Today in Xinjiang History: 11 August 1892

120 years ago today, the shadow-cloaked hills of the Ili Valley silently witnessed the murder of a woman and her daughter.

The story begins with Zulpiqar, a man from Kashgar who had come north across the mountains to Ghulja in the Ili Valley. Zulpiqar, a Turkic Muslim (“Turki,” or chanmin in Qing official parlance), owned his own horse, and he worked as a guide for some of those traders and travelers along the north-south route between the two cities.

Zulpiqar’s work brought him into regular contact with a trader whom Qing records call A-pa and his wife, Aysha Khan. It seems that A-pa was often away on one kind of business or another, and during those long months when he was out carting goods from settlement to settlement, though she lived with her little daughter Cholpan, Aysha got lonely. Sometime in February of 1891, Zulpiqar came by the house, and his relationship with Aysha went from flirtation to adultery. From then on, Zulpiqar would come over and give her gifts, and their affair continued for some time.

The Ghulja Catholics and the Scheut Missionaries

Since I returned from Sweden a few weeks ago, I've been very busy. On the one hand, I'm taking an intensive course in second-year Japanese. The precious little free time that such an undertaking leaves me has mostly been spent working with the records I was able to access from the old Swedish mission stations in Kashgar, Yarkand, and Yengisar. In Stockholm and Lund, I found a surprising wealth of information on the social and economic history of the Tarim Basin, 1890s-1930s, which I would have been wholly unable to access if not for a rather masterfully-taught year-long course in Swedish and the kindness of the wonderful people who work in Swedish archives. More on that later.

I was just reading James Gleick's piece in The New York Times about digitization of documents and the fetishization of their physical form. I'm personally a partisan of digitization: Now that money is getting tighter all across the academic world, being able to at least assess the availability of sources before risking a field visit saves time and money. It's better for the documents, which deteriorate when handled, and it helps libraries save on storage space. It's good for research, as it allows students to train with documents earlier and to plan their dissertations better. The main drawback, to my mind, is the potential for digitization to be an opportunity for censorship. Digitization is a kind of canon-formation.

Other people, as Gleick notes, lament the loss of "serendipity," which I take to mean the satisfying feeling that comes from accidental discovery, that one gets in the archives. I'm sympathetic: I remember, when I was quite small, experimentally prising open a picture frame containing my great-grandfather's World War One service record and "discovering" a stack of documents wedged behind it that no one had noticed in decades. The same feeling was revived earlier this summer, when I kept coming across interesting ephemera and misplaced sources for local history in bundles labeled "miscellaneous documents." Yet, digitization is not the enemy of serendipity.

Gleick's article led me to a little bit of luck where he links to Europeana.eu, a massive pan-European digitization effort. Whenever I run across a new digital collection, I reflexively try a series of keywords: Uyghur, Uighur, Uygur, Uigur, Xinjiang, Sinkiang, etc. Usually, the first one is "Turkistan."

In this case, "Turkistan" led me to a photograph, taken in Ghulja, of the Scheut missionaries, the members of the Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, based in Scheut, Belgium, who went to minister to the Ili Catholics at the turn of the last century. The story goes that a group of Catholic converts was moved on from Gansu in the early nineteenth century, around 1814, and exiled to Ili, where they soon lost all contact with the Catholic Church and, presumably, experienced the tumultuous years of the Muslim rebellions, of Russian rule, and Qing reorganization from a unique and interesting perspective. The Ili Catholics show up here and there both in local gazetteers and in Euro-American travel writing, and I believe it was a British officer who first did them the kindness of writing to the Holy See about their long-lost flock.

The lives and times of the unfortunate missionaries sent thither by the Scheut Fathers are documented by Gorissen in his piece, "The most unfruitful mission in the world: CICM fathers Frans and Jozef Hoogers in Xinjiang: 1895-1922," published in The history of the relations between the Low Countires and Chinese in the Qing era (1644-1911). Gorissen works from mission documents, including a great deal of personal correspondence demonstrating that the missionaries really, really hated living in Ili and wanted to go home. Even Mongolia, also Scheut "territory," was considered a better assignment.

Another article, "清末民初圣母圣心会新疆传教考述（1883-1922年）" by 汤开建 and 马占军 (in 西域研究 2005, No. 2), which draws extensively on Gorissen and other European scholarship, provides a better historical overview of the mission with attention to the relevant Chinese sources. It also includes handy charts.

The Scheut mission archives contain just some of the remarkably range of European-language primary source materials still available for the study of Xinjiang history. When we think of missionaries in Xinjiang, we think of French and Cable, of George Hunter (the "Apostle of Turkestan"), and, of course, of the long-standing Swedish mission. Yet, we forget the Catholic missionaries, including the wayward Father Hendricks, and the ephemeral Norwegian mission in Ghulja. There are further works available in German that people don't read much, and I dare say there is a great deal to be read in Armenian. With the exception of the latter, taking advantage of such sources in French, Flemish, etc., would require much less of a time investment than slogging through Russian and Japanese and provide, in some cases, a much richer record and the perspective of individuals more interested in the price of grain and the rituals of life than in the raw geopolitics of the Great Game. What's more, these documents are located in friendly archives in countries that want to make them available.

Sweden has Good Archives; Xinjiang has Good Fruit

I have had the good fortune to spend these past two weeks, with two more to go, on a research trip to a series of archival collections in Lund and Stockholm, Sweden. (With thanks to the American-Scandinavian Foundation, which generously awarded me the grant!) The trip has been successful in the extreme: I've not only found a range of materials previously unknown to me and unused in scholarship, but also met some great people who do very good work.

As East Turkestan aficionados are well aware, Lund is home to both the Gunnar Jarring Collection and to a host of texts printed at the Swedish Mission Press in Kashgar. The Collection is made up of a variety of texts, ranging from an attractive volume of Nava'i, which might keep Nick up all night, to dozens of contracts, notes, and ephemera, which are really more my thing.

All of that aside, I was determined, upon my arrival in Lund, to get a look at a rare piece of travel writing, H. I. Harding's Diary of a journey from Srinagar to Kashmir via Gilgit, printed at the Mission Press in 1922. Harding himself requested a posting as the Vice-Consul at Kashgar, where he served from 1 August 1922 to 31 July 1923, apparently out of a sense of adventure. There are a few interesting scraps of information in the Diary, but it was disappointing as a source.

Harding's work is redeemed, however, by its value as literature. It is wonderfully artful fluff, full of unlikely couplings of images and meditative reflections on both the stately and the minute. He breaks up the travelogue with "intermezzos," as he calls them. In one, Harding speaks with the voice of the Karakorum, telling the story of its coming into being. In another, he thinks about some future citizen of the Republic of Pamiria, what flag he might salute and what he might miss when far from home.

Harding ends his book in the garden of the house he has rented in Kashgar, where he sits and ponders a peach:

I have, of course, several kinds of peaches in my garden, ripening at different seasons, but the peach I will tell you about is the one I now hold in my hand; just now, this minute, ripe and perfect beyond compare. Her complexion is of a pale and dainty yellow, deepening on one cheek to the most enchanting of pink blushes. Her skin is so soft, so titillatory that I have to control my hand which would otherwise crush her delicate form in a spasm of extasy. Her odor is so exquisite that my lips quiver with delight and that sickly feeling of overpowering love gives me a feeling of weakness in the whole region from the neck to the abdomen. I struggle against the desire to make myself one with her, struggle and fail. By a touch of the finger I ask her skin to remove itself; it does so, and in two mouthfuls the nuptial ceremony is completed. Never shall the memory of that dear moment fade; even death shall us not part.

Oh, my.

It is unfortunate, and perhaps a product of the time in which I live, that I cannot help but read sexual overtones into much of what Harding writes. I have searched for information on him and found effectively nothing, so I am left with his ambiguous relationship with the children he meets along the route of his journey. Today, the specter of colonialism and all that it implies about race, gender, and power leans over my shoulder and makes inappropriate comments whenever I read a travel narrative. Furthermore, I came of age in the 90s and, thus, hear The Presidents of the United States of America in my head whenever peaches come up in conversation. So, I can't help but wonder: When Harding "makes insidious love" to a child when his parents are out of the room, is he just a starry-eyed dilettante travel cooing over an adorable kid? Or is he making the relationship between colonizer and colonized manifest by raping a child?

I'm inclined to think that Harding was just enjoying his journey and taking delight in the strangeness and newness of every little thing. His books is over-the-top, to be sure, but in a way that is charmingly ridiculous and quite unlike the almost venomous prose of a Przhevalskii. I heartily recommend the book and welcome other responses to it.

Muhakamat al-Lughatayn

I was once advised that it takes "a special kind of nut" to study Xinjiang. The comment was raised with regard to Justin Rudelson, who, in his introduction to Oasis Identities, lists the dozen or so languages he learned in preparation for his research. Like many others, I took it both as a warning as to the sorts of problems I would face in the course of my work and as a kind of challenge.

Six years later, I speak several languages passably well and read a half-dozen others. Certainly, first earning an MA in Linguistics helped tremendously: Not only did I learn a great deal about languages, how they're put together, and how to pronounce their funny sounds, I also gained an appreciation for the universality of the language faculty. (It was a very, very Chomskyist program.) That's a very reassuring thing, the idea that, really, they're all the same under the hood.

What really enabled an ongoing marathon of language-learning, however, was following links from one language to another, avenues of typological similarity or shared content. I will illustrate this with a diagram, slapped together with Netdraw in about 15 minutes:

Languages, each one a node, are labeled thus:

Ones that I have studied as "living" languages and learned to speak are circles. "Dead" languages, or at least ones that I've only learned to read, are squares.

The nodes vary by size. The larger they are, the longer I've studied them. (Mandarin Chinese: 11 years; Uyghur: 5 years; French: A bit on my own, etc.)

Then, I've labeled them by a sort of "super-family." The Romance languages, then, are all gray, as are the Germanic ones, since they belong to Western Indo-European. Persian and Russian, which form a bridge with the Asian languages, are Eastern Indo-European. Then I've done them by broad, paralinguistic area: Uyghur, Mongol, and Finnish are all under "Central Eurasian," while Chinese, Japanese, and Wenyanwen (Literary Chinese) are under "East Asian." This makes for some very clear areal distinctions in the diagram!

Finally, there are the arrows. An arrow pointing from a language to a language shows that knowing the first contributes or contributed actively to understanding and using the second. The thicker the arrow, the closer the connection.

Let's work through this. I studied 5 years of Spanish in high school. This was completely and utterly useless, but it taught me how to learn languages, more or less. This is its only contribution to Chinese, which I started in college as my third language. (Yikes, memories!) On the other hand, some years later, it was in fruitful dialogue with German: Only a good first-year German teacher got me to understand the subjunctive, which suddenly made perfect sense in Spanish, while Spanish had been my most recent European language with declinations. Finnish, which I -- looooong story -- ended up studying for a little less than a year was my first agglutinative language, and it prepared me for Uzbek, which then turned into Uyghur.

As we move left through the diagram, it becomes less historical and comes more fully to represent what goes on in my head as I learn or work with a language. Take Mongol, which I studied intensively for a summer: In my head, it was just Uyghur grammar with different words. Indirect and direct speech especially just grafted themselves onto my Uyghur grammar. What this meant, unfortunately, was that my hard-earned Uyghur started to turn into Mongol! Oh, no! Thankfully, even though Japanese also resembles Uyghur, and my intuition for Japanese derives entirely from Uyghur grammar, it seems to be just different enough that there has been no cross-contamination.

There's a similar problem, now that I'm learning Swedish. Swedish, by the way, is a surprisingly helpful language to know for Xinjiang from the 1890s through the 1930s. Anyway, Swedish started off in my head as a dialect of German, and it drew from the same resources. Now it's starting to take over. What I really need is a reason to speak German regularly, which will help me differentiate it.

On the other hand, sometimes a low level of interlinguistic differentiation is helpful. Take the big blue cluster on the left. When I approach a Chaghatay text or a Uyghur conversation, the two languages are in dialogue in my mind. In fact, I couldn't get my Uyghur speaking to improve at all for about a year until I started reading Chaghatay regularly. It's partly, I think, because modern Uyghur writing is often so stilted and dry, as well as derivative of Chinese and Russian styles, and partly because the modern stuff doesn't talk about certain things that are still central to Uyghur life. I've found it helpful to approach Uyghur as part of a big, lumpy Ottoman-Persian-Chaghatay continuum that all sounds more or less like Uyghur in my head. Indeed, to read Chaghatay or anything really interesting in Uyghur, I end up pulling my Redhouse Ottoman dictionary off the shelf or looking things up in the online Steingass Persian lexicon.

This must be tedious, so here's the lesson: It gets easier. After a few languages, some really central ones, they all start to look more or less the same. Your brain gets used to the work of absorbing vocabulary, you develop strategies for learning grammar patterns, and, eventually, you feel like you've seen it all. Now, I still think Armenian would kick my ass, and I have no illusions about learning Naxi. Yet, working my way from language to language has been a good strategy. I'm lucky that I studied Uyghur, which has such a rich vocabulary from Persian and even borrows from Russian. That made it a great starting-point.

Actually, Uyghur might just be the best language in the world, in terms of its utility. Yes, I'm biased, but I'm also getting tired of taking classes. Without learning to speak Uyghur and, over time, differentiating the sound of a Persian word as opposed to a Turkic or Arabic one, scanning through prose would be substantially more difficult. I already know half of the Persian vocabulary I learn, and about a quarter of the Arabic, as well, though I've only just begun that long journey.

Big ignorant roar

It can be difficult to picture the East Turkestani past. Even what lies closest to us, the photographs taken by some missionary in the 1930s or some rioter with a digital camera, are scenes, arrangements of views. The scrapyard that was the Urumchi bazaar in the time of Khoja Niyaz seems as empty as a movie set. It's hard to place Haydar Sayrani or Aitchen Wu in those ramshackle timbers, much less to ask ourselves how their wives and families, so absent from the historical and narrative records, went about their shopping.

Foreign researchers have little access to rural life in Xinjiang, unsurprisingly, and that usually gives them a pass on social history. Ildikó Bellér-Hann's work, both her historical anthropology volume and her other work on oral culture and the law, presents the best research and synthesis to date, I think, of what we do and can know. When I look at Community matters, a very popular volume in every library I've known, I have trouble, however, discerning the signs and mechanisms of change over time that intrigue me as a historian. How do we get from Community matters to Down a narrow road (another amazing book)? For, surely, there is something in between.

Native researchers, Uyghur or otherwise, though they may pose interesting questions about folkways and agriculture in the present day, seem hardly to have considered the consequences of living in a historical world lit only by fire of one sort or another. Partly, there's a been a terrible oversight by which none of the Jarring materials are available in Xinjiang. But it's also due, in part, to the ways that one party or another scrambles to promote a narrative of "development": Whether you're a Uyghur nationalist or a PRC apparatchik, sometimes you want to talk about Uyghurs being poor and backward, and sometimes you don't. On the one hand, the story goes, this place was poor and backward -- but now look what the Party (or Rebiye Kadeer) has done to promote business and growth since the 1980s! On the other hand, you can point to any number of little industrial projects from the 1890s onward and find "proof," after a fashion, that Transhistorical China (or Uyghur entrepreneurs) had the first leather factory, or whatever, in Central Asia. The presence of a factory with 200 employees can imply that Ghulja in 1907 was just like Shanghai in 1948; yet we are faced with the facts of agriculture in the 1930s, which seem not to have changed in hundreds of years.

As things stand, then, it baffles the mind to ask what Baha'uddin Musabayev knew and Amanisa Khan ate. Do we know Tejelli indeed? And is he even worth mentioning, if every time that name arrives, it brings with it heavy inches of flimsy paper imprinted with awkward modern Uyghur?

My education began in earnest, and perhaps ended shortly thereafter, with "Caedmon's Hymn." In Anglo-Saxon, of course, because that's how it sends the best, and my English teacher's mighty leather-clad foot upon his particleboard throne.

Creator all-holy, He hung the bright heaven,
A roof high upreared, o'er the children of men. ... etc.

It became a sort of dhikr for me, as I think it was for him.

Still I feel myself closer to the medievalists, with their photocopies of cramped lines of Gothic script disgorged from the end of a cut feather. Working through manuscripts banishes, for a little while, the questions that preoccupy my time period, trite, nagging issues of modernization, of global movements, of everything contracting and mechanizing. (And, indeed, it can all start to seem very Steampunk, if you're not careful.) It gets me away from the preoccupations of the propagandists, from the two-faced narrative of progress.

Heaney talks about Caedmon.

And all that time he'd been poeting with the harp
His real gift was the big ignorant roar
He could still let out of him, just bogging in
As if the sacred subjects were a herd
That had broken out and needed rounding up.
I never saw him once with his hands joined
Unless it was a case of eyes to heaven
And the quick sniff and test of fingertips
After he'd passed them through a sick beast's water.

Do we know Tejelli indeed?

The man who copied the "Risāla of the camel-drivers," too, ran his fingers through a sick beast's water. I cannot help but wonder what he wanted from his days, if he lived to see his children have children of their own. Maybe his son took over his craft. But did he get to recite the formula that made his boy a master? There is a terrible emptiness here, a space that our eyes are trained to ignore. I wonder if it can be stared into?

International Man of Lunacy

If you're like me and have an unhealthy obsession with Xinjiang, you've probably read Ahmad Kamal's narrative of Silk Road derring-do, Land without laughter (1940). I've debated with myself and others countless times whether the book is a work of complete fiction or a very real narrative of travel and adventure in 1930s Xinjiang from the perspective of a deranged individual. Land without laughter has the most improbable of protagonists and narrators, Ahmad Kamal, the son of Tatarstan, the crypto-Muslim, born on a Colorado reservation, who learned military tactics at the knee of a banished Prussian officer, an American Muslim liberating the homeland of his brothers. It's full of the good old tropes of pop-orientalist fiction, right down to a dusky-skinned, green-eyed "temporary wife" whose eyes beg for his caress.

It turns out to be authentic, at least more or less.

Ahmad Kamal turns up again in A mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Muslim Brotherhood in the West (2010), a new book by journalist Ian Johnson recounting the CIA's role in fostering Islamist groups as a counter to Soviet influence. Kamal, as it turns out, was born Cimarron Hathaway in 1914 to a well-off family in a Denver suburb. Some storm in his head, as his children will tell you, drove him to become "Qara Yusuf," son of Kara Yakub, a man in search of his long-lost Turkic father. The rest of his life combined literary endeavors in both Arabic and English with a strange and still mysterious intelligence career.

I won't cut into Johnson's book sales, nor could I summarize this story in a blog post. If you locate the book for yourself, go straight to chapter 10 ("The novelist's tale") and beyond. It's worth a read.

As for Land without laughter itself, if you haven't read it, you should, and, if you have, you should re-read it with a little less caution. Ahmad Kamal has been easy to dismiss because his stories seem so unlikely, but, since his CIA file says he was in Xinjiang in 1935, this could be a good source for the history of the Sheng Shicai period. I, for one, am going to try to get through the rest of his ouevre.