The City Itself
I first saw the word Dunhuang, many years ago, at an exhibition in the British Museum in London. The museum has approximately 15,000 items from this Chinese city in its collection, and most likely all of them were whisked out of China during the United Kingdom’s empire-building adventures of the 19th century. Most of them came from Dunhuang’s caves, which house some of the world’s largest statues of Buddha (see Mogao Caves below). The city’s name stuck with me amid a whirl of fantastic stories of the legendary Silk Road, on which it lies. This is the 5,000-mile Silk Road of Marco Polo; the Syrian Assassins (where the word “hashish” comes from, by the way) loyal to the Old Man of the Mountains; the great trading cities of Bukhara, Tashkent and Samarkand; the great Arabic university cities of Baghdad and Damascus; The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night (as it is correctly known as) by mad, bad, multilingual Richard Burton; and the terra cotta warriors of Xi’an. Try and go to Dunhuang and not feel part—an infinitesimally minute part—of all that history and folklore, sandwiched as you are between the Chinese provinces of Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, which is predominantly Muslim in culture and religion.

Sand is what you first notice. It creeps into the city’s small but modern airport, fills the eye holes of your shoes before you’ve even got comfortable in your taxi and lies in huge quantities to both sides of the road. At meal times, an occasional grain of it will crack in your teeth, an experience known, no doubt, to anyone eating sandwiches on the beach. To that extent, it is nothing short of miraculous that the streets of Dunhuang, announced by an imperial-style Chinese arch, seem mostly cleared of the stuff. Piles of vegetables, fruits and chilies survive being placed in stands in the market and residents do not need to cover their eyes and mouths with bandanas.

Dunhuang, approximately 1,500 miles west of Beijing, always has been an important stopping-off point for traders on the Silk Road, a place to stock up on provisions, hear the gossip from other traders and receive warnings of the dangers that might lurk ahead. Such places were known as caravanserai. One was needed at Dunhuang perhaps more than at other places for one reason: To the west lay the immense, dry, dangerous Gobi Desert, which is mainly a rocky expanse, rather than a sandy one. Next to the Gobi, and on the traders’ Silk Road route, is a sandy desert, called the Taklamakan. Its name sounds better in the local language, as its loose translation into English is “the desert from which no one returns.” If I saw that on my 13th-century map, I might be persuaded to spend a little more time in Dunhuang, too.

Dunhuang’s airport is nine miles east of the city, and the drive between the two already provides a notion of what the desert looks like. Mostly it is not the desert of Hollywood images of Lawrence of Arabia but an expansive, flat area of nothing—gray-yellow sand and small rocks. Once in a while a low ridge of sandstone cliffs breaks the beautiful monotony.

The first thing a visitor sees on driving beneath Dunhuang’s entrance arch is the 251-room Dunhuang Hotel (www.dunhuanghotel.com/en), which has rooms to both sides of the road and a restaurant and conference space to the left. Upstairs is a theater in which dancing troupes perform regional dances of graceful choreography and synchronized movement. The Chinese restaurant is no different from the vast majority of restaurants in this country—noisy. (I was watching the TV broadcast a game of Ping Pong, which needs no language skills to be understood and followed, so it was a little bit of a mystery to me why a waiter smiled at me and changed channels to a news broadcast in Chinese. Maybe he just didn’t like me?)

A few hundred feet down the road is a statue comprising four camels—of the two-hump Bactrian species that has always lived in the area—that stands in front of the Dunhuang Museum. The museum feels a little institutionalized, but its exhibits are interesting enough, with artifacts chronicling the rise and fall of several Chinese dynasties, the people of which all, despite being forgotten in the mists of time, left evidence of their arrivals. Behind the museum, as the city begins to peter out in a series of dusty side roads, is a small park with another statue, this time of a fierce warrior. Around the park’s edge were Mongolian yurt tents. It looked like a temporary fair had set up shop, but this was not the case. These were homes and food stalls. The largest statue in the city is the one in the middle of its one traffic circle, a huge statue of a Chinese beauty playing a guitar behind her head, sort of like Jim Hendrix used to do, if you will excuse the crass analogy.

My favorite activity in Dunhuang was visiting the market. During the day, Muslim Chinese operate food stalls, while in the evening, things are lit up and stallholders sell an amazingly broad range of relative nontouristy knick-knacks. I found a small pot with a lid that dated to the early 20th century (or at least I was told this by someone at the hotel). They were made for mass consumption, and many (but not mine) depict erotic scenes. I searched all around the market for another example but found no other. The evening market, known as the Shazhou Night Market, stretches the whole length of one street. At one end are stalls selling delicious kebobs of grilled lamb, grapes and a single piece of lamb fat. All is rubbed in chili, and my mouth is watering now just writing about them.

To the Caves
One of the two major tourist sites in Dunhuang is the Mogao Caves, aka The Caves of a Thousand Buddhas. (A popular name, for also I have been to the Temple of One Thousand Buddhas on Kowloon Island, Hong Kong.) The road to them lies in between the city and the airport. The drive there does not look promising, until the car rounds a low bluff. Inside the cliffs are 492 caves with a staggering wealth of Buddhist art covering more than 1,000 years.

It was deemed an UNESCO World Heritage site in 1987. The official UNESCO report that gave it such status included in its pages the following three statements:

1.   “In the desert landscape of the extreme northwest of the province of Gansu, are the cliffs of Mogao, which form the eastern edge of Mount Mingsha. The cliffs rise above the Dachuan River, which is [15 miles] southeast of the Dunhuang oasis. Within the cliffs are the 492 natural cells and rock sanctuaries extending over [5,200 feet] that make up the famous Caves of a Thousand Buddhas (Qianfodong);”
2.   “The group at Mogao, so strongly linked with the history of China, also constitutes an anthology of Buddhist art with paintings and sculptures spanning a period of a thousand years;”
3.   “The paintings at Mogao bear exceptional witness to the civilizations of ancient China during the Sui dynasty (cave no. 302 contains one of the oldest and most vivid renderings of the Silk Route theme; the mural depicts a camel pulling a cart), the Tang dynasty (workers in the fields in cave no. 23 and a line of warriors in cave no. 156) and the Song dynasty (the celebrated landscape of Wutaishan in cave no. 61 is an incunabular example of cartography, with its cavalier view of the region, where nothing has been left out—mountains, rivers, cities, temples, roads and caravans are all depicted).”

Monks worked in near darkness painting intricate scenes of both Buddha’s and their lives, and the detail is amazing. Only about a dozen caves are open to tourists due to conservation efforts, and photography is strictly forbidden (for a better look, visit the wonderfully colorful website of the Friends of Dunhuang, www.friendsofdunhuang.org). It is incredible to conceive of these solitary monks, who started work here before Buddhism was granted religious status in China, painting while sitting on crudely constructed scaffolding inside each cave with only the light from oil-smeared wicks to work by. Some caves are small, others large.

What are most celebrated here are its gigantic Buddhas. It has both the largest indoor standing Buddha and the largest indoor reclining Buddha (both are approximately 120 feet in length). In order to protect the paintings, the rooms are still feebly lit, and the semi-darkness gives to the Buddhas a hulking presence.

Buddhist monks lived here until 1930, although it was a Taoist (Daoist) monk—his name was Wang Yuan-lu, and there is a small exhibition about him at Mogao— who discovered the caves’ most precious treasure, the Diamond Sutras, perhaps the world’s earliest printed document, in 1900. The world’s archeologists and adventurers made a beeline for the place, and through one-sided deals and blatant thievery, much of the caves’ contents now can be seen in European cities. British archeologist Sir Marc Aurel Stein, who died and is buried in Kabul, Afghanistan, comes under particular admonishment from Mogao’s exhibition literature, and Wang himself was subject to much ire over the years for the ease in which he gave cartload after cartload of priceless records away to foreigners.

Dunes that Sing
Dunhuang’s other great attraction is its gigantic Mingsha sand dunes, approximately five miles west of the center of the city. A good hotel is here is the Silk Road Dunhuang Hotel (www.the-silk-road.com/hotel/dunhuanghotel/location.html). The map of Dunhuang on its Website is the best map I could find, and it is pathetic.

For good or bad, visitors are free to clamber over any dune they want here, except for the one that stops a small lake called The Lake of the Crescent Moon (for its shape), to prevent it from getting silted up. Long lines of “clamberers” snake up the dunes’ ridges. The foreigners here almost to the person (myself included) refuse to wear the plastic red garters handed out to protect your footwear from the sand, while Chinese visitors have no scruples concerning this. It is a little comical to see a line of seven or eight red-legged people slowly climbing. After 10 minutes of rigorous exertion it is possible to be on your own. Supposedly when the wind blows gently, the dunes sing. (If the wind blows more than gently, it is advisable not to be out here, or even on the Dunhuang streets. The roads outside the city do on occasion become impassable as a dune decides to encamp on them.) That the dunes sing is what the tourist officials told me, but when I was there all I heard was the whooping of Europeans sliding down the dunes on plastic sleds. Perhaps sleds are the best way down, for even walking leads to a speed in which every step could lead to a mouthful of sand.

The proper name of these dunes is Mingsha Shan, or, in English, Echoing-Sand Mountain, so who am I to doubt its tonal attributes. Camel rides and—probably not so ecologically sound—motorbikes provided alternative means of transport, although neither can get you to the top of individual dunes. In the middle of this area is the 600-foot-long Lake of the Crescent Moon (Yueyaquan in the local dialect), an oasis that does not silt up. The reason for this, it was explained, was that the wind blows from one direction, yet the dunes protecting it are aligned in a different one. Everyone seemed very proud that it had not silted up in 1,000 years (there’s that number again; I assume they mean, in historical memory, but 1,000 just sounds so much more impressive). Beside the lake are small fishponds and crop fields, and more camels.

Out into the Ends of the Earth
In olden times, traders and travelers would stop at Dunhuang and stock up on supplies. They would also learn the gossip and get their travel permits authorized. After administrative duties were completed, everyone had a choice. Go northwest to the Yumenguan Pass or southwest to the Yangguan Pass. Neither was a better choice than the other. To Yumenguan, they would perhaps run into the warlike Hun (all uncivilized hordes to the north were given this name) or fry in the desert; go to Yangguan and they would perhaps come across cutthroat bandits or freeze in the mountains.

The drive to Yumenguan takes time, even though it is only 60 miles from Dunhuang, but the scenery is hypnotic. Several hours will pass as you make your away over flat sand, with only the occasional building (for shepherds?) to break the horizon. At the pass is the Hecang Tower, built by the Han Dynasty. It is crumbling but still stands, and in front of it is a thick trickle of a river that feeds a small marsh of grass and low scrub. A Hen harrier flew over when I sat by it. Also here are the farthest western reaches of the Great Wall of China, but a section of it built by an earlier dynasty than that which built the more famous stretches close to Beijing. The Great Wall of China here is no more than 10 feet high, and it is broken into small patches, rather than being one continuous structure. The strands of hay that poked out of the ground fascinated me. These, too, were parts of the wall, although the specific pieces had crumbled and blown away almost to nothing.

Beyond this the traveler really is in a land of no return. I continued over the rutted road, swerving off it if the desert was firmer and smoother than the road, which often was the case. I crossed the Bei Shan Mountains. The next thing to see is a plain of desert dotted with curiously shaped rocks that local tourism officials have gone to some extent to pretend they resemble animals.

Here is a conversation I had:

Official: “This one looks like a peacock.”
Me: “It does?”
Official: “And this one looks like a lion.”
Me: “A little, I guess.”
Official: “Yes. Enjoy them all.”

I would rather make my own mind as to what they were shaped like, or not to have to consider that at all. It was a beautiful spot, with huge rock outcrops popping out of the smooth sand. This is the Sanlongsha Yardan Geopark, and it is spectacular for its quietness and solitude. It also has what must be the World’s Loneliest Restroom. Ten miles back at the visitor center is a small museum and a restaurant. This is where the photo of the TV watcher in the slide slow (see link above) was sitting. The visitor’s center is low to the ground and resembles the low sandstone bluffs of the area, which is all well and good, but behind this is a 300-foot-high telephone and TV transmitter.

The bus that took me to Sanlongsha Yardan stopped a mile and a half short of the provincial border of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous region. This is the home of the Uigüir people, Muslim Chinese, who are occasionally a thorn in the side of the Chinese government. Travelers need additional visas to enter, although there are tour groups who take regular groups of travelers there, visiting the towns of Urümqi, the province’s capital, and Kashgar. I met a few people who had come from Kashgar, and they told me that it was like stepping back into the Middle Ages, a place that still has blacksmiths and leather tanners. Groups also visit the Kum Tagh Sand Dunes, in which still roam wild camels and Tibetan asses.

To reach the other pass, Yangguan, you have to go back to the junction that leads to Dunhuang and then, instead of going back to Dunhuang, drive in the other direction. The pass contains a larger fort than does Yumenguan, perhaps because it has been restored and now contains a large museum. A very polite intern conducted me around the museum, which gives an overview of the history of the site. At every exhibit—every exhibit—she preceded her explanation with “And now, valued visitor, I draw your attention to…” It was annoying at first, bearable later and very amusing by the time we finished 45 minutes later. (Just be warned, if this might not be to your liking.) She then led me outside and up to the guard tower and wall that looked little different to what travelers 600 years ago would have seen. This is the end of the Great Wall of China. A huge mound of earth, which was in fact mainly comprised of broken tiles dumped over hundreds of year, was pointed out. It was no huge leap of the imagination to picture trails of camels and wagons disappearing into the distance.

Very surprising to me was the existence of a grape-growing region between the two passes, the vine finding a way to grow in the middle of the desert. A little wine is produced (not as much as in the town of Turpan, farther to the west), but mainly the grapes’ use is restricted to raisins.