The Emperor Far Away Read Free

they have a language of their own. They have spread all across China too, unlike most of the minorities who remain clustered in their traditional homelands.
    Just their faith in Islam marks them out and the ten million Hui are the sole people classified as a minority because of their religion. Yet, despite their closeness to the Han – the Mandarins of the Qing dynasty distinguished them from more troublesome minorities by dubbing them HanHui – their presence is still an inconvenient hangover from the past. They are the most tangible evidence that Jiayuguan was once both a crucial junction on the Silk Road and China’s far western edge, a place Marco Polo claimed to have passed through, the gateway to and from Muslim lands where Beijing had no remit.
    Until the eighteenth century, the Chinese were content to stay put in Jiayuguan’s fort. Only after the Ming dynasty was overthrown by the Manchus, who swept down from north-east China to take Beijing and establish the Qing dynasty, did China turn its attention towards the territories beyond Jiayuguan. Under Emperor Qianlong, the Qing decided they needed to put more space between them and the central Asian tribes they feared would invade.
    Armies of Manchu Bannermen started moving west. By 1759, they had massacred around one million people and terrified everyone else into submission. But the Qing’s control over the region the Chinese now call Xinjiang, which means ‘New Frontier’, was always unconvincing, as a series of revolts in the nineteenth century confirmed. Uprisings continue to this day.
    Jiayuguan remains a place where China is still seeking to expand its frontiers further. Near by is Jiuquan, China’s space city, from where an increasing number of rockets carrying satellites and the country’s taikonauts blast off. In Jiayuguan, you can watch the Long March rockets blazing across the clear desert sky towards the stars, as wondrous a sight for the locals as the camel caravans with their cargoes of unknown treasures that passed through in the days of the Silk Road must have been.
    Late one afternoon, I boarded a train moving slowly west to Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang and China’s far west, following the route of the Silk Road through the Hexi Corridor. Once known as the ‘throat’ of China, the Corridor is a bleak, 1,000-kilometre-long sand and pebble plain which the locals call huang liang , a phrase that translates as ‘desolate’. A few small towns, former oases on the Silk Road, are dotted across it, but there are hardly any villages. Most of the land is too barren to be cultivated. It is scarred and fissured, as if it has been hacked at by an irritated giant wielding a monster hoe.
    During the Silk Road’s heyday, the Hexi Corridor was the conduit for the caravans headed via Xinjiang to far-off India and the Middle East with exotic new inventions like paper and gunpowder. Coming in the opposite direction, the spice merchants and monks and Muslims spreading the new religions of Buddhism and Islam knew that the Corridor was the final hurdle to be navigated before reaching the safe haven of Jiayuguan.
    Centuries later, Emperor Qianlong’s armies travelled through the Corridor on their way to claim Xinjiang for China. Now, it is ordinary Chinese who cross it. The train I was on had originated in Shandong Province, a thirty-one-hour ride away in eastern China, and few of the passengers were Uighurs, the people native to Xinjiang. Instead, Han men with bare chests and pyjama-clad women occupied every bunk, sat on the fold-down seats in the corridor or just stood staring out of the windows, while their children ran around playing.
    Chatting, and sometimes singing, at all hours, they played cards, drank tea out of plastic containers which they topped up with hot water from thermos flasks and munched Chinese train food – instant noodles, processed sausages and sunflower seeds. Ignoring the no-smoking signs, they scratched, yawned and fingered their