Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [125]
Suddenly, the driver veered back toward the paved road, and as we returned to it I felt true relief. What was that about? I wondered. I looked behind us. Of course. It was perfectly clear. We had taken a detour around the tollbooth.
I was let off before the entrance to the Mogao Caves, and the driver indicated that he was amenable to waiting for me until I’d finished. I explained, in that curious way one does when you can’t speak the local language, that I might be a while. He shrugged and indicated that he didn’t have anything better to do. It’s a desert. Not a lot of passengers here. And he had a laowai here who thought he was very cunning with his bargaining, but really, it’s like taking candy from a child. So he’d stay.
I paid the entrance fee and was pleased to find an English-speaking guide, who led me on a path through a small canyon. In its walls, hundreds of caves had been carved. They are known as the Thousand Buddha Caves, and inside the grottoes monks had painted vast murals and carved hundreds of stucco sculptures to encourage meditation and enlightenment. Many of the frescoes had been financed by Silk Road merchants. The Mogao Caves lie at the very edge of the Silk Road’s most daunting challenge—the desert crossing—and travelers either expressed their gratitude for completing the journey or their hopes for making it across by paying for lavish testimonies to their devotion. For the sake of preservation, all the caves are now sealed and only a few are opened each day for visitors.
“This secret library cave,” informed my guide, a young woman not entirely in command of the English language.
“There were thousands very holy manuscripts. English people steal them.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes. In 1900, they trick monk and steal manuscripts. And you see those Buddhas without faces? Muslim people deface the Buddhas in 1920.”
There were more scratched-out faces in other caves. “It’s a shame, isn’t it?” I said. “Why can’t we all just get along? Muslims and Buddhists, Christians and Jews. Live and let live, don’t you think?”
“I know not what you say,” she said perfunctorily. I got the feeling that she’d memorized a script and any deviation from it would prove troubling to her. Frankly, I understood little of what she said and just nodded thoughtfully as she explained the story behind the immense hundred-foot-tall Buddha in the largest cave in a language known only to herself. We passed an open grotto with a sign that declared that under no circumstances should one think of entering, so I entered to find men with brushes working on a faded mural of a divine bodhisattva. Was this restoration or re-creation? It can be so hard to tell in China, and I wanted to explore this point with my guide, who had yanked me back, but her answers were insensible to my ears. But here and there, as I followed her from cave to cave, I’d pick something up though the incomprehensible din.
“In 1924, Americans take the statue. Now at Hoffhod University.”
“I’m sorry. Where?”
“Hoffhod University.”
“Ah. Harvard University.”
“Yes. Hoffhod.”
I was completely sympathetic to the difficulties many Chinese have with that pesky r, as I could not fathom getting my mouth around the vast majority of Chinese sounds.
“Chinese people very angry. It is our cultural heritage. Many things stolen from Mogao Caves.”
She did have a point. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Western archaeologists had plundered the world, filling up the museums and libraries of Europe and America with international treasures. But, of course, China had had its own little Cultural Revolution—Destroy Old Culture!—so much of China’s cultural legacy had been sadly destroyed by the Chinese themselves.
“Cultural Revolution finished now,” my guide noted when I made the point.
Very true.
One of the appealing things about being in a small