Colin Thubron: "Impregnable Pass under Heaven"

[Kapa]

The end of China’s world
Where the great Qilian range disappears into the Gobi, a vast fortress marks the edge of China. Colin Thubron reaches the ‘Impregnable Pass under Heaven’

In my train to Jiayuguan there was scarcely room to sit on the floor, and the cold was so intense that people’s breath blinded the windows to frost-patterns inside.

For a few miles we followed the Yellow River before it looped under a bridge and was gone. Then night came. Padded and scarved, passengers slept where they were, heaped among their bundles as if in camp, their children sprawled loose over their knees. Every time the train stopped, a new influx sent a tremor of suffocation through the mass.

I found a space in the bridge between two carriages, where my quilted overcoat enclosed me like an eiderdown, and tried to sleep. I was crushed amongst Hui farmers, who sang to themselves in small, toneless voices, propped against one another’s backs and shoulders, or asleep on their feet like horses. Women brought their babies to urinate down the joint between the carriages beside us, holding them proudly steady. The urine froze within seconds.

I woke to morning and a changed country. The Qilian range had retreated southward behind a ravelin of snowy foothills, and to the north stretched a sandy, level plain — the southern rim of the Gobi. The mountains dropped into it with a frozen brilliance. I half expected them to sizzle. But the desert was as cold as they were.

An intermittent dust of grey stones covered it, and here and there the wind had swept it into a liquid tumult of dunes. All around us, the horizon was closed by the shaped splendour of those mountains, or by nothing at all. It was the end of one wilderness and the start of another. Our engine smoke divided them with a pink streamer in the early sun.

We reached Jiayuguan at midday. It was a bungaloid steel town, built for the desert to howl in. I was the only person in my hotel. I gnawed through a near-inedible meal, my head full of the fortress I had glimpsed in the desert close by. In my restaurant the suggestions book had last been inscribed a month before by a lone Japanese: “The service was dreadful. Nobody even spoke to me.”

I marched to the fort in cold excitement. It had been rebuilt by the Ming in 1372, and dubbed the “Impregnable Pass under Heaven”, and for two millennia, under almost all dynasties, its site had marked the western limit of the Great Wall. From here, since the early years of the Roman Empire, the Silk Road had linked China to the Mediterranean. Even now it invited a journey westward through the Muslim oases of Xinjiang, but the snows and the enormous fort — the traditional terminus of China — dissuaded me.

Massed foursquare on the desert’s edge, the slope of its bastions lent it an Assyrian austerity. But as I approached, its ramparts erupted into a delicacy of coloured gate-towers, like a funfair inside a prison, and beyond them a little open-air theatre, now restored, had been painted with women and animals in an absurd, defiant sweetness of civilisation at the end of the world.

I climbed its ramparts into the wind, my eyes streaming. To the south, the pass which it defended opened between the black folds of the Mazong range and the white of the Qilian mountains. To the west, the Great Wall crossed the desert in isolated scarps and beacon-towers. For a moment, restored to its 30ft height, it wrapped the fortress in an outer curtain, then faltered southward a few more miles to its end.

But to the north the Gobi — the drowner of cities — spread void under the colourless sky. A mauve band dissolved its horizon. This was the feared hinterland of the Chinese mind, a chaotic barrenness racked by demons and the ever-lingering nomad.

From where I stood, a flying crow, hunting for civilisation, would spread its wings a thousand miles southwest across Qinghai and Tibet before alighting hopelessly on Everest. If instead it endured a thousand miles due west, it would plummet into the wilderness of Taklimakan far short of the Afghan frontier; and northward, after crossing Mongolia, it might wander Siberia for ever.

Into any region beyond the Great Wall, disgraced Chinese were banished in despair. Jiayuguan was “China’s Mouth”. Those beyond it were “outside the mouth”, and its western gate — a vaulted tunnel opening into the unknown — used to be covered with farewell inscriptions in the refined hand of exiled officials. Local people called it the Gate of Sighs.

Even if the outcasts survived among the surly Mongols, they would die beyond the reach of any heaven. Demons would torment them in their sandy graves, and Buddhists be condemned to an eternal cycle of barbarian reincarnations.

It was early evening when I started across the sand the last few miles to the Wall’s end. I withdrew my head into my overcoat like a tortoise. The wind flayed every chink of exposed skin. In front of me the rampart had long since shed its gloss of tamped clay, and was blistered to earth innards.

Often the desert had overwhelmed it, pulling a pelt of stones and camel thorn over the parapets until the sand slid down the far side and subsumed them. Ahead the Qilian ranges were divorced from the plain by haze — a glistening mirage.

I had been walking for two or three miles. The light was fading. The only life was a pair of Bactrian camels browsing on nothing. In the approaching mountains I saw no trace of ramparts, no sign where the Wall went.

Suddenly the land dropped sheer beneath my feet. In its canyon, 200ft deep, wound a concealed river — an ice-blue coldness out of nowhere. It must have started as a glacial torrent, but over millennia it had sliced the earth clean. The ground looked so unstable I was afraid to approach the edge. I found myself shivering. All colour had been struck out of it, except for mineral greys and blues. Under the Wall’s last, broken tower the river moved to its end in the Gobi through the steel-grey earth under the white mountains.

This extract appears in the new edition of The Traveller’s Handbook (Wexas £16.95). To order a copy for the reduced price of £15.25, including p&p, call The Sunday Times Books First on 0870 165 8585. The original text is from Behind the Wall, published by Heinemann

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