Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron Read Free Book Online

kebab-sellers, men kneading five-yard-long noodles, and butchers’ kiosks hung with halal lamb and beef.
    In their chief mosque, the fusion of China with Islam is like artful theatre. You wander through courtyards interlocked like those of a Ming palace, where the stelae are carved alternately in Arabic or Mandarin, and a minaret rises out of a porcelain-tiled pagoda. Stone dragons and tortoises coil and slumber here and there, ignorant of the Muslim ban on living images. The roofs tilt and swing above their high-coloured eaves, and across the lintels Chinese birds and flowers flock round Koranic inscriptions. An imam’s sermon booms over loudspeakers from a prayer-hall strung with neon lights. The voice is emphatic, overamplified, but I can barely comprehend a word.
    Then, alongside my disquiet, an excitement rises: it is the stir of things transforming, of peoples intermingling and transmuting one another. This, I recognise, is the merchant’s reality: everything convertible, kaleidoscopic. The purity of cultures, even the Chinese, becomes an illusion. So the hybrid mosque is like a promise or a warning. It is the work of the Silk Road, long ago. Nothing ahead of me, I sense, will be homogeneous, constant. To follow a road is to follow diversity: a flow of interlocked voices, arguing, in a cloud of dust.
     
    Huang was still dreaming his big dream, and hoping, I think, that I might become part of it. One evening he caught me returning to my hotel, and grasped my arm in sudden conspiracy. He knew a man, he said, who collected things. You understand, things.
    ‘He knows people in the villages, farmers. They find tombs. They go down on ropes with a lamp, and take the things out at night. By day they cover the hole up again.’
    ‘How does this man get them?’
    ‘He stays in a village for two days, three, then he begins to hear who has the antiques. They start to come to him. There are some villages where they’ve become very rich.’
    I said uselessly, knowing these people’s poverty, ‘They’re destroying history.’ Huang was silent. ‘And it must be dangerous.’
    ‘The air in the tombs is very bad. Some have died down there.’
    That night, in a dead-end alley, Huang shouted up at a curtained window. The silhouette of a woman came and went. Then silence. The smuggler presented a moving target, Huang said. His shop was rented for a few months only; so was his house. ‘But you don’t have to buy. Just look. Just look.’
    The door opened on an owlish, sallow face, and we were motioned round the corner. The corrugated-iron gates of a shop rattled up and crashed down again behind us. In its dimness I saw that the man was very young. A pair of thin-rimmed spectacles turned his eyes to weak headlamps. His moustache was a light dust. He looked like the kind of student who was crushed in Tiananmen Square. And his shop showed almost nothing: a few Qing vases and some modern scroll paintings–the usual horses and landscapes. A cover.
    ‘You are interested in these?’ He pointed to some lurid oils by a local painter.
    ‘No, not these.’ I wondered what Huang had told him about me.
    The man hovered behind his counter, fumbled in boxes, and I heard a lock click. His owl’s eyes flickered to mine. Then cautiously he unwrapped something from swathes of cloth, and stood it upright, without speaking. I found myself looking at a Han dynasty terracotta soldier in a blue jerkin with red sleeves, veryfaded. Its face was smudged away except for a pinch of nose, and its right hand grasped a lost weapon. I’d seen identical pieces in the Shaanxi museum that morning. Perhaps too identical.
    The smuggler said: ‘Two thousand dollars.’
    I circled it uncertainly. It was interesting, unlovable. The smuggler circled it with me, as if afraid I might snatch it. Perhaps he was older than I imagined, I thought. He carried a cold, pedantic authority. One by one he began unwrapping other Han pieces: a yellow dragon coiled in a