I found a Uighur, Zhu Ma Hun—
He said he came from Tacheng, on the border of Soviet Kazakhstan, about 500 miles from Urumchi and about as far west as anyone can live in China and still be regarded as Chinese. That gave me an idea.
"You're not Chinese, are you?"
"Yes! I'm Chinese!"
He was big and friendly, fat faced. He might have been a Turk, a Smyrna merchant, or a pasha with a big paunch. He said he had been to Mecca on the hajj.
We were strolling along the mountain road. We passed a public toilet—the Chinese tend to erect them in the middle of all beauty spots—and though we were forty feet away, the thing gave off an overpowering stink. Every public toilet I saw in China was so vile it was unusable. Every foreigner mentioned them; the Chinese never did spontaneously—not because they were fastidious but because they were ashamed and phlegmatic, and preferred to suffer in silence.
"I think you don't have many of those in the States," Zhu Ma Hun said.
"Right," I said, thinking he meant the brick shit house, but I saw that he was pointing to a yurt, where an old nomad—possibly a Tadzhik—was lugging a bucket of water.
"But do you have
"Not as many as you," I said.
The Chinese idea of a picnic lunch is an assortment of dry sponge cake and stale cookies. Mr. Yang had given me a box in the car, and I had not realized what was in it until I was some distance up the mountain. I fed the whole thing to some cows.
That afternoon, still hungry, I looked for something to eat in the market at Urumchi. My favorite street food was a kind of stuffed pancake called
There are so few Western travelers in Urumchi that Uighurs become animated when they see them. They stare, they gabble, they proffer dried fruit and bunches of fresh grapes. One man tried to interest me in his medicines: dried and splayed lizards (for high blood pressure), deer antlers (for potency), snakes, frogs, and birds' beaks, and a hideous little bundle of twiggy things that he said were the umbilical cords of donkeys.
"They are very good for you," he said vaguely, when I asked what they were for.
The traders in the market, selling the carpets which are woven in Urumchi and the clothes that arrive by train, were either bearded men in skullcaps or fat women in brown dresses. They held up their merchandise, they beckoned me over, but whenever I got close they breathed on me and snatched my wrist and spoke the Uighur greeting.
"Shansh marnie?"
There were more dead animals elsewhere in Urumchi. It is a measure of how deep in the hinterland the town is that there are still many wild animals in the surrounding countryside. At one shop I saw the usual snakes and dried lizards and umbilical cords, but also wolf pelts, fox furs, a half a dozen bearskins and the carcass of an eagle—a white-shouldered Imperial Eagle (so my bird book said), with a wingspan of about six feet. This beautiful bird was a great deal bigger than the Uighur woman selling it.
"Do you want to buy it?" she said.
"What would I do with it?"
"You take the feathers and rub them on your skin. It's good medicine."
"What about this?" I said, pointing to the skull of a gazelle, to which two lovely horns were attached.
"Medicine. Grind it into powder. It makes you strong."
There were any number of Western scientists who claimed that traditional Chinese medicine could be efficacious; but what this woman was saying—and the man in the market with his donkeys' umbilical cords—was surely complete nonsense?
I was prepared to believe that the Chinese had the herbal solutions to high blood pressure, and that acupuncture had its practical uses; but when they scrunched up a dead owl and said, Yum, yum—good for your eyes, I wanted to say Bullshit. If I didn't, it was only because I didn't yet know the Chinese word for it.
There are a handful of tigers in China, some in Hunan, some in the far northeast. Needless to say, they are an endangered species. There is so little food for them that when they're very hungry these tigers will eat insects and frogs. In a copy of a Chinese magazine
