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By Root 1273 0

a calm place. I checked into a hotel and walked outside in the late-afternoon light to have a gander. The architecture was utterly unremarkable, but there was a pleasant small-town vibe, a congenial unhurriedness. It was the first place I’d seen in China where drivers didn’t sit on their horns. No one troubled me here. It was, dare I say it, laid-back. And nothing is laid-back in China. Dunhuang is also very mixed in its population. This is where China abuts into Central Asia. Though predominantly Han Chinese, there were also Uyghurs in Dunhuang, Muslims wearing their distinctive white hats. I made my way through a street that was setting up for the night market, past stalls selling books, ornaments, a little bit of everything, and settled at a table in front of a restaurant. Across the way there was a hairdresser’s shop with heavily made-up hairdressers idling at the door, waving and beckoning me toward them as they stood and flitted in their tight-fitting, clingy clothes. Messagee! Even here? I wondered. In Dunhuang? This town, this little eensie-weenie teeny town on the edge of the desert? Jesus, I thought. It’s startling the degree to which prostitution exists in China.

Before me, a friendly Muslim waiter set down a bowl of noodles with meat. I had pointed to it moments earlier and he’d cooked it up in a hotpot. It was good, a little gamey perhaps, and I opened up my guidebook since I didn’t have anything else to read, and soon learned that the local specialty in Dunhuang is luruo huang mian, or donkey meat with noodles. Super, I thought. I’m eating an ass. That’s all right, I reflected. For years, I’d been eating horse meat, a fact discerned only much, much later when Sylvia had accompanied me on a trip to Holland and, at my uncle and aunt’s home in Brummen in rural Gelderland, she’d inquired what precisely was that curious-looking cold cut I’d just used to make a sandwich. Horse, she’d been told, whereupon I coughed and hacked and choked on my sandwich as my uncle explained that for dinner that evening we’d be having the hare he’d run over the previous day. They’re good salt-of-the-earth people, my family in Holland, and I will not hear another word about how boring Dutch cuisine is. Indeed, it prepared me for China. If I could eat roadkill in Holland, I could certainly eat an ass here.

The Mogao Caves lie somewhere in the Hexi Corridor, once the only path between China and the West. Not far away is the Gilian Shan range, a solid wall of mountains that shoot out of the desert. Beginning in the fourth century and spanning more than a thousand years, worshipers of Buddhism filled the 492 grottoes of Mogao with art and thousands of ancient manuscripts. Once trade along the Silk Road collapsed along with the Yuan Dynasty, however, the grottos and caves lay forgotten until the early twentieth century, when Europeans began to hear rumors of their existence and they hopped over to explore and plunder, because that is what they did.

The Mogao Caves are not far from Dunhuang, and I hailed a taxi with a driver babbling on his cell phone as he drove me to a corner on the outskirts of town, where another taxi idled along the curb. The driver indicated that I should depart his taxi and hop in that one. Perplexed, I did as he asked, whereupon the pockmarked driver began to yell into his cell phone. They are not silent people, the Chinese, and I paid no mind as we passed the last cotton fields and followed the paved road through a barren desert of sand and stones.

Suddenly, the driver veered off the paved road to follow a deeply rutted gully. And why are we doing this? I wondered. Not for the first time, I wished I spoke Chinese. What’s he saying on that cell phone?

I have the foreigner. Now give me my money.

I was beginning to grow concerned, because earlier I had seen the turn-off to the Mogao Caves. And this wasn’t it. We went farther into the desert. We passed a dead dog rotting in the sun. The driver continued to yell into his phone.

I’m nearly there. Bring the gun.

A surprising number of Westerners do get themselves