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JOHN DEF;RANCIS In the Footsteps of Genghis Khan I JOHN DEFRANCIS @ A KOLOWALU BOOK UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII PRESS HONOLULU @ 1993 University of Hawaii Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 98 97 96 95 94 93 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-PublicationD ata DeFrancis, John, 191 1- In the footsteps of Genghis Khan / John DeFrancis. p. cm. "A Kolowalu Book." ISBN 0-8248-1493-2 (alk. paper) 1. Inner Mongolia (China)-Description and travel. 2. Kansu Province (China)-Description and travel. I. Title. DS793.M7D37 1993 951I.77-dc20 92-36542 CIP Designed by Kenneth Miyamoto University of Hawaii Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources FOR CAMELEER ZHOU and even CAMELEER XIAO and MANAGER GUO and ADMIRAL CHEN and of course MARTIN and GEORG and TORGNY and especially KAY Contents Acknowledgments ix 1 You Can't Do That Anymore I 2 Martin and the Ides of May 8 3 The City "Returned to Civilization" 21 4 By Bedbug to Larkland 35 5 The Temple of the Larks 45 6 The Swedish Connection 62 7 My Namesake, Prince Virtue 71 8 A Day in the Life of a Desert Traveler 80 9 A Desert Diner's Guide 93 10 From Grassland to Gobi 104 1 1 How the West Was Lost 118 12 Tales of Cameleer Zhou 128 1 3 Camelo t Peachy and 0 ther Bactrians 13 7 14 Death Row in the Desert 145 15 The Mongols That Time Passed By 157 16 The Torgut Diaspora 168 17 The River That Died of Thirst 181 18 Marco Polo's Lost City of Etsina 196 19 Prisoners of Warlord Little Big Horse 21 1 20 Where the Great Wall Ends 228 2 1 Trucking along the Old Silk Road 242 22 By Titanic II Down "China's Sorrow" 258 23 "Two Flat-footed Fools" 2 78 Maps Route of Travel 3 The Torgut Diaspora 170 The River That Died of Thirst 183 EtsinaIKhara KhotoIBlack City 205 Where the Great Wall Ends 234 The Silk Road through the Gansu Corridor 243 By Titanic II Down the Yellow River 260 Act nowledgments All the photographs of the travels narrated in this book were taken by H. Desmond Martin. Unfortunately, neither he nor I thought to include him among the subjects to be photographed. As a result, the only photographic record of his participation in the journey is his shadow in the picture he took of the Xinjiang caravan in chapter 10. The drawings in this book were made by Myra Taketa, a multitalented secretary in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Hawaii, whose sunny disposition increased the pleasure of our collaboration in the production of these light sketches. 1 / yOu Can't Do That Anymore We dodged warring armies by stealing twelve hundred miles down the bandit-infested Yellow River on an inflated sheepskin raft. You can't do that anymore. You can't repeat our thousand-mile camel trek across the Gobi Desert in the footsteps of Genghis Khan. You can't sit at a camel-dung campfire in the very heart of that huge desert and listen to a Mongol narrate how the Great Khan was castrated by a captured Tangut beauty he tried to take to bed. Neither can you visit the oasis, then one of the most remote places in the world, where we met a Mongol princess descended from survivors of the most horrendous mass migration in human history. Nor can you barge into the preserve of a churlish Muslim warlord and become a prisoner in his fortress town. There's lots more we did then that you can't do anymore, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, many areas of China that challenged the adven- turesome in the good old bad old days were declared off-limits more than a half-century ago. Since then, the barriers have been removed (though sometimes replaced) in most of the country, including even Tibet, but not in the heart of the Gobi Desert, not in sensitive border areas, which have become even more inaccessible today than they were then. In recent years quite a few tourists have gotten to the fringes of that forbidden expanse. I have joined them, in my mind's eye, like a starveling out of Dickens gazing hollow-eyed into a bakeshop window. But even though the view from the outside is now obscured, it is still possible, for a discerning eye, to make out something of the veiled interior. It's easy enough to get to a few vantage points where you can try to