THE SANDS OF THE TAKLA MAKAN

Charklik, Chinese Turkestan.  Since I was a young boy with dreams of exploring the world, the essence of remote mystery was summed up by the innermost heart of Asia called Chinese Turkestan.

That's what the region's great explorers like Sven Hedin (1865-1952) and Aurel Stein (1862-1943) called it, but the term went out of fashion when the Peking government named it Sinkiang in the 1950s, translated as New Province, but the Chinese characters actually mean New Border.

Then in the 1970s Peking demanded we spell Chinese words and place names differently, riddling them with x's, q's, and j's, insisting we spell their capital as "Beijing" and their New Province as "Xinjiang."

What defines the region is one of the world's great deserts, an ocean of sand the size of France yet so empty and vast it has been known for many centuries as The Takla Makan (tah-kla mah-con), meaning, "If you go in, you don't come out."  The Desert of Death.

It's circumscribed by the red lines around "Xinjiang" on the map.  They show how the famous Silk Road split in two at the fabled oasis of Kashgar to go around the Takla Makan, above and below, the Northern and Southern Silk Roads.  (The connecting road south of Korla is modern.)

The southern route was the original, and far older than silk.  Before silk, it was known as the Jade Road, for it went through the string of oases on the southern edge of the Takla Makan, to which rivers flowed from the giant Kun Lun Mountains separating Chinese Turkestan from Tibet. 

The rivers carried rocks of jade down from the Kun Lun, the most precious substance in the world to Chinese, far more valuable than gold.

But Medieval and Renaissance Europe wanted silk, not jade, so the much easier northern route became the standard Silk Road, while the southern route was lost and forgotten.

For some reason, however, in 1273, Marco Polo (with his father and uncle who had earlier taken the northern), took the Southern Silk Road.

What I as a young boy fifty years ago most dreamed of doing was following the route of Marco Polo through Chinese Turkestan, to those lost and forgotten oases of the Southern Silk Road that hardly anyone in the world knew about much less had been to, with the magical names of Yarkand, Khotan, Charchan, and Charklik.

For all but the last few of those fifty years the Southern Silk Road was completely off-limits to foreigners, and the road itself a thousand mile-long four-wheel track of mud and sand.  Now it's open, the road is paved, and here I am, having traversed Polo's route from Kashgar to Charklik.

(Charklik is where that new road down from Korla ends at the southern route.  Polo did not continue on the southern route to Golmud, but went straight across an uninhabited "Desert of Lop" to an oasis called Dunhuang.  It took him 30 days to cross it, there's still no road, and you need camels like Polo.  Maybe someday.)

I was expecting an ultimate in the exotic and remote, for things to have changed little since Polo's day.  In some ways that's what I found.  But for others, I am in a state of shock.  What I have found here astounds me, and I thought I'd share it with you.

Discretely, mind you, given where I am.  I can explain more when I get home.

For after all, Chinese Turkestan, or Xinjiang, is Moslem China.  The native inhabitants, whose homeland this has been for millennia, are Turkic, not Chinese.  Culturally, ethnically, and historically, this place is not Chinese.  But in reality – and reality is what counts – this is China.  Of that there is no doubt, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

I knew, for example, that the capital of Xinjiang, Urumchi, is a Chinese city, another faceless place of buildings everywhere with a population of some five million – but I sure wasn't ready for Charklik to be another Chinese city as well.

It has a microscopic population by Chinese standards, not more than 50 thousand, some 60 to 70 percent of whom are Chinese bureaucrats or immigrants.  Yet it has 100 yard-wide streets and gigantic government buildings appropriate in size for a major metropolis.  Behind the government buildings are row upon row of apartment buildings to house the bureaucrats.

It's suffocating to Xinjiang's native inhabitants, a Turkic people called Uighurs (wee-gurz).  The Uighur part of the city is a charming place of small unpaved lanes shaded and lined with tall white poplar trees, each mud-brick home proudly displaying a colorful and intricately decorated door.  Walking down one of them, I asked my interpreter (a Uighur from Kashgar) if it would be possible to meet a Uighur family and see their home.  He said let's try and I chose one at random.

We were welcomed into a large courtyard covered by a grape leaf trellis.  The home was beautiful and spacious, the walls covered with gorgeous carpets from Khotan.  We were served tea and  deliciously sweet melons.  The couple, Abdulhami and his wife Tudahan, had a good life, she tended the large family garden, he had a large flock of sheep that grazed in the Kun Lun.  He made some 60 thousand Yuan a year (over $9,000) which supported them comfortably and had enabled them to raise their grown children well.

They loved their home, but the government wanted to tear the entire neighborhood down to build more apartment buildings.  "Living in such a place is like living in an anthill," the man said. "It would be like a prison for us."

He sighed.  "You say you are here following the explorer you talk of, Marco Polo," he said to me.  "But long ago when he came here, the Southern Silk Road was to the north, because Charklik and the other oases were there.  But the Takla Makan keeps growing, the sands keep moving south – and so does the road and the oases.  The Takla Makan is filled with cities that are now covered by its sands."

He paused.  "Just a few years ago, Charklik was completely Uighur.  Now the Chinese are flooding in, there is no stopping them. The Chinese are as many as the grains of sand in the Takla Makan.  I fear we Uighurs will someday be swallowed up like those lost cities and vanish into the sands of the Chinese."

There was no anger in his voice, just resignation.  Virtually all Uighurs are Moslem.  There are tens of thousands of mosques in Xinjiang, and they are well-attended.  At the Idkha Mosque in Kashgar, it's normal for 20,000 worshippers to attend Friday prayers, and 50 to 70,000 on festival days.

Yet the great majority of Uighurs practice Sufism, a peaceful, almost pacifistic form of Islam.  It's the opposite of radical Wahabbi Islam spread by the Saudis.  I could find no evidence of Saudis spreading it here.  I suspect that if they tried, they would be firmly rejected.  The Uighurs are an ancient people who just want to live their farming way of life and peacefully practice their religion as they have for centuries.

There are the clocks.  At the Idkah Mosque right behind where the imam recites the prayers and towards which all worshippers face, is a large red digital clock.  It tells everyone the right time to pray – in Uighur or "Xinjiang local" time.

China is a huge country, about the size of the US, and even though it's as far from Beijing to Kashgar as New York is from LA, the Beijing government insists the entire country have only one time zone: Beijing time.  So the government and the Chinese in Xinjiang keep their clocks and watches set to it, while the Uighurs set theirs two hours earlier.  It's a mild form of resistance and everyone seems to sort it out with no fuss.

But just why are there so many Chinese in Xinjiang now – why now, just in the last few years?  A one word answer:  oil.  Billions of barrels beneath the sands of the Takla Makan.

It was discovered in the 1980s.  To get to it and get it out, the Chinese spent much of the 1990s performing an incredible technological feat:  building a road straight across the Takla Makan.

The Desert Highway is 400 miles long, a direct line from near Korla to an oasis on the southern road called Niya.  Every few miles there is a small blue building (108 in all), a pumping station to pull up water from 300 feet down, each one manned by a couple who live in desert loneliness, freezing in winter, scorched in summer.

The water is pumped through multiple lines of black plastic tubes to drip-irrigate a 30-foot wide swath on either side of the narrow two-lane road, growing a thick green belt of plants like sacsaoul and tamarisk to hold off the sand.

I stopped at one – Well No. 98 – and met a smiling cheerful Chinese woman who loved the peace and beauty of the desert.  Did her husband, I asked, who was away on his motor scooter for supplies.  "I hope so," she replied with a merry laugh.

I was on my way to the middle of the Takla Makan, for that is where PetroChina's Tazhong Oilfield is, the purpose of the Desert Highway.  I was welcomed and could take pictures anywhere.  I struck up a conversation with one of the Chinese engineers who was happy to practice his English with me.

So happy he inadvertently blurted out a revelation.  "When we first started production ten or so years ago," he said, "we were pumping out so much oil and we thought it would never end.  Now it is.  Our production is declining rapidly.  Soon we will run out.  The Takla Makan has much less oil than we thought."

Oh-oh.  What happens to all the Chinese immigration and development along the Southern Silk Road when the oil that's paying for it runs dry?  Will the sands of the Takla Makan take over Tazhong and the Desert Highway as they have every other past presence of man?

Other sands are taking over much of northern China, a process known as desertification –  threatening even Beijing.  According to reliable estimates, every year now despite prodigious efforts to halt it, another 4,000 square kilometers in northern China turns to sand.

Nonetheless, from my vantage point in this almost absurdly remote oasis of Charklik, while I wouldn't bet against the Takla Makan, I wouldn't bet against the Chinese either.

This is a proud and confident culture, quite sure of itself, possessed of gigantic human and natural resources.   Come what may, it is here – here in Charklik and here in the world – to stay.  It is not going away.

Today's China is a very formidable country, with which it will take a very serious effort by America to compete.  China is a serious country, the antithesis of frivolous.  The absolute last thing we can afford at this moment in history is to be the opposite, a frivolous country, the antithesis of serious.

America is not exempt from history, which is riddled with once-mighty now-vanished nations, as vanished as the lost cities buried in the sands of the Takla Makan.

This will be our fate if we choose self-hating suicidal frivolity instead of seriousness.  It is the choice we face on November 4^th. 

The setting sun turns the sand dunes a soft pale pink.  They seem so gentle, serene, and enticing.  They are on the edge of Charklik and they are a beautiful sight.  Beautiful and deadly. As I stare out into them, I am hoping and praying that just a few days from now, America will choose to be serious.