A Yurt Tale
or
Slightly Lost in Western China
I stared out the window of the tour bus as the highway began to climb up and out of China proper and into the mountains bordering Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Kirgizstan. Controlled by the Chinese, the area is inhabited by three main ethnic groups: the Kyrgyz, the Kazakhs, and the Tajiks.
*Update: Western Chinese minorities are receiving international attention as their forced labor produces one-fifth of the world’s cotton products. More information.
After touring the city-oases around the edge of the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts, we were now motoring our way over the Karakoram Highway toward the Khunjerab Pass and Northern Pakistan, hoping to reach the Hunza Valley.
We’d left the cities and civilization behind, and I would have no chance to escape the controlled environment of the bus. With several long days of travel ahead, we had to be content to look out at the steep hillsides and forbidding, snow-covered mountains.
My mother Sarah was a little worried, and excited, about the altitude. A large rubber balloon of oxygen had been prepared for her. If she felt light-headed, she could inhale the oxygen through a small valve at the end of a clear tube.
We’d taken the journey in hopes of discovering some of the most untouched textiles in the world- that of the Tajiks, Kazakhs, and Kirgiz. Intricate and unique, their household creations of felt and embroidery are made from the wool of their sheep: clothing, carpets, blankets, and even the thick felt wrapping of their traditional dwelling, the yurt. The natural wool fibers are dyed in deep reds and blues and then felted, woven, and embroidered in the same way they have been for thousands of years.
But now, on this marathon journey, hurtling toward the national frontier without stopping, we could never meet a traditional weaver or textile artist. There was no time to stop, and no place to stop, just mile after mile of inhospitable mountainsides.
An Invitation
When my mother Sarah invited me on a guided tour of China’s Silk Road in Western China, I accepted without a second thought. I imagined an untapped wilderness of textile hunting and discovery.
I’d long dreamt of visiting the nomadic cultures of the Eurasian Steppe and Western China, where I’d heard they could make massive sheets of felt. Once, I saw a black and white photo of men wearing long white blouses and wool vests trampling a long, rolled-up package of wool in order to transform it into the felt cover of a yurt. Fascinated, I wondered how it could be done!
My mother and I have done felting at home. Anyone can do it, really. If you’ve ever sent a wool shirt or sweater through the wash to find that it is smaller and denser, that is felt. The wool fibers felt themselves together naturally, thanks to one-way barbs on the fibers that make the wool mesh together ever more densely. Every time you put that sweater through the wash, it felts even more!
American felting for crafts is generally a process of purchasing pre-dyed and combed wool and arranging it in a design to be felted by pushing the fibers together with a needle or taking brightly colored pieces of unspun wool to lay out, then sandwich between layers of cloth and roll up in a jelly roll. The package to be felted is dropped in a soapy clothes washer to be felted by machine agitation. Clearly, a tame process compared to whatever was happening in the nomadic cultures of Western China.
I’d seriously considered visiting some of the areas further north and West of China, but there were practical obstacles to going to the Eurasian Steppe for any length of time. First, I would have to learn the language and some of the customs. The deal breaker was the reported terrible weather, 30 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit) in winter, 120 degrees in the summer. No wonder they hid in felt houses!
I wondered if it was possible to learn the traditional way of making the large sheets of felt for lining the nomadic people’s movable dwelling, the yurt.
Though I longed to learn more about felt making and other textile making techniques in Western China, I didn’t know what to expect. With no prior knowledge of the language or the culture, making this bus journey could be the safest and quickest way to access the culture and the textiles.
After touring the Gobi Desert and the lively provincial cities on its periphery, we began climbing the escarpment at the western edge of the desert, through the Northwestern arm of the Kunlun Mountains, and up into the Karakoram Mountains.
The China-Pakistan Friendship Highway went up and up, through more mountains and past more lakes formed of melting glaciers. And we were always accompanied by the presence of the towering, snow-white Himalayas just out of sight, occasionally peering over and into our view.
But we could scarcely catch our breath. After two dizzying twelve-hour days, hurtling through otherworldly landscapes that ran into each other, I just wanted to experience the country first-hand. Instead, I was confronted by the all too familiar, and very local culture of my fellow passengers.
There were two buses. Our bus was full of families and retirees, and the other bus carried unattached adults, the “fun” bus.
I shared a seat with my mother, Sarah, 82 years old. After the long ride, we were tired but relaxed. During a rest stop, a clearly worried passenger hurried over and asked me to take my mom away from a dangerous ledge, but I declined. Mother was a force of nature, and I was better off to avoid the confrontation!
My mother has had her share of traditional weaving-related adventures, and led us as teenagers, backpacking through Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia in search of traditional huipils and woven belts. We both hoped to encounter beautiful textiles on this trip to Western China.
A Textile Mother
My mother is a textile mother, and I am a textile daughter. We kids spent summers running barefoot through the grass and making tie-dye and batik. As we grew up, there were always steaming vats of vinegar-smelling dye and different colored skeins of wool yarn everywhere. I learned to spin and weave, untangling and rolling yarn into balls.
I became a professional batik artist and mom moved on to large, abstract crochet pieces, including a huge, 12-foot-tall fishnet of yellow plastic strapping called a Kiddie Catcher that you could stand inside. It blew everyone’s mind when it hung from a tree on the Boston Common in 1972.
There were other families on the bus as well, an American family living in Thailand with 2 school-age children and their visiting aunt from the States. A father and his grown son sat in the back. Like us, they had taken their complicated relationship and brought it on the road.
After the exhausting 21-hour flight, San Francisco to China, we were informed that the Chinese authorities had stopped our American tour-guide at the border, denying him entry. Without his knowledge of the history, geography, and local culture to guide us, there would be no way to interact with the local people or interpret our experiences.
We were assigned a second guide, a Chinese national. But he was soon called away to interpret at the imminent 2008 Olympic games in Beijing after less than a week with us. We were left to explore on our own, and most of the tour passengers did not stray far.
Without a guide to set the tone and orient the group to the wonders and deep history of the place, the passengers of the bus began to provide their own subtext.
Have Bubble, Will Travel
Forays off the bus were jarring, but high adventure. The bathrooms were wrong. People stared at us. The language barrier meant we couldn’t converse with the locals or haggle prices.
During a rest stop in a small market town a determined woman in a kerchief carried a long stick that she used to herd 30 head of sheep down the main highway. I saw a sleepy donkey with a beautiful, sad face hitched to a little cart, waiting patiently.
We took some photos of it and the townspeople observed us snapping shots of the mundane aspects of their lives.
When the bus door closed behind us the sounds of sheep and clamoring foreign voices were immediately silenced, and we traveled on in cushioned comfort. Elated with the brief encounter, I felt relieved to be motoring away.
It was reassuring to get to know everyone on the bus, in our bubble of language and culture. We all agreed that we were bold and brave indeed for even venturing on the arduous journey. The long days made it feel as if we were working for it.
The inside jokes that noted how different, or similar, the scenery was compared to home gave us mastery over the situation.
The comradery made the world passing by even more distant than it had been in my daydreams, and staring out of the glass, I longed for a different perspective.
In the broad, mountain-encircled basin between the Kunlun Mountains and Karakoram Range, the bus slowed at a crossroads and a group of people stood at the side of the road, waiting for transport. They wore informal, western-looking clothes.
But the local women of child-rearing age, and all the marriageable girls- all of them- wore at least one piece of red clothing as an accent. My red cap of wool herringbone, and the red hood that emerged from my black peacoat gave me a kindred woman-ness. In the language of textiles and dress, the cultural symbol had been achieved, and just by luck! If given the opportunity, I could play the “respectable woman” role.
I longed to meet them, but it was a fantasy. The bus would not stop.
I never got to witness felt-making, but I did see a sheet of black felt lining the back of the same donkey cart. Diaphanous, it was about an inch thick but transparent. It was barely felt at all!
The windows of the bus looked out on an unreality. Without a guide, there was no way to interact with the people. The scenery was inspiring, but we never stopped long enough to find out who lived there.
In Search of Tradition
What made my desperate separation from the traditional culture worse was realizing that the local people had long since been acculturated to Chinese norms.
The strategic location and rich resources of Xinxiang Province make its development a delicate matter. The central government is in the process of building a massive infrastructure of roads, railways, and oil and gas pipelines with Xinxiang as the hub. The new infrastructure will integrate the economies of China, Central Asia and the Middle East, reaching all countries in the region, financed by Chinese credit.
The Chinese have invested 2.35 trillion yuan in economic stimulus and price supports since 1949 and have built out roads and housing throughout the western Chinese province. The government reports poverty dropped from 19.4% to 6.1% between 2014 and 2018. But many of the traditional customs are now discouraged or downplayed.
Further on in the same valley, I noticed a yurt in a fair-ground near where we had stopped for lunch.
Mother was tired, and no one wanted to chance missing the bus, but I’d come to find traditional textiles and culture! I dashed across the highway to have a look. I peeked in hopefully, hoping to glean some inkling of a traditional yurt from this clearly uninhabited replica. But it was completely bare of textiles or furnishings, constructed of steel pipe, and covered with aging canvas, instead of thick layers of felt.
Worse than sterile, it was an insult to the culture it purported to represent. Only a gullible school child could have been fooled by it. To all others, it was a clear sign of contempt and disrespect. I returned to the bus disheartened. There was no way to make my wishes known to the anonymous bus driver. I began to wonder if there were any yurts or felt makers left!
I’d made opportunities to be away from the group on our stops in the oasis cities on the edge of the Gobi Dessert. I snuck out of the hotels before dawn to see tai chi players while mom rested; I sat alone in a darkened café to observe the local culture passing by.
As we climbed out of the fertile valley where I’d seen the display yurt, I began to despair of ever seeing the true lifestyle of traditional textile makers.
Now we were heading ever further from the metropolitan areas, and on to Pakistan, dangerously close to the border of Afghanistan.
If you could see it on a map, the wind-swept China-Pakistan Kunlun Highway goes on and on until, at the Western border of China, it plummets into the rock-walled canyons of northern Pakistan. We would reach Kilometer Zero before plunging over the Khunjerab pass.
The sweeping vistas of the Kunlun Mountains approaching the Himalayas were mesmerizing, but we never stopped to explore. It became a passive viewing experience. The scenery was stirring and inspiring, but not tangible.
We were all tired and stiff from the days spent watching a never-ending panorama of mountains, gorges, and small glacial valleys, and the smug commentary became tedious.
Would we never meet someone interesting, besides our bleary-eyed fellow travelers or the professionally cheerful hotel workers?
And just when I thought I couldn’t bear another moment, something happened.
A Change of Luck
Near the top of a pass, in a small, grassy valley flooded by summer snow-melt and surrounded by steep mountainsides the bus stopped abruptly. We were informed it had broken down and there would be a wait of several hours. Mother was not doing well in the altitude, so she went down with the first busload of passengers. She gave me a mischievous look that said, “I can’t stay, but you have fun for both of us!”
Along the lonely, two-track highway there were no other parked vehicles. No hawkers, no other tourists. We were on our own, with only a disabled tour bus for security. The freedom was exhilarating.
Without a guide to shepherd us, we had only our very innocent observation of the surroundings. The driver waiting in the bus was as good as invisible, given the language barrier and his disinterest in us.
Seeking a defensible spot a little way from the highway, a few of us assembled on a large, half-buried boulder, facing the little valley below.
Ecstatic to be outdoors, a man I had not seen before set off to climb the 2,000-foot mountainside behind us. My eyes, and heart, followed him until he became quite tiny, resting at the top to enjoy a view of snow-covered peaks, the beginnings of the Himalaya. A couple from our bus investigated some faint ruins at the lakeshore. I was not the only one with pent up and denied passions!
Another person from our group walked over to explore a burial ground with many large, white beehive-shaped tombs. Out of nowhere, a local man ran up, speaking sharply. On no uncertain terms, despite the language barrier, he was clearly forbidding us from soiling the graveyard. We were foreigners and needed to respect the local culture and law.
My heart thumped when I realized a camp of three yurts was just down the highway. I began to make my plan.
“I’m going to visit a yurt!” I blurted out, making a tentative step in the general direction of the yurts. I’d have to walk down to the road, and then a half-mile to where the yurts stood in a tidy settlement near the side of the highway.
“I can go with you!” His name was Greg.
“Can I join you too?” Katrin had a slight German accent. They must have come from the ‘fun’ bus, the pre-retirement group. We descended to the road, making conversation.
Greg informed us he’d often been the point of contact with local villages while serving in VietNam. I didn’t tell him I’d studied Batik in the villages of Java.
I felt exhilarated to be outside the protective bubble of our group and I began to feel I was entering another world. I had to experience the local culture; I had to take the leap into the unknown.
In order to reach the yurt settlement, we would have to cross a narrow bridge. Two men stood on the other side of the bridge. They observed us silently.
As we were about to cross the bridge, Katrin began to fall behind.
“Katrin, what’s wrong?” She didn’t answer. A shudder moved her drooping shoulders.
“I…I can’t!”
She turned and hurried back. Maybe she saw something in the men- menace, forbidding, or the possibility of no return.
We were so far from home, from any governmental authorities. I give her credit for leaving Germany to come and see the world! But I wonder if she ever regretted turning back.
Not speaking or understanding a word of Chinese, we smiled politely and bowed our heads at the men from our side of the bridge. I learned later, based on the goat-horn textile motifs in the yurt and the location, that this was a Kyrgyz group.
As we approached, the two men stayed on guard, impassive and neutral. It was possible they spoke as little Chinese as we did!
I looked over my shoulder, a last look at Katrin and the group. We were leaving the control zone of the highway and entering an autonomous society of nomadic shepherds that certainly had its own laws and traditions.
In large-family oriented societies, lone travelers are often regarded with suspicion or pity, so I was pleased to have a companion on this adventure. We each provided cover for the other.
We walked past very deliberately and respectfully; we knew we were guests. Just at calling distance from the first yurt, we stopped in unison. Greg looked at me sideways and nodded in approval.
I couldn’t help smiling in anticipation of entering their world. We chatted quietly, waiting for an invitation to come closer.
A yurt is a round nomadic tent; the sidewalls consist of a collapsible, basket-like network of long wooden strips fastened together in a diagonal lattice framework.
To form the ceiling of the yurt, longer sticks radiate from a heavy wooden hoop in the center, all snuggly wrapped in great sheets of cream-colored, felted sheep’s wool about half an inch thick.
Impervious to the elements, like a giant felt hat, the yurt provides year-round comfort. The insulating wool protects the inhabitants from the exceedingly hot and cold seasonal temperatures further north on the Steppe.
In 833 A.D., the celebrated Chinese poet, Bai Juyi, wrote a poem about a yurt he kept in the front courtyard of his mansion:
“The finest felt from a flock of a thousand sheep stretched over a frame shaped like the extended bows of a hundred soldiers.
When the typhoon blows, it does not shake, and when a storm pours it gets even stronger.
The Yurt casts a lonely shadow during nights brilliantly illuminated by the moon, but its value doubles in years when the winter is bitterly cold.”
It was a small settlement of only three yurts, situated to take advantage of what little traffic passed along the long, lonely two-lane track between China and Pakistan over the summer.
We remained a polite distance and after a few minutes a tiny, wind-swept face peered around the edge of the yurt and beckoned to us.
The Yurt
We were ushered into the yurt by a smiling six-year-old girl. Greg could barely squeeze through the oval doorway; the intricately woven summer door-hanging was flung over the outside of the yurt.
A chubby old woman- the child’s grandmother- raised herself from a sleeping position and wiped the corner of her mouth. It was her way of saying “I am sorry I didn’t have time to prepare anything special for you!” I loved her instantly.
The yurt was large but cozy, with wooden boxes and chests of drawers arranged under the eaves of the thick woolen walls, and in front of those, stacked carpets to serve as sofas and mattresses. The central area around the stove was kept clear for shoes, firewood, and other dusty things. We entered and crawled around to the right, to sit on low stacks of carpets.
The Grandmother, presiding on a mound of carpets at the back of the yurt, patted a spot on the rug next to hers. I sat close to her, with my shoes off. Beyond her were foodstuffs and cooking gear for every day and, arranged further around the yurt, were more piles of carpets and a jumble of things organized in cloth sacks.
We were offered yogurt that tasted of wool and cooking smoke.
At last! To experience the authentic yurt life!! After the disappointment of the “display yurt,” with its bones of galvanized pipe, this was a living yurt, with rich tapestries everywhere. There were thick, comfortable stacks of carpets, perhaps for sale to passing truck drivers, to sit on. I saw narrow, handwoven yurt bands in red and black, snaking behind the wooden framework of the yurt, and tassels hanging from the ceiling.
I marveled that such a thin network of wooden strips, arranged in a diamond network could hold up all the thick felted walls, tapestries, and the roof, with its heavy central wheel of wood.
This was a rare opportunity to look back in time and witness the millenniums-old yurt culture. The perfect vehicle for following herds of sheep and goats throughout the seasons, it could withstand the vicious winters of minus 30°on the Eastern Eurasian steppe and stay cool in equally brutal summer conditions. We were considerably south of the worst weather, but this was the same dwelling that had been used since before history.
I was barely aware of my surroundings. I didn’t know which culture I was observing, Kazak, Kyrgyz, or Tajik. Disoriented, I depended on the Grandmother to lead me through the experience. I was completely enchanted with her.
I finished my yogurt and Greg offered me his. I found that, unlike mine, his yogurt had been sweetened with sugar. Perhaps they knew more about us than we had imagined!
Gift Exchange
I’d carried two gifts from America: a pair of beautiful low, white cowboy boots and a pair of colorful felted mittens.
The mittens were oversized and crafty, felted of bright, non-matching roving colors on the thumbs and body, with giant coconut fiber buttons on the cuffs. I hoped they might be useful in winter, and perhaps inspire a textile conversation. The Grandmother looked at them politely, but I am sure the design could have been much improved by a Kyrgyz artisan.
The Grandmother presented me with a 15-inch scrap of black wool army blanket, with red and hot pink chain-linked wool embroidery in the traditional Kazak motif, the goat’s horns. With some agitation, the wool embroidery would felt together with the wool blanket, but for now, it was beautifully embroidered.
I keep it on a large pillow and use it to look back in time, to the yurt and the Grandmother’s hospitality.
The entire visit took place in pantomime and lasted 30 minutes. The smiling red-cheeked girl removed my red cap of wool herringbone and exchanged it with a red polyester trucker’s cap. I should have let her keep it, but I needed it to stay warm on the rest of my journey!
I gave away my presents, smashed from my suitcase, but paid for the textiles and baubles the Grandmother presented to me. Finally, my pockets were empty, and Greg’s crossed ankles had started to hurt. It was time to go back to the bus, and I reluctantly began to say good bye to them.
I wanted a picture with the Grandmother, so I draped myself around her and tickled her under the chin until she smiled for Greg to take a snapshot. I should have abandoned the bus tour and spent the summer with her, but my mother was waiting in a hotel on the other side of the pass.
Next in the series (same trip):
- Lost passport, how we got back after the tour had to leave without us. Cause I ate the wrong thing and got sick.
- The solar eclipse: ecstatic, then sad and angry when it ended.
- Using a taxi to catch up to the tour and Ma being carried up the mt on the taxi driver’s back.
- Early morning tai chi sessions, the darkened cafe, shopping for obscure things, market place forays
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A Yurt TaleSlightly Lost in Western China
I stared out the window of the tour bus as the highway began to climb up and out of China proper and into the mountains bordering Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Kirgizstan. Controlled by the Chinese, the area is inhabited by three main ethnic groups: the Kyrgyz, the Kazakhs, and the Tajiks.
*Update: Western Chinese minorities are receiving international attention as their forced labor produces one-fifth of the world’s cotton products. More information.
After touring the city-oases around the edge of the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts, we were now motoring our way over the Karakoram Highway toward the Khunjerab Pass and Northern Pakistan, hoping to reach the Hunza Valley.
We’d left the cities and civilization behind, and I would have no chance to escape the controlled environment of the bus. With several long days of travel ahead, we had to be content to look out at the steep hillsides and forbidding, snow-covered mountains.
My mother Sarah was a little worried, and excited, about the altitude. A large rubber balloon of oxygen had been prepared for her. If she felt light-headed, she could inhale the oxygen through a small valve at the end of a clear tube.
We’d taken the journey in hopes of discovering some of the most untouched textiles in the world- that of the Tajiks, Kazakhs, and Kirgiz. Intricate and unique, their household creations of felt and embroidery are made from the wool of their sheep: clothing, carpets, blankets, and even the thick felt wrapping of their traditional dwelling, the yurt. The natural wool fibers are dyed in deep reds and blues and then felted, woven, and embroidered in the same way they have been for thousands of years.
But now, on this marathon journey, hurtling toward the national frontier without stopping, we could never meet a traditional weaver or textile artist. There was no time to stop, and no place to stop, just mile after mile of inhospitable mountainsides.
An Invitation
When my mother Sarah invited me on a guided tour of China’s Silk Road in Western China, I accepted without a second thought. I imagined an untapped wilderness of textile hunting and discovery.
I’d long dreamt of visiting the nomadic cultures of the Eurasian Steppe and Western China, where I’d heard they could make massive sheets of felt. Once, I saw a black and white photo of men wearing long white blouses and wool vests trampling a long, rolled-up package of wool in order to transform it into the felt cover of a yurt. Fascinated, I wondered how it could be done!
My mother and I have done felting at home. Anyone can do it, really. If you’ve ever sent a wool shirt or sweater through the wash to find that it is smaller and denser, that is felt. The wool fibers felt themselves together naturally, thanks to one-way barbs on the fibers that make the wool mesh together ever more densely. Every time you put that sweater through the wash, it felts even more!
American felting for crafts is generally a process of purchasing pre-dyed and combed wool and arranging it in a design to be felted by pushing the fibers together with a needle or taking brightly colored pieces of unspun wool to lay out, then sandwich between layers of cloth and roll up in a jelly roll. The package to be felted is dropped in a soapy clothes washer to be felted by machine agitation. Clearly, a tame process compared to whatever was happening in the nomadic cultures of Western China.
I’d seriously considered visiting some of the areas further north and West of China, but there were practical obstacles to going to the Eurasian Steppe for any length of time. First, I would have to learn the language and some of the customs. The deal breaker was the reported terrible weather, 30 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit) in winter, 120 degrees in the summer. No wonder they hid in felt houses!
I wondered if it was possible to learn the traditional way of making the large sheets of felt for lining the nomadic people’s movable dwelling, the yurt.
Though I longed to learn more about felt making and other textile making techniques in Western China, I didn’t know what to expect. With no prior knowledge of the language or the culture, making this bus journey could be the safest and quickest way to access the culture and the textiles.
After touring the Gobi Desert and the lively provincial cities on its periphery, we began climbing the escarpment at the western edge of the desert, through the Northwestern arm of the Kunlun Mountains, and up into the Karakoram Mountains.
The China-Pakistan Friendship Highway went up and up, through more mountains and past more lakes formed of melting glaciers. And we were always accompanied by the presence of the towering, snow-white Himalayas just out of sight, occasionally peering over and into our view.
But we could scarcely catch our breath. After two dizzying twelve-hour days, hurtling through otherworldly landscapes that ran into each other, I just wanted to experience the country first-hand. Instead, I was confronted by the all too familiar, and very local culture of my fellow passengers.
There were two buses. Our bus was full of families and retirees, and the other bus carried unattached adults, the “fun” bus.
I shared a seat with my mother, Sarah, 82 years old. After the long ride, we were tired but relaxed. During a rest stop, a clearly worried passenger hurried over and asked me to take my mom away from a dangerous ledge, but I declined. Mother was a force of nature, and I was better off to avoid the confrontation!
My mother has had her share of traditional weaving-related adventures, and led us as teenagers, backpacking through Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia in search of traditional huipils and woven belts. We both hoped to encounter beautiful textiles on this trip to Western China.
A Textile Mother
My mother is a textile mother, and I am a textile daughter. We kids spent summers running barefoot through the grass and making tie-dye and batik. As we grew up, there were always steaming vats of vinegar-smelling dye and different colored skeins of wool yarn everywhere. I learned to spin and weave, untangling and rolling yarn into balls.
I became a professional batik artist and mom moved on to large, abstract crochet pieces, including a huge, 12-foot-tall fishnet of yellow plastic strapping called a Kiddie Catcher that you could stand inside. It blew everyone’s mind when it hung from a tree on the Boston Common in 1972.
There were other families on the bus as well, an American family living in Thailand with 2 school-age children and their visiting aunt from the States. A father and his grown son sat in the back. Like us, they had taken their complicated relationship and brought it on the road.
After the exhausting 21-hour flight, San Francisco to China, we were informed that the Chinese authorities had stopped our American tour-guide at the border, denying him entry. Without his knowledge of the history, geography, and local culture to guide us, there would be no way to interact with the local people or interpret our experiences.
We were assigned a second guide, a Chinese national. But he was soon called away to interpret at the imminent 2008 Olympic games in Beijing after less than a week with us. We were left to explore on our own, and most of the tour passengers did not stray far.
Without a guide to set the tone and orient the group to the wonders and deep history of the place, the passengers of the bus began to provide their own subtext.
Have Bubble, Will Travel
Forays off the bus were jarring, but high adventure. The bathrooms were wrong. People stared at us. The language barrier meant we couldn’t converse with the locals or haggle prices.
During a rest stop in a small market town a determined woman in a kerchief carried a long stick that she used to herd 30 head of sheep down the main highway. I saw a sleepy donkey with a beautiful, sad face hitched to a little cart, waiting patiently.
We took some photos of it and the townspeople observed us snapping shots of the mundane aspects of their lives.
When the bus door closed behind us the sounds of sheep and clamoring foreign voices were immediately silenced, and we traveled on in cushioned comfort. Elated with the brief encounter, I felt relieved to be motoring away.
It was reassuring to get to know everyone on the bus, in our bubble of language and culture. We all agreed that we were bold and brave indeed for even venturing on the arduous journey. The long days made it feel as if we were working for it.
The inside jokes that noted how different, or similar, the scenery was compared to home gave us mastery over the situation.
The comradery made the world passing by even more distant than it had been in my daydreams, and staring out of the glass, I longed for a different perspective.
In the broad, mountain-encircled basin between the Kunlun Mountains and Karakoram Range, the bus slowed at a crossroads and a group of people stood at the side of the road, waiting for transport. They wore informal, western-looking clothes.
But the local women of child-rearing age, and all the marriageable girls- all of them- wore at least one piece of red clothing as an accent. My red cap of wool herringbone, and the red hood that emerged from my black peacoat gave me a kindred woman-ness. In the language of textiles and dress, the cultural symbol had been achieved, and just by luck! If given the opportunity, I could play the “respectable woman” role.
I longed to meet them, but it was a fantasy. The bus would not stop.
I never got to witness felt-making, but I did see a sheet of black felt lining the back of the same donkey cart. Diaphanous, it was about an inch thick but transparent. It was barely felt at all!
The windows of the bus looked out on an unreality. Without a guide, there was no way to interact with the people. The scenery was inspiring, but we never stopped long enough to find out who lived there.
In Search of Tradition
What made my desperate separation from the traditional culture worse was realizing that the local people had long since been acculturated to Chinese norms.
The strategic location and rich resources of Xinxiang Province make its development a delicate matter. The central government is in the process of building a massive infrastructure of roads, railways, and oil and gas pipelines with Xinxiang as the hub. The new infrastructure will integrate the economies of China, Central Asia and the Middle East, reaching all countries in the region, financed by Chinese credit.
The Chinese have invested 2.35 trillion yuan in economic stimulus and price supports since 1949 and have built out roads and housing throughout the western Chinese province. The government reports poverty dropped from 19.4% to 6.1% between 2014 and 2018. But many of the traditional customs are now discouraged or downplayed.
Further on in the same valley, I noticed a yurt in a fair-ground near where we had stopped for lunch.
Mother was tired, and no one wanted to chance missing the bus, but I’d come to find traditional textiles and culture! I dashed across the highway to have a look. I peeked in hopefully, hoping to glean some inkling of a traditional yurt from this clearly uninhabited replica. But it was completely bare of textiles or furnishings, constructed of steel pipe, and covered with aging canvas, instead of thick layers of felt.
Worse than sterile, it was an insult to the culture it purported to represent. Only a gullible school child could have been fooled by it. To all others, it was a clear sign of contempt and disrespect. I returned to the bus disheartened. There was no way to make my wishes known to the anonymous bus driver. I began to wonder if there were any yurts or felt makers left!
I’d made opportunities to be away from the group on our stops in the oasis cities on the edge of the Gobi Dessert. I snuck out of the hotels before dawn to see tai chi players while mom rested; I sat alone in a darkened café to observe the local culture passing by.
As we climbed out of the fertile valley where I’d seen the display yurt, I began to despair of ever seeing the true lifestyle of traditional textile makers.
Now we were heading ever further from the metropolitan areas, and on to Pakistan, dangerously close to the border of Afghanistan.
If you could see it on a map, the wind-swept China-Pakistan Kunlun Highway goes on and on until, at the Western border of China, it plummets into the rock-walled canyons of northern Pakistan. We would reach Kilometer Zero before plunging over the Khunjerab pass.
The sweeping vistas of the Kunlun Mountains approaching the Himalayas were mesmerizing, but we never stopped to explore. It became a passive viewing experience. The scenery was stirring and inspiring, but not tangible.
We were all tired and stiff from the days spent watching a never-ending panorama of mountains, gorges, and small glacial valleys, and the smug commentary became tedious.
Would we never meet someone interesting, besides our bleary-eyed fellow travelers or the professionally cheerful hotel workers?
And just when I thought I couldn’t bear another moment, something happened.
A Change of Luck
Near the top of a pass, in a small, grassy valley flooded by summer snow-melt and surrounded by steep mountainsides the bus stopped abruptly. We were informed it had broken down and there would be a wait of several hours. Mother was not doing well in the altitude, so she went down with the first busload of passengers. She gave me a mischievous look that said, “I can’t stay, but you have fun for both of us!”
Along the lonely, two-track highway there were no other parked vehicles. No hawkers, no other tourists. We were on our own, with only a disabled tour bus for security. The freedom was exhilarating.
Without a guide to shepherd us, we had only our very innocent observation of the surroundings. The driver waiting in the bus was as good as invisible, given the language barrier and his disinterest in us.
Seeking a defensible spot a little way from the highway, a few of us assembled on a large, half-buried boulder, facing the little valley below.
Ecstatic to be outdoors, a man I had not seen before set off to climb the 2,000-foot mountainside behind us. My eyes, and heart, followed him until he became quite tiny, resting at the top to enjoy a view of snow-covered peaks, the beginnings of the Himalaya. A couple from our bus investigated some faint ruins at the lakeshore. I was not the only one with pent up and denied passions!
Another person from our group walked over to explore a burial ground with many large, white beehive-shaped tombs. Out of nowhere, a local man ran up, speaking sharply. On no uncertain terms, despite the language barrier, he was clearly forbidding us from soiling the graveyard. We were foreigners and needed to respect the local culture and law.
My heart thumped when I realized a camp of three yurts was just down the highway. I began to make my plan.
“I’m going to visit a yurt!” I blurted out, making a tentative step in the general direction of the yurts. I’d have to walk down to the road, and then a half-mile to where the yurts stood in a tidy settlement near the side of the highway.
“I can go with you!” His name was Greg.
“Can I join you too?” Katrin had a slight German accent. They must have come from the ‘fun’ bus, the pre-retirement group. We descended to the road, making conversation.
Greg informed us he’d often been the point of contact with local villages while serving in VietNam. I didn’t tell him I’d studied Batik in the villages of Java.
I felt exhilarated to be outside the protective bubble of our group and I began to feel I was entering another world. I had to experience the local culture; I had to take the leap into the unknown.
In order to reach the yurt settlement, we would have to cross a narrow bridge. Two men stood on the other side of the bridge. They observed us silently.
As we were about to cross the bridge, Katrin began to fall behind.
“Katrin, what’s wrong?” She didn’t answer. A shudder moved her drooping shoulders.
“I…I can’t!”
She turned and hurried back. Maybe she saw something in the men- menace, forbidding, or the possibility of no return.
We were so far from home, from any governmental authorities. I give her credit for leaving Germany to come and see the world! But I wonder if she ever regretted turning back.
Not speaking or understanding a word of Chinese, we smiled politely and bowed our heads at the men from our side of the bridge. I learned later, based on the goat-horn textile motifs in the yurt and the location, that this was a Kyrgyz group.
As we approached, the two men stayed on guard, impassive and neutral. It was possible they spoke as little Chinese as we did!
I looked over my shoulder, a last look at Katrin and the group. We were leaving the control zone of the highway and entering an autonomous society of nomadic shepherds that certainly had its own laws and traditions.
In large-family oriented societies, lone travelers are often regarded with suspicion or pity, so I was pleased to have a companion on this adventure. We each provided cover for the other.
We walked past very deliberately and respectfully; we knew we were guests. Just at calling distance from the first yurt, we stopped in unison. Greg looked at me sideways and nodded in approval.
I couldn’t help smiling in anticipation of entering their world. We chatted quietly, waiting for an invitation to come closer.
A yurt is a round nomadic tent; the sidewalls consist of a collapsible, basket-like network of long wooden strips fastened together in a diagonal lattice framework.
To form the ceiling of the yurt, longer sticks radiate from a heavy wooden hoop in the center, all snuggly wrapped in great sheets of cream-colored, felted sheep’s wool about half an inch thick.
Impervious to the elements, like a giant felt hat, the yurt provides year-round comfort. The insulating wool protects the inhabitants from the exceedingly hot and cold seasonal temperatures further north on the Steppe.
In 833 A.D., the celebrated Chinese poet, Bai Juyi, wrote a poem about a yurt he kept in the front courtyard of his mansion:
“The finest felt from a flock of a thousand sheep stretched over a frame shaped like the extended bows of a hundred soldiers.
When the typhoon blows, it does not shake, and when a storm pours it gets even stronger.
The Yurt casts a lonely shadow during nights brilliantly illuminated by the moon, but its value doubles in years when the winter is bitterly cold.”
It was a small settlement of only three yurts, situated to take advantage of what little traffic passed along the long, lonely two-lane track between China and Pakistan over the summer.
We remained a polite distance and after a few minutes a tiny, wind-swept face peered around the edge of the yurt and beckoned to us.
The Yurt
We were ushered into the yurt by a smiling six-year-old girl. Greg could barely squeeze through the oval doorway; the intricately woven summer door-hanging was flung over the outside of the yurt.
A chubby old woman- the child’s grandmother- raised herself from a sleeping position and wiped the corner of her mouth. It was her way of saying “I am sorry I didn’t have time to prepare anything special for you!” I loved her instantly.
The yurt was large but cozy, with wooden boxes and chests of drawers arranged under the eaves of the thick woolen walls, and in front of those, stacked carpets to serve as sofas and mattresses. The central area around the stove was kept clear for shoes, firewood, and other dusty things. We entered and crawled around to the right, to sit on low stacks of carpets.
The Grandmother, presiding on a mound of carpets at the back of the yurt, patted a spot on the rug next to hers. I sat close to her, with my shoes off. Beyond her were foodstuffs and cooking gear for every day and, arranged further around the yurt, were more piles of carpets and a jumble of things organized in cloth sacks.
We were offered yogurt that tasted of wool and cooking smoke.
At last! To experience the authentic yurt life!! After the disappointment of the “display yurt,” with its bones of galvanized pipe, this was a living yurt, with rich tapestries everywhere. There were thick, comfortable stacks of carpets, perhaps for sale to passing truck drivers, to sit on. I saw narrow, handwoven yurt bands in red and black, snaking behind the wooden framework of the yurt, and tassels hanging from the ceiling.
I marveled that such a thin network of wooden strips, arranged in a diamond network could hold up all the thick felted walls, tapestries, and the roof, with its heavy central wheel of wood.
This was a rare opportunity to look back in time and witness the millenniums-old yurt culture. The perfect vehicle for following herds of sheep and goats throughout the seasons, it could withstand the vicious winters of minus 30°on the Eastern Eurasian steppe and stay cool in equally brutal summer conditions. We were considerably south of the worst weather, but this was the same dwelling that had been used since before history.
I was barely aware of my surroundings. I didn’t know which culture I was observing, Kazak, Kyrgyz, or Tajik. Disoriented, I depended on the Grandmother to lead me through the experience. I was completely enchanted with her.
I finished my yogurt and Greg offered me his. I found that, unlike mine, his yogurt had been sweetened with sugar. Perhaps they knew more about us than we had imagined!
Gift Exchange
I’d carried two gifts from America: a pair of beautiful low, white cowboy boots and a pair of colorful felted mittens.
The mittens were oversized and crafty, felted of bright, non-matching roving colors on the thumbs and body, with giant coconut fiber buttons on the cuffs. I hoped they might be useful in winter, and perhaps inspire a textile conversation. The Grandmother looked at them politely, but I am sure the design could have been much improved by a Kyrgyz artisan.
The Grandmother presented me with a 15-inch scrap of black wool army blanket, with red and hot pink chain-linked wool embroidery in the traditional Kazak motif, the goat’s horns. With some agitation, the wool embroidery would felt together with the wool blanket, but for now, it was beautifully embroidered.
I keep it on a large pillow and use it to look back in time, to the yurt and the Grandmother’s hospitality.
The entire visit took place in pantomime and lasted 30 minutes. The smiling red-cheeked girl removed my red cap of wool herringbone and exchanged it with a red polyester trucker’s cap. I should have let her keep it, but I needed it to stay warm on the rest of my journey!
I gave away my presents, smashed from my suitcase, but paid for the textiles and baubles the Grandmother presented to me. Finally, my pockets were empty, and Greg’s crossed ankles had started to hurt. It was time to go back to the bus, and I reluctantly began to say good bye to them.
I wanted a picture with the Grandmother, so I draped myself around her and tickled her under the chin until she smiled for Greg to take a snapshot. I should have abandoned the bus tour and spent the summer with her, but my mother was waiting in a hotel on the other side of the pass.
Next in the series (same trip):
Lost passport, how we got back after the tour had to leave without us. Cause I ate the wrong thing and got sick.
The solar eclipse: ecstatic, then sad and angry when it ended.
Using a taxi to catch up to the tour and Ma being carried up the mt on a man’s back.
Early morning tai chi sessions, the darkened cafe, shopping for obscure things, market place forays
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