conceived. The last things are in his hands. At some unknown time–in ten thousand, a hundred thousand years–he will be reborn on earth to redeem all living beings.
But like the messiahs of another culture, he spawned sedition.Peasant rebellions arose in his name, under leaders claiming to be the Maitreya reincarnate: men with fallible desires, and too-mortal destinies. In Tang times, it seems, this dangerous Indian deity was suppressed, to reappear centuries later as a fully Chinese domesticated godling: a fat, laughing hedonist swarming with little children. This ‘Laughing Buddha’ embodies a worldly ideal: a full stomach and many progeny. He squats in the doors of Chinese temples, and is the bane of curio shops. Here only the Tibetans remember the promise of his austere ancestor.
Beneath the temple the pilgrims at last clamber to their feet, sheathed in dust, and dare to gaze up at the Maitreya. Still standing, I feel nervously profane. But I see swathes of silk falling from golden shoulders and the coil of gold dragons on his crown. Behind him blossoms a mandorla of luminous intricacy, and eight Bodhisattvas circle the hall around him. Then the doors clang shut and the image is gone.
4
The Last Gate Under Heaven
In the long Gansu corridor, curving to the end of the Great Wall, the air hung dim with the dust of the Gobi. Aeons ago the wind-borne loam had layered itself beneath the mountains in putty-coloured scarps, combed into vertical furrows and gashed by gullies. To the west the Qilian ranges, rising toward the plateaux of Tibet, glimmered through the haze in flanks of sallow stone.
Down this desolation glided a new highway. Eighteen years ago I had laboured this way in fierce cold on a train packed with Hui farmers. Now a sleek bus moved through the wilderness, and I sat among unkempt commercial travellers bellowing into mobile phones, while a conductress served mugs of hot water, and a kung fu film fluttered across a television overhead.
For millennia this passageway to central Asia had drawn nomadic tribes south-eastward into China’s heart, and funnelled merchants and armies the other way. It was chronically restless. In the nineteenth century the rebellious Hui, rising under Muslim banners, had been decimated by Chinese arms and hunger. The villages still looked poor and half populated under that colourless sky. Even their tiled roofs vanished; they became mud squares and rectangles, which crumbled like biscuit. Auburn mules tugged their ploughs through the dust.
For two hundred miles we pounded between derelict fields and gravel flood-beds, while on one side the hills flattened to desert and on the other the mountains lit up with snow and gleamed before us in a long, jagged blade of dimming light. I disembarked on to the empty highway, in a valley whose ends had blurred away, thenstarted along an embankment toward a town two miles across the fields. I had no idea what Yongchang was like: it had caught my curiosity for strange reasons. For all I knew it was off-limits to foreigners.
There was no one to be seen at first. Then beneath me I noticed a middle-aged peasant lying with his back propped against the dyke, masturbating. I went past in quiet some twenty yards behind and above him. I wondered what he was dreaming, or if he was dreaming at all: of the village beauty, perhaps, or a blonde fantasy from one of the porn movies that circulate in secret; or perhaps he was remembering his wife. But I went by fast, silently laughing a little, my feet noiseless on the track above, and did not look back.
An hour later I entered a neat country town, prospering mysteriously in the bleakness. People crossed the street to stare at me. Others burst out ‘Foreigner!’ in open shock. In my small hotel the Soviet system survived–of a guardian with keys on each floor; but mine was young and distracted, and kept peeping down from her window into the local secondary school, where the little emperors were playing
But like the messiahs of another culture, he spawned sedition.Peasant rebellions arose in his name, under leaders claiming to be the Maitreya reincarnate: men with fallible desires, and too-mortal destinies. In Tang times, it seems, this dangerous Indian deity was suppressed, to reappear centuries later as a fully Chinese domesticated godling: a fat, laughing hedonist swarming with little children. This ‘Laughing Buddha’ embodies a worldly ideal: a full stomach and many progeny. He squats in the doors of Chinese temples, and is the bane of curio shops. Here only the Tibetans remember the promise of his austere ancestor.
Beneath the temple the pilgrims at last clamber to their feet, sheathed in dust, and dare to gaze up at the Maitreya. Still standing, I feel nervously profane. But I see swathes of silk falling from golden shoulders and the coil of gold dragons on his crown. Behind him blossoms a mandorla of luminous intricacy, and eight Bodhisattvas circle the hall around him. Then the doors clang shut and the image is gone.
4
The Last Gate Under Heaven
In the long Gansu corridor, curving to the end of the Great Wall, the air hung dim with the dust of the Gobi. Aeons ago the wind-borne loam had layered itself beneath the mountains in putty-coloured scarps, combed into vertical furrows and gashed by gullies. To the west the Qilian ranges, rising toward the plateaux of Tibet, glimmered through the haze in flanks of sallow stone.
Down this desolation glided a new highway. Eighteen years ago I had laboured this way in fierce cold on a train packed with Hui farmers. Now a sleek bus moved through the wilderness, and I sat among unkempt commercial travellers bellowing into mobile phones, while a conductress served mugs of hot water, and a kung fu film fluttered across a television overhead.
For millennia this passageway to central Asia had drawn nomadic tribes south-eastward into China’s heart, and funnelled merchants and armies the other way. It was chronically restless. In the nineteenth century the rebellious Hui, rising under Muslim banners, had been decimated by Chinese arms and hunger. The villages still looked poor and half populated under that colourless sky. Even their tiled roofs vanished; they became mud squares and rectangles, which crumbled like biscuit. Auburn mules tugged their ploughs through the dust.
For two hundred miles we pounded between derelict fields and gravel flood-beds, while on one side the hills flattened to desert and on the other the mountains lit up with snow and gleamed before us in a long, jagged blade of dimming light. I disembarked on to the empty highway, in a valley whose ends had blurred away, thenstarted along an embankment toward a town two miles across the fields. I had no idea what Yongchang was like: it had caught my curiosity for strange reasons. For all I knew it was off-limits to foreigners.
There was no one to be seen at first. Then beneath me I noticed a middle-aged peasant lying with his back propped against the dyke, masturbating. I went past in quiet some twenty yards behind and above him. I wondered what he was dreaming, or if he was dreaming at all: of the village beauty, perhaps, or a blonde fantasy from one of the porn movies that circulate in secret; or perhaps he was remembering his wife. But I went by fast, silently laughing a little, my feet noiseless on the track above, and did not look back.
An hour later I entered a neat country town, prospering mysteriously in the bleakness. People crossed the street to stare at me. Others burst out ‘Foreigner!’ in open shock. In my small hotel the Soviet system survived–of a guardian with keys on each floor; but mine was young and distracted, and kept peeping down from her window into the local secondary school, where the little emperors were playing
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