Today’s post is a little pedantic, but the background is necessary so that you can understand the posts following this one.
Xinjiang, the region we had just entered, is a vast territory, almost as large as Alaska. Though China has had an on-again, off-again presence for the past two millennia, the name, Xinjiang, is Chinese for “New Border Region.” It has only been a part of China for the last two and a half centuries, after being conquered in the 1750’s.
A Uighur
Similar to Alaska, Xinjiang is located northwest of the Chinese mainland. In Xinjiang, I often heard people refer to the Chinese mainland as “neidi” or the interior of the country, as though Xinjiang were on some island.
The northern half is cold, bordering Russian Siberian, and, in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s provincial capital, winter temperatures often drop to -40. The southern half of the province is largely a vast desert, the Taklamakan Desert. The Taklamakan is a huge sandy hole that swallows most of the life which dares to go into it. Though still cold in the winter, the Taklamakan is hot in the summer, with temperatures reaching 115.
The Silk Road ran along the northern and southern rims of the Taklamakan, in the southern half of Xinjiang. It is along the rim of the desert where a group of people, the Uighurs, mostly live. The Uighurs, sometimes spelt Uyghurs, are a group of Muslim Central Asians who speak a Turkic language and look Middle Eastern, not Chinese.
Uighur – Spelling it out
As I mentioned, Chinese empires have occupied Xinjiang over the past two thousand years, though they never thoroughly controlled or populated the region. Even as far back as Emperor Wudi, our friend whose grave had the Naked Terra-Cotta Warriors, Chinese empires were involved in the area today that is Xinjiang through trade and military expeditions.
Old Uighur
That said, these were empires that ruled over various peoples, similar to the Roman Empire or the Mongol Empire. They promised stability and economic opportunity in exchange for allowing one elite group, largely based on a single ethnic group, to rule it all. And even when a Chinese empire did occupy it, Chinese people were few and far between, with a medley of other ethnic groups occupying the area. In fact, large groups of Chinese people did not move out to Xinjiang until the 1950’s.
Middle East or Middle Kingdom
And most of the rest of this blog will rest on understanding one fact: the Uighurs are citizens of the country of China, but they are a completely different ethnic group that identifies more with the Middle East than the Middle Kingdom. Being part of a country they do not believe in, they are angry, and things are getting bad.
When we pitched this project, we wanted to use hitchhiking as a way to meet real people in China. We have met real people in China, as our posts on Drink Horse One Army demonstrate. However, somedays, we have had to give up on hitchhiking in order to get where we are going. Long distances, we have found, have been impossible to hitchhike. Few cars are going that far and even fewer are willing to take you that far.
But those bus journeys that we have done have sometimes been more real than our hitchhiking.
Geared up
After our experience with the Armed Police in Subei, we went back to Dunhuang. We wanted to get out of not only the town, but the province, as quickly as possible, so we bought the next ticket for Urumqi, the megalopolis above the Taklamakan Desert.
The bus was a sleeper bus, with three rows of upper and lower bunks. It was crummier than any sleeper bus I had ever ridden on, bits unscrewed and railings falling apart. We loaded our luggage into the luggage compartments underneath and found a bed beside a left-wing Frenchman. The bus was supposed to leave at five, just a few hours after we returned to Dunhuang. By five, the bus was only half full of ticket holders.
Sleepy
Unlike trains, which are run by the government, bus drivers have opportunities to be more entrepreneurial. The more people they can pack onto the bus, the more money the driver will make. At around five thirty, a large clutch of migrant workers herded onto the bus. They were not paying the full price, I assumed, but the driver wanted to fill every bed up, making as much money as he could.
Making Friends
After the migrant workers boarded, we began to move, but we only drove for ten minutes, into the industrial part of Dunhuang. Again, the driver wanted to make as much money as possible. At a meat processor, the bus driver unloaded all luggage from the lower compartment and, with the help of five butchers, loaded thirty-five sheep carcass into the luggage compartment. Our luggage was then thrown onto the bus and we had to stow it in the aisles.
Little Lamb, who made thee
The bus did not have any air-conditioning on it, but fortunately, when the bus was still half full, we had been able to grab beds near the buses only two openable windows. After the sheep bodies were loaded, we departed from Dunhuang, snaking along the northern rim of the Taklamakan Desert, traveling through the night across most of the desert’s eastern half. Each time we had to use the bathroom, we had to struggle over the entirety of the bus’s luggage.
Move Your Bags
Seventeen hours later, we arrived in Urumqi ragged.
What does thirty five sheep carcusses packed in a bus’ luggage compartment look like?
Make sure to read this post to understand what happens in the following one.
The day after our nighttime encounter with the police, we did little. I ran over to the bus station and bought tickets to get us out of town. The town had little to offer, other than the people, and we had been singed by our contact with them the night before. As I walked back into the hotel, I noticed a car with license plates from the Armed Police parked outside. At the time, I could only wonder if it was connected to us.
Just before we got on the bus, we returned to dumpling place we had been to before, the nice lady who took pictures of us and sent them to all of her friends. As we were chomping down on mutton dumplings, she walked up to our table and smiled. “Last night, after you guys ate here, my daughter showed me a photo her friend had sent her and she said, ‘Mom, look, there are foreigners here in Subei.’ And I said, ‘Yea, they ate at my restaurant.’ Last night, everyone in Subei was talking about you guys online on Wechat (the Chinese Whatsapp)!”
Hearing this, I realized that, perhaps, we had been too open. With everyone talking about us, the police must have gotten word. Maybe that was what did us in.
Before we boarded the bus, the uniformed cop appeared from a store nearby, carrying a bottle of water. He boarded his paddy wagon and drove it past us, not looking at us. Again, I could not say it was not a coincidence, but I was left to wonder if he was there to watch us leave.
Across from the bus, I noticed another car with Armed Police plates. Behind him, in a similar looking vehicle with normal tags, a man sat, waiting. At first, I did not think he had anything to do with us. He was not looking at us, but leaning back, as if lazily nodding off. But then a man in a uniform with a camera stepped into his car and they drove off. Coincidences were piling up.
Finally, after a long, unexplained delay, the bus left. A mile or two outside of town, we stopped along the roadside and our bus was checked. Normally, these bus checks functions are performed by old ladies, just to double check that everyone is wearing a seatbelt and count the number of passengers. But this time, a man with bursting biceps stepped on the bus to do the check. I had never seen a Chinese man that strong. By this time, I was clear that he was a member of the Armed Police, checking to make sure that we, in fact, were leaving town.
As we left Subei, we were watched every step of the way. In a way that we had not experienced before, we found ourself under the watchful eye of the Chinese surveillance state.
The contrast was striking. We had had such a great time talking with the people of Subei. They were warm and open. In a way unlike what we have experienced anywhere else in China, they were excited to meet foreigners. And it was in Subei that the Chinese state least wanted us to talk with people. It was in Subei that the Chinese state felt most threatened by our presence.
Make sure you read the previous post about our ride in a Chinese paddy wagon. Otherwise, you may have trouble following this post.
After we took a ride in the Chinese paddy wagon, the rest of the night’s events were tedious. The short cop with the uniform took us to the hotel that I had been to earlier that day, the one that was over-priced and underwhelming. The cop, the camera still hanging from his neck, helped us carry our bags into the grand, marble lobby of the only hotel in Subei where we were allowed to stay.
The girl behind the desk wore a traditional Mongolian dress, though she was not Mongolian. She was a young woman, probably not twenty years old. The cop ordered her to register us, but she protested, saying did not know how to register foreigners. Only the manager could do that, and the manager had returned home for the night. So we could not stay there.
Our cop pressed her. “You have to let them stay here. Your hotel is the only hotel in Subei allowed to accept foreigners.”
“I do not know how to do the procedure for them, and it is too late to call the manager,” the girl protested.
“Do it anyways.” The cop pushed.
“You are really pushing me around,” the young girl said. “I’ve only been here for a month. I don’t know how to do this, and the manager will get angry at me if I call her.”
“Do it anyways.”
Calling the manager did little. Afterwards, the young girl still insisted that she did not have any way to take us in that night.
Then, the cop called the man with the gun, the one who I mentioned in the previous posts. His message was simple. “Get it done.”
“Okay, look, you need to let these guys stay in your hotel, otherwise, tomorrow, you are going to get fined.”
“I don’t have anyway to let them in. Stop pushing me!”
“Okay, look, I’m not going to fine you, but someone is going to fine you. It is not me doing this. Look, just give your manager a call, and I will talk to her.”
She called the manager again and handed the cop the phone. “Look, I can come and pick you up,” he told the manager on the phone. “It is not a problem, but I need you to allow these foreigners to stay here. Just tell me your address and I will come by. It is not a big deal.”
Eventually, the manager agreed to come, but she said the price for our room would be four hundred r.m.b., almost $70 USD.
“Four hundred?” The cop was surprised at how expensive it was. “How much money do you have?” the cop turned to us.
“Three hundred.” I answered. “And we need money to get back to Dunhuang.”
The cop negotiated on the phone on our before turning back to us. “Three hundred is the lowest she says she can go.” We had little choice but to agree
With the camera hanging on his neck, the cop took a photo of each of us, both our passports and our faces, a sort of ad-hoc mugshot. The receptionist gave us a room key, and the wifi password, but, as a final indignity, we were not able to get internet. The expensive hotel that we were forced to stay at because it supposedly better met our needs, could not even get us internet.
This post is both exciting and disturbing, but, to understand it, you will need some background. To understand the authority under which the police apprehended us, read this post on hotels and foreigners. To understand the day before, make sure to have read this post about how we got into this particular hotel.
We were returning to our hotel around midnight. Subei is a tiny town with few foreigners, and we had tried to avoid being seen by police. When we noticed a paddy-wagon creeping closely beside us, I waved Galen into an alleyway. We doubled back and waited for a few minutes, hoping that the police would get tired of looking for us.
Keeping to the alleyway, we slunk back towards the cheap flophouse where we were staying. Two men were urinating next to our hotel’s outhouse. Not realizing that that was where we were staying, I almost walked past the place. One of the men told me, “Oh, this is where you are staying.” I was surprised. At first, I assumed that it was just another one of the hotel’s patrons, one of the guys who recognized me from earlier that afternoon.
As we walked towards the light of the hotel entrance, I realized I was wrong. The man accompanying us had a crew-top above his slightly-built body, a camera dangling from his neck. He wore the light blue uniform of the police. Beneath the hotel’s entrance, the girl who had, that afternoon, jubilantly welcomed us looked distraught. “Sorry,” she said.
At this point, I was not certain of the nature of the trouble we were in. I assumed it had something to do with us staying in a hotel that did not allow foreigners, but I was not sure which way things would go from here. Would they just have a talk with us? Would they take us to jail? Would they kick us out of China?
We were walked into our room by the uniformed cop with the camera around his neck. The door had already been unlocked, and the light was on. It was clear that the police had already been in the room, though it appeared that they had not rifled through our bags.
The uniformed cop stood aside as a second police officer entered our room. He was cool, wearing a black 361° t-shirt and black slacks. I noticed a small pistol in a holster on his right side. Police in China do not usually carry guns, so we knew this guy was man was in charge, probably a member of the Armed Police. The father of the house, who we had eaten with a few hours before, walked into our room several times, ignoring us and offering the man with the gun a cigarette. “You should have called us immediately when they arrived.” He told the father, taking the cigarette.
The man with the gun turned to us and interrogated us a little. “Why did you come to Subei?”
“We came to hike in the mountains,” we told him.
The man with the gun explained to us the hotel we were currently at was so backwards that it did not have the software necessary to input our passport information, and therefore it was not legally authorized to accept foreigners. So, we had no choice but to leave that hotel. Only one place in Subei accepted foreigners, but I had decided that hotel was not worth the cost, being ten times more expensive than our chosen accommodations and lacking wifi.
“You can watch the world cup,” the man with the gun insisted. “You know Argentina is playing Belgium tonight. Have you been watching the matches?”
“I do not like soccer,” I answered.
“Well, the facilities in the hotel we are taking you too are much better for you as foreigners,” he said.
“But that hotel is too expensive, we do not have that much money,” I tried to resist.
“Either way, you cannot stay here,” he responded.
We had more back and forth, but I was clear there was no other option for us. Crossing his legs, the man with the gun sat on the bed and watched us pack. At first, he pushed us to hurry, but Galen had so much camera gear that it always takes him a while to pack. The man with the gun clearly wanted to be somewhere else, but he waited patiently as Galen gathered his stuff.
“When are you planning on leaving Subei?” the man with the gun asked.
I realized that we would now be watched closely. Our plans to hitchhike into the mountains and camp were impossible. “I guess we will leave tomorrow.” I told him.
“Good.”
As we walked out of the flophouse, the high school girl again approached us. “I am so sorry,” she told us. The uniformed cop helped us carry our bags into the paddy wagon and we climbed into the backseat.
The man with the gun slipped into the passengers seat as the uniformed cop began to drive. We made our way down the road, but he did not turn for the hotel they had said they would take us to. I realized, we were heading towards the police station. I did not know if they were going to have to process us.
In fact, we did not get out at the police station; we simply dropped off the man with the gun. Everything had been explained. He had flexed his authority. His job was done. “Call me if you have any trouble,” the man with the gun told the uniformed cop as we took off towards the hotel.
The streets were empty. By this time, it was half past midnight. We sailed quietly down the wide avenues. The remaining cop looked up in the rearview mirror and asked, “Why did you come here?” as if we had not been honest when we answered his boss.
“We came here to hike in the mountains.” I shrugged.
“Foreigners never come to Subei,” he said, repeating what others had told us.
Above is a video Galen secretly filmed while we were being detained.
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I have not mentioned this so far in the blog, but we are getting publicity from a lot of different groups. We even have a magazine in China publishing our stories. Unfortunately, they do not appear to be putting it in the online edition, but we are getting into print.
Thanks again to Tom Lee for working with me on getting these articles published. It has been a great experience.
We were in the tiny town of Subei, which I discussed in the previous post. During our explorations of Subei, we were walking along a country road lined just past the edge of town when a man pulled beside us on a little motorscooter. He just barely kept pace with us, wobblingly maintaining his balance at such a slow speed. I could not tell if he wanted to talk with us or if he was just drunk.
It was both.
The Mongolian
A balding man wearing a semi-casual collared shirt, staring at us over his tinted glasses, saluted us with the typical greeting of: “Herro!”
I turned around and smiled, “Ni Hao.”
The man was a doctor in the Mongolian Medicine hospital we had passed on our walk out. The area around Subei was largely populated by Mongolians and they retained a strong influence within the town, even having their a hospital to practice their own traditional Mongolian medicine.
The man had been drinking, I assume for some official function at the hospital. We talked a little more, and he gave me his phone number, an ordeal that took several minutes because his thought process was less than fluid. After a little while, he pushed his motorbike to the side of the road and waved us into what looked like someone’s house but apparently doubled as a store.
In the store
Inside, we sat down at what may have been someone’s kitchen table. The Mongolian man ordered us each a beer, the priciest they had in this two-bit town, throwing a wad of money at the old man bringing the beers. The old man brought back his change just as a child on a couch beside us began to cry. The old man picked him up and began to assuage him.
“Is that your son?” The Mongolian asked the old man.
“No.” The old man laughed, embarrassed, almost angry. “It’s my grandson.”
Baby
The Mongolian humphed and continued chatting with us. We sat, drinking and talking for more than fifteen minutes. The man’s name was Patsu; carefully, he wrote his name out in Mongolian for us, the infant’s cries still going. Patsu was jolly. Part of it was the alcohol, but it was largely natural. He bellowed when he laughed and looked at us piercingly when I spoke to him.
He was drunk, so the conversation revolved around several points that he repeated.
“I am Mongolian. We are not like the Han Chinese. We are stronger physically, we have more endurance, and we are nicer. And we like to get drunk,” he explained, as if I needed to be enlightened on that last point. “We are a great race. Genghis Khan conquered all of Asia. We are a very simple people, it was a very simple project. It was only about conquest. Our race is great.”
“America is a great place, a powerful country. I have lived in Russia and Mongolia, and I have family there. But I would like to go to America. However, I need someone to write a letter of invitation. If perhaps we meet later, and you think I am a good person, perhaps you will consider writing one for me.” He made clear his motives in talking with us. “If you are a Mongolian citizen or a Russian citizen, it is not very difficult to get a visa to the United States. But if you are a Chinese citizen, like me, even though I am Mongolian, it is much more difficult.”
We left the store with the old man and continued walking. Patsu left his motorbike behind, waving off our protestations that he should not leave it there.
We walked on along the road, a steady trickle of motorbikes and three-wheeled carts passing by, each looking at our group wide-eyed. From telephone poles above us, the village was broadcasting a regular propaganda program, one hour in the morning, two hours in the afternoon.
Then he told us a joke about President Bush, the younger. I did not get it, though I am not sure if it was because of my language abilities or because he was drunk. Either way, I laughed politely. The propaganda program spoke about being civilized and not getting too drunk. I love propaganda; it is only good at doing bad things, but it does so little of the good it seeks to achieve.
We stopped by another store, and Patsu threw more money around. We talked more of largely the same things.
And then we parted. Patsu told us to call him later, when we returned to town. We watched him stumble back in the direction of his motorbike. We went the opposite way.
Like the others we met in Subei, Patsu desired contact with someone outside of this two-bit town. Patsu had been outside of Subei, outside of China even, and it was clear that that was part of the reason he was so wealthy. But he wanted more, he wanted to go to America. He never explained what he would have done in America. Perhaps he believed it would have made him richer. Or perhaps, he only wanted to go there out of admiration.
Make sure to check out this earlier post explaining why many hotels do not allow foriegners to stay.
As I mentioned before, we had been trying to get into the wilds of the Qinlian Mountains that ran along the southern end of the Gansu Corridor, marking the northern-most extent of the Tibetan world. From Google Maps, the wilds of the Qinlian Mountains looked vast and unpeopled. I had hoped we might be able to get to what looked to be China’s largest lake with no paved road leading to it.
We were in Dunhuang, on the western end of the Qinlian mountains. Google Maps suggested that, just thirty miles to the south, going around the sand dunes that surrounded Dunhuang, the town of Subei had access to the most westernly extent of the Qinlian Mountains and the wild spaces beyond that. So we went to Subei.
Unlike every other town that we had been in, Subei had few places to stay. I found a small motel that charged 120 r.m.b, or $20 USD, but they had no internet. The fanciest hotel had bad internet, but it was 360 r.m.b., or $60 USD. I was not willing to pay that much for a hotel that could not even give us internet.
Walking further, I found a small, mud baked house with a hotel sign hanging out of it. It was a family run place with several rooms along two of the walls in the interior courtyard. The facilities were basic. The room had two beds, a furnace and a desk, an old television on top of it. The hotel did not have a bathroom, only an outhouse just outside the back gate in a dirt lane that divided the city from green fields and, beyond that, mountains. For a shower, they had wash basins in the room which could be filled with warm water. Still, they did have internet access, and the room was only 50 r.m.b., less than $10 USD.
The family that ran our flophouse
By the primitiveness of the facilities, I knew this flop-house was probably not authorized by the Chinese government to accept foreigners. However, the family’s two high school daughters, who functioned as the hotel’s reception, had never met a foreigner, and were excited at the prospect of our stay.
I filled out the registration form, though some questions were difficult to answer. “What ethnic group are you?” I wrote the Chinese character for America.
“This should be okay, right?” one sister whispered to the other.
Dumplingess
It was already in the afternoon, and Galen and I had not yet eaten lunch, so we dumped our things in the room and skipped back into the main part of town. At an intersection that seemed to mark the center of Subei, we stopped in a small dumpling place. The restaurateur was tickled to have us, serving us a hot plate of twenty something veggie-filled dumplings. At first, she surreptitiously took photos of us with her phone. Before long, we waved her over and posed with her, taking some photos of our own. Immediately, she sent the photos to her friends. Her friends were floored to see foreigners in her place. Foreigners never came to Subei, she told us.
Strolling around town, we ran into some college-aged students. We stopped to talk with them and have some shishkabob. As we pulled meat off the skewers, they took photos with us and sent them to all their friends. We told them that we were planning on hitching into the mountains the next day. They told us, “It will be hard to get into the mountains. Very few people go there. Worse, you may not be able to get a ride back.”
“We will try it,” I assured them. “We are not afraid of failure.”
They laughed and, sending more photos of us to their friends, said, “Foreigners never come to Subei.”
We ate dinner with the family who we were staying with. The meal was simple, a noodle dish with veggies mixed in. As I mentioned before, noodles are all they eat in this part of China, with hardly any rice. They peppered us with the questions we normally get, where are you from, how long does it take to fly to the United States, why had you come all the way out to Subei.
“We came because we wanted to go and hike in those mountains.” I explained to them.
They laughed at the absurdness of it all. “It is very cold in the mountains.” Then, looking us over, one of the high schoolers said the same thing everyone told us. “Foreigners almost never come to Subei.”
The people of Subei all welcomed us warmly. None of them had ever meet a foreigner. No foreigners ever come here, they told us. But they hungered for a taste of the outside world, somewhere far away from their tiny town.
We walked along the highway for no longer than three minutes. I was about to take a traditional Chinese roadside bathroom break, when Galen warned against it. We were fairly close to a series of small military camps, and Galen, in the distance, could hear a large diesel engine humming towards us. I did not want to encounter the People’s Liberation Army, certainly not when I was liberating myself.
I watched as the large green troop-transporter passed us, the uniformed driver looking down at us. Just behind the truck, there was a large SUV. Without thinking, I stuck my hand out. The SUV slowed down and pulled over.
Two men were in the back seat and a driver was in the front. Though their vehicle was fancy and clean, the three occupants were poor and dirty. They clearly did not own the car; I assumed that their boss was having them drive it.
After I made sure they were not expecting us to pay, I squeezed into the backseat with the two guys and Galen hopped into the passenger seat. We began talking, and one of the guys in the backseat began asking me about the NBA. I did my best to keep up in the discussion of the teams that he knew by heart and I had only vaguely heard of.
They asked me what we were doing out in China, and I told them that we had come to explore the Silk Road. The basketball fan turned to his companions and then to me. “That is too bad you came a little too early.”
Unclear, I asked him what he meant.
“The Silk Road, I don’t think they have finished building that,” he explained. I sat there unsure of what to say.
At a construction site on the outskirts of the city, the two men got out, saying goodbye. The driver took us farther into the city and then dropped us off, from which point we took a bus back to our place.
