape soon deteriorated into a gray crust, sliced by a recently paved, two-lane highway used almost exclusively by overloaded trucks.

Our first meal on the road--box lunches of bread, water and a few unidentifiable items--was served near a highway truck stop. Considering our options, we carried the boxes across the road, past a pig and a garbage heap to the top of a dry hillock, where we chowed down and considered the view. Staring down the bleak road and across the decidedly unpicturesque desert, we had reason to question our sanity for making the journey at all.

Not that we weren’t warned. “This is not an easy trip,” Sara Tucker, GCI’s special projects coordinator, wrote in a memo to tour participants before departure. “We hope that short presentations by lecturers will liven up the journey on the long drives from Dunhuang to Hami and Hami to Turpan. The other difficulty is lack of facilities: There are no restrooms along the road, except behind sand dunes. Our only option is men to one side of the road, women to the other.”

Tucker was right about the lack of amenities, but the trip was not difficult. Although I never encountered a completely functional modern toilet and I ate parts of animals that I hope never to encounter again--chewy goat’s head, crispy chickens’ feet, slimy camel’s paw--my most vivid memories of Xinjiang don’t concern faulty plumbing. The Silk Road I remember took me to ruins of ancient cities, an astonishing array of regional art, spectacular scenery and modern cities that appear more Turkish than Chinese.

But little of this had been apparent on our first night in Hami. Although we had dined sumptuously and had boned up on Xinjiang history--with the help of our erudite guide, Jeffrey Riegel, chairman of the department of East Asian languages at UC Berkeley--the city was dispiriting. Like the brand new Hami Hotel, where a glitzy lobby is a front for dirty, dysfunctional guest rooms, the city seemed to pride itself on shoddy new construction.

Furthermore, we had been hit with a demand from the Hami police for $17 per person. Xinjiang was dangerous, we were informed, and the fee was necessary “insurance.” As far as we could tell, the charge was the cost of a police escort service that we neither needed nor wanted.

(Hami “insurance” was only one of several attempts by the Chinese to exact a little more along the way. As many travelers discover, prepaid travel packages in China do not always preclude the possibility of additional charges.)

But now, only an hour’s drive from Hami, we were in a tranquil old adobe village with a spirit of generosity.

Primitive as it is, Wupu is a model of architectural integrity, built to accommodate people who live in a climate that ranges from well below zero to more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit and gets less than an inch of rain each year. Throughout the region, water is channeled underground from mountains to lowland agricultural areas where fruits and vegetables are grown and later dried. In sharp contrast to high-rise apartment buildings that are sprouting up around cities, traditional homes are one-story, thick-walled structures with underground storage rooms for produce.

After the dancing, a Wupu town official escorted us to lunch in a four-room adobe house with a roof of poplar beams and reed, a walled courtyard in front and an arbor-covered patio in back. We washed our hands under an outdoor hose and passed through a hallway into a living/dining/sleeping room, where we took off our shoes and crawled up on a brick platform that fills most of the room, serving as both a heated sleeping area and a dining place.

An abundance of colorful fabrics lent the simple house--the private home of a local family--an air of opulence in keeping with the Silk Road. Runners of printed fabric, laid over richly patterned carpets, served as our tablecloth. Shelves set into the adobe walls were stuffed with bright quilts and pillows decorated with metallic stitchery.

Feeling a bit like voyeurs in the world of Marco Polo, who traveled this way to the court of Kublai Khan in the 13th Century, we sat cross-legged on the floor and indulged in a feast: great rounds of naan , grapes and dates, followed by generous pots of mutton and potato stew, rice mixed with vegetables, beer and tea.

After another round of entertainment by the same little dancers who had greeted us, we finally got down to the business of visiting a nearby burial ground. Excavations of Wupu’s 3,000-year-old graves in 1978 and 1984 unearthed 50 corpses, along with clothing, pottery and utensils. (Examples, including mummies, are displayed in a small museum that occupies three rooms on the second floor of the Hami Cultural Office.)

The children of Wupu bade us a noisy farewell as we boarded the bus back to Hami. On our approach to the city we stopped to see a complex of tombs built for kings who reigned over Hami from 1697 to 1930. Mixing Islamic and Chinese design, the royal tombs are adjacent to the 300-year-old Great Mosque of Adker, where crowds gather on Islamic holy days.

After another night at the Hami Hotel, we set off for Turpan, the most appealing of the three major cities we visited. Stretching out over a large, flat area that lies below sea-level, it’s a peaceful town of about 100,000 people where grape arbors cover sidewalks and hand-painted billboards lend splashes of color to major thoroughfares. Ancient men in great coats mingle with women in dark dresses and heavy brown stockings in Turpan’s marketplaces, while children in Western-style warm-up suits seem to come from another planet. Despite such evidence of change, the people live simply. Walking around the city early one morning, I saw sleepy residents emerging from tiny mud-brick buildings that double as shops and living quarters. With little space inside, they brushed their teeth and ate their porridge outdoors, where they would later sell produce.

Serving as a base for bus tours to several major ancient monuments and home to a regional museum, Turpan offers a satisfying mix of history and modern culture. Two monuments that bring archeologists and art conservators to Turpan are remains of 2,000-year-old adobe cities on the outskirts of town. In a wetter climate, the buildings would have long since disintegrated. But here, where rain is a rare occurrence and dust a constant challenge, large sections of the structures are intact.

Jiaohe, the larger of the two ruined cities, was established during the Han dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) to protect the Silk Road. At its peak in the 9th Century, it was home to more than 6,000 people, but was abandoned during the 13th Century as a result of war, a lack of water or both. Most of the remains date from the Tang dynasty (618-907).

About six miles west of Turpan, Jiaohe sits on a plateau formed by the juncture of two rivers. A mile-long stone path through the center of the city divided residential and commercial zones. Archeologists have found remains of Buddhist temples and courtyard dwellings, as well as artifacts that attest to the cultural richness of the deserted city.

Wandering through the ruins is an eerie experience that evokes thoughts of ancient civilizations and profound awareness of the power of nature. While the foundations and walls inspire awe for the people who imposed an orderly structure on such a harsh land, erosion has chiseled many of the ruins into craggy spires that resemble natural rock formations. As the sinking sun cast dramatic shadows across my path and I walked alone in the ruins, I had no difficulty imagining a caravan laden with silks and spices arriving at this historic citadel.

The other ancient ghost town, Gaochang, is about 30 miles southeast of Turpan. Also built as a Han dynasty garrison, the city was abandoned during the 16th Century. Although smaller and less well-preserved than Jiaohe, Gaochang was the capital of a region that included 21 other towns. Unlike Jiaohe, which was protected by steep river banks, Gaochang was fortified by walls. Nothing remains of the palace at Gaochang, but archeologists have found houses, temples and tombs, as well as Buddhist artworks, mosaic floors and manuscripts in seven languages.

Neither Gaochang nor Jiaohe has an on-site museum, but artifacts from both cities can be seen in the Turpan Museum and the Xinjiang Museum in Urumqi. The same is true of Astana, a large burial ground near Gaochang, where we went by bus. Three of Astana’s tombs are open to the public, but visitors have to go to the two museums to see a cache of Tang dynasty statuary, textiles and artifacts excavated there.

Also near Turpan, in a breathtaking setting, is a complex of Buddhist caves known as the Bezekelik Grottoes, which we visited by bus. Situated in a valley near red sandstone hills (known as the Flaming Mountains) Bezekelik has all the natural beauty a desert-weary traveler could desire. Majestic sand dunes rise behind the caves, a river runs through a lush oasis below them, and the air is refreshingly crisp. The man-made component of the site--about 100 caves constructed of adobe bricks and cut into one side of a long, curving cliff--is striking as well.

Indeed, if most of the Buddhist wall paintings that once filled these caves hadn’t been removed by German archeologists and taken to Berlin--where about half of them were destroyed by bombs during World War II--and if the remaining frescoes hadn’t been defaced by Muslim zealots, Bezekelik would surely be a Mecca for art-loving travelers and scholars. Unlike the Mogao Grottoes--which remain a magnificent cache of Buddhist art despite damage caused by the elements, pollution, vandals and losses to foreign museums--Bezekelik’s artistic glory can only be divined from photographs and in fragments of frescoes at the caves and in Berlin’s Museum of Indian Art.

Monks built the Bezekelik Grottoes between the 4th and the 14th centuries, while Buddhism was making its way from India to China along the same road that transported old Cathay’s precious commodities to the West. Artists covered walls and ceilings of the caves with larger-than-life-size portraits of Buddhist monks, paintings of Buddha and an international assembly of devotees, and depictions of Indian gods.

The caves were forgotten and filled with sand in 1905 when German adventurers Albert von Le Coq and Theodor Bartus found them. Clamoring around the monastery complex, the men started an avalanche of sand that revealed the paintings. “Suddenly, as if by magic, I saw on the walls . . . splendid paintings in colors as fresh as if the artist had only just finished them,” Le Coq wrote of his chance discovery.

Le Coq, Bartus and their colleague Albert Grunwedel cut 620 frescoes out of the caves and transported them to Berlin, where they were installed in an ethnological museum. Like other explorers who have ripped great works of art out of their original context, the Germans may have believed they were saving the frescoes, but the transported works that couldn’t be moved to safety during the war were lost. Destruction of the Bezekelik paintings may have been inevitable, however. After European explorers were thrown out of China in the late 1920s, Muslims disfigured all the images of gods and human beings they could get their hands on.

Depressed by thoughts of these cultural atrocities, we returned to Turpan and cheered ourselves up with the spectacle of its street life. The most energetic members of our group rented bicycles and rode around the city, while the rest of us visited the Emin Minaret (a tapered brick tower built in 1778) and strolled along arbor-covered sidewalks, past colorful shops and hand-painted billboards promoting local produce and Communist virtues.

The largest slice of life on view in Turpan is the central market, which fills cavernous buildings and sprawls into surrounding outdoor areas. Sunday is said to be the big day, but we found no shortage of attractions on Monday and Tuesday.

A staggering array of clothing, textiles, housewares, hardware and food-- is on display. Being a far more dedicated observer than acquisitor, I wandered into side corridors and outer reaches, where I saw everything from the preparation of noodles to open-air shops for shoe and watch repair. A section of health-related products displayed medicines, herbs and hypodermic needles. Nearby, a grubby shack offered dental services. How do I know? By the big, hand-painted pictures of teeth posted outside.

Unlike Dunhuang, where cheerfully aggressive street vendors had greeted us with a chorus of hellos every time we ventured into their territory, Xinjiang’s merchants seemed to take little notice of foreigners until the latter showed an interest in making a purchase. The serious shoppers in our group bought carpets, silk scarves and jackets, cotton yardage, cashmere sweaters, donkey saddle bags and dopas during our trip.

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Our final stop was Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. This bustling, traffic-snarled urban center seems to be gripped by an urge to obliterate everything old and replace it with something new, big and ugly. Our temporary home, the Friendship Hotel, was not new, but it was big and ugly. Inconveniently located on the southern edge of town, the hotel had the look of a Communist retreat that had outlived its usefulness. In contrast, a towering new Holiday Inn in the center of town is an obvious symbol of capitalistic enterprise.

The din and traffic jams of Chinese jeeps and Russian and Japanese vehicles that greeted us in Urumqi were a shock, but urbanity has its rewards. One of them is the Xinjiang Museum, which has a 30,000-piece collection of regional artworks, artifacts and costumes, as well as cultural relics dating back to the Stone Age.

We had already seen an impressive array of ceramic tomb figures and textiles from the Astana burial ground at the Turpan Museum. The larger showcase at Urumqi displays even more treasures from Astana--small figurines depicting ethnic minorities, statues of male acrobats, paintings of women playing chess and serving food and brocade footwear.

The last day of our journey took us to Heavenly Lake, a mountain retreat where Khazak people live in yurts and offer tourists horseback rides and short boat trips. Colorful signs offered lodging in a yurt, local dishes and pictures “fine and cheap,” but we contented ourselves with hikes and views of the alpine scenery.

As we flew out of Urumqi the following morning, the desert swallowed up all the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures of Xinjiang. Chinese Turkestan was already a dream. Back in Beijing, after a dinner of pasta and red wine in the squeaky-clean, Swiss-managed Movenpick Hotel, I felt as if I had never left home. But now, as I leaf through a small mountain of tour books, museum catalogues, notebooks and photographs, searching for ways to put an adventure into words, I remember Xinjiang.

It’s a little girl inviting me to dance, women in kerchiefs and heavy brown stockings, goateed men in great coats. It’s the haunting remains of Jiaohe, Gaochang and Bezekelik. It’s the modern Asian crossroads that has replaced the historic Silk Road.

GUIDEBOOK

On the Silk Road

Getting there: United, Cathay Pacific, Delta, China Air, Northwest and China Eastern fly from LAX to China. United has the most frequent service, with daily flights from Los Angeles to Beijing and Shanghai, both connecting through Tokyo, and nonstop flights to Hong Kong. Round-trip restricted fares to Beijing or Shanghai start at about $1,400; to Hong Kong, $1,200.

Tourists to China might also consider round-the-world tickets, offered by major carriers. United’s round-the-world service covering China costs $2,548 for economy class.

Air travel within China is restricted to Chinese carriers, which offer limited service. Tours of the Silk Road region generally use trains and buses to cover relatively short distances within Xinjiang.

Outfitters: The trip I took was created by Getty Conservation Institute representatives and was a one-of-a-kind experience. But the following companies are among those offering tours of the Silk Road region and other parts of China:

Crown International Travel, 10801 National Blvd., Suite 510, Los Angeles, 90064-4243; tel. (310) 475-5661, fax (310) 475-6881. Customized tours for individuals and groups.

Abercrombie & Kent International, 1520 Kensington Road, Suite 212, Oak Brook, Ill.; tel. (800) 323-7308, fax (708) 954-3324. “Traders and Travellers,” 25-day tours from Hong Kong to Bangkok, including the Mogao Grottoes at Dunhuang and the three Xinjiang cities of Turpan, Urumqi and Kashi. Tour prices per person (double occupancy) are $5,960 for land arrangements, $536 for airfare within China, approximately $1,695 for round-trip economy-class airfare from the West Coast.

For more information: China National Tourist Office, Los Angeles Branch, 333 W. Broadway, Suite 201, Glendale, 91204; tel. (818) 545-7505.

--S.M.