In the footsteps of Genghis Khan

295 Pages·1993·26.1 MB·English

by  DeFrancis, John, 1911-2009

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