To the environmentalist Ma Jun, the uncontrolled irrigation was more than just a waste of resources: “This is clearly an ecological crime. Its victims are the plants, animals, and birds.”20 Large areas of Xinjiang were desiccated. Lop Nor, once the second-largest saltwater lake in China, was effectively soaked up by trillions of cotton buds. In the late 1950s, two-meter-long fish swam in its waters. By 2006, even the smallest species were struggling to survive in what had become a trickle in the desert close to the military’s main nuclear testing ground. With it went the Tarim tiger, the large-headed fish, huge numbers of Bactrian camels, and a greenbelt of poplar forests.21 With the tree barrier gone, the Taklamakan and Kum Tagh deserts joined up, forcing
During our first stop on the road, I chatted to a young woman wearing a headscarf who had just moved to a new village after marrying a local man. I congratulated her and asked how she liked her new home. “It’s good. This place used to have a bad reputation for being poor, but incomes are rising thanks to tourism,” she said. The problem now was not money but water for the family farm. Every ten days she had to apply for an irrigation permit at the local Communist Party office. If approved, her family received a card entitling them to use water for three hours each day, after which they had to divert the irrigation channel toward another permit holder.
At that point we were interrupted. An official wearing army fatigues strolled over indignantly. “Stop that. No journalists here.” Not wishing to make any trouble for the woman in her new home, I left without complaint. I asked driver Wu why the locals were so sensitive. “This is a military zone and you are a foreigner.” I hadn’t noticed on the way in, when all I had seen were newly constructed tourist lodges, but, sure enough, on the nearby hills were clusters of khaki buildings. A short distance down the road was the Nanshan military airport.
As we drove out of the restricted area, Wu told me he too had been forced to retreat from the land. Before he became a taxi driver, he had inherited the farm his parents created in the wilderness. At first he made a decent income growing leeks and peppers. But around 1998, the land deteriorated and the crops failed year after year. The earth had become useless within two generations.
As we talked, a syrupy pop song popular at the time played repeatedly on the car stereo. Its English lyrics conveyed the zeitgeist of mutability:
They say nothing lasts forever.
We’re only here today.
Love is now or never.
Bring me far away.
I asked Wu the name of the singer, assuming he must be a fan because the track had been playing all the way from Urumqi. “I don’t know, I just downloaded it on my computer,” he said, shrugging.
A wall of lush green hills rose up ahead of us. The road climbed and dipped through a narrow gorge flanked by steep granite slopes and dense pine forests. After the two-dimensional flat pastels of the plain, there was a pleasing variety of shape and color above, below, and on either side. I had time to enjoy it. Our car was twice held up by flocks of goats being shepherded along the narrow road by Kazakh herders on horseback. Such scenes would soon be a thing of the past. Earthmovers and mechanical diggers were laying the foundations for a new highway that would speed tourists through the valley without interruption.
After thirty minutes the pastoral scene on either side of the ravine gave way to an industrial horror story. The valley widened, the light dimmed, and the air thickened. This was no mountain mist or low cloud. It was a putrid haze. The source was an anti-Shangri-La, a dirty secret hidden in the hills: the Houxia power plant and concrete factory, which appeared to be competing with one another to belch the most sulfurous smoke into the sky. Their chimney stacks were too short to lift the gas above the roof of the valley, so the smog gathered denseness, shrouding the dormitories of the workers and the black heaps of coal waiting to be fed into the furnaces.
This industrial estate was another legacy of Mao’s push into the borders. Factories like this were part of preparations for war against the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s, when the chairman declared a “Third Front” in the country’s most remote inland regions. His plan was to scatter China’s industrial base so that it would be safe from bombing. Soldiers and students set about building roads and factories in rural idylls. It was a major cause of disruption of local ecologies.23
We drove onward, upward, and out of the smog. Almost immediately the scenery returned to a bucolic state. The road climbed beside steep gorges, through thick pine forests, and up onto alpine meadows. A familiar muzziness told me the altitude was around 3,000 meters. On the roadside, I spotted the round white yurt of a Kazakh family. We were getting close. The space-seeking nomads dwell in an increasingly narrow band of land just below the snow line and just above the limits of Han settlement. As in Yunnan, the Tibetan Plateau, and elsewhere, an ethnic minority was being pushed farther to the geographic fringes.
The herdsmen roamed the slopes looking for fresh pastures for their sheep and goats. Their movements were seasonal, driven by the weather, which made them more sensitive barometers of climate change than sedentary urban dwellers.
A few miles on, we entered a grassy plain surrounded by glaciers. In the midst was a Kazakh family erecting a yurt for their summer camp. They allowed me to film them as they tied thickly padded walls to a metal frame. The material had to be heavy to keep out freezing mountain winds and was tied in place with wire twists rather than cord knots. Bahebieke, the young head of the family, supervised the work and, between puffs on a cigarette, explained in rudimentary Chinese what was happening. He said the family were moving to this summer camp a week earlier than the previous year and almost a month earlier than five years ago because temperatures were rising. The winters, once bitter and long, were getting shorter and milder.
“It has become warmer, especially these last two years. That glacier used to come all the way down to the road, but now it stops halfway up the slope,” he said, pointing to the wall of ice several hundred meters away.
Warmer climes meant less hardship. Life had improved in other ways. The family had recently acquired a solar panel that gave them enough electricity for a lightbulb and a radio. Bahebieke had switched from a horse to a motorbike. The China mobile signal was so good in the mountains that he could keep in touch with family members working in the city by phone. Their livestock was growing. Looking over to some animals grazing by a meltwater stream, Bahebieke said his family now tended 400 sheep.24 But bigger herds did not necessarily equate to greater wealth.
He was worried about the mountains he roamed. “As the glaciers melt and the temperature rises, there is less snow and rain. That means less grass. The sheep are not able to get fat. This is the problem we face. For a herdsman, that is a great loss.”
Other nomads had found a new way of making money. For the final ascent to the glacier, I stopped by a couple of yurts to hire a padded jacket and pay for a motorbike ride up the final few hundred meters to the ice field. Fifty years earlier, Zhao and his expeditionary team would have taken hours climbing this rutted, winding track. We juddered up in ten minutes. At the top, overlooking Urumqi Number One, I felt a guilty exhilaration. I was privileged to be in this breathtakingly beautiful place, yet I had come to look for signs of decline. It seemed disrespectful. And difficult. I suddenly realized my inability to grasp the scale of the changes taking place. I knew the history of the glacier’s retreat, that the two lakes of ice had been one giant sea until they split in 1993. I had read that it was thinning at a rate of six meters a year. And I had been told that the water dripping from the glacier could have been locked in place for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years. I knew this ancient natural legacy was being wasted and degraded. But, standing in front of the glacier, it still looked utterly huge and magnificent. As at the Three Gorges, perhaps I could not appreciate what had been lost because I had never seen the former glory.
Locals, though, had watched the diminishment of the ice with growing alarm. Ashengbieke, my Kazakh motorbike taxi driver, was only eighteen, but he said the glacier had split in half and changed color since his childhood. “While I was growing up, it used to be very cold here. It used to snow in summer, but now it rains instead. Because of the air pollution, the glacier turned black. It used to be pure white and the two snowfields were joined as one.”
I clambered down a slope to get within touching distance. Up close, the glacier had a cold sensuality.
