The Emperor Far Away (8 page)

4

The Great Game Again

Leaving Almaty proved far harder than I had anticipated. A public holiday resulted in Kazakhstan’s borders being closed for three days. Instead of moving on, I found myself in Astana Square listening to a concert of Beatles songs being performed in honour of Constitution Day. ‘Come Together’ was turned into a heavy-metal anthem, while the British ambassador, in what was clearly above and beyond the call of diplomatic duty, did a passable version of ‘In My Life’, accompanying himself on piano.

I plotted my escape over cold herring and numerous vodkas in the company of Almaty’s tiny community of foreign journalists. My plan was to head west to Kyrgyzstan, just a few hours’ drive away. From Bishkek, the capital, I would turn south-east and make my way down to the border with Xinjiang. Then I could travel across Xinjiang’s Kyrgyz autonomous prefecture to Kashgar, where my China adventure had begun back in 1988.

First, though, I needed a Kyrgyz visa. Again, my timing was bad. I was told it was Kyrgyzstan’s turn to be celebrating a national holiday soon, and that the Kyrgyz consulate would be shut for days. But it has a reputation for being hopelessly corrupt, so early one morning I joined the queue outside hoping I could persuade the consul to give me an express visa before the consulate closed down for the holiday.

Three other westerners stood in line. Alicia, Philippa and Sebastian were in their early twenties and on a fifteen-country odyssey around Asia and Africa making a documentary about camel milk. They enthused about its potential to lift nomadic communities out of poverty, and cure everything from anaemia to tuberculosis. ‘Camel milk is the new oil,’ Alicia said. ‘It’s only a matter of time before the rest of the world finds out about it and tries to get a piece of the action.’

True or not, and I had my doubts, I was impressed by the way the trio operated. Alicia was American and arty, responsible for the vision of their film and for shooting it. The well-spoken and pretty Philippa hailed from Shrewsbury in England and was the practical one who arranged their schedule, while Sebastian, a gregarious, bearded Swede, had a gift for getting people to talk. Together, their different personalities seemed to fuse, turning them into a formidable and determined three-headed unit.

They travelled in a way that was alien to me, utilising social media for almost all their needs. The budget for their documentary had been raised by crowd-funding, where individuals pledge small amounts of money via the internet. They spurned hotels, couch-surfing their way around the world and using Twitter to find contacts and helpers in each country they arrived in. Facebook and a blog enabled them to provide daily updates to their followers. Compared to their wired journey, I felt like a Victorian traveller setting off into the interior armed only with a pen and paper.

After three hours, I arrived at the front of the queue and came face to face with the Kyrgyz consul, an unhappy-looking middle-aged man. My request for a same-day visa was greeted with a flat
nyet
. It would take him five days to issue an express one. I told him I needed to be in Bishkek the next day. He shrugged. I offered to pay extra to get the visa today. ‘500 tenge,’ was the reply. I handed over the money, about £20, the visa fee and my passport. He slapped a sticker in it which said ‘Kyrgyz Republic’, scribbled my passport number on it and handed it back.

By lunchtime the next day I was in Bishkek, after another high-speed drive through endless grasslands, where goats and sheep grazed, that ran towards the mountains in the far distance. Along the way, I asked the Kazakh driver if Bishkek was nice. ‘No,’ he replied. At passport control on the Kazakh side of the frontier, the official paused before stamping me out of the country and asked me if I was sure I wanted to leave.

I was beginning to detect a theme. As we drove into Bishkek’s eastern suburbs, bouncing down crumbling roads lined with decaying apartment blocks and swerving past cars dating back to the time of Gorbachev and
glasnost
, I wondered if I was in the right place. ‘It doesn’t look like the capital, does it?’ said the driver. Even in the centre of town, only a few statues and a couple of forlorn squares offer a clue that this is Kyrgyzstan’s first city.

Bishkek never managed to dispel my first impressions of it as an extended, unlit sink council estate. It is small and undeveloped, a city of corner shops and kiosks, with far fewer ethnic Russians than Almaty. At night, much of it becomes an open-air pub. Groups of men in the tracksuits which have supplanted traditional nomad garb as the national dress in urban areas gather to swig vodka in parks and squares, or wherever there is space to sit. Anyone unable to afford the £1.50 needed to buy a bottle can slake their thirst with a 10p shot of firewater at a street stall.

Getting drunk is what many people do in Bishkek. But there are different ways of achieving oblivion. So while the poorer locals drink outside, richer residents can imbibe in a handful of bars that charge western prices. They exist primarily to fuel the US Air Force personnel based at Manas, Bishkek’s airport. Since 9/11 and the NATO intervention in Afghanistan, Manas has become a gateway for the men and supplies needed to combat radical Islam in the region.

Both Kyrgyzstan’s former masters in Moscow, who also maintain military bases in the country, and the Chinese are disturbed by the US presence in Bishkek. The fact that there are significant numbers of American soldiers in two countries bordering China – Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan – only reinforces the paranoia that is deeply embedded in the CCP’s psyche. Ever since the former colonial powers forcibly established mini-colonies in ports like Hong Kong and Shanghai in the nineteenth century, Beijing has been wary of any foreign activity close to its frontiers, seeing it as a potential prelude to another attempt to carve up the Middle Kingdom.

But the ’stans of central Asia have always been a crossroads of conflict, an area where major powers tussle for power and influence. In the nineteenth century, they were one of the battlegrounds for what Kipling called ‘The Great Game’, the tug of war between the British and Russian empires for control of the region and so of India. The game had reached into Xinjiang, and now history is repeating itself. This time around, it is a three-sided fight, with the combatants being the US, Russia and China. The prizes are the oil, natural gas and minerals the ’stans hold.

Sandwiched between Russia and China, and with Washington offering much-needed cash in return for access to Bishkek’s airport, Kyrgyzstan is not much more than a pawn in the battle for central Asia. It is mineral-rich but mountainous, making access to those precious metals difficult. Nor does it have the huge reserves of oil and natural gas that enable Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to bargain effectively with the new Great Game players.

Kyrgyzstan is also more unstable than its neighbours, principally because relations between the different ethnic groups are far from harmonious. The small Uighur and Hui communities complain of Kyrgyz discrimination against them, as do the ethnic Russians. In the months before I arrived, the country had teetered on the edge of civil war with anti-government protests in Bishkek. There were also violent clashes close to the border with Xinjiang between the Kyrgyz and ethnic Uzbeks, who are the majority in the south of the country.

Militant Muslim groups are rumoured to operate there, including the remnants of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, an organisation which fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan and has recruited a few Uighur fighters in the past. That alone is enough reason for China to seal its frontiers with Kyrgyzstan whenever trouble breaks out. When I arrived, the border crossing near Osh, the country’s second city and home to most of the ethnic Uzbeks, was still shut following the fighting in the south.

That left only the border post at the Torugart Pass, a sliver of land sitting high in the Tian Shan Mountains. All frontiers in central Asia open and close on the whims of officials who live far from them and who never have to use them. The Torugart Pass crossing is more unpredictable than most. It is officially open for Chinese and Kyrgyz citizens only, unless you have a permit and onward transport on the Xinjiang side of the frontier arranged in advance.

A local travel agency told me they could arrange the papers and a car to get me to Kashgar once I was across the border. But it would take them a few days. Unwilling to stay on in unlovely Bishkek, I arranged for the permit to be delivered to the small town of Naryn, which lies on the route to Xinjiang, where I had been told I could easily arrange a ride to the frontier.

Rural Kyrgyzstan’s peaks and alpine lakes are a delight after Bishkek. The road to Naryn twists through the Khrebet Kara Katta Mountains, one of a string of ranges that criss-cross the country. We followed a river that sparkled in the sun, travelling as high as 3,000 metres across lush green hills where men wearing
kalpaks
– the patterned felt hats with high crowns and turned-up brims that are Kyrgyzstan’s national headgear – rode horses beside flocks of sheep.

Above them, eagles with wings spread wide floated on the thermals searching for stray lambs to pounce on. In the winter, wolves come down from the mountains to hunt, according to one of the other passengers in my shared taxi. There were yurts scattered across the grassland, as well as antique-looking mobile homes mounted on car tyres, outside which women in headscarves cooked on open fires and dogs lazed.

The road was peppered with gaping holes, but the driver didn’t let that slow him down. Instead, we careered across its whole width in the quest for the fastest passage. His car was a typical, beaten-up central Asian taxi: cracked windscreen, non-functioning dials on the dashboard, worn tyres and doors that could be opened only from the outside. Shared taxis have taken the place of public transport in Kyrgyzstan; all the bus terminals I saw were derelict shells of buildings that served only as meeting points to find a ride in a private car.

Naryn is no more than a staging post, an extended village strung along a road at the bottom of a mountain valley. I stayed with one of the many families who rent out rooms in their homes. They lived in a low-rise Soviet-era apartment block with a corrugated-iron roof and walls covered in sickly yellow pebbledash. There were precarious balconies that looked like they were about to fall off and rotten wooden windows, but the bed was surprisingly comfortable and the breakfast of cheese, ham and fresh bread the best I ate in Kyrgyzstan.

From Naryn, I headed further south to Tash Rabat, an old Silk Road caravanserai said to date back to the tenth century. It is more of a fort than an inn: a grey stone edifice partially sunk into the steep hillside of a valley. The gates were chained shut but I clambered on to the roof, still riddled with the holes that allowed the smoke from the fires of the travellers and merchants to escape.

Yurts are the only accommodation option now. As the sun sank, I realised it was going to be an uncomfortable night. Tash Rabat is 3,000 metres high, and it was the beginning of September and already nippy in the early evening. Hazira, who rented me a bed, agreed. ‘It’s too cold to be sleeping in a yurt,’ she said as we sat in her warm mobile home drinking black tea. ‘I’ll be closing for the winter next week and moving into my house.’ She was right; not even the stove fired by cow dung that Hazira lit could keep me warm in the early hours.

Scraping the ice off the car’s windscreen, we left at first light, driving past trucks so overloaded with hay it bulged far over their sides, as if the vehicles had been given Afro haircuts. Further on, the road to the border was being rebuilt by Chinese migrant workers. They were small-time players in the new Great Game, filling in potholes in the middle of nowhere, but still part of it. Repairing roads is an easy, cheap way for China to win friends among the locals, while trucks from the motherland will rumble down the refurbished highway with goods to sell.

Their foreman was from Heilongjiang in China’s far north-east and was first puzzled then pleased to be hearing a foreigner speaking his language. With the Torugart Pass getting closer, I was increasingly anxious about whether my door back into Xinjiang had been slammed shut because of some event I had no knowledge of. I asked the foreman if the border was open. He nodded and said, ‘
Mei wenti
’ – no problem.

As we climbed higher into the Tian Shan Mountains, the peaks became craggier and some were topped with snow. We ran past a lake of glistening, deep-blue water. The border fence appeared on the right-hand side of the road and soon a line of trucks with Chinese characters emblazoned on them. Kyrgyz passport control was an unheated shed. Then it was a short, steep climb around the final few tight bends up to 3,700 metres and the Torugart Pass itself.

An iron pole lowered across the road separated Kyrgyzstan from China. Smoking and dozing in the car, I waited a couple of hours for my pick-up to arrive from Kashgar. It came in the shape of two smiling Uighurs in a Toyota. The pole was raised and I was back in the Middle Kingdom, descending swiftly into red sandstone hills and Xinjiang’s Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Region.

Only the fact that we had exchanged mountain pasture for a more austere, desert-like landscape gave me a clue I was back in Xinjiang. The villages closest to the border are all Kyrgyz, with the men wearing the same
kalpak
hats I saw in rural Kyrgyzstan. Like the majority of their cousins across the border, few of China’s 160,000 ethnic Kyrgyz are still nomads. They have abandoned their yurts for mudbrick houses and life as farmers, although they remain known for their prowess on horseback.