Gansu Province yields a fascinating glimpse into how life was lived
As our coach trundled steadily along a provincial highway, a shimmering red dot in the distance was the only car that had passed us in an hour. It soon disappeared into the darkness.
Apart from the road ahead illuminated by the headlights, there was nothing to see out of the window. For a person born in southern China like me, this kind of situation was rare, worrying even.
It was 9:30pm. Most of the people on the coach were fast asleep. The driver, also the tour leader, had been working for over 12 hours. By the time we reached our destination, it would be midnight.
“They work long hours because May to October is the high season here,” a local taxi driver had told me the day before.
In the middle of nowhere, the coach came to a stop. The driver lit a cigarette. People hopped off and chatted under the headlights. The summer night in the Gobi is cooler than in many parts of China.
I was traveling in Gansu Province in the northwest. The area is known as the Hexi Corridor, an alluvial plain area west of the Yellow River. I was en route to the cities of Dunhuang, Jiayuguan and Zhangye.
Dunhuang
Zhang Qian, an envoy of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220), first arrived in Dunhuang in the second century BC, establishing a garrison there. It became an important junction of the northern and southern silk roads that connected the empire with Central and Western Asia.
The history of Dunhuang is dominated by multi-ethnic living, cultural integration and communication. The Mogao Grottoes, 25 kilometers from the city center, are a perfect illustration of this.
The name refers to a collection of Buddhist grottoes dug over a period of 1,000 years. Rulers of different ages were keen to over-paint murals in the caves drawn by previous patrons and create their own.
Following our tour guide’s torchlight, we were able to see traces of earlier mural layers underneath a corner of the present layer that had peeled away. Murals of the Sui (AD 581-618) and Tang (AD 618907) dynasties are generally considered to be of the highest artistic value.
If murals at the Mogao Grottoes portray religious ideals, the painted bricks found in tombs in the area vividly depict worldly life more than 1,700 years ago.
We visited one such tomb in the Gobi to the east of the city. The desert was actually a natural graveyard, dotted with various conical mounds, old and new. A stele put up by the local cultural heritage bureau confirmed the tomb’s identity.
An old man in a cap opened the door for us. He told us the tomb belonged to a Western Jin Dynasty (AD 266–316) official and his wife. It was raided in 1983, but the murals on the bricks had been kept well.
Following the steps down a narrow corridor leading to the burial chamber, one can see a screen wall of painted bricks, with themes ranging from animals, historical stories to auspicious motifs.
In Dunhuang Museum, we saw more examples of such painted bricks excavated from similar periods. These murals showed vibrant scenes of everyday life: How people traveled in carriages pulled by horses, how they grew mulberries, how they slaughtered their cattle and even how they hung their clothes.