Dr. Jack Wheeler
October 30, 2008
Charklik, Chinese Turkestan. Since I was a young boy with dreams of exploring the world, the essence of remote mystery was summed up by the innermost heart of Asia called Chinese Turkestan.
What defines the region is one of the world's great deserts, an ocean of sand the size of France yet so empty and vast it has been known for many centuries as The Takla Makan (tah-kla mah-con), meaning, "If you go in, you don't come out." The Desert of Death.
Thus the fabled Silk Road split in two to go around it to the north or the south. In 1273, Marco Polo took the south.
What I as a young boy fifty years ago most dreamed of doing was following the route of Marco Polo through Chinese Turkestan, to those lost and forgotten oases of the Southern Silk Road that hardly anyone in the world knew about much less had been to, with the magical names of Yarkand, Khotan, Charchan, and Charklik.
For all but the last few of those fifty years the Southern Silk Road was completely off-limits to foreigners, and the road itself a thousand mile-long four-wheel track of mud and sand. Now it's open, the road is paved, and here I am, having traversed Polo's route from Kashgar to Charklik.
I was expecting an ultimate in the exotic and remote, for things to have changed little since Polo's day. In some ways that's what I found. But for others, I am in a state of shock. What I have found here astounds me, and I thought I'd share it with you.
For after all, Chinese Turkestan, or Xinjiang as Beijing calls it, is Moslem China. The native inhabitants, whose homeland this has been for millennia, are Turkic, not Chinese. Culturally, ethnically, and historically, this place is not Chinese. But in reality - and reality is what counts - this is China. Of that there is no doubt, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
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