Silk Road Project

Craftspring

2010-07-21T12:37:00.007+08:00

Based on the adventure and incredible experiences of the fellowship travels chronicled in this blog - I recently created Central Asian Craftspring - a social business that helps Central Asian artisans to design and sell their products to the European and USA markets.

As my friend and designer Thuy-Tien Crampton wrote, "Craftspring aims to create a socially responsible exchange celebrating Central Asia’s craftsmanship in a way that respects traditional methods and local natural materials."

Come explore our work on our new website: www.cacraftspring.com

The MUSIC of China's Nomads

2010-07-21T12:06:00.003+08:00

Discover some of the music from the Kyrygz and Kazakh diasporas living in China's western province of Xinjiang

www.eurasianet.org/music

for more information and videos, explore www.eurasianet.org/music

Ferghana Valley - A Story of Silk

2007-10-03T05:23:00.000+08:00

The beginning
We forget often the origins. Those places where everything starts: a change in the land, a mulberry tree that has seen the shifts in the waters, its trunk knotted in the wisdom of years, in resistance, a glance.

Here in Marghilan things start in courtyards, houses built to provide shade and cool. They are a succession of verandas, terraces, and rooms kept dark with linen veils: a cool cavernous realm. We are in Mirzaahmedov Usto’s house. Closed onto itself, it is a private world within four walls, in the middle a courtyard garden for green and sky. But walls mark clear geographies. No windows give out onto the street and the architecture, like the life of its inhabitants is turned inward, centered on family.

The home compound is a fortress, built in retreat from the weight of sun and outside glances. We knock and call before entering. The women do not leave without permission. We are not like kids – we have interiorized the reflexive now almost intuitive barriers that our age mandates we acknowledge. At night I write in my notebook: little girls are already women, adopting the limited geographies of their mother’s: domestic prisons. But there is also a comfort in walls; a safety. Here we are protected and kept from that wild world for which we have constructed so much fear. We are out of reach of outsiders, stray dogs and the violence of unknown men. (These days, I feel a brick batise being built around me. Walls rising, imperceptible but real, like a shaking, a rumbling of which I am the architect. Sewing my own Paranja. (Paranja - the local chador once worn by women in the Ferghana and throughout Uzbekistan before Soviet times).

And yet in this clearly defined and self-contained space there is passage, there is color and all the pain, fantasy and happiness of human lives. Family members trickle in throughout the day: cousins, their children. Older men come more formerly, waiting at the door for an escort into the middle, the womb, the heart of the family.

Here, in this courtyard in the middle of Marghilan starts a story of silk

A Kingdom and its Princes
In Marghilan, silk is the center of the universe – its legends and practical magic are wrapped up with the realities of the town. Stay here a couple of days and you can get a first sense of both. In its fine woven threads, dyed and intertwined, silk carries the economy of the town, its livelihood, its hierarchies, its dynamics. To the silk is tied power, religion, ambition, opportunities and the balance of women and men. In Marghilan, silk is like history – fluid, luxurious in its complexities, brutal and manifold.

Everyone in Marghilan is connected to silk weaving. From the raising of silkworms, harvesting mulberry leaves, the preparation of thread, the designing, the weaving, to the selling – the city is centered on the craft.

Fazlitdin Dadajonov is a prince of silk and the director of his self-made Ikhat National Craft Development Center. Entering Fazlitdin’s house, we enter a palace. We are brought out of the sun into its cool rooms, where we are served fresh pistachios (a curious discovery for me), chocolates, walnuts and all sorts of succulent dried fruits on precious blue porcelain dishes.

We enter abundance and tradition – sitting cross-legged on the ground sipping luxurious mineral water and scented teas.

Fazlitdin is a fourth generation silk weaver. He sits boldly and has the proud stature of a man who knows his place in the world – on top. He is very impressive with his scissor-cut features and his crisp white shirt. Money is folded up in his shirt pocket.

I write in my notebook: “Fazlitdin is smiling and laughing, talking about his spirituality. He is a prince receiving us. I wish that I was wearing gold, had dark charcoal eyes and smelled of rosewater. Can I say: one minute Sir, we have been on the road, we need a sweet honey shower.”

Sitting and talking with Fazlitdin through the afternoon is to be faced with paradoxes – many. When he talks, he never looks me in the eyes – a constant reminder of my sex. feminine, inferior. And yet he is exuberant in his hospitality, answers my questions with interest and is engaged in our conversation. We are invited to a copious lunch, and endless pots of green tea. He speaks of markets, deals, potential business partners, he has traveled to the USA twice – and is planning another trip this summer. He likes America and its freedoms. He seems modern, open to new ideas and change, and yet sometimes he is surprisingly conservative, brutally canonical in his beliefs. He has found a good wife for his son he boasts: she is 16 he says, reads Namaz and wears the Hijab. They will marry in the Fall, when she will be 17. She will stop high school after her wedding, but will continue her religious education. He hopes to have a Muslim wedding for the celebration he says, “without dancing or music. Men will come in the morning and women in the afternoon.” Speaking with Fazlitdin is to feel comfortable and then suddenly homesick.

Over the two days spent with Fazlitdin, I will learn to appreciate these paradoxes, learn to accept the complexities of living in Marghilan – where religion and the preservation of customs is fought for with an impressive strength and vigor. Here in Marghilan I feel for the first time the religious and political power that craftsmen once wielded in their towns: in preserving conservative gestures, they are preserving the traditions that keep them alive. I come to believe that saving these values and traditions, brutal that they are, is perhaps the only way to preserve the town’s economic livelihood: the physical, demanding, slow, soft, hand-weaving of silk.

Marghilan’s Silk, hand-made from worm to beautiful liquid cloth seems to be reliant on resolute conservatism and the most traditional structures of Islam. In buying that tempting and magic cloth we affirm a way a life, we accept that there are different worlds. different values. It is an ode to the difference in the world: that variety that lets us dream. but within that giving in, within that acceptance of rules and geographies decided by others, I whisper: rebel sisters. rebel. knowing that freedoms can be acquired among the madness.

Near Histories
The Soviet Union was keen on breaking the historical resistance it faced in the Ferghana Valley – the hideaway for the Basmachi – those rebel warriors fighting the empire-builders to the north.

In Central Asia: 130 Years of Russian Dominance, A Historical Overview edited by Edward Allworth, the authors talk in great length about the resistance the Russians found in the Ferghana, with the first rumbles starting in 1885. Ten years later in “1895, a Naqshbandi Ishan from Andijan, Ismail Khan Tore, was arrested in Aulie Ata, where he was collecting funds to finance the holy war. (…) Three years later, May 18, 1898, it was again in Andijan that a revolt broke out which spread immediately to the districts of Osh, Namangan, and Marghilan. Leading it once again was an Ishan of the Sufi brotherhood of the Naqshbandi.”

“The consequences of the [unsuccessful] uprising were manifold. To the reprisals against the guilty were added “economic” disabilities upon certain villages accused of having lent too much support to the rebels. In the Marghilan district, several villages or hamlets were destroyed, their inhabitants expelled for having taken part in the revolt, and the population replaced by Russians who were allotted a great amount of well-irrigated lands, where they began growing cotton. The Central Asians were transplanted to barren lands and founded a new village, Marhamat.”

The Ferghana would continue to revolt into the late 1920’s.

But the Russians were determined to fortify their hold on the region. First, undoing the centrifugal position of Khokand with the new modernity of the Tsar’s regional center: Ferghana city. Then, busting up the networks of religious schools and leaders – the empire set about to its work of changing the region. Marghilan – the historical center of Islam in the valley was kept a close watch on and a tightly fitted lid was placed on the city and its leaders.

Private silk weaving was pronounced illegal – the practice was to be entirely focused in the city’s new factory. This was an economic decree set to also break the political power of rich silk merchants. Fazlitdin’s grandfathers, wealthy land owners and craftsmen – the merchant sovereigns of the valley - were stripped of their property and studios and forced to work in the factories.

The pressure, control and suspicion were too great and the family moved to Andijan where they were safer.

In Andjian, Fazlitdin recounts, the Marghilan weavers would unite and secretly continue the silk weaving in the homes of friends: an elite class whispering. As a child, he would be taken to these secret meeting rooms by his father, where they would stay for two or three days at a time. It was frightening Fazlitdin says. Many people were arrested for this kind of gathering, and there was always a fear that some passerby would hear the rhythmic swing of the silk loom in action and report their meeting place. These secret hideaways were enclaves of tradition: the humming of prayers, the secret hope for freedoms, the candles lit against the empire. These secret meetings were a time of teaching – and fathers passed onto their sons the craft of weaving and the beliefs of Islam: the bare essentials of bloodline traditions.

Master Mirzaahmedov was a pillar in Marghilan. A keeper of the faith, a master of silk weaving. For his secretly continuing to weave silk at home, resolute to keep traditions alive, he was sent to the desert prisons of Kashgardaria for six years.

The Fall
With the fall of the Soviet Union, Mirzaahmedov was released and returned home again. His genius and spirit were finally recognized with material success and official accolades. These men who live through hell and heaven. In 2005 he received the presidential award recognizing his work as a master, which came with a check of 7.5 million syms. (I don’t remember the exchange rate – but it’s a bundle of money). Mirzaahmedov grew his home-based business by welcoming tourists and demonstrating his traditional craft.

For Fazlitdin, an entrepreneur ready to revive the strength and power of his family, the fall of the Soviet Union was also a blessing. “For our family,” he says, “the collapse was good. Now, there are incentives for hard work, for business and building.” He believes that the collapse was also positive for the city of Marghilan. Indeed Marghilan has profited from the exuberant market for its radiant silks, and is now visibly busy rebuilding its mosques and medressas – although now under the paranoid eye and control of Islam Karimov, who perhaps more than the Soviets, fears the power of Islam. (many stories there. police. and freedoms hounded)

With the space and freedoms of the Fall, Fazlitdin has created a slow (steady) smart business. He opened his Ikhat National Craft Development Center in 2001 and has since then steadily increased the output and reach of his ambition. Today 30 people work in the center. Every month the center can weave 200 meters of silk. (beautiful) Around the center land does not lie fallow: orchards have been planted in every spare inch of land – Fazlitdin likes growth. There are no barren fields under his watch.

Fazlitdin’s quality is unbeatable in Marghilan. He has the best product – a reality clear to the touch. He sells his textiles to Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara traders who come place orders at the center. Tourists visiting Marghilan also add to revenue.

Generations have been reborn in the Dadajonov house success. Fazlitdin’s father still overlooks the silk production, while Fazlitdin trains his two sons in the business. He is tough on his sons, who listen in on meetings with clients and have learned most steps in the production, but who Fazlitdin says are simply not yet ready to take over. He’s hard to please. His sons have glowing skin. sharp. they are beautiful, but they stand at distance: the sons of the king. One of the employees (beautiful dark skin stretched softly on a tight architecture of muscle and pride) – a weaver – stands out among the young silk barons. He has learned almost all of the steps of the silk making and during the morning silk-dying, he leads the movement, his strength and confidence clear. Here the buds of battle: the pauper and the princes. Life among the routine of the everyday.

Silk and Saints
Fazlitdin tells about the history of silk. Silk was not born in Marghilan he says. It was first developed in Japan and Tajikistan he believes. Only then was it imported to the Valley. I ask him if there are any stories or legends about how silk arrived in Marghilan, but the history doesn’t roll off his tongue. He makes no mention of China and her rebel princess.

But he does tell us of the Prophet of Silk – Eyüp (in Turkish), Ayyub (in Arabic), or in English – Job, a major prophet in Islam.

In Marghilan, Fazlitdin tells us that – the once wealthy Eyüp came to the valley as a mendicant friar, riddled with sores and lesions. Eyüp never blamed God for his hardship and pain, and endured his chastisement so humbly that God rewarded Job’s patience by healing him with the waters of a sacred stream. From his sores, tells us Fazlitdin, silk worms fell to the ground. And so with his healing the patient prophet imported silk to the valley. Today Eyüp remains the protector of all who work with the fine material. His tomb (one of them) is in Bukhara, built on a spring outside the old Ark walls.

Looking on-line, I find some echoes of this story:

“At the end of the nineteenth century, German biblical scholar and linguist J.G. Weitzstein (1815-1905) traveled to [a] monastery near Damascus where he found Job’s tomb, his well, and the stone on which he sat on his dung heap. He also found several petrified rocks about which he tells us this:
While these people were offering up their Aur [afternoon prayers] in this place, Sa’d brought me a handful of small, round stones, which tradition declares to be the worms that fell to the ground from Job’s sores, petrified." (source: http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/Vicchio_Image_Ayyub.htm)
Fazlitdin also tells as about the protector of silk designers: Baha’ Al-din Naqshbandi, the Hadith writer and founder of the Naqshbandi Tarikat - Sufi brotherhood. Born near Bukhara, Naqshband greatly influenced Islam in the region, and it’s not surprising to hear his name in Marghilan where Islam comes in concentrate – and where Naqshbandi leaders were once fermenting riots against the Soviet Empire. Naqshband’s name, Faztlidin tells us means, designer. It has also been translated as "related to the image-maker" or "Pattern Maker". Today, Naqshband continues to bring inspiration and health to the silk weavers, and he is venerated as a patron saint.

I wonder about the rites and rituals of the veneration – more to research here.

The Fabric
There are many types of silk woven on the rhythmic looms of Marghilan. Bakhmal – double-sided silk velvet, which all but disappeared in the 18th century to be famously revived by Mirzaahmedov Usto in the past decade. Shoye – silk, as we mostly know it: one color, light as the wind, fluid, ephemeral. And then there is Adras - local magic - called Ikhat in the West – that bold weaving of color, a kaleidoscopic look at angry cloud-covered sky pierced by sunlight, alive, corporal. I see in the colors, bright, daring femininity woven for the world; gifts of cloud and texture. Adr means cloud in Persian.

Here among the mosques; among the imams, the soul of the world pulsing. A colored map of emotions, sketching out that longing; that richness, ancient. In the patterns, the soft etchings of the older orders of the world – when we danced untempered by this cement and this speed and distance of movement. In the patterns, echoes of times past when we laid down among the chaos of Emirs and Khans.

Adras – bloodstained, crass, cruel, ash-strewn, salted, bitter, real.

There is order and science in the cloth. Children start to learn at the age of 10 or 11 and only the true masters will learn all the 18 stages of the fabric – from the pattern-drawing and tying, to the dying, the washing, the stretching, loom-setting, to the final weaving of string into magic. Only men can rise beyond the division of labor inherent in the 18 steps that start after the gathering of the mulberry leaves and the fattening of the worms. Silk is a commodity of power to be controlled by few. There are secrets still. Rules – that even the colors must follow: first the Whites, than the Yellows, Reds, Greens, Blues and then the darkest Black – for the tying and dying.

The dying of silk is work. physical strength demanded.

For Adras cloth, the threads are dyed and arranged into a pattern before weaving. This makes dying math. There are multiple colors baths during which the silk is taken off the design loom. Replacing the silk back onto the loom while respecting the pattern is about seeing the pattern in small signs etched on the threads. Signs of order and direction that help the artisan tie the strings back up to the design board, preserving the pattern. To this dance is added the wrapping and unwrapping of cotton yarn that protects the silk from being dyed by a certain color - tiedye fashion. Unwrap one color to dye another. Once dyed yellow – depending on how you wrap and unwrap you can get green, blue and yellow in the next color baths. exponential color. (it’s complicated, and my words are not helping.)

Futures
Silk in Marghilan has launched boldly into the market economy. Although it is difficult (expensive and paper-heavy) to export anything (except cotton and gas, I guess) from Uzbekistan, the local Marghilan silk-makers have more than taken advantage of the tourists that flock to Samarkand and Bukhara in increasing numbers. Fazlitdin is confident in the growth of his Ikhat center within the needs of domestic demand. He is also willing to brave the hassles and pressures of export and work with partners in the USA and Europe.

The continuation of Mirzaahmedov’s work is a little bit more precarious, although also carried by domestic demand.

Mirzaahmedov Usto died a year ago. He was a 7th generation weaver, grown up among the activity and sound of silk. In death, his spirit remains to walk the walls of the family home. He’s like a ghost here, palpable in the sadness. His family is still living off the gestures and traditions of silk weaving, but the links to traditions are slightly faded, a little tarnished. None of Mirzaahmedov’s sons have a passion for the craft and now a cousin, Mahmut Turzanov comes in everyday to run the workshop. Although Mahmut studied with the master for 15 years, there is a frailty to him, a childishness. These age old skills are precarious legacies. Here in the house of an old master is now the slow forgetting of ancient gestures.

Mirzaahmedov’s son is absent from the house and workshop – he wakes in the late afternoon and spends the nights drinking with his friends under the cover of darkness. He is not interested in carrying his family or its traditions. He’s young, perhaps he’s sick of all the weight of tradition. He’s obviously set himself loose from the rhythms and demands of the silk.

But the women of the house continue to carry the walls. The women are in charge here. There is Mirzaahmedov’s wife – fierce. She is tough, hard-edged, and has a piercing beautiful, almost violent look. She sees through me. (I’m tired and we maneuver around each other. Two centers colliding.) But she carries the business, intent on preserving the work of her husband. Kamberoy, Mirzaahmedov’s pensive beauty of a daughter helps her mother to keep the house and its tourist business running. Being the only daughter left in the house is no gift and Kamberoy work from dawn to late after dark.

The family has benefited from the new market for silk – silk tourism. Before his death, the master left both the tradition and the economic machinery to support his family: a tourist restaurant in his home, a silk gift shop and a potential guesthouse (the construction to be finished next year). Mirzaahmedov opened his home to tourists as early as 1992. The family then built their current larger compound to host the growing number of visitors. Now there are tourists almost every day, especially on Thursdays and Sundays when they come to see Marghilan’s bustling market. Their address is written in the French Petit Fute (the equivalent of the Lonely Planet) – ensuring a steady stream of French tourists. They are also in a Japanese guidebook.

While he mom hosts the tourists, Kamerboy makes sure that the long table on the veranda remains always prepared – ready to pour tea and serve cakes and candies. When the tourists leave, Kamerboy helps Mahmut in the strenuous work of dying and weaving. She looks absent, gone. Her heart is not in the work. She is burdened with the weight of legacies inherited: heir to a stumbling empire. There is a sadness in the house; a decay that I can’t quite get my hands on; a desperation. The master has left a castle ready to be deserted. Looking at Kamberoy I ache.

At night a soft cool and quiet falls on the household. The activity of the day over and gone: silence, a mother talking with her unruly son in the night. In the morning, the family will return – the daughter, the sisters, the cousins, all who work in the weaving and making of the family silk. All will fight again the weight of forces leading them away from a father’s work.

the Ferghana Valley - Metals are for Men

2007-08-31T02:13:00.000+08:00

Mutalibjan is nervous about taking us out to lunch. Damira and I are wondering what is wrong. We have already stopped at two Chaihanas (teahouses) which Mutalibjan has insisted on checking out himself. Returning to the car, Mutalibjan says that they are too dirty for us, but we sense that there is another problem. We decide to get on the road to the next village and look for something on the way. In a green patch of trees, a Chaihana is spread out in the cool shade overlooking a canal, we pull over and get out. Finally! some kebabs and bread! We wash our hands, take off our sandals and sit down on the raised platforms arranged around the arch of the courtyard. Sitting down cross-legged, we notice that subtle bang of silence: our entrance has broken the conversations of neighboring tables and all eyes have turned to us - Mutalibjan and his two young women guests. We look around, shyly returning some of the stares – all the eight or so tables are filled with men, young and old, their eyes on us, inquisitive. We have broken onto the stage of a man’s world, punctured their peace. Mutalibjan instantly feels uncomfortable, and we are soon back on the search. I’m dying for a sip of tea. argh! Where shall we eat, when no women in these small villages eat outside of their homes? The public space is masculine, and Damira and I wear colorful skirts – long but clearly feminine.

On the road we pass fields of cotton and wheat, lodged in between the sprawling towns and villages. The valley seems to be forever reproducing, people and their progeny. The earth here is worked and mastered by man, its fringes densely populated – a far cry from the solitary expanse of Kyrgyzstan. We pass a closed-down cotton textile factory. None of the farmers sell the factory their cotton anymore. They get better prices on the international markets. Mutalibjan tells us that the local wheat is used to make alcohol, while more wheat, for flour and bread is imported from Kazakhstan.

Arriving in Shakhrihan, hunger emboldens us and we slip into the back of an almost empty Chaihana and finally bite into kebabs in the retreat of the garden tea-drinkers. We joke about our circuitous approach to lunch. After lunch, I smoke a cigarette, although I know women here don’t smoke. Mutalibjan laughs and joins me. After lunch we head to Echon Aka’s house in the center of Shakhrihan.

Father Echon
Rahmathudja Alihodjaev, known as Echon Aka is the kind of man that carries the world: he exudes life, laughter, discipline, honor, craft. He’s the best knife-maker that I will meet throughout Central Asia, a humble king of knives.

Echon Aka has a golden smile, filled with golden teeth as it is. He talks to us about generations and dynasties, about legacies passed from father to son, about movement and becoming part of a local landscape. His family – the Alihodjaevs have been part of the thick tapestry of the town for 200 years. The family story starts with a king, the Emir of Khokand, Omar Han and his decision to construct a canal from the Uzgen Reservoir (in today’s Kyrgyzstan) to Andigan and its suburbs. Where there is water, there is life. And when the waters arrived flowing through Shakhrihan (where the canal ended) the 2,000 year old city saw instant revival. Craftsmen flocked to the city, and in 1819 there were more than 30 craftsmen here.

Echon Aka says, “In our culture we have a saying that is like a law. If there are more than 30 craftsmen in one area, that place is considered a city.” So in 1819, Shakhrihan, which today is a dusty haphazard agglomeration of run-down houses, became a proud, growing city. And so it was that as the village was growing into a finer town, the first of Echon Aka’s ancestors came looking to make his fortune in the land. Born in 1730, Ismael Khoja who stemmed from Marghilan’s religious elite came to settle down and help in the renaissance of the town. He set up shop on the edge of the canal, and started shaping the knives and scissors that his fellow-citizens demanded. Ismael Khoja’s great-great-grandchildren would continue his blacksmith trade in the city, preserving his mark and signature engraved in iron.

“A boy becomes a man at 12,” says Echon Aka. This is when they can start working with knives. (I’m wondering about the varying ages of maturity. In today’s Iran, women are forced to veil as of the age of 9. Is that when we become women?) But here in Shakhrihan, boys are initiated to the trade at 12, after which it takes five years of apprenticeship to become a master.

The carrying of knives remains a tradition throughout the region. Every man has his knife. And so Echon Aka’s craft is feathered by strong local demand. His studio is very much alive and the ambers on the blacksmiths hearth still alight.

Echon Aka’s studio is within the courtyard of his home, but distant enough from the living quarters to give the women of his family the privacy they need. We do not see one woman that afternoon. The house is centered on a beautiful, dense and fragrant rose garden.

In one of the side rooms around the courtyard, the studio is filled with the clamor of hammers on metal, the clinks of tools carving the final details and the angry gust of the fire torch melting the colored wax that will pigment the knives’ handles. Four students sit in a circle, working on their pieces. Echon Aka has trained 40 students in the knife trade, teaching only three at a time. Today too, his three sons work alongside their father. “Thanks be to God my three sons will follow my footsteps in this craft,” says Echon Aka. This is clearly a family business, and Echon Aka is keen on preserving the legacy of his forefathers. Around the studio, some of his 11 grandchildren are playing, watching, and occasionally mischievously getting in the way.

During the Soviet Union Echon Aka and his family became part of a knife-making organization, and made knives in their home studio exclusively through this organization. For their work they received a regular salary every month. Echon Aka notes that they also made knives and scissors and workmen’s tools, but were prohibited from making the large knives and weapons of the past. No swords were made, and knives larger than 20 cm or thicker than 2mm were illegal and considered weapons. He says these rules were harsh and contrary to local customs, and believes that the USSR discriminated against the region. To prove his point he notes that at the time in the Georgian Republic, knives could reach 70cm.

Today Echon Aka is once again making his own production. “I do knives, scissors and axes as well as other tools.” Tailors order their scissors from him, those who work will metal order saws, while people from all over Uzbekistan come to him for knives and small swords. He only sells his products from home: his fame allows him to focus on the making, the selling comes naturally. Echon Aka’s output its low, but the quality of his objects is extremely high. His knives are beautiful, his scissors stunning – comfortable, sharp, just the right weight. Stars and a crescent mark his work: the signature of a master. The designs and the shapes have not changed for decades. “I’m 55 years old, but I’m not as skillful as my father, that is the biggest difference between the generations.”

the Ferghana Valley - Clin d'Oeil d'Andijan

2007-08-31T01:50:00.000+08:00

Andijan: at the center an association

Waiting at the Kyrgyz/Uzbek border at Osh, I write in my notebook: crossing into new worlds, leaps and jumps in one place – we are turning in circles. Repeating steps in madness trying to get some perspective on these - the dents and contours of the earth, the finer wrinkles of the world: appealing, sensual. Inscribed upon them, the symphony of human lives, the texture and geometry of histories. And here these gunmen standing in the middle of the plain demanding a halt. Crossing the border, I feel like a fugitive, walking in front of a firing squad. There is a tension here in the straight shot – a road punctuated by barbed wires – and one metal hut where all is determined: in or out. Passing into Uzbekistan is about negotiating with gangsters.

Uzbekistan feels like a land under cover, tightly sealed for better control. I’m not used to these military check-points, these guns held as if they carried the reason of the world. I’m uncomfortable with the endless waves of policemen that walk the streets. After a long, although harmless interrogation by a policeman at a road block, I learn to never catch a soldier’s eye.

And then, after the border checks, the road-blocks and the fear – you reach places like Mutalibjan’s office in the Andijan Hunarmand (hand-made) Association, and you pause for sugared tea and conversation. Here you can sink into the country – the hospitable gestures of its people.

Crafts, Markets and Warriors
Mutalibjan’s office is wall to wall color, draped in Suzanni – the traditional colorful embroidery of Uzbekistan, wood carvings, dolls, pottery. He points to all the over-load of creations scattered among the desk and the walls and says, “In the Ferghana Valley we have a multitude of craftsmen, but we have no tourists.” He means no market for the crafts. Here in Uzbekistan tourism has enabled a booming of traditional crafts, but that market is focused around the blue-tiled concentrate of Samarkand and Bukhara, and the Ferghana Valley remains in the shadow. Fear of political instability and the valley’s bad-rap (domestically and internationally) means that no tourist structures are being built up here – so that the shadow seems like it will darken its outline at least for the short-term.

But in shadow, warriors rise. Mutalibjan shares his office with Mansura Yusupova, a dynamic, boisterous fireball of a woman. She is the (natural) head of the Hunarmand Association. Full of life, but tough - Mansura is clearly in charge. She carries the flame and she is up for a challenge.

Taxes
The Andijan Hunarmand Association was created in 1997, by the Uzbek president Islam Karimov himself. In a gesture of goodwill to the international community and supposedly on the advice of UNESCO’s then country director, in 1997 Karimov granted craftsmen in Uzbekistan a complete exemption from taxes. This was seen as a very strong gesture to encourage, promote and revive crafts in the country. Regional organizations were then created to handle the registration and administrative tasks the new law entailed. In Andijan alone 810 craftsmen registered with the Hunarmand Crafts Organization.

Crafts in Uzbekistan have gained recognition – from tourists and the government. Crafts once received much attention from international organizations – but the work of those organizations has been greatly hampered if not fully halted by the government’s clamp down on international NGOs and organization in retaliation for the wide international criticism Karimov received over the Andijan riots.

The streets of Andijan…..craftsmen in the bazaar. committee of 10 people who decide which craftsmen to promote. (who falls between) there are craftsmen still making the tools used by people – and next to the craftsmen association is a row jam-packed with metal workers, making doors, blacksmiths and wooden furniture makers.

Bridging Markets
Mansura has been the head of the Andijan Hunarmand Organization since 2000. Her work with Mutalibjan focuses on promoting local artisans to those cities beyond the valley. They are busy training and advising local craftsmen on the particular demands of tourists who travel to Samarkand and Bukhara. They are go-betweens, mediators between the makers and their distant market. Mansura has revived crafts for which she senses a market – like Nuriddin Khotamov’s traditional leather and embroidered silk shoes. She has also started a papier-mâché doll business of her own. Both businesses are working, and I will see the same shoes and dolls sold throughout the country. Nuriddin’s shoes have won a Seal of Excellence award from UNESCO.

Mansura graduated from university where she studied to be an art critic. From 1987 to 2000 she worked in the Literary and Art Museum of Andijan. Today she’s just come back from an exhibition in France organized by the Uzbek embassy in Paris. She’s excited to use her few words of French, and calls me mademoiselle. She is clearly a full-blown business woman, and talks in numbers and orders: 200 Suzannis for a businessman she met in France, 20 small and 20 large dolls for an upcoming exhibition in Samarkand. She talks about crafts frankly, she’s straight to the point: “Business is the driver behind the survival of traditional crafts,” she says. “If craftsmen can only sell two or three pieces of their work, then interest is lost and the craft disappears.”

She sees her work as creating markets – and she’s got personal interest vested in the success of her endeavors. She not only makes dolls, but also creates Suzannis, bags, pillows, and clothes. She employs almost 100 women to hand-make her creations, which she then sells to markets in Samarkand, Bukhara and if she can, abroad. She says that many women come to her looking for jobs. “Their husbands don’t let them work all day,” she says, “but the work they do helps their families financially.” Mansura says that she’s an artist. She’s an artist with an intuitive MBA.

Mutalibjan stands in retreat, he is shy, but his face is open and he is soft spoken. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union he taught automobile repair in a technical college. But he comes from a family of professional weavers: silk and cotton weavers. The Soviets had prohibited home-made weaving, but his family continued secretly and he learned the trade concealed behind the door of his family home. He tells me that there were serious reprimands for those caught continuing this kind of home production – which directly competed against the local factories. Some weavers he knew were imprisoned for their boldness. Although he is nostalgic about the Soviet Union and regrets its collapse, he says that there was a clear repression of the valley’s traditional ways of life. “If the Soviet Union had lasted twenty more years, the knowledge of crafts would have disappeared altogether.” He says that the Soviets gave craftsmen a brutal, almost fatal blow. The market and social structures of the USSR did not support the traditional locally-based craft economies.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the technical school at which Mutalibjan worked stopped distributing salaries. It was equivalent to unemployment. Faced with a blisteringly depressed job-market, Mutalibjan went back to the skills he knew: weaving. “We weren’t happy to start this traditional work again, but we had no choice.” It was slow languorous work and local people refused to buy the hand-made cloth, whose price was unable to compete with the cheaper China-made alternatives. “People don’t buy traditional, they want modern,” Mutalibjan says. After attending an NGO-sponsored seminar on how to write grant proposals, Mutalibjan and his family won a support grant from the Soros Foundation in 2003 – just before the organization was ejected from Uzbekistan, like so many others. The grant helped to support the family’s traditional weaving for a while, but unable to compete with Marghilan’s weaving and with no real desire to continue, the family has stopped weaving altogether.

There is a fierceness, a boldness required to succeed in the crafts market here. It is not enough to make high-quality pieces; the craftsmen need a marketer’s ruthlessness and business creativity.

But Mutalibjan has a grace, a shy beautiful smile, and an easy connection with people – one that I will see in action over the next few days spent with him, as he introduces me to artisans in and around Andijan. He and Mansura are opposites that match – and the craftsmen of Andijan are lucky for their effective teamwork.

the Ferghana Valley - Osh and her lady

2007-08-31T01:47:00.000+08:00

A short word about Saltanat and her Osh
Osh, sprawled around the Suleyman’s Throne mountain: reaching out, ragged, chaotic. Here, we are far from the capital’s control and there seems to be a freedom and chaos unfelt in the north. The streets are a rush, and the bazaar has shed its soviet rigidity to revive its oriental clamor and scents. There is an effervescence of selling and buying, a center of exchange. Chaihana’s, laid-back terrace eateries and tea houses provide easy escape from the bazaar activity and the rush of streets. Here women and men sip their endless pots of tea, chewing on samsa (the Central-Asian lamb-filled samosas, which are found from Xinjiang to the Caspian – perhaps beyond?) and kebabs. We are in proximity to Uzbekistan and the streets here are shared by Uzbeks and Kyrgyz – a proximity that is readily exploited by politicians to cause social unrest and tense days of riots and fighting – as in June 1990. But intermarriage here is not taboo, and many people speak both languages. 400,000 Uzbeks live in the city.

Borders are junctions, meeting grounds. Osh feels like the US/Mexican border town in Orson Wells’ “Touch of Evil”: black and white, mysterious, a little dangerous. In the early evening, we hurry home.

3,000 year old Osh has at its center both spirituality and history. A climb up to Suleyman’s Throne, will throw you into Kyrgyz Islam, infused with ancient superstitions – walking through a cave, sliding a hand over a stone for fertility, circling a tree praying for inner peace. The Prophet Mohammed is said to have once prayed here, and today informal pilgrims walk on the hill’s steep paths. Readers of the Koran wait for a donation, while young people come to catch the cool wind above the city.

Aridity – (or lack of time)
Among this rush and activity, crafts in Osh know little effervescence today. There is no center giving energy to the whole – and so crafts here are still a personal, bazaar-based production. It would be more interesting to go out to see the villages around the city – Gulcho, Karulja, Eski-Nookat, and further south to Batken province (places where I unfortunately didn’t have the time to go – I’m sure the story would change with insight into these regions). But Osh, which stands as the center of those other towns and villages, has not united their craftsmen, or infused the region with an economic outlet or sales platform for the region’s crafts. The town is still missing an organization, a personality to breathe that creative wind. The Golden Valley Crafts Organization, which once aspired to such a role, is now a sad workshop for second-rate ceramics, and has turned towards modern fashion design as a source of income. I meet some felt-makers who make modern Shyrdak for exhibitions as an extra source of family income – but there is none of the passion and inspiration seen in Bishkek or Issyk-Kul. Damira, my translator and I are shocked by one of the craftsman’s poverty – a completely empty house echoing with children’s crying. The family’s four sons are working in Russia, while their wives and children await them here in the two-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of the city. We are looking for some color to take refuge in.

Sultanat brings color to the landscape
Sultanat’s got style. Antique silver rings on her fingers, she’s got a seductive stare, almost nonchalant, but resolute. Feminine, alive. Like many of the women in Kyrgyzstan’s craft industry, she has connections with Aid to Artisans, who first came to the region in the late 90’s to talk about crafts business with local artists and craftsmen. Sultanat worked with the NGO as well as with CACSA, and has attended exhibits throughout the region. She has had her own crafts store for the past 15 years.

Sultanat is trying to support craftsmen in southern Kyrgyzstan, and her small colorful store sells some of their products. Up until now however she only works with craftsmen in the close vicinity of Osh, but recognizes the need for her store to branch out to more villages and towns in the south. She has researched the artisans there, and is aware of their production and knowledge. She would like to expand her business, but says that it will be hard to finance the growth. Already with her present store, Sultanat and her husband lived three years without profit, and mostly live from their paintings. “Financing growth right now will be a risk.” she says, “The political situation is still volatile and that it directly impacts tourism,” – the couple’s greatest source of clients. But Sultanat remains optimistic and is applying for grants from US government organizations to start a five-year project creating an Osh-based crafts center.

Sultanat says that they have now learned how to foster strong partnerships between their store and craftsmen. They know what can be sold, what locals and foreigners demand, and what the adequate price for each object is. She notes that the local government is also getting involved in supporting crafts. On May 28th, a global handicrafts market was held in Osh, hosted by the regional (oblast) government.

Sultanat notes that there is still a clear dichotomy between the cities and villages: crafts production in southern Kyrgyzstan is still centered in the villages while the selling and business of crafts is centered in the cities. Stronger bridges need to be created between both, even if she notes that this may impact the esthetics of the local production. Sultanat believes that it is inevitable that crafts will change. “We are in contact with other countries, other artists, the global world. Kyrgyz crafts will change and no longer be the art of nomads, but of pseudo-nomads. This is inevitable with our lifestyle changes: the functional is becoming merely decorative.” However, Sultanat believes that it is possible and primordial to preserve very traditional crafts. “It is like our language, part of ourselves,” she says. She believes that stores like hers can help to preserve the crafts – enabling local craftsmen to live from their generational skills. She notes that southern Kyrgyzstan needs to start actively supporting the crafts in the Osh and Batken regions.

Talking about the Region
“We are small isolated countries,” Sultanat says, “and we have each developed in isolation.” She says that there is not much interaction in the region beyond what CACSA enables – a handful of craftsmen that attend regional exhibitions. Considering the opportunities, she says, the exchange is minimal. Andijan is one hour away, Marghilan and Ferghana only two hours away, but she doesn’t know the craftsmen there. Despite this lack of exchange, for the first time in Kyrgyzstan, I see some crafts from other countries in her store - Uzbek silk and Tajik hand-embroidered hats. She has made some Tajik and Uzbek partners through CACSA – and so there is some border crossing, but the reality of exchange looks grim.

the Ferghana valley – a short intro

2007-08-31T01:40:00.000+08:00

Valley: n. a fold in the world. a womb, fertile. a place where life begins, where cities are built. the Great Rift Valley, the Valley of Kings, the Ferghana Valley. a safe place, where conquerors come to rest protected by surrounding mountains, irrigated by waters, scented by springs. Valley.

Land
There are many ways to approach the Ferghana Valley. From the North-East, you could follow the Kara Balta gorge out of Bishkek’s own Chui Valley, following the newly cemented road (started by the Turks, finished by the Chinese) through the devastating height of mountains, past rock and a petrified ocean of soft green dunes, to then descend – like the waters – into the patchwork of tamed agricultural land that starts beyond Jalalabad. If however, you are tempted by a southern route from Dushanbe, you will have to weather more stunning and funambulist heights – the vertical Pamir highway to Osh, or the only slightly tamer road through the roaring knife-carved millennium canyons of the Fann Mountains, up and through the hair-pin twists and turns of the Anzob and Ayni Passes, snowed in from October to May. From those wild lonely heights, you start your northerly descent into the madness and beauty of human civilization and Khujand - the 2500 year-old city at the helm, guarding the southern gates of the Ferghana Valley and the wide blue river bed of the Syr-Darya – the valley’s thirst-quencher. Taxer and Commander at the gates, Khujand stands proud, though lately a little broken, a little disconnected by new boundaries and tightened visa-regimes. (There is a sense here that we have splintered our world with nations, fragmented the great plains and their mountains). A more lackluster Westerly approach to the valley will take you from the Tashkent metropole past a slew of police posts and passport checks through the relatively low (2,267m) Kamchik Pass, known to be hermetically sealed to isolate the valley in times of strife (as most recently in 2005 following the Andijan riots when the road was closed for several weeks – the government feared the unrest would pour into Tashkent). This is the fastest route – and despite the police, it is the only one without a border crossing.

These stunning roads carved through height and mountain, lead to the flat fertile elongated bowl of the Ferghana Valley. Here, the earth is rich, dark, damp, the population dense. History abounds as does color, with mostly greens (the cotton only blooms and is harvested in early fall.) The Valley’s land and its fruits are fed by a web of canals – carved out in the 1939 with the muscle and sweat of communist fervor: The Great Ferghana Canal and its tributaries (built in 6 months with the labor of 160,000 collective farm workers). The industrious soviet planners eager to create bumper cotton harvests brought controlled water to the valley. Bringing modern irrigation, they also attracted an ever growing slew of people, ready and willing to work the land. Today, the population density is so great that water again has become gold – a scarce resource that is used and recycled, treasured and fought for. In Rishtan the family I live in walks for about 1 km to get drinkable water for the day. In Miramin’s family home in Istarafshan, drinkable water flows for about 20 minutes each day – enough time to fill up a handful of plastic cisterns. In the summer heat, boys swim naked in the freshness of the canals. Girls, no matter what age are not allowed this cool release. (I’m dying for a swim, but I’ll have to wait for Tashkent’s looser rules to slip into a makeshift bikini.) Entering the Ferghana is also to enter sedentary agricultural and urban centers and their more canonical religions and century-old customs, built and cemented by time.

Legend and Legacy
The valley is a land marked by towns, ambition and tradition. It is dense, alive, pulsing with human stories. It is also a landscape painted with ethnic myths: the residue of historical might and the passage of conquerors. It is a melting pot of cultures, languages and peoples – both complex and beautiful. In his book “Black Sea: the Birthplace of Civilization and Barbarism” Neal Ascherson writes about the rich often explosive mix of cultures that have molded the land around the Black Sea. It is a beautiful description well-suited to the Ferghana Valley:

“Human settlement around the Black Sea has a delicate, complex geology accumulated over three thousand years. But a geologist would not call this process simple sedimentation, as if each new influx of settlers neatly overlaid the previous culture. Instead, the heat of history has melted and folded peoples into one another’s crevices, in unpredictable outcrops and striations. Every town and village is seamed with fault-lines. Every district displays a different veining of [ethnicities and people].”

It is this same feeling that one gets in the Ferghana Valley. A delicate, fragile and beautiful melting pot.

Cities of legend, founded by kings, rulers of silk and sands, older than Rome, this is one of those pieces of earth at the heart of human history. Osh, Andijan, Jalalabad, Khujand, Khokand, Marghilan, Namangan– the names slip off the tongue in a lullaby of legend. King Solomon, Alexander the Great, Amir Timur, Genghis Khan, Stalin – this is a place where men have left their footprints. But recently these legends and the tracing out of nation states after the fall of the USSR, has left a delicate legacy – a patchwork of ethnicities, the creation of “us, we” and the “others”.

Today Ferghana is a body divided, suspended between three capitals: Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan), Dushanbe (Tajikistan), and Tashkent (the Uzbek bully). If the maps of the region are hard to read, this is no surprise, it is an awkward puzzle of borders and delimitations. It is a body marked by the hassle, stress, prohibitions, fears, taxes and logistics of border crossings. It is a land where sisters, brothers, and parents live across borders, where families are torn by passports and administration. But mostly, it is a place where languages and ethnicity do not neatly fit into the demarcations of borders.

In Kyrgyzstan, of 5 million nationals there are 679,000 Uzbeks (almost 14% of the population), in Uzbekistan officially there are two million official Tajiks, but the actual number is said to be as high as seven million (many ethnic Tajiks are believed to have registered as Uzbeks to avoid harassment), in western Tajikistan there are also large communities of ethnic Uzbeks and Kyrgyz.

Again, reading Neal Ascherson on the Black Sea, you can get a sense of the tension and danger that seems to lie in the ethnic configuration of the Valley (long quote, but Mr. Ascherson writes so well). The quote also hones in on the potential for violence left by the abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union:

“An ancient, ‘multi-ethnic’ community is a rich culture to grow up in. Bosnia was once like that. So was Odessa before the Bolshevik Revolution, or Vilnius, in Lithuania, before the Second World War. (…) But nostalgia makes bad history. The symbiosis has often been more apparent than real.

Living together does not mean growing together. Different ethnic groups may co-exist for centuries, practicing the borrowing and visiting of good neighbors, sitting on the same school bench and serving in the same imperial regiments, without losing their underlying mutual distrust. But what held such societies together was not so much consent as necessity – the fear of external force. For one group to assail or attempt to suppress another was to invite a catastrophic intervention from above – the dispatch of Turkish soldiers or Cossacks – which would pitch the whole community into disaster.

It follows that when that fear is removed, through the collapse of empires or tyrannies, the constraint is removed too. Power struggles in distant places, to which one group or another feels an allegiance, reach the village street. Democratic politics, summoning unsophisticated people to pick up sides and to think in terms of adversarial competition, smite such communities along their concealed splitting-plane: their ethnic divisions. And often, reluctantly at first, they divide. The familiar neighbors, with their odd-smelling food and the strange language they speak at home become part of an alien and hostile ‘them’. Antique suspicions, once confined to folk-songs and the kitchen tales of grandmothers, are synthesized into the politics of paranoia.

All multi-ethnic landscapes, in other words, are fragile. Any serious tremor may disrupt them, setting of landslips, earthquakes and eruptions of blood. The peoples themselves know this, and fear it.”

Nick Megaron, a professor at Cambridge University (quoted on Eurasianet) echoes that fear, saying: “The Ferghana Valley borderlands were once a dynamic and intricate mosaic of ethnic groups, kinship networks, land-use patterns and economic activity. Recent border policies of Ferghana Valley states have shattered that mosaic.”

Governments come to pieces over the land. The valley’s roads, rail, energy and water grids, most designed before borders were drawn and nations built in 1991, nonchalantly criss-cross countries almost indifferent to the political battles they cause today. This land was once the integrated outskirts of the Soviet Empire, unified by ideology and language. Today it is a cut-out, pantomime land, locked in a tug of war. International agencies worry greatly about potential conflict – and recently there have been some. These fears have kept tourists out of the valley, but despite the occasional mumble about unemployment and the surreptitious watering of fields under the cover of dark, traveling there - the valley seems calm.

Still, ethnic strife has exploded in the recent past. Violent ethnic clashes broke out in June 1990 over land distribution in the small, mountain village of Uzgen, in the Kyrgyz part of the Valley and spread to Osh only 55 km away. (This violence is said to have been fostered and fanned by the local political parties, vying for more power). On January 3, 2003 there were riots at the Kyrgyz/Tajik border in the region of Isfara, seemingly over water issues. While staying in Rishtan, in the Uzbek part of the Valley, a fight between two adolescents flamed fears of ethnic conflict in the neighboring city of Khokand – one of the boys had been Uzbek, the other Tajik. The Uzbek boy died – and Khokand was worried about retaliation. Rishtan locals told me that it was just young boys fighting over some mishap in the bazaar, but Khokand citizens, about 40km away were worried enough to believe that such an unlucky skirmish could evolve into something bigger. Indeed, it seems that if some political group has an agenda to promote – these skirmishes could be manipulated and masterminded into violence.

Some of the ethnic violence is also fanned at the highest level. Uzbekistan which provides electricity and gas for Tajikistan’s part of the valley regularly cuts off the supply in the below freezing winter weather – political pressures thus easily exerted. The metal workers of Istaravshan, in the Tajik Ferghana rapidly adapted to this institutionalized harassment and its ensuing daily power shortages, and have reinstalled the traditional hand-powered flame-blowers of their fathers. Better to have low output than no output at all.

Faith
In the Valley too, there are some rumbles of religion.

Fundamentalist Islam is said by many to be stirring in the Valley, and this fear (so greatly enhanced in our global sensitivities since Sept. 11) has been used by the Ferghana Valley governments, especially Uzbekistan to clamp down on many forms of religious schools, gatherings and groups – strikes that often crush pluralistic, non-fundamentalist efforts in its wake. But even USA and Europe-based think tanks take the threat very seriously. The Valley is thought, most notably, to be a breeding ground of support for movements such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (though it is not clear if the group still exists after the death of its leaders and many members in Afghanistan) and Hizb-ut-Tahrir, which is thought to be popular among ethnic Uzbeks throughout the region. I meet no one in the Valley that openly tells me of their adherence to these groups – but I imagine that it is a dangerous avowal to make.

On quick passage through the valley, it seems the Islamic revival is in renewing spirituality – a people reawaking to the practice of Islam after years of Soviet slumber and religious repression. There are few if any chadors, and calls to prayer are noticeably absent in the Uzbek part of the valley. Faith seems to be translated by gestures and open, honest, proud belief. The breaking of bread and the attending of Friday prayers.

There are some pockets however – like Marghilan, the capital of hand-woven silk – where renewed Islam has reawakened traditionalist thinking and some of the harsher pre-Soviet traditions that formerly held the region. In all the neighboring towns, I am told – almost in a whispered warning - that Marghilan is very conservative. Later, walking unveiled in Marghilan’s streets, I feel an outsider, stared at, noticed. Here Islamic modesty is imposed by the town’s conservative outlook, and people’s glances. It is the first place in the region where the veil is worn formally and with clear religious – rather than cultural – meaning/style. It is also the only place in the valley where my hosts take me to visit mosques and other religious shrines. Many of the boys in the silk factories I visit also take pauses in their work to read Namaz five times a day.

In these pockets, women bear the grunt of traditionalism – I want to say archaic, hard traditions. In Marghilan, the girls get married young: 15 and 16 year old brides are not surprising. Asking a group of girls whether they could finish school and go to university after getting married, one laughs, and says that now her husband’s family compound is her home, her geography. When talking about his son’s upcoming wedding, Fazlidin Aka, one of the silk tycoons in town, tells me that he has found a perfect wife for his son: she is 16 he says, reads Namaz and wears the Hijab.

The late master of silk velvet weaving, Turgonboy Mirzaakhmedov’s daughter Kamberoy, also in Marghilan, was not allowed to continue her university education, despite passing the difficult entry exams and demonstrating her ability and desire to study English. The expense would simply not be given to a girl, and Ferghana University, only one hour away, was considered too far and inappropriate for Kamberoy. Staying at her family’s home for three days, I come to know her and respect her worn beauty, slim and vertical with eyes carved out by lack of sleep. She tells me that she does not want to get married, but that her mom will find her a husband and she will marry this year at 21 – a year later than expected because they could not have a wedding feast for at least one year after the death of her father. In the morning at 4h30, I hear her waking and starting to clean the courtyard. I ask Kamberoy if she wants to come with me to the next towns I will visit, to escape if just for a while. She wants to come, but is not allowed. (It is now her mom who is perpetuating the pressure and restrictions once imposed by her father.)

Mirrors
Beyond some of the harder stories – those stories of women who are not given the space to dream, there is a cool, gargling calm to life in the Valley. Waking to work before the heat, the day starts early. Naps are taken in the afternoon from noon to three, and then tea is sipped in the cool night winds under grape vines. Nights are peppered with dance and song. In Rishtan I drink warm vodka and go to sleep easy. In Marghilan I secretly smoke a cigarette behind a tree. In Istaravshan I sleep with the women and the children of Miramin’s family and am lulled to sleep by the television. In Andijan, I buy strawberries in a night market.

This valley has many lives, always redefined, a collage of mirrors – seeming to reflect what you are ready to see.

Valley: n. centerpiece, critical. a broken puzzle. pockets of countries strewn throughout the land: Sokh, Shakhimardan. (pockets of Uzbekistan scattered in Kyrgyzstan). Warukh, Western Qalacha (Tajik enclaves within Kyrgyzstan), pieces. border crossings. 22,000 flat sq km – a distance from which you forget the mountains. City centers, Ferghana city, Khokand infusing the districts with urban mores. longer veils in Marghilan. Poverty, unemployment, and the daily routine. Women restricted to family compounds, not walking out alone. Craftsmen hard at work, forced to find markets in the tourist towns on the other side of the country.

----

The articles that follow are part of the dance I was privileged to have in the valley, a broken, non-expert, but heartfelt outlook on the valley: a collage of stories.

I did not spend many days in the valley. 3 days in the Kyrgyz slice of it racing between Jalalabad and Osh, 2 weeks on the Uzbek side, and one week on the Tajik heights – but it is a place that marks, that sings. Some parts I entered were alive, glowing, real, others slow, depressed, and almost rancorous. Its crafts are dense beauty, a quilt of colors and harder realities. It is the heartland of traditions reborn, some successfully, others struggling, others dying slowly. Marghilan silk, Shahrihan cutlery, Andijan jewels, mi Rishtan Boys, Isfaran ceramics, Istaravshan calico prints, Khujand embroidery. There are stories to be told here.

THANKS
Many thanks to the directory “Craftsmen of the Ferghana Valley” given to me by CACSA (Central Asian Crafts Support Association) with which I worked for 3 (discontinuous) weeks in the Valley. The directory, published in 2005 was the work of three crafts associations – CACSA (in Kyrgyzstan), Hamsa (in Uzbekistan) and Fatkh (in Tajikistan) and sponsored by USAID and the Eurasia Foundation. It is an inventory of craftsmen working in the craft centers of the Osh, Jalalabad and Batken oblasts of Kyrgyzstan, the Sogd oblast in Tajikistan and in the Andijan, Ferghana and Namangan oblasts of Uzbekistan. Many of the contributing writers, including Natalia Mussina in Uzbekistan, Svetlana Balalaeva in Kyrgyzstan, and Osmanjon Khomidov in Tajikistan were of great help. merci. merci. Also thanks to Damira Umetbaeva assistant professor at the American University Central Asia in Bishkek for help translating Uzbek, Kyrgyz and Russian.

Fergana Valley - excluded from symbols

2007-08-28T01:11:00.000+08:00

Reaching Southern Kyrgyzstan and its expansive flat and fertile agricultural land, one begins to wonder if the Tunduk – the yurt center – is a symbol wide enough to include these agricultural towns and urban centers – these places of passage, once protected by city walls. The Tunduk suddenly feels like a narrow definition for the nation. Not all here were once nomads. So boldly painted on the flag, I wonder if the numerous Uzbek population of Kyrgyzstan’s south resents this symbol that so blatantly excludes them.

a first thought on entering the Fergana Valley.

some color still

2007-08-28T00:53:00.000+08:00

if there is shadow, there must be color still.

(a preview of the Qashga'i nomads... some soul, before i return to the chronological order of things)

out of time, out of mind

2007-08-28T00:40:00.000+08:00

sometimes you have got to break chronologies to find again those orders, those frameworks that make things work. breaking mechanics to oil that rusting machinery of our routines.

so here, out of order (because I have yet to write about time spent in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan), some shadows of three blistering cloudy weeks in a sophisticated land where I have walked mostly heartbroken and splintered, searching for some traction to these bustling, densely populated schizophrenic cities and their people. walking part whole, part covered, badly dodging the slippery greedy hands of marauding perverts (young and open-faced fellows), surprised that I have not yet learned to sense the approach of their unwelcomed pinches and strokes. (Wishing too that I had learned wushu. ba bam!)

Outside, a parade in shades of black: femininity over-baking under the sun. Having to zoom into visible details – a nose, a painted piercing eye, a delicate hand – to find the soul of the world - that beauty that lets us live.

Three weeks digesting the first culture shock for me on this journey: soul-shaking, a rocky bumpy ride – which ended only recently in a flight from the beautiful and disturbing urban centers to find refuge in the Zargos mountains among the color and femininity of the Qashga’i nomads. a breath of dance.

finally finding some footing here in Iran – this subtle, brutal, multi-ethnic, poetic place at the heart of the world and history.

Reclaiming the Nomad - At the Center a Yurt

2007-06-29T00:25:00.000+08:00

A Home in Nature
A red carcass, made from fire, wood, water and sweat. Its exterior made from the shepherd’s bounty: wool felt and song. The yurt is the center of life: a mobile hearth, the center of the nomad’s creativity and freedom.

for more pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/silkroadproject/sets/72157600307504833/

The yurt consists of many parts: the wooden lattice, the kerege, on which uuk, curved wooden poles are tied to hold the crowning cap - the tyunduk – which acts as both a window and a flue (chimney). The Chi, or reed wrapping, decorated with colored threads protects from wind and dampness. Thick pressed wool (felt) coverings wrap the outside, and then there are Alakiiz (multi-colored felt carpets), Shyrdak (the quilted/appliqué felt mosaic carpet used to decorate the walls and floor), Jabyk Bash (embroidered curtains for the Yurt door), Teigirich (the horizontally woven border decoration for the outside of the yurt), Tchachery, the woven interior decorations, and others still.

To make the yurt takes patience, skill, and soul.

It is a practical, functional home into which creativity and life are woven: Soul integrated into the daily life. The yurt is creation intricately intertwined with survival. It embodies the nomad’s respect for his world, the environment – and is made of all the elements in the proximity of the nomad: wood, wool, reed, water, fire, natural dyes. Simple, it is full of spiritual generosity: colors, symbols, forms, and patterns which unveil the spirit, soul and energies of the makers.

The whole expresses the world of the nomad, their freedoms and the harmony of their lives in nature. To pack it up and shift pasture lands takes a mere three to five hours. It is the embodiment of mobility.

The yurt stands at the intersection of science (architecture, form) and the enchantment of nature and spirituality. At its core is a lifestyle of meaning and unity with nature.

Kyyzl Tyy
I go to Kyyzl Tyy – a village of Yurt-makers with the golden-toothed Salkyn – my friend and interpreter from Bakenbaevo. We go meet the open-faced Gulbar and Sapar – a man and wife team. Sapar and his two sons build the wooden elements of the yurt, while Gulbar and three women from the village make the felt and reed elements that will decorate and protect the frame. The yurt is a union of labor, a union of the sexes – partitioned by separate tasks, but brought together in the whole.

Sapar and Gulbar make about five complete yurts a year, and about 20 carcasses – just the wooden frame. One yurt needs about 15 parts of felt, thick and sturdy to last a decade. The wooden frame lasts for two decades, outside in all the elements, it is built to last.

Sapar, now 54 has been making yurts since he was 12 years old, taught by his father. His is a family trade that has continued for multiple generations - more than he remembers. His grandfather also made jewelry. Sapar says that if his father had continued to make jewelry, he too would still make it, but his grandfather died while his father was still young, and the knowledge disappeared.

We sit down to tea. The cows are in the summer pastures – so there is no fresh milk, and we spoon powdered milk into our black tea.

The mosque calls to prayer, and Sapar’s two sons rush out of the studio. They are beautiful, tall and lean, with sun-kissed dark skin and sharp eyes. The mullah beckons and the sons run off to the mosque, where they pray five times a day. The mosque in Kyyzl Tyy was finished 3 months ago. Before, the sons would go every Friday for the Juma Namaz in the neighboring town. Now, proximity enables more fervent devotion. The mosque was built with Syrian money: new, shiny, calling. Gulbar and Sapar do not pray, but they are happy that their sons are learning. Gulbar says it will give them a good education and up-bringing, while keeping them away from alcohol, drugs and cigarettes – the common ailments of the village men.

Over the past decade, almost every household in Kyyzl Tyy has started to make Yurts. After the close of the Soviet Yurt factories (production was centralized), local and foreign demand for the portable hearths increased, and the whole village went to work. Mostly, they are exported to tourist centers, where travelers pay a steep price to experience the great wide. Some are still bought by local semi-nomadic shepherds.

Sapar says that ten years ago only five or six families made yurts, but today more than 100 families are involved in the trade. He does not think this will last, as many of the yurt-makers make sub-standard quality. However, in the meantime, the increase in production has put great pressure on the local willow trees used to make the carcass. Where once, Sapar used to just cut down trees from the neighboring forests, he now has to buy wood from Jetty Ogus, a valley about one hour from Kyyzl Tyy.

A Way of Life
But despite this boost in the local Kyyzl Tyy economy, today, the semi-nomadic way of life the yurt embodies is threatened. Urbanization and globalization are forever pulling people away from the nomadic lifestyle, luring them with tales of fabulous wealth, material goods and the unsustainable luxuries of our Western lives. (of course, there are many good things about our way of life: health care, education, travel and many others, but there are also many problems. here, I’m thinking about the problems). The Kyrgyz are increasingly sedentary – the impact of sovietization and today’s global world. They are losing touch with the land, and the symbiotic relations of man and nature are being exploded – worn down, strained.

Ak-Terek, a Bishkek based NGO supported by the Christensen Fund (“backing the stewards of cultural and biological diversity”) studies the traditional knowledge surrounding the yurt and the economy of the nomads – animal husbandry. The stunningly beautiful and soft-spoken director of Ak-Terek, Nazgul Esengulova, is worried that the links between generations are weakening, and much of the traditional knowledge of the pasturelands and the nomadic lifestyle are disappearing.

The biocultural landscape of the Kyrgyz nomads is shifting rapidly, perhaps irremediably. Nazgul tells of the extreme land degradation that the Kyrgyz herders have inherited from the Soviets. Focused on quantity, the soviets multiplied the amount of sheep herded on pasture-lands – thus draining the richness of the pasture soils. They ignored the traditional rotation of pastures, and brought scientific methods to the animal husbandry: vaccinations, calendars and time-tables etc. That delicate balance, and “ecoute” or listening of the land disappeared. Where once the grazing times and places were determined by knowledgeable/versed herders who could read the pastures by the appearance of certain plants and animals, under the Soviets, all pasture land was used to full capacity, ignoring the traditional signs of over-grazing etc.. Furthermore, in creating a commune, the Soviets took away ownership of the land, thus taking away the intimate link and responsibility towards the land. The commune broke that deep respect between a herder and his pasture.

Here ecology and culture collide. How we live – our cultural norms, lifestyles - impact our natural world. (why do we always need to look elsewhere to be reminded). It is an interesting field of work – understanding a biocultural landscape. a double lens of culture and science.

The delicate knowledge of the pastures’ cycles, including its shifting plant and animal-life have all but disappeared. Nazgul and her organization have worked with many of the herders around the Song Kul alpine lake. She speaks of an elder in Tuluk village, Albi Mahamat Ata, who at 84 still knows a lot about the land and its signs. But he’s getting old she says, and often mixes up stories, and slips and slides between realities. The elders are disappearing, and with them that sacred – incredibly ancient - knowledge. Today, Nazgul says, many of the young herders do not want to listen to what little traditional knowledge remains, they rely on science and technology. They now force open mountain passes with bulldozers, rarely rotate their pastures, and have short-term profitability goals.

Where we – the ultra-modern West - should be learning from nomads, they are unfortunately learning from us. Our rapid, secular, disenchanting worlds are conquering even these high-mountain pastures.

The yurt which is the physical embodiment of the nomad’s sustainable subsistence and spiritual world may remain – in museums and tourist destinations – but the real soul and indigenous traditions and knowledge from which it was crafted are disappearing fast.

I’m thinking about Dinara Chuchunbaeva who said that, “Today, the disappearance of traditional cultural values [is] precipitating the extinction of traditional skills and expertise accumulated for ages, handicrafts are becoming a rarity (…)”

Perhaps crafts can be saved, continued – but what about this soul, this knowledge, this lifestyle. Can we ignore this when working with crafts – the soul and values from which they emerged?

Reclaiming the Nomad - the Sacred

2007-06-29T00:10:00.000+08:00

sacred places.
mazars. manas in the city
will we still know how to express emotion in the cement centers of our global worlds?
have we already forgotten?
I think of Lizou, crying when we depart.
and that afternoon when Dad bid me farewell with some dollars, a holy book and tears.

for more pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/silkroadproject/sets/72157600374643203/

we have ridden out of the city. a van. scholars, travelers, and mazar-keepers. we have entered those green summer valleys around Bishkek, where the mountains fold green and rock into inviting canyons leading upwards. a winding road up to Chong-Tash.

we arrive into the afternoon buzz of insects and a small stream.

all of the sudden, he throws his arms up into the air. running wildly up to the memorial, crying, yelping. sadness and astonishment. disbelief. he runs up the stairs to the brick kiln where 140 people – the elite of Kyrgyzstan – were executed in one of Stalin’s purges in 1937. there he sits, finds a piece of paper, a pen, and writes rapidly. words. prayers. voices. emotion.

we have come to the Chong-Tash memorial with the keepers of Mazars - sacred sites. we sit down to pray. palms upwards. open. prayers for the world, its madness and its calm. Allah Akhbat. we break bread and share the music of prayer. Stalin, father of death. will the shaman voices expel his dark soul from the world?
Chong-Tash. November 5, 1937

shadows and blood.
we shall reconquer these areas. plant a tree of life and build an opening to the sky.

(many thanks to Aigine and Gulnara Aitpaeva for sharing this with me)

Reclaiming the Nomad - An Ode to Bishkek

2007-06-18T03:01:00.001+08:00

Kyrgyzstan is still pulsing with the spiritual heritage of the nomad, the Jailoos (summer pastures), the cycles of fattening and waiting, of summer and winter snows.

In May, beyond the urban center of Bishkek, these summer pastures are beckoning. The sacred, fought-for autonomy of families and tribes in the wild. Here once stood the traditions of survival and autonomy: beautiful color woven into the vast expanse. Balance and respect. Symbols bursting with meanings, interiorized and innate. Symbols of lives, woven, sewn and chiseled into rock and into crafts: arrows of departure and return. A rhombus for the world, for the patronage of the family: protecting and encompassing. Rams horns for wealth and prosperity, bird wings for flight and inspiration.

And at the center of the world, the opening. The yurt center, the Tunduk. Open to the stars, to the worship of the sun and the rain. The continuing importance of this symbol is embodied by the Kyrgyz flag on whose center reigns the Tunduk. red, daring.

Yurts are aperture: an architecture for the infinite.

There is a sacred to this place, still felt silently in the city. This is a people who could live in the wild – I imagine it to be a fierce knowledge, an autonomy among the chaos of the world. A love of freedom. Some gestures remain: an amen at the end of tea and bread. Guests entering when they appear. doors open, no need for phone calls or preparation. Here is a time made for guests and welcoming: the values of the wild mountains.

And among this mountain sacred – an urban center, open to the modern, bustling, global world.

In its architecture and layout, Bishkek is a Soviet City, a capital of culture and administration. Theatres, parks, administrative buildings, schools, it is outfitted for urban exploration. It is a cacophony of languages and faces, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Tajik, Kazakh, Chinese, Turkish, Indian, Uighour, Dungans, – French of course. Here the world collides. Faces. Postures. Fragrance. It is a city of movement.

The roads however are a catastrophe, an obstacle course of holes and crevices. The parks and sidewalks have not been weeded in years it seems. The street lights have not been fixed in decades. It is a city that blacks-out at night: not one streetlight for the late-night reveler. It seems that the administrative and physical upkeep of the city stopped when the Russians left. The people of Bishkek are now making due with the eroding infrastructure – decrepit enough to wonder what will happen to the city when the infrastructure really crumbles.

But Bishkek remains a true urban center. The city is a dance of femininity, unveiled, untempered. The streets are a competition of mini-skirts, a tik tak rhythm of high heels, a web of fish-net stockings. Though small by comparison to any other global city, Bishkek is an urban center in every sense of the word. A place of concentrated means and creativity, a place of open mores and values. The urban distance giving the anonymity and freedom to explore beyond traditional values, and the indifference or wisdom to accept difference.

And yet here in the city, traditions still enter and thrive. Surrounded mainly by women here – I hear mainly of the values that affect them. Virginity is still key – to be protected, sheltered and valued. Surgery to sew up the hymen is common, though completely confidential and low-key. Sexual freedom is in getting sewed back up. Women get married early – 23 is often considered old for marriage. When people ask me how many children I have, they are surprised that at 27, I am not even married. Women are more numerous than men here and so the competition for marriage is great, as is the shame of not finding a partner.

The city has not changed this altogether. The pressure seeps in from families in rural centers and time-old traditions.

But there are those more delicate and (what I think are) good traditions that are felt here too. The spiritual and the sacred. The mountains seen from the city. Pictures of Manas – the Kyrgyz warrior – etched on city walls. A woman’s arms extended to the skies. Color. The golden toothed smiles. The long greetings. The forms of politness: Aka, Apa. The sacred balance of respect and rules. Traditional proverbs, stories told. The sound of Ordo Sakhna. The swinging hips of gypsy women.

Bishkek is a city alive. The mountains are close by.

Reclaiming the Nomad - a Mother and Daughter Team

2007-06-18T02:53:00.000+08:00

A Mother and Daughter Team: Kalipa Asanakunova and Asel Saparkova
I am introduced by Galina Turdyeva – whose studio is in the adjacent building. Galina tells me that Asel and Kalipa, have a strong business – anchored in souvenirs and Christmas ornaments and that I should go talk with them. The door to Asel’s small studio is open. There is one table, at which two women work. Ornaments hang from the decorative branches of a wooden pedestal. A couch and table with the usual utensils for greeting impromptu guests: tea, coffee, cookies, candy and bread, are arranged in a corner.

Asel speaks great German, so the conversation with her is easier. Lucky as Elena has had to go back to school and can’t translate for me this afternoon. My Russian is still so painfully basic.

A Women’s World
Asel and I sit down to coffee. She’s a punk of a Kyrgyz with bleached blond hair. She’s got rocker shoes – those high-rising sneakers, worn down with that edge of cool. She’s wearing long blue-jean shorts and a black t-shirt. She’s comfortable in her body, and occasionally flicks back her dyed blond bang. She’s clearly a city girl – but a metallic city girl with that tough attitude.

I’m a little tired and so we sit down on the Ikea-like studio couch and have coffee and some samosas before a more formal interview. Asel asks me how old I am. Answering 27, she asks, like everyone else here, if I am married. No I tell her, I have just broken up with my lover of almost seven years. I have been thrust out into the world, strong and a little disoriented. She nods saying that sometimes it is right to leave, or be left. She’s breaking up with her husband right now, and is worried about her daughter. It’s a little sad to bond over sad love stories, but I like these impromptu moments of intimacy with women.

Back to Business
Asel’s mom, Kalipa, has been an artist and designer for the past 30 years. Seeing the market potential for felt souvenirs she joined in the stream of artists and opened her studio in 2000. She received a starting grant from Aid to Artisans – the American development organization that really (and surprisingly) has done an impressive and positive job in Kyrgyzstan. With that first USD 1,500 Kalipa was able to kick-start her creative and business visions.

Asel joined her five years ago to lead the business and sales aspects of the studio, while Kalipa focuses on the creative designs. At first Asel and Kalipa sold their products exclusively through craft stores in Bishkek (Tumar, Kyrgyz Style, Tsum etc.), but taking advantage of Asel’s German, the mother/daughter team started directly selling their products in Germany. Asel attends the Import Shop Berlin sales forum each year, where each year she sells almost everything that she has brought and also gets orders from several buyers.

Asel and Kalipa stand with pride in their studio, and with unfeigned pleasure they state that their organization is the second or third leading organization in Kyrgyzstan for felt products, behind only Tumar Studio. They state however that they are the uncontested leaders in the small souvenir market. Today their studio employs 50 women. They have a revenue of about 20,000 to 30,000 USD per year. Last winter alone they made 10,000 USD over the Christmas season. Theirs is a successful and profitable team.

A Kyrgyz Business Model
Asel and Kalipa follow the business model that I will encounter throughout Kyrgyzstan.

It is a business model centered on the need for high and consistent quality and design control. It also takes advantage of the high unemployment rate in Kyrgyzstan, providing part-time home-based labor to unemployed women.

The business model is centered on one studio/organization/NGO, but involves a wide network of female employees based in their homes, in the villages in close proximity of the organization. One or two studio leaders design all the crafts that will be made by the organization and its network. Based on those designs, four to five full-time salaried staff work in the main studio and prepare the various felt pieces that are needed for each design. They prepare the felt, choose the colors, and cut out the pieces according to pre-determined sizes. The four to five full-time workers than create “craft kits” which include the felt pieces, the chosen color of thread that will be used to assemble the pieces, as well as all the accessory beads or tassel.

The main studio then distributes these ready-made “craft kits” to their network of home-working women. These home workers will be paid per piece for their assembly and embroidering of the pieces. They bring the finished pieces back to the studio and pick up the next order of “craft kits”.

Integral to this business model is the idea of development. And these businesses not only create vital jobs, but are also aiding in the revival and preservation of traditional gestures and crafts.

As I am talking with Asel and Kalipa, two women are preparing the craft kits that will be distributed to their network of 50 women. One woman comes into the studio with her finished pieces. She is a young and beautiful woman, her work precise. Asel goes over each of the more than 30 pieces (small angel ornaments), making sure that they are well assembled. The work is well done. They give her a next “craft kit” that she will assemble over the next two weeks.

Kalipa says that many women come to the studio looking for work. They try to give as many women as possible the opportunity to work with them, but they say there are just too many women looking for employment. They are proud that they give good salaries to their network of women.

Asel and Kalipa are looking to expand, building a bigger main studio and employing a larger network of women. They are not going to take out a loan, but rather re-invest some of the previous years’ profit. Their biggest challenge will be how to find more demand – they know it exists, but they need the capability to seize and attract it. They tell me this would be possible with a multi-lingual staff.

They are optimistic about the future, and now have the financial security to take risks and explore market options. Watch this mother-daughter team get BIG.

Reclaiming the Nomad - a Soviet Woman

2007-06-18T02:40:00.000+08:00

Notes from a Converstation with Almadjan Mambetova, head of the crafts organization Kyrgyz Heritage

I meet Almadjan in her office in southern Bishkek, and later we go out for a beer. I return several times to talk with her. My sister Marie buys me a beautiful quilt from her store for my birthday. (merci)

these are notes from the first talk we have.

Almadjan is a bold woman. Short. compact and strong. She has perfectly messy bleached blond hair. Provocatively modern. She is not someone who will complicate her life it seems - she’s brutally straightforward. I like it. A sharp-shooter. She wears a touch of make-up, but she does not look flustered by her soft wrinkles. She is at ease with her age and her life. She has had many lives.

Almadjan talks about her daughter and her mother. She is part of a line of strong, bold, and strikingly unconventional woman. He mother was divorced and left her husband when Almadjan was a little girl. She was raised by women. You can feel the force she finds in her femininity. She wears ethnic silver bangles around her wrist. a red shirt and black pants. she’s put together. fresh.

A Self-proclaimed Soviet Woman
Almadjan repeats, “Oh yes, I’m a Soviet Woman”

“We, Soviet women,” she says, “are highly educated.” According to her experience – a sentiment I will find throughout Kyrgyzstan - there is nothing bad or pejorative in being a Soviet woman. Her parents were communists, dedicated to communist ideals. “Honest, clear, clean,” she says. Her dad was a physics teacher, her mom a history teacher. “Nobody craved or lusted after money,” she says. “We traveled freely around the USSR. As a child, I went to Tashkent, Moscow. Probably the only problem with the Soviet Union,” see notes, “was that is was closed. We didn’t see much luxury, but we felt secure, in jobs and as persons.”

She admits that much of Stalin’s policy for Central Asia was to exploit and tax the land, killing the brightest and strongest of the Kyrgyz men and women, not letting them become a strong nation. But she says, “the USSR gave much to Kyrgyzstan. They gave us access to the world, to world culture, to literature, science and technology. They gave us the notion of statehood. They gave us literacy. This is why it makes no sense for us to tear down Lenin’s statues. This is why we can remember.” Almadjan marks however that “of course there were many negatives which stemmed from the narrow policy of communist party leaders. Collectivization was brutal and unnecessary. Nationalists were also punished and suffocated. But our crafts never stopped. The Embroidery, the Shyrdaks, the Kurak all continued.”

Under the USSR, talented craftspeople were organized under the banner of the “State Crafts Union” which centralized creation and industrialized production. Quantity was often more important than quality. Styles were chosen by the factory’s designers – often inspired by Moscow. The Soviet presence did severely impact – almost impair handicrafts. Speaking recently in Uzbekistan with Mutalibjan, the second in command at Andijan’s Hunarmand Crafts Association, he confided that had the Soviets stayed 20 more years, most of Central Asia’s crafts traditions would have been lost.

The Fall of the USSR
An English teacher at one of Bishkek’s top universities – Almadjan was armed for the fall of the Soviet Union. She had acquired the tools to reach out to the English-speaking world. She quickly went to work for the US government – the second country, after Turkey to open its Embassy in the Capital. (The US was indeed eager to get its foot in the door.) Almadjan joined the government’s USIS – the US Information Services here in Kyrgyzstan, where she was exposed to the ins-and-outs of American culture, and introduced to the money, grants and support that US organizations were willing to give to Central Asia.

Having acquired the experience, expertise and confidence, in 1996 Almadjan opened one of the first NGOs promoting women’s rights in Kyrgyzstan. She then wrote a plan to the Soros Foundation – one of the largest donors in Kyrgyzstan, doing outstanding and interesting work. She met with George Soros and got her project supported. She’s the kind of strong woman you want to give money too – she looks fierce, as if she could blast through any obstacles. fearless. Its easy to see how she could have seduced the philanthropic American billionaire.

She designed an international conference on “Patchwork and Modernity”. Three days of roundtables, master-classes and exhibitions.

Kyrgyz Heritage
Inspired by the idea of combining Patchwork and Modernity, and driven by the need to do more to support the many unemployed women she was meeting, Almadjan decided to open a crafts business. With an original group of 5 women, the crafts business openned in 2001. Each woman invested 2,000USD into the venture. They looked for skilled and talented women who could embroider and felt and launched themselves.

“The beginning was a waste of time,” says Almadjan. “We wasted so much time and resources. We were not business minded, and didn’t really understand the market we were entering. We didn’t know how to keep our production up to international standards – we didn’t know the basics, like which colors would sell, which sizes fit our biggest demand pool.”

“It was two years spent out in the rain,” Almadjan says, “All our money disappeared.”

Then a Canadian consultant came to help their faltering organization. She was a retired consultant, ready to act as a volunteer advisor for the organization. She turned the organization around. She came three times for two weeks over a three year period. She made an electronic catalogue to send to potential buyers, she donated a digital camera so that the organization could share their work. Most of all, the consultant designed and wrote a business plan for the company. She conducted business seminars, and developed an order form. Almadjan, sums it up saying: “basically, the consultant taught us how to run our business.”

Today there are 23 women who work part-time from their homes as seamstresses for the company – renamed Kyrgyz Heritage - as well as 7 full-time staff. Most of the 23 woman are originally from the countryside, but now reside in Bishkek. The company is focused on Kurdak – patchworking.

Her business is doing well, but Almadjan says the competition is FIERCE. She claims that there are over 300,000 people working in crafts today in Kyrgyzstan. Out of a population of 5 million, this is quite substantial.

Symbols
Today, Kyrgyz Heritage is focused on reviving traditional Kyrgyz patterns and symbols in Patchwork. The company makes quilts, wall-hangings, bags, pillow-covers, table liners – you name it - all boldly designed with the symbols of the Kyrgyz nomads.

“We [the Kyrgyz] have our own way of thinking,” says Almadjan. “The early Kyrgyz were children of nature. They considered themselves as part of nature: the sun, moon, mountains were intertwined in their lives. They knew a cyclical time, led by the equinox. At Kyrgyz Heritage, we have integrated this knowledge in the crafts we make today. We incorporate the meaningful ornaments of the past.”

mountains. nomads. infinite. skies and the sun.

Even if the symbols and some gestures remain, today, most Kyrgyz have lost the knowledge of their ancestors self-sufficient way of life. So that the mountains that once protected and nourished their forefathers – are now serious obstacles to development.

(enough to wonder if the nomadic lifestyle was not much more adapted and better for the high mountains. sometimes, I feel that these are the lifestyles that will save the world when we have blasted the planet with our delirious consumption and ignorance – another story – but some people are working on the question and trying to preserve this nomadic knowledge for use around the world, especially in refugee camps. The Yurt Revolution)

back to mountains and the development challenge they pose.

About today’s economic crisis
“We are 97% mountainous,” says Almadjan. “We have to deal with high-mountainous conditions. Roads, development, everything is harder here. Compounded with constant earth-quakes, landslides. This is eating at the state budget. Everything is more expensive in Kyrgyzstan. Furthermore, we are landlocked – we have to pay for all our access. We have to pay everyone.” Almadjan says.

Almadjan sees the end of the Soviet Empire as having the scale and amplitude of a revolution. Any revolution she says is accompanied by a severe crisis in all spheres of life: economic, morality, culture (tradition), education. She says that the transitional period after a revolution can last anything from 5 to 50 years depending on the geopolitical interest/policy/leaders. It has been almost 20 years already for Kyrgyzstan.

This is a hard burden. time stretched out and frozen.

I ask Almadjan about the role Islam can play in Kyrgyzstan
She says that Islam is a “young and aggressive religion.” She thinks that Islam is at the top of its spiral – peaking globally. But after this peak, she says Islam will start to decline on a global scale. “Of course we [the Kyrgyz] converted, but we are modern,” she says. She believes that 90% of Kyrgyz traditions are nomadic, she accords only 10% to Islam.

(This an answer from a “Soviet Woman” – and many contesting ideas emerge over the next weeks in Kyrgyzstan. but the country is overwhelmingly liberal and more about personal-religious experience rather than canonical/institutional frameworks.)

Almadjan points out that the traditional ornamentation of Kyrgyzstan’s crafts are devoid of religious influence. Ornaments have preserved the nomad’s beliefs – their links with the natural world, their worship of the stars and the sun. The ornaments, she believes have preserved the meaningful, informative symbols of the nomads. Every hook, every turn in the design has some semantic meaning. Reflecting the openness of the plain, the freedom of the nomads.

It is these meanings that Kyrgyz Heritage tries to revive.

The Future of her Business
The seasonal shifts in demand she says are “absolutely frustrating”. In the summer tourist months the company runs smoothly, but the winter is hard to get through. The company still needs to stabilize demand and find new year-round buyers.

Furthermore, Almadjan laments that “there is no support for the business community here, especially the small-business community. The unstable political situation is hurting us – it’s hurting our production lines: women can’t come to work if there are demos going on. It’s hurting our demand, as tourists don’t want to travel to Kyrgyzstan if there is political instability.”

She has been to the demos raging this week out on Ala Tau Square. She’s trying to oust the current president – a “southy” she says pejoratively. She will be at the front-lines of change.

She’s 62.

Reclaiming the Nomad - A Golden Thimble

2007-06-18T02:26:00.000+08:00

Again, so many thanks to Prof. Emita Hill, Gulnara Aitpaeva and the Aigine Girls, CACSA and Asel and Elina who made Kyrgyzstan shine for me. Rhakmat!

Altyn Oimok
The Golden Thimble, Bokonbaevo, Issyk Kul Oblast, Kyrgyzstan

Janyl Baisheva, Director

Bokonbaevo is a ghost of a town. It is a wide, vast, quadratic series of dusty streets, about 5 km south of the blue shores of Lake Issyk Kul. It is a dot on the cracked and pot-holed highway leading around the lake and onward to Bishkek. Here the economic crisis is palpable and real. no factories, no industry. no work. The only light in town comes from sunlight bouncing off the new mosque’s metallic cupola and minaret – a gift from Turkey. Contrasting the first dreariness of Bokonbaevo’s sad streets is the abrupt beauty of the Tian Shan, whose peaks rise just beyond the town – but even the mountain’s proud shadows seem to want to hide the degradation of the shamble town. Bokonbaevo seems a scar in the exquisite natural scenery.

It is here that Janyl has created her Altyn Oimok (Golden Thimble) – a burst of color and texture.

The story of Altyn Oimok starts in 1996. The collapse of the Soviet Union has seeped deep into the population of Bokonbaevo, the economic crisis sinking into the population’s bones like the chills of a humid winter. The women in Bokonbaevo are united in hardship. So many of their men – husbands, sons, and brothers - have succumbed to the depression of chronic irremediable unemployment, many drowning their sorrows in vodka. The once tight-knit threads of family structure are being stretched thin.

It’s about this time that three of the town’s women decided to unite together to fight unemployment and revive the pride and strength of their communities. Determined, the women want to fight for their families and themselves, to emerge from the shambles of their country’s economy and to revive the honor and pride of their everyday lives. They are ready to put up a fight.

These three women had talked to Aid to Artisans and Dinara Chochunbaeva – and were convinced by what they had discussed: women’s traditional handicrafts could be an income-generating activity.

They first attended Aid to Artisans workshops and seminars on business-creation and marketing. From the newly created Central Asian Crafts Support Association (CACSA), the offspring of Aid to Artisan’s work in the region, they learned how to make high-quality standard products that could target foreign markets, tourists, and later even American soldiers at the Manas Airbase in Bishkek.

The women were learning what they could do and felt empowered and ready to set up an organization of their own. No easy task, when this had never before been done.

Today, in 2007 Altyn Oimok has been busy making handicrafts for 12 years. They have 16 full-time staff in their office and workshop, and 35 women who work with them from their homes. Their market has been focused on the tourists who come to enjoy the blue of of Lake Issyk Kul, but in 2004 with the help of CACSA they exported their first products to Canada. Their products include both traditional felt handiwork such as Shyrdaks and Ala Kiyiz, as well as new products designed for the tourist and foreign markets such as felt slippers, necklaces and small souvenirs.

This success is not a surprise when you meet Janyl. There’s just something in the light of her eyes. a cool reassuring calm. a determination. Janyl, wearing a colorful scarf on her head, is a woman of clear stature. She is gentle and speaks calmly but firmly. She is deeply invested in her community.

Hers is Social Entrepreneurship

Altyn Oimok has worked with the most vulnerable women in Bokonbaevo, gathering, training and employing single mothers, women from poor families, women who have been physically abused. Janyl says that many unemployed women who feel powerless or lost come to find work with her organization. “They become empowered and strong here,” Janyl says. “We give them a chance to develop their skills, to gain financial autonomy and respect within their families and the community.” Altyn Oimok’s business is clearly engaged in community building and in bringing positive social change.

This is Janyl’s clear and simple passion: to return the respect of daily life and beauty to her community. She is a social warrior. simply. resolutely.

Janyl says, “In our village, making handicrafts is the only income-generating activity that can be done while also staying at home and taking care of our families.” Altyn Oimok’s business model, which follows the “Kyrgyz Model” (described in the introductory blog article), enables women to contribute financially to their family’s well-being, while still enabling them to be present in their households.

Janyl takes us inside the homes of some of the women who work with her – she is welcomed as an old friend. a partner. There is clear respect. Working with Altyn Oimok has not only helped the women contribute to their family’s income, but has created a clearly united group of women. a community.

Janyl has many plans for expanding the reach and breadth of Altyn Oimok’s work. She dreams of building a children’s daycare within the workshop, enabling more women to come and work with her, and enabling them to work over-time when they receive large orders. She also wants to build a training center where women can learn about new craft design, models, and marketing. She wants to encourage women to start their own organizations and wants to help in the skill-building.

Janyl also has very business-minded goals, which include making Altyn Oimok a big profit-generator with a more regular market.

Up until today, Altyn Oimok has been vulnerable to seasonal market variations. This is due both to the seasonal nature of market demand (tourism) and the seasonal production of raw ingredients (sheep are sheared in spring, felt is made in summer). Summer is the best time for felt production, which is currently done outside (Altyn Oimok only has a small interior workshop), and dried in the summer sun.

Janyl would like to get the necessary equipment and work space to be able to make the felt continuously throughout the year. She also dreams of incorporating pressing equipment for the felt-making, which would reduce the labor-intensive process and enable her to produce more of the raw materials (felt) the organization uses to make their crafts.

All of these dreams require substantial investment. Janyl feels that a bank loan would be too risky, as there are no loans made specifically for small-business generation. She relies on the organization’s savings and potential grants from development agencies. She is ready to listen to new ideas – and would be happy to get a specialist’s volunteer hours.

…

Here, in Kyrgyzstan, it seems that even the direst situations can be transformed: the lights are out in the Bishkek night, but it helps to see the stars.

Kyrgyzstan Reclaiming the Nomad - intro

2007-06-18T01:58:00.000+08:00

Any article on Kyrgyzstan must first start with many thanks. First to Prof. Emita Hill for continuous encouragement/ideas and pointing me to the amazing women of Aigine - Gulnara Aitpaeva and her team. Most days in Bishkek involved a stop to the Aigine office to chat, have tea or just say hi – it was an inviting home-base, full of women passionate about Kyrgyzstan and the country’s spiritual heritage. merci. And of course, many thanks must go to CACSA – the Central Asian Crafts Support Association and the organization’s executive director Svetlana Balalaeva, who pointed me to an amazing network of craftspersons and let me hang around the CACSA office asking questions and participating in seminars. And to Asel and Elina – what can I say – it was so amazing to live with you both. colorful. wild.

Below is an introductory article that I wrote for the NewEurasia Website – a website uniting bloggers from around the Central Asian region. www.neweurasia.org

Crafts in Kyrgyzstan: A Look at Creative Small-Entrepreneurs
While the politicians talk and argue about policy, struggling to piece together effective democracy, life on the street goes on: people, everyday, waiting for change, and continuing to craft a living among the economic chaos and slowly crumbling soviet infrastructure. Political quarrels and corruption have left many still unemployed, lost, and without the necessary financial tools to enter a new economy of competition and risk. It has left many blisteringly poor. Part of the picture is bleak. But the hardship has also spurred a small, mostly female group of craft entrepreneurs creatively supporting their families and communities.

Looking at crafts in Kyrgyzstan today is to look at hope and the strength of small entrepreneurship.

On the Recent Development of Crafts
Crafts development in Kyrgyzstan was fostered by the need for employment and profit-creation. When Soviet economic structures fell over night in Kyrgyzstan, women and men were left unemployed, without the security once offered by the planned Soviet system. The brutal loss of employment and the distress and poverty caused by the rampant inflation that followed the disintegration of the Soviet Union put clear pressure on family heads, the breadwinners. This chaos created unlikely entrepreneurs. Women from both urban and rural regions were faced with the hunger-pangs of their children, and the primal (perhaps cliché) need to feed and maintain their families. Emboldened by need, women launched into small business ventures.

“Women became aggressive. The woman had to face their children asking them where dinner was,” says Almadjan Mambetova, Chairwoman of the crafts organization Kyrgyz Heritage. “It was the women who would hear their kid’s pangs of hunger. Not the Dads. Faced with unemployment, women became interested in crafts,” Almadjan states. After the fall of the USSR and losing her job as a painter, Galina Turdyeva the founder of the Bishkek-based Kiyiz Art Studio says that “this is when I had the idea to open something on my own. I had so many doubts. I was not sure how to combine art with business. But under the strenuous economic circumstances, and the surprising turns of life, I had to do just that - launch myself into this business.”

At this time, development organizations played a pivotal role in the development of these entrepreneurs. Organizations like Aid to Artisans began to show local women that the crafts they were making for their families (felt-rugs, weaving, embroidery, etc.) could be sold for profit. Foreign aid organizations working with local experts like Dinara Chochunbaeva introduced the idea that there was a market for all these formerly home-centered crafts. Women could capitalize on the ancient skills at which they already excelled.

Unlike other regions, crafts in Kyrgyzstan were traditionally made for a family’s own consumption and use, not for economic activity. Each family had the knowledge and skills to make a wide variety of crafts. However, the idea that these home crafts could be sold for profit was new. In the context of unemployment and high economic pressure, the idea took root and developed with initial financial help from a large variety of development organizations.

“The present had failed them,” Almadjan Mambetova says, “so many women looked to the past to see how they could earn money.”

“A tough life has made us remember our traditions,” says Galina Turdyeva.

Women created crafts organizations and started making traditional felt rugs, Shyrdaks and Ala Kiyiz for the foreign and tourist markets. Through trainings with organizations like CACSA, the Central Asian Crafts Support Association (an offspring of the work done by Aid to Artisans) they learned the wide variety of different crafts and souvenirs that could be sold. They learned the essentials of business-creation, marketing and how to make consistently high-quality goods following international standards.

Reviving Old Traditions
This new small business-creation was all the more powerful (and successful) in that it was built on the rich and deep-rooted knowledge of Kyrgyz traditional culture. Marketing and business knowledge were brought to already existing local knowledge and technologies.

The nomadic/semi-nomadic way of life of the Kyrgyz, and the character of the traditional Kyrgyz economy based on herding had promoted the development of many home crafts for local/family consumption. Often away from town-centers and their markets for months at a time, each family needed to be able to produce the crafts essential for the daily life of their household. Each family thus knew the technologies and skills involved in the crafts, which were passed down from generation to generation. This was a rich knowledge carried and shared by each member of society. (This is not true to all crafts, as some crafts like metal-working were specialized and usually done by one local master). Even after years of Soviet rule and the lifestyle changes brought by the Soviet economy, most households in rural areas still knew these skills, many continuing them for home-consumption.

The women-entrepreneurs with the help and support of the development agencies would tap into this local knowledge.

A Kyrgyz Business Model
To harvest the unique opportunities created by the widespread craft knowledge, the women developed a tailored and focused business-model.

Choosing one craft: the first step for creating their businesses was to focus on one of the traditional crafts. As the main element in the nomad’s traditional house (the yurt), felt occupied a key place among traditional crafts. Furthermore, the knowledge of felt-making (unlike metal-working for example) was still widespread after the fall of the USSR. The raw materials (wool, water) for felt-making were also readily available and affordable. There would also be minimal infrastructure investment involved in felt-making, as it could be made entirely by hand. It was therefore logical for the new entrepreneurs to center their budding businesses on felt.

Quality was the next challenge. Although each woman knew how to make the felt and felt-products, there was great variance in the quality and style of each piece. Each woman had different quality standards. This was a hurdle the entrepreneurs needed to overcome.

To focus the quality and design control, the business model was centered on one studio/organization/NGO, which then reached out to involve a wide network of female employees based in their homes, in surrounding villages. One or two studio leaders design all the crafts that will be made by the organization and its network. Based on those designs, four to five full-time salaried staff work in the main studio, where they prepare the various felt pieces that are needed for each design. If the studio makes its own felt, rather than buy it ready-made, the salaried staff is also responsible for felt-making. The full-time salaried staff prepares the felt, chooses the colors, and cuts out the pieces according to pre-determined standard sizes and designs.

The four to five full-time workers in the main studio then create “craft kits” which include the felt pieces, the chosen color of thread that will be used to assemble the pieces, as well as all the accessory beads or tassel. The main studio then distributes these ready-made “craft kits” to their network of home-working women. With these craft kits, the main studio assures the creation of standard sizes and designs as well as the high quality of the felt. The home workers will assemble and embroider the kits, and be paid per piece. They bring the finished pieces back to the studio and pick up the next order of “craft kits”.

Socially Responsible Business
Integral to this Kyrgyz business model – and what I believe makes it really innovative - is the idea of development. The business model directly addresses and “takes advantage of” the high unemployment rate in Kyrgyzstan, providing part-time home-based labor to unemployed women. It taps not only into the existing skills of the community, but the need of many women to find part-time employment. These artist businesswomen have created organizations with clear grass-roots social benefits.

Most of the studio heads that I talked to, stressed the point that they are employment-generating ventures, creating jobs for vulnerable women.

Building on these social results, the new business-women have learned that communicating and marketing the “social goals” of their studios and businesses could be profitable. They have learned that both their buyers and potential donors value these social results: buyers ready to pay higher prices, donors ready to distribute grants. Interestingly many of the business leaders that I talked to call their studios “NGOs”. Indeed they are non-governmental private ventures, so in essence are NGO’s, but the organizations have the clear aim of being profit-driven ventures, and are not dependent on grant-money for survival.

That these crafts organizations have become versed not only in the existence of wide demand for their products, but also in the marketing and development vocabulary of the West - is probably closely linked with the presence and initial support of aid and development organizations in Kyrgyzstan. But this conception of their small crafts businesses as NGOs, I believe is also interesting, in that it highlights both the strength and weakness of the Kyrgyz crafts market. First, the strength of the market’s creativity and talented marketing, and second the apparent weakness of the overall business environment that does not support small-entrepreneurs, but forces them to search for development grants and aid in order to grow.

Reviving Tradition
Beyond their employment-generation potential, these small crafts-businesses are also helping to revive and sustain ancient gestures and traditional knowledge.

As household objects of daily use, crafts are tightly intertwined with a people’s traditional way of life. Crafts are fossils of tradition and life, maps of cultural identity reflecting daily gestures and generations of esthetic choices. To look at a craft object is to glimpse at how people see and act in their world. Yet, as objects so closely tied to traditional lifestyles, they are also vulnerable to the abrupt changes in lifestyles, seen most recently in Kyrgyzstan with sovietization and now globalization.

“Today, the disappearance of traditional cultural values [is] precipitating the extinction of traditional skills and expertise accumulated for ages, handicrafts are becoming a rarity (…)” says Dinara Chochunbaeva

Galina Turdyeva, head and founder of the Kiyiz Art Studio, speaks about the disappearance of traditional knowledge. She points to the fact that the links between the generations are fading. Where once young women would learn these crafts from their mothers and grandmothers, today this passing-down of knowledge is becoming a rarity.

Galina believes however, that a strong market for traditional crafts can help revive these generational links and help preserve that sacred knowledge. “If there is a market,” she says, “people will continue to make traditional crafts and arts. The future is dependent on the existence of a market for the goods.”

Many of the new crafts businesses have explored and revived some of the most traditional ornaments of Kyrgyz culture. The felt rugs made by the organizations include those ancient pre-Islamic forms that reflect Kyrgyz ancient shamanist wisdom and spirituality. The ornaments of the crafts carry images of sacred myths and symbols, their color choices reflecting the balance in nature, and the cyclical rhythm of the nomad’s world.

“We have our own way of thinking,” says Almadjan Mambetova of Kyrgyz Heritage. “The early Kyrgyz were children of nature. They considered themselves as part of nature: the sun, moon, mountains were intertwined in their lives. They knew a cyclical time, led by the equinox. At Kyrgyz Heritage, we have integrated this knowledge in the crafts we make today. We incorporate the meaningful ornaments of the past.”

There are many people trying to preserve the know-how: the knowledge to make the felt crafts and interpret their ornaments. Others are also starting to revive other crafts and traditional knowledge.

In Bokonbaevo, Jildis Asanakounova the founder and director of Felt Art Studio, wants to expand her successful business to include embroidery. “I see that embroidery skills are disappearing rapidly,” she says. Jildis has been collecting antique embroidery pieces and learning some of the stitches, but she believes that more needs to be done to save the knowledge of Kyrgyz embroidery. “I am looking to integrate some traditional embroidery in the crafts we make for tourists, to create a market for embroidery. I’m sure it can work,” continues Jildis. She is currently looking for the funds she will need to expand her business into this new line of crafts. She notes that time is pressing however, as many of the older women who still know how to embroider are getting older, and will soon no longer be able to teach and share their craft. A micro-finance loan or a small-business initiative grant would be rightly placed in her hands.

A Maturing Market
There are no crafts if there is no profit. It is perhaps an obvious statement, but it needs to be retold. If there are no buyers, there will be no makers. Over the past sixteen years, Kyrgyz craftsmen and women have created their market: assembling the makers and seeking out the buyers, they have transformed home-centered crafts into profitable businesses.

Today, the Kyrgyz crafts market has a variety of actors. There are large support organizations, like CACSA and the Kyrgyz Crafts Organization that assemble, support, and market Kyrgyz crafts. There are large local shops and showrooms such as Tumar, Kyrgyz Style, and Tsum that provide a local sales-surface for small crafts organizations from throughout Kyrgyzstan. There are also a few foreign-based stores that regularly purchase from various Kyrgyz studios, providing a foreign sales-surface. However, studios mostly rely on crafts fairs and festivals to gain access to the foreign market. The market also has numerous individual studios with their own local storefronts. The home-workers with no participation in sales stand in the background, but are pivotal to the success of the organizations.

The supply is strong and competition fierce. The actors however, remain small and the work hand-made and labor-intensive. The increase of machinery will most likely bring about significant change in the market structure. One of the market’s greatest strengths – beside the beauty of their products is the predilection of the Kyrgyz organizations for creative innovation. A real strength that is visible in Kyrgyzstan’s crafts-market is that it is not only about revival, but about seeking new creativity, new innovation and adjusting to the preferences of demand.

Ideas are quickly recycled among the different workshops and studios and the fierce competition is motivating higher quality and continued innovation

Sales and finding demand is the current challenge: how to create sales-surfaces abroad, where the demand lies. If someone has an advantage in reaching out to the foreign market they will inevitably start to lead. Kalipa Asanakunova and Asel Saparkova have demonstrated this, as they have used Asel’s fluency in the German language to tap into the German market, and become leaders there.

Foreign demand remains relatively untapped – and the market therefore remains dynamic, with many new opportunities to seize.

The craft industry in Kyrgyzstan is firmly implanted and strong – but there remains much left to do to help small-entrepreneurs realize those larger, more ambitious plans. Small entrepreneurs are at the base of both economic and social growth and change – they are the local actors that can perhaps help Kyrgyzstan emerge from economic crisis. They are integral players, and they need support.

Dömbra Nation - 11 (Black Stallion)

2007-05-17T18:43:00.000+08:00

Mountain Magic
We rent a car for the day and head into the mountains to Japarbek Jianglihan’s house. We enter the mountains flushed with an exuberant sun and spring’s first green. The mountain roads we take wind up through a deep colorful valley. We are alone in the expanse and slip through the scenery. It is a clear day to breathe the great wide open. And too soon, I find that we have entered Zhuan Dai Village just below the Zhuan Dai Mountain Pass

more pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/silkroadproject/sets/72157600048726829/

We arrive to the magic mountain home, just at the entrance of the village, hugging the mountain dotted with grey, black and white sheep. Japarbek is glowing with happiness and excitement. He is suddenly a kid, eager, proud, and excited to play the Dömbra for his impromptu guests. He has instantly dropped all of his work for the day - tending to his newborn sheep, watching the others graze - to spend the day with us, blessing the afternoon with an endless concert. Even when we are tired, from listening and concentrating, he wants to continue to play, eager to express all his happiness and play for us all the songs that he once knew.

He wants to slaughter a sheep, and heaps presents on us. Endless gifts of generosity. Tea and Beshparmak of course. Milk and tangy homemade blueberry jam.

Japarbek puts on his best clothes. Finding his white head cover to be a little bit dirty, he goes to the store that he and his family keep to make extra money and pulls out a new bright white head cover. He slips on his velvet jacket and his grandson too puts on the decorations of the day.

A Father’s Dream
Japarbek was born in 1946, and started to play when he was only four. Encouraged by his father, he would play when visitors entered the house, and take his Dömbra to the neighbor’s whenever possible. His dad, determined to have a master Dömbra player in the house, would take the young Japarbek with him to every ceremony, feast or party where his son could listen to Dömbra. His father believed that music starts with the ears and wanted to place the seed of the Dömbra in his son. And so the young Japarbek attended every wedding and Akyn competition in the neighboring villages, discovering his local geography and building his ear.

Japarbek was able to study five years in elementary school, but the family did not have enough resources for him to continue. He would tend to the family and its sheep, walking in the great expanse of the pastures and grassland. Perhaps the second ingredient for a master Dömbra player

In 1957 a Kazakh movie was played in the outdoor movie theatre in Qinghe town. Japarbek attended and was mesmerized. But, he was mesmerized not by the movie or the beautiful actors – but by its soundtrack. The movie featured a Dömbra player who gently stroked the song “Hei Ze Ma” or black stallion, a song written by the famous Dömbra composer, Baisembai. This song was to mark Japarbek, leaving a strong impression on his soul and a restlessness in his fingers.

Hearing the song “Hei Ze Ma” Japarbek said that he realized that the Dömbra could tell life. The instrument could translate feelings and the rhythms of his life on the plane. “Hei Ze Ma”, clearly brought to life the galloping of the stallions in the summer pastures, and he awoke to the fact that the Dömbra could tell the story of his people.

Coming home late from the movie, he played the song by heart for his father. His father was moved to tears, seeing that his son had learned the secret of the Dömbra. Japarbek says that he too was happy to have fulfilled his father’s dream, and from that time on the Dömbra would be an essential partner in his life. He turned to his Dömbra with new diligence, and a bequeathed sense of responsibility.

We sit in Japarbek’s three-room house, sitting on the raised surface of the bed/living room, surrounded by the piles of dowry shyrdaks and covers that his wife brought with her years ago for their marriage. We sit and listen to Japarbek play, some songs that he remembers well, others from which he only plays a few verses. He plays over 40 songs for us, and the morning slips into the afternoon and then into the early evening. He says that he could play until morning, and I wish that we could stay. I would just lie down on the colorful felt shyrdaks and dream away, thinking of nations and music and people and the freedoms of a nomadic life surrounded by family.

But our driver wants to go back to town, and we reluctantly get back into the car and slip away from Japarbek’s colorful home, returning to the dusty cement county center. Leaving some part of beauty.

Dömbra Nation - 8 (Instrument Makers)

2007-05-17T17:58:00.000+08:00

Along the way, Song Yu Zhi and I meet five Dömbra-makers. All men, all masters of sound: Sultan Kaze, Mahediti, Dr. Kabidula and the Paizola Father and Son.

With the instrument makers we learn about economics, tradition, rigor and compromise.

Dömbra making is developing fast, bolstered by the high demand for the instruments that began with China’s reform in the late 70’s. Dömbra-making has become a lucrative business and logically Dömbra makers are increasing. This tradition is far from being lost, and rather traditions are being maintained and expanded upon.

Dömbra as Medicine
Dr. Kabidula, a retired doctor from the Altai Kazakh Hospital has anchored his Dömbra playing and making in his vision for healthy living. He talks about mental and physical health, and sees the Dömbra as giving the Kazakh community both. He believes that Dömbra playing is anchored in the need for people to translate their emotions of happiness and sadness and get in touch with their spirit – and psychology.

Dr. Kabidula also believes that the sharing of stories are important emotional expressions for the community, and that this sharing is medicinal. It is an essential part of the Kazakh culture he says – to share the emotional through the Dömbra.

When he retired from his position at the hospital, Dr. Kabidula had nothing to do, and so decided to fill his free time by making instruments in his workshop, a small garage-like cabin below his apartment building, a stone’s throw from the hospital. He says that making the instruments is mental and physical exercise, keeping him healthy and alert. But beyond the health benefits, the Dömbra-making also enables his family to avoid economic hardship – he sells each Dömbra for RMB 200-300, thus comfortably complimenting his retirement.

Kabidula is from a family of carpenters, craftsmen with agile hands. As a child his family was completely autonomous he says. His grandfather made everything for the house – tables, bowls, etc, while the women made the rugs, cloth etc. He learned the carpentry trade from his forefathers. His uncle was also a very good Dömbra maker.

Dr. Kabidula has agile hands and a piercing intellect to guide them. In his workshop he crafts instruments and other medical gadgets. He is a talented inventor with 3 patents and another of the way – for all sorts of medical needs including broken bone reparation, crutches and massage therapy. (He has also co-written two books on Kazakh traditional medicine.)

Dr. Kabidula’s instruments have amazing sound. Deep and resonant. Song Yu Zhi plays a mandolin made by Kabidula and the whole case vibrates with the strings – the sound is clear and long-lasting.

The sounds are indeed medicinal, we escape to other places.

Sound and Beauty
The masters we meet are concerned about quality – sound quality and the beauty of the instruments. Dömbra making is about compromises, weighing beauty and sound. Finding the architecture that will enable both.

This is the work of Paizola father and son.

In Chem Chek Village, a 15 minute drive south of Altai city, we talk with Yerbolat Paizola, the son of the Paizola father/son team.

A confident maker of Dömbra, he is 25 and started to make Dömbra professionally with his father when he was 20. His is an inherited craft: profitability facilitating the inheritance.

We talk about the Dömbra’s recent evolution from the quadratic/square shaped Abai Dömbra to today’s round-bellied Jhambul Dömbra. The change from the Abai to the Jhambul has occurred over the past 30-40 years in China, and now the Paizola team exclusively makes the newer, rounder Jhambul Dömbra.

Yerbolat takes us into his workshop and shows us the process of making the Dömbra: the Paizola’s delicate mix of esthetics and sound. From the processing of the wood (soaking, molding, drying) to the assembly of the pieces, a simple Dömbra can take two days to make. The more precise and beautiful pieces can take up to one month – these are made to order.

The Paizola team sells most of their instruments from their home, but have also started to sell their instruments in local music shops in Altai city. Expensive or unique orders however are still made directly to them in their home-workshop.

In his workshop Yerbolat listens to slow beautiful Dömbra music. Light comes through his western-looking window, and we watch the sun set as Yerbolat shapes wood into sound. His apprentice watches. He has been chosen among many men who volunteered to learn the craft. He will one day take this knowledge and open his own workshop, further giving birth to sound and the histories it carries.

Dömbra Nation - 6 (inventing new instruments)

2007-05-11T12:42:00.000+08:00

This is the sixth article about the 20 days Song Yu Zhi and I spent chasing the Dömbra, the two-stringed long-necked lute of the Altai, the soul of the Kazakh people. This slender cedar wood instrument carries the sacred of the nomad: those long nights spent below the stars. It is the vessel of the Kazakh people’s oral history: the tool for recounting the tragedy and strength of ancestors and for performing the emotional and the poetic.

for more pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/silkroadproject/sets/72157600046975805/

Sultan Kaze – Sound Innovator and Instrument Maker
Two Mornings with Sultan Kaze in the Yili Kazak Autonomous Region
Born in 1965, Sultan Kaze is a craftsman dedicated to the revival and development of Kazakh music. He has crafted and revived many of Kazakh’s most traditional instruments, and used these instruments to develop and invent others. He is an experimenter of sound histories. His works are exposed in the Illi Museum for Kazakh Culture.

Sultan Kaze studied at the Illi Music and Dance Troupe and in 1992 was named its director. First learning how to play to Dömbra, he quickly started to be interested in more ancient Kazakh instruments. An assiduous researcher, he gathered all the available literature in Illi and across the border in Kazakhstan, but found few materials on ancient instruments. Only one foreign book (he did not state it origin- probably Kazakhstan) published in 1978 enabled him to learn about the various types of instruments and how they were made. The book provided only a structure – and Sultan Kaze was left to improvise and investigate in his basement workshop below his apartment. He was determined to revive the instruments he saw – and his investigations were instinctual, he says.

Sultan Kaze is a historian and an inventor, a storyteller with agile and constructive hands. He has dived into wood and strings, experimenting with revival and histories.

Pulling from old pictures, he is rebuilding the past and innovating on sound.

He is a deep well of history – he has lived for these instruments and culture since the days of China’s reform.

Kybyze
Sultan Kaze first crafted the Kazakh’s traditional Kybyze, a two-stringed violin – which is set on the musician’s lap and played vertically with a horse-tail bow. The hollow body of the classical Kybyze is covered with camel or cowhide and the strings are made of naturally processed sheep intestines. After finishing his Kybyze, he felt that the notes and musical range of the Kybyze were restricted, finding its low tone too monotone an unvaried.

(photo: Sultan Kaze with ancient Kybyze. Kybyze means instrument in Kazakh)

He investigated methods to make the Kybyze more alive, and more adapted to today’s new sounds – he wanted to be able to play both Kazakh and foreign music.

From his investigations, the modern Kybyze was born. Maintaining the same shape and structure, he added two more strings to increase the range of the instrument, and covered the hollow with wood (rather than camel-hide) to help make a more stable sound (not dependent on the caprices of the changing seasons – their humidity or dryness). The new four-stringed Kybyze now gave musicians access to a greater musical repertoire, while conserving the sounds and effects needed to play traditional Kazakh songs. Sultan Kaze proudly states that the new modern Kybyze is successfully performed and starting to develop among the community.

Zhitegen: Kings, Sons and Seven Strings
Sultan Kaze’s experimenting did not stop here. Building on the success of his modern Kybyze, Sultan Kaze revived and transformed the Kazakh Zhitegen – or “seven strings”. He knew of the Zhitegen only in books. The instrument had died away and had not been used for the length of memory. Noone recalled the sound, until the 1938 excavation of a burial ground in southern Kazakhstan were the remains of an old Zhetigen were found.

From pictures and descriptions, he revived the instrument – again in his compact basement workshop.

The Zhitegen, he tells us has a magic history:

The Zhitegen was born in myth and chaos, in the time when the wide open plains were continuing their path in life and death, peace and war. One year on the plain the cold came crashing to the land, bringing with it an epidemic that swept through the population.

One leader of the tribe, a rich man dotted with seven sons was to be hard hit by the snows and disease.

The epidemic entered the leader’s tent, striking his first son. Shattered and heartbroken by this death, the old man nailed a string across his Zhitehan board. Zhitehan, or “Seven Kings” was a traditional dice game played on a large wooden board with colored sheep knuckles (small curved bones). With this string of remembrance stretched across his game board, he could no longer play and be merry without remembering his son.

But the epidemic was not to leave so soon, and rapidly slayed a second of his sons. The old man, in remembrance lays another string across the wooden board. But the epidemic was well entertained in his house and rapidly spread through all his progeny, slaying all of his seven sons. For each of his sons, the old man nailed a string across his Zhitehan board, and soon the game board was flush with seven strings.

Out of desperation, wishing his sons back to people his tents and encampment, the old man caressed the strings longing for their return. As he touched the strings (probably made of mutton intestine or wool) he realizes that they make beautiful sound. The old man is enchanted - his sons are there – speaking with him through the strings. The strings have become their memory, and the old man starts plucking the strings into melodies of sadness and recollection. Thus the Zhitegen “Seven Strings” was born.

The Zhitegen strings are held up above the wooden board by mutton bone knuckles – probably the same ones used in the Zhitehan game.

(photo: both Sultan Gaze and his wife are masters of creation, reflecting eachother)

Kazakh and Chinese Fusion: the New Zhitegen
After reviving the Zhitegen, the innovative Sultan Kaze had to go further. He could not help but notice the similarities between the Zhitegen (a horizontal harp) and the traditional Chinese horizontal harp, the Guqin. He thus developed a new Zhitegen with 18 strings (some plastic, metallic, and some still made of sheep intestines) and again an extended range of sounds and possibilities.

(photo: Sultan Kaze with old (right) and new (left) Zhitegen)

It is the same board, with a variation on scales.

He is still working on the sounds possible with this instrument – whose strings are held above mutton bone knuckles like the traditional Zhitegen. Song Yu Zhi enthusiastic about this musical investigation suggested many other possibilities – such as using the same strings as used in traditional western harps – and Sultan Kaze’s investigations may further see interesting developments.

An Instrument for a Nation

2007-05-10T21:45:00.000+08:00

Dömbra

Again, many thanks to Song Yu Zhi and Patrizia for enabling this part of my trip, with so much discovery. Thanks must also go to Song Yu Zhi’s close friend, Mamour a Kazakh man whose life is centered on the Dömbra. He gave us invaluable contacts and support.

We are chasing the Dömbra, the two-stringed long-necked lute of the Altai, the soul of the Kazakh people. This slender cedar wood instrument carries the sacred of the nomad: those long nights spent below the stars. It is the vessel of the Kazakh people’s oral history: the tool for recounting the tragedy and strength of ancestors and for performing the emotional and the poetic.

The Dömbra Nation
We spend 20 days discovering the places where the Dömbra’s magic is alive and breathtaking – in villages, children playing, elderly men who have transmitted the gift to the next generation, and the masters writing and reviving older traditions. The Dömbra is omnipresent and a core part of any Kazakh home. In every village we travel through – Urumqi, county centers, mountain communities, small towns on the edge of summer pastures – the Dömbra is alive and strikingly articulate.

During our research, we also slip into those parlors of officialdom where China’s folklore is chiseled and constructed, where shows are constructed and the traditions of various peoples mixed and confused. We skip from authenticity to folklore, between magic and politics: a beautiful path of song and emotion.

Births and Myths

There are many stories recounting the birth of the Dömbra. All are beautiful tales set on the wide infinite summer pastures of the nomads. The Dömbra is an instrument born of geography, to lighten solitudes and build nations.

One story tells of a love. A beautiful young woman, brave and confident who dares her young lover to make a cedar tree create sound. Only then will she marry him. Eager, ambitious and in love, the young man works night and day, chiseling, molding and carving out the Dömbra from the tree. Finished, he beckons his love with sweet serenades. The cedar tree has come alive in his hands and the emotions and voices that emerge from the hollow wood woo his young love.

Another story tells of the gifts of the natural world, conspiring to help man. A young shepherd is tending to his sheep in the summer pastures. Hard, open, lonely work. The shepherd is restive and lonely, aching for company – when he hears a strange voice beckoning. He follows the sound across the green of the land and is surprised to find the dried carcass of a sheep. The sheep intestines, torn apart by hawks and other predators have been wrapped around the sheep’s ribs, where they have dried. Above the hollow of the leather carcass the dried strings of intestines are vibrating in the winds – producing sound. Intrigued, the shepherd starts to pluck the strings, and is stunned by the emotions he can translate with this natural echoing box. The young shepherd reproduces the instrument with wood – recreating the hollow of the sheep carcass above which he strings sheep intestines – making the first Dömbra. (Traditionally, the Dömbra strings are indeed naturally processed sheep intestine)

Perhaps the Dömbra is really the descendant of other lutes brought from the Ferghana or Persia or other lands – but in the memory of the Kazakhs it was born on the wild, lonely and generous plain – given by nature to quell man’s solitude, express love, and build nations.

A look at Central Asia from Beijing

2007-05-04T18:28:00.000+08:00

Central Asia – seen from Beijing (raw notes, a little boring)

It’s often said that China is keenly aware of its periphery, and that saying might still be true. China is an empire, and Central Asia is on its western flank.

Although most people in far-off eastern Beijing are hardly aware of the five “stans” that lay to the west, China’s political, military, and economic interaction with its western neighbors is of growing importance. I set out to talk with some experts on the region – to get a feel for China’s policy framework towards Central Asia. Unfortunately, I only talked to foreigners – one Polish, the other Russian – but both were working in Beijing and involved in Central Asia.

A winter afternoon in Beijing, talking with the China head of UNDP’s Silk Road Initiative.

The UN’s Silk Road Initiative has been frozen recently by a lack of funds, and I am surprised by the ineffectiveness of the United Nation’s monolith: visions and great ideas without implementation – dwindling resources and perhaps a loss in international support and confidence. I’m just wondering what will happen if such global institutions falter? Here in this structure are deep knowledge and the presence of great minds – but how to keep them from rotting in offices, unpeopled and empty, wrought by boredom and ineffectiveness? (just a passing note)

Marketing the Silk Road
The UN’s Silk Road Initiative is hoping to bring people and leaders together – as in a recent Silk Road Summit held in Xian in June of 2006. The organization wants to build or “market” an image of the region – the Silk Road region – a vast basket willing to embrace all those countries who want to be part of this regional identity, from Turkey to Korea. Mr. Hubner says it is less a historical identity, than a business council with a positive and productive vision for present action and future development.

This marketing work has the goal of attracting and consolidating investments so essential for growth and stability in the region.

The Unexpected
Mr. Hubner knows the region well, and speaks first of its instability – he takes Kyrgyzstan as an example: a country who was “on the right track,” ready and willing to follow the direction of the international community, striving to build a nation, but failing miserably to attract any foreign investment or gain real economic traction. Kyrgyzstan, he says is frozen in its economic crisis, stumbling under the burden of corruption. Kazakhstan on the other hand, Mr. Hubner notes, is building itself on the wealth of oil and gas, with thankfully some of the profits trickling down to the people. The president of Kazakhstan however remains one of the richest men in the world.

This is a region he says that has inherited what it did not expect – left with a political and
economic vacuum, left in havoc by the fall of the USSR. The five Central Asian states were not yet ready to build nations, and had not been trained in independence.

Central Asian countries are still struggling with some basics Mr Hubner notes – such as the symbolic foundations of a nation: languages and the status of history. The five states, Mr. Hubner believes are still struggling with an almost colonial heritage, battling with gifts and chaos. Gifts: first a Lingua Franca – Russian, to communicate beyond boundaries. And then Chaos: economic dependency on the Soviet monolith, and the hardship of suddenly seeking new structures and partners.

China in Central Asia: stability and peace?
Asked about China and the Central Asian region, Mr. Hubner directly speaks about the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Mr. Hubner highlights two interesting trends in the SCO. Firstly the organization’s recent expansion to Iran and Pakistan as observer-members and secondly the growing interaction that the organization is enabling for China, India, Russia, and the region.

Central Asia is a crossroads not only for China and the West, but also a gateway to the growing South-Asian market.

The SCO has 6 members: Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. As of 2005, it also has four observer members: India, Pakistan, Iran and Mongolia. Afghanistan has only come as an occasional guest and Turkmenistan is still not involved.

Mr. Hubner highlights the growing importance of the SCO countries as a world block, driven by a common vision and with demonstrated cooperation abilities. As is feared in the West the SCO could potentially be a real opposition to the NATO block. The SCO with its observer members includes 5 nuclear powers and almost half of the world’s population. Enough, I imagine to make the Pentagon cringe.

The obvious strongmen in the organization are China and Russia. Mr. Hubner interestingly notes that China’s interest in the region is mainly anchored in the need for stability and peace. He believes that China is looking to gain insight into this region that is still a “Terra Incognita”. He does not believe that China has any military goal, or targeted “enemies” or expansive goals. Indeed he says, China does not consider that region aggressively, but rather only see’s America as its real challenger on the global scene. Mr. Hubner believes that much of China’s policies (cultural, economic and military) are targeted to building a challenge to America’s hegemony. But Mr. Hubner believes that China’s involvement in the Central Asian region, is indeed only to ensure the peace and stability of the region. China’s main tools up to now have been investment and economic activity.

After September 11th however, the presence of American military bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan used for Bush’s offensive in Afghanistan perhaps provide further incentive for China to be involved in the region. Does China see this as American encroachment into its sphere of influence? September 11th literally put Central Asia on the American map of the world. (Bush as a geography teacher). And although the Americans were kicked out of Uzbekistan in 2005 after the US gov. criticized the Uzbek gov. for their brutal handling of the Andijan riots, the American Base in Kyrgyzstan is still up and running, although with a greatly increased rent (up from zero to 200 million dollars). America is also present in the region with oil deals, humanitarian aid, and the regular flow of businessmen and women. – perhaps giving China that itchy feeling.

Of course, Mr. Hubner also notes that Xinjiang is a primordial reason for China’s involvement in the region. Xinjiang looks quiet and controlled, he says, but despite the investments going into the region, there is “always something going on there”. Perhaps China’s knowledge of the Central Asian region can help it deal with the problems and obstacles in Xinjiang?

A New Block – New Principles of Unity
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is seated in Beijing, tucked in between the future construction site of the American Embassy and one of Beijing’s swanky bar streets. Pieces of China’s Central Asian policy framework are formulated within these quiet pastel walls.

Talking with Victor Trifonov, Senior Researcher at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), one thing becomes clear: the SCO was clearly born in opposition to NATO and recent USA international policy.

The SCO’s introductory materials spell it out (with some shoddy grammar - which should be excused as the official languages of the SCO are Russian and Chinese): “In the history of modern international relations, creation and development of “Shanghai Five” represents diplomatic practice of creative value. It initiated new global vision with regards to security, containing principles of mutual trust, disarmament, cooperation and security, enriched new type of interstate relations. (…) This new world vision has raised human society above cold war ideology and made an invaluable contribution to creation of a new model of international relations.”

The SCO introduction further takes a bite at America’s cowboy tactics on the international scene. “As regards foreign policy, the heads (of the SCO) emphasized that the modern world order must be based on the consolidation of mutual trust, good-neighbourhood relations, the abandonment of monopoly and single rule on international affaires; it must follow the prevalent status of principles and norms of the international law.” The SCO countries seem to be clearly aligned against America’s primacy in world affairs.

Mr. Trifonov stresses that unlike the intervention/interference habits of the USA, the SCO agreement very clearly states that the countries in the organization will not intervene in domestic politics or affairs of other member states. (China notoriously lauded the Uzbeks on their handling of the Andijan riots that put the civilian death toll in the hundreds - but internal policies shall not be criticized)

The SCO and the Fight against Terrorism
Mr. Trifonov highlights that the SCO was concerned with global terrorism long before September 11th and the US’s aggressive plunge into the anti-terror game.

The precursor of the SCO, the Shanghai Five was created to solve outstanding territorial disputes between China, Russia and three of the new Central Asian states. Indeed with the Shanghai Five, China’s borders with Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan were all re-drawn and finalized. The initial Shanghai Five, however, was rapidly expanded to include other forms of cooperation and dialogue. The group invited Uzbekistan (which does not have a boundary with China) and created the Shanghai Cooperation Organization for expanded regional cooperation.

Upon its creation on June 15, 2001 the SCO countries cited several new goals, including the fight against the “three evils – terrorism, separatism and extremism.” The SCO had thus declared a fight against terrorism three months prior to September 11th.

The “three evils” clause seems to highlight China’s paranoia that terrorist or separatist groups will enter China through its western frontier. This could indeed be very destructive to China’s gargantuan colonial efforts to keep control of the predominantly Muslim province of Xinjiang. Indeed (in a China-centric view) the “three evils” clause seems to directly target the Uyghur separatists that continue to fight for the independence of Xinjiang. China would obviously want to sever the links between the Uyghurs and their Turkic brothers in Central Asia, and must be eager to gain the support of Central Asian governments in these attempts. The SCO agreement has helped China pressure Central Asian countries to capture and extradite Uyghur separatists who flee Xinjiang. (I’m sure a similar story can be told for Russia and its Chechens, and Uzbekistan and the IMU).

China aside, Mr. Trifonov highlights that Central Asia does have huge geo-strategic salience in the fight on global terrorism. The fight against the fundamentalism, terrorism, and drug/arms-trafficking that seeps in from their southern neighbors – Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan – is important and pressing. Peace and stability are keys to building an economically strong region – and focusing on terrorism is part of the solution.

(I forgot to ask Mr. Trifonov about religion – and the role religion plays in the organization – Islam, Christianity, Atheism…I think this is perhaps an interesting factor in the SCO meetings)

Eurasian Superpowers: China and Russia
Talking with Mr. Trifonov, it is clear that Russia and China consider Central Asia within their orbits: China and Russia are showing themselves to be the two Eurasian super-powers, eager to both flex their muscle with the help of the SCO and keen to diminish Western influence in the region.

Russia and China each fund 24% of the SCO budget. Each country has 7 representatives in Beijing, while Kazakhstan has 6, Uzbekistan 5, Kyrgyzstan 3 and Tajikistan 2.

The SCO enables Russia and China to inject vital economic support into Central Asia, and the SCO projects are funded by the China Bank of Development and Russia’s New Ekanom Bank. China has pledged USD 500million to finance SCO projects, which range from a trans-Asian highway to hydro-electric power stations, to irrigation projects. Beyond the SCO however, China is also flooding the Central Asian market with consumer goods, construction materials and telecommunications (ZTE and co.). Russia floods Central Asia with its pop-stars, second-hand Ladas and decapitating vodka.

Russian and Chinese influence are converging in the region (the China part being new).

Over the past 20 years, Mr. Trifonov notes, Russia and China have been realigning, and over the past five years, their relationship has been rapidly enhanced. Mr. Trifonov notes that 2006 was the year of Russia in China – a fact that I had not noticed at all - but Trifonov insists it was a great success. 2007 will be the year of China in Russia. An obvious geo-political triangle – Russia, China and Central Asia will undoubtedly become increasingly intertwined. I wonder if Central Asian countries are eager to oblige.

Xinjiang - the setting

2007-05-03T21:25:00.000+08:00

Thanks to Song Yu Zhi, the ambitious Confucian rocker (and also many thanks to one of my closest friends, Patrizia for letting her man take a month out to travel with me) I was able to go to Bei Jiang – the northern expanse of Xinjiang. We trekked on a beautiful journey north of the Tian Shan Mountains through the Dzungarian basin to the Altai in search of Dömbra masters – the long-necked two-stringed Lute of the Kazakh people.

(map sources: map from le Monde Diplomatic website. their sources: Atlas of the people’s Republic of China, Foreign languages Press, Pékin, 1989 ; Jacques Leclerc, Aménagement linguistique dans le monde, université de Laval, Québec, Canada ; Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Maps and publications, Washington DC ; Recensement chinois de novembre 2000 ; ChinaOnline, Chicago.)

Below – a short, very fragmented and cursory introduction to Xinjiang: the land and politic of our journey.

Barriers and Beauty
One sixth of China’s territory, Xinjiang is a contested and beautiful place. Wild and ravenous, it is a confluence of mountains, deserts and deep basins. Miles from any ocean, this is a land of dryness, of wind and rock carved by glaciers and the movement of tectonic plates. (the memory of earth). This is land dependent on glacial waters that rush down towards the grape and melon fields of its oases, and then disappear into its deserts. a land of desperate magic.

Proudly standing between 73˚3 and 96˚30 longitude and 34˚10 and 49˚31 latitude, Xinjiang is bordered on the east by the Chinese provinces of Inner Mongolia and Gansu, on the north by Kazakhstan, Russia and Mongolia. To its west are Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan, while to the south, Xinjiang borders Pakistan, India and Tibet.

Pamir, Tian Shan, Kunlun, Altai, Hindu Kush, Fan Mountains, Karakorum – it is a land of mythical names.

This is where the world converges.

But beyond its stunning landscapes, one of the most striking features of Xinjiang is that it is - and feels - contested. Today, by recent turns of geopolitical fortunes/misfortunes, Xinjiang is China’s most north-western province – one of China’s five autonomous regions.

Despite its belonging to the Chinese Mainland however, Xinjiang feels like another land, another country. It is host to 13 minorities, most of them of Turkic descent (Ouighurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks etc.) and is a place of Turkic tongues and cultures. It is a place of golden teeth, scarves, fragrance (the men and women both wear loads of perfume – really nice) and lamb kebabs. It is also a land of faith and religion, and is home to 23,000 of China’s 30,000 mosques.

This is the start of Central Asia, the great colossus where Europe and Asia meet.

In Xinjiang this meeting of cultures is more of an explosion than a smooth and fruitful exchange. There is a tension to its streets and architecture, as if there was a constant murmur of discontent. In Xinjiang, and especially in Urumqi, a silent but constant battle is played out, opposing the influx of wealth and economic development brought by the Chinese and the claim by some Ouighurs that this is their country, part of a Pan-Turkic land which is not Chinese. Here is the setting for a complicated battle of identity – Han Chinese are also seen as Xinjiang Chinese, Ouighurs identify with their Turkic brothers, but many who have succeeded in Chinese schools and society, are now Ouighur-Chinese - still neither Chinese and branded by many as less Ouighur. The combinations are many to which are added the complications with other minorities - Kazakh, Hui, Uzbek etc - between whom relationships are also not so clear cut. Xinjiang is the real melting pot of cultures – and a pot that it bubbling.

These latent tensions often surface in violent demands for freedom and autonomy. Battles and strife in the early 20th century led to several proclamations of independence – first in Kashgar and then later in Guldja (today’s Yining) in 1944. More recently riots and uprisings in Kashgar in 1990 and violent riots in Guldja (Yining) in 1996 have once again unveiled the region’s volatility. Some Ouighurs still have independence on their mind – and this January a gun battle in Xinjiang’s Akto County near the border with Afghanistan, resulted in the death of one Chinese People’s Armed Police and at least 18 Ouighurs (branded by the government as terrorists). China blames the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (one small group of Ouighur separatists) for more than 200 terror attacks between 1990 and 2001, causing 160 deaths and 440 injuries. This same group was very controversially added to the U.S. list of terrorist organizations in 2002.

This is a contested land – a territory in which the Chinese are clearly colonizers.

We Shall Shift Geographies
“Communist China’s incorporation of Xinjiang was an attempt to override historical and geographical divisions there within a short time space, and to turn the region into an internal colony.” (Source: Rudelson, Justin Jon “Oasis Identities: Ouighur Nationalism Along China’s Silk Road”. Columbia University Press, 1997). Before 1949, Xinjiang was oriented economically and culturally to the west, with the region’s most important towns Kashgar and Illi facing towards Central Asia’s Fergana Valley and Russia. Distance and harsh terrain made interaction with China scarce.

The communist muscle would brutally shift these cultural and geographic realities.

“The Communist Chinese government sought to fully incorporate Xinjiang into its core political economy (…) Its goals therefore included shifting Xinjiang’s economic and geographic focus away from the west to diminish its trade with the Soviet Union and toward Urumqi and the east. Urumqi was made the transportation hub toward which all roads of Xinjiang were oriented. This new highway network was of immense strategic value for the Chinese. However, it was the westward extension of the railroad in 1962, from China proper to Urumqi that had the greatest effect on Xinjiang. Once the center of Xinjiang shifted to Urumqi, the importance of the cities of Kashgar and Illi diminished.” (note: Rudelson)

This new transportation network would enable China to strengthen its control of the region, shipping in economic goods, settlers and its army. China was to colonize the region with pure numbers – shipping in millions of settlers to populate the region with Hans. (The settling of populations in Xinjiang also helped to relieve the burden of rapid demographic growth in eastern China, that was putting too great a pressure on land in the east.)

The first of the Han Chinese migrants were demobilized Communists troops – quickly followed by train-loads of women from China’s poorest provinces. Talking with Lao Zhang, a Han Chinese whose parents were part of the first truck-loads to arrive, he told me that women were literally shipped into Xinjiang to find husbands among the first Han settlers. On arrival in Urumqi, they were merely assigned a man: a union for the nation. Brutal matchmaking. These first Han Chinese migrants were then followed by unemployed men and women from the Chinese mainland, and later Hans with stigmatized family backgrounds and youths sent to the countryside. Some of the persons displaced by the Three Gorge Dam are also said to have been moved to Xinjiang.

There is a violence to every aspect on Xinjiang’s recent history: brutal matchmaking, migrations across thousands of kilometers, and lands claimed and divided.

Urumqi
Arrival in the mountain Han city. Urumqi could be a jewel in the landscape – slipped as it is between crystal mountains and an expansive plain to the north. But somehow the architects were too hurried by tensions, the urban planners too busied by fear, and the city seems to have forgotten it sits on a natural throne. It is a sprawling mess of cement madness and suspended highways. The city is closed in on itself, and never do the mountains provide rest here.

We exit the train under the cover of clouds, as if there was a conspiracy to hide the Han encroachment of Xinjiang. One train a day. We arrive and quickly disperse. The only reminders of our intrusion are the subtle hands of Ouighur pick-pockets: the obligatory tax of the land.

The Han colonization is a delicate and sad play on lives and hopes: on the whole it is a politic of conquering and economic development, on the personal, it is people searching for new lives and economic opportunities. It seems brutal and unfair that normal people always get sent to the frontlines and burnt in the cross-fires. Here, those people are hopeful Han Chinese sent by their government to people and claim China’s northern frontier. The hope dies quickly it seems, to give place to tense and nervous routine.

Here Han and Ouighur are interwoven, yet not close – an uncomfortable and unwanted proximity.

We stay at Lao Zhang’s apartment, hidden in the dusty and dank backyard of coughing smoke stacks and an electricity plant. His parents came to Xinjiang in 1959 from Henan, arriving after 3 days and nights of bumpy bus rides on dirt roads. They came with the hope and ambition of pioneers, ready to build a new nation, but were quickly welcomed by hardship, -30˚ weather, and the disdain of the local population. But 40 years later they are still here, working out a meager existence in a fourth floor apartment of their factory compound. They have lived a hard life, in a land of violence and scarcity. They have stayed in the brutal urban center – not profiting from the wild beautiful expanse beyond. A wet black soot of a charcoal life among the cold and cement. There is no green here – only the light of tight-knit families and their hospitality.

Lao Zhang left Xinjiang in his youth, wandering to Beijing in hopes of becoming a rock star. Guitar in hand he lived the gritty bohemian life of Beijing’s underground, idealizing Che Guevara and living among the poets and the vagabonds. But this sweet, free and radical existence did not change his stance on the Ouighurs of his homeland – to him – and he openly states it - they are still uncultured and dangerous. Walking through the bustling and colorful Ouighur part of town, centered around the bazaar, Lao Zhang is uncomfortable. He walks as if threatened, never calm, checking his pockets, avoiding contact with the crowd. In the jam-packed Ouighur restaurant where we have lunch, he hesitates to sit down next to a Ouighur man, looking for another place. He says “we” – the Chinese – have helped the local population rise from their uncultured and uncivilized existence. He believes the Chinese have a right to claim the land because they have brought economic wealth and development. (When he talks I can’t help but think of France in Algeria). He has no Ouighur friends, and speaks no words of the Ouighur tongue.

His everyday life is filled with this battle, rocked by this animosity. But a poster of Che still hangs in his hallway. Juxtaposed to his generosity and kind spirit, his stance on the Ouighurs is even more brutal.

This kind of reality shades Xinjiang’s intense beauty with devastating tensions. But some parts are even darker – like the paramilitary town of Shihezi through which we cross on our way to Illi. An all-Han town created by the Liberation Army, it was built on a small plot of wetlands surrounded by desert. The founders dreamed of making – as one of the residents tells me – a city as brilliant as Shanghai. Several people repeat to me that I shouldn’t be scared in this town, its safe they repeat, there are no Ouighurs. (There are many interesting research subjects for those urban-developers/planners/ethnographers – as history and politics are clearly played out in Shihezi’s urban design – especially the staggering volume of its budding industrial development zone).

Shihezi is the center of the Han Chinese paramilitary force – the headquarters of Xinjiang’s colonization. And the power of this paramilitary force called the Production and Construction Corps (PCC) should not be dismissed: “The PCC, with a population of over 2.2 million in 1992, has been a major political force in maintaining Chinese control of Xinjiang. By mid-1982, it had established over 170 state farms and had built 69 medium-large factories. By 1984, the PCC accounted for a quarter of the value of Xinjiang’s total production.” (note: Rudelson)

There is a cold, calculated colonization happening in this land.

Strategic Control
But despite the tensions, the explosions, the drunken fist-fights and ethnic slurs – it seems China will never give up this land - a buffer zone between China’s core and Central Asia.

“The stability of Xinjiang is important to China. It is seen as a test case of central control, relevant to Beijing’s grip over Tibet and Inner Mongolia. Xinjiang is also viewed as a traditional buffer against Turkic Moslem invasions from the North-West. The province also contains three major oil basins: the Turpan, Jungar and Tarim, with up to 150 billion barrels of reserves, according to some optimistic estimates. Last but not least, the People’s Liberation Army maintains numerous bases and nuclear weapons testing grounds in the region, which could be threatened if the Ouighurs gain control.” (Note: Silencing Central Asia: The Voice of the Dissidents. 7/27/01, Ariel Cohen, Ph.D, Eurasianet.org)

……and yet
Within this violent crazy background, we set out into the beauty of the land, searching for the most traditional melodies and rhythms of Xinjiang’s Kazakh minority. We do not enter into the majority-Ouighur world of Xinjiang’s southern territory, and instead head north into the Kazakh Autonomous Region. We dive into color and magic.

Across the Gobi Desert

2007-05-01T23:17:00.000+08:00

Maps and departures: points like constellations, or paths to hidden treasures. Departures from the traffic city and lovers bundled in black. Headlights in the night, we are heading out west, the furthest that I have ever gone: to the land suspended between nations and identities, between faiths and histories. My hands are so dry they are cracked like turtle shells, exploded and useless. The train is racing.

A conversation with my top-bunk neighbor. He will travel the three days in his suit. The man beside me is a punk with really busted teeth, chanting his music in the night. Outside the landscape flashing.

La bêtise humaine a était greffe dans la terre ici. C’est la montagne et les fleuves qui en ont pris pleins la gueule.

Song Yu Zhi, my traveling partner thinks that this place (China) is volatile, that everything can explode violently, cave in onto itself: a collapse of the apparent calm. The capital cities are funambulists uneasily balanced above violence and poverty. He wonders, what is an education that pushes everyone to go to university and then go abroad? He says that education in China today pushes everyone not towards knowledge, critical thinking and society building, but towards the competition for financial success. A dangerous brew, when the sought-after exuberant wealth is inevitably scarce.

We are skipping across the country: Xian, Baoji, Tianshui, Lanzhou. A place seen from a distance is like any other, but how nice it would be to spend a day walking along Gansu’s frozen hillsides. This land has been worn down and wasted. It is old, lame soil, one that can not give life to the eager, growing masses. (And so we are picking up the excluded and the lonely and bringing them on our silver dragon to the new territories. In the vastness of a conquered land they shall be given jobs and land). The world is passing by, distant like a silent movie: the barriers of glass and movement. Before us a sad mountain of golden sand broken by shadows.

Song Yu Zhi says that this is a land of peasants, a country of farmers. He says there is no intellect here, no creativity. He is hard on his land, his home. I have been traveling among the success of economic growth, and had forgotten that nothing is magic. But he reminds me that there is both danger and beauty in traditions: old traditions, crafts and gestures anchored in the land, repeating the same stories, ideas and rules for centuries. Centuries lost in rules and regulations. Perhaps it is this routine, this acceptance and passivity that the communists wanted to break? Bang!

A table mountain ribbed by shadows and sun. The construction project at its feet looks like a play-mobile game below a natural stronghold. One day the mountain will reclaim its base with a threatening crush. The mountains are rising slowly, and our path is lengthened by the detours of valleys. Flat houses congregated in every inch and fold of the land. The sand mountains become deserts to the north.

Slipping on my sweater. We have awoken to snow mountains and colder lands powdered white: inviting. A twisted iron factory in the foreground, and further, endless folds as if the hills were hiding a treasure. The earth is conspiring to add texture and distance. But the hills are still low enough to divine the wide and I feel the plains and plateaus of the Himalaya to the south: tempting.

We are piercing through white. Small red bushes ferociously fighting frozen beds. It will be nice to eat the first bowl of Xinjiang noodles. “Jia Ge Mian”.

We race into a 20.5km tunnel through the mountain, saving us a 100km detour around the base. Ear pops and we are again out of the dark. I am remembering a summer party, when the young French man gave his fedora to a beautiful girl, and the next year returned unrecognizable.

This is a night crossing of the Gobi Desert

In the morning light, it is a moonscape where man has left traces, derisory for their smallness: a scratch on the surface of a deep continent. This landscape is vast, impenetrable, infinite. I can imagine the sound of caravan bells. This must have been an incredibly fertile plain when the water still flowed.

Here all the elements are left to surface: water, wind and fire play with the farce of human life. Last week this train was turned over by the wind. (Four deaths and other men still missing). The winds here pick up boulders and carve out mountains. Who are we to dare a crossing? I have come only to see the shadow of a mountain rising beyond the grey and golden expanse.

The men in my compartment are talking. Bears in the Altai Mountains have evolved to use tools, they say. They have learned to throw stones at buffalos and are known to hang camels on tree branches to eat them slowly. This is the wilderness we are approaching – one for which the Hans have legends and deep fears: a wild natural land without the cement comforts of home. We are on a train packed with Han. In Urumqi, we shall do the unloading. Numbers shifting with each train-load: a Chinese colonization.

We talk about the price of real-estate in each of China’s cities. Kunming 2,000-3,000 RMB/m2, Urumqi 4,000, Shanghai 24,000, Beijing 10,000. shuffling prices and lifestyles.

Outside, cement roads carved through sand and gravel, in a few decades they will be under a sea of sand. Oil wells and burning gas. Just outside Urumqi, a field of windmills. The Tian Shan (Celestial Mountains) come closer. We have arrived.

Anhui – Chinese Exorcist Theatre - Nou Xi

2007-05-01T23:16:00.000+08:00

Anhui – Chinese Exorcist Theatre

for more pics: http://www.flickr.com/photos/silkroadproject/sets/72157594561828639/

Nuo Xi
In Yin and Mao Dan Villages, they used to perform their local Nuo Xi, exorcist theatre from Chu 7 to Chu 15, starting on the 7th day of the New Year. But now, to accommodate the villagers who leave around the 7th or 8th to return to their jobs in the city, the ritual has started earlier.

Apart from the dates, nothing much else has changed in the exorcist ritual – during which the village bridges the divide between the earthly and the divine hoping to chase and stamp away evil spirits. Spectators stand before the ancient show as male actors call on sacred and dangerous forces that seem to climb out of the walls, out of the incense urns and the percussion band’s beats. The movements are recognizable yet obscure, filled to the brim with meanings unknown to outsiders. There are spirits descending from the mountains, swimming up-stream, emerging from the village’s alleys. It is an eerie and powerful show, which starts at dusk.

Boundaries Broken
We arrive on the morning of Chu 5 through haphazard bus encounters and truck rides hitched on mountain roads. We follow the pock-faced busted teeth Mr. Liu, who obviously has spent too many nights with the baijiu bottle. He and his family turn out to be wonderfully hospitable and give us a room in their freshly built and painted house hidden in the shadow of the mountain. We spend two nights with them, coming home in the early hours of the morning when the exorcist theatre ends, eating candied peanuts and sipping local green tea. Three to the hard wooden bed.

A comfortable home turns out to be a necessity after the madness of the grenzenganger – these actors walking between life and death, between earth and heaven, dancing to the insidious beating of the metallic gong. Together with the sulfuric bust and burst of flames and crackers, and the thick sultry almost nauseating vapors of incense – we are stepping on the limits of folly. Come armed with strength and disbelief. The ritual is overwhelming – imposing itself on all the senses. The painted wooden masks worn by the actors immobilize emotions, and it is as if spirits are walking before us, emotionless, lost in the delirium. We are stroking the demonical: beautiful color and bang among which frozen faces move and talk in foreign tongues.

The dance and movements of the actors are repetitive and intoxicating – and if the spectator is not sucked into boredom he or she is brought to rapture by the physical mantra unraveling slowly on stage. These are physical prayers cadenced by deafening percussion - footsteps slowly drawing patterns and symbols on the stage. Every movement has meaning. “The Nuo performance is based on the step known as the Yu step, which is a sequence of eight steps across the Luo diagrm. The actor stamps with one foot, and drags the next foot to join in the movement. The pattern of the feet on the earth in the Yu step, and other steps used in exorcism theatre and Daoist ritual have been recorded as early as the Song dynasty in a Daoist manual (…)”. (source: Jo Riley, Chinese Theatre and the Actor in Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). The actors are tracing diagrams on the ground, writing characters with their movements: physical poetry infused with ancient meaning.

“Stamping on the earth in the Chinese model carries the meaning of suppressing evil spirits, so the simplest interpretation of the Yu step is that the performer ritually cleanses the stations of the grid by stamping his foot in each. These movements place the foot and the earth into strong relation with each other. Not only does the stamping foot literally press down the demon, it also calls forth a terrific force and an equally terrific sound. The percussion orchestra in the nuo is a vital element of the performance.” (source: Jo Riley)

The ritual seems timeless – as if we were connected with other generations – a ritual unbroken by histories, passed for centuries from father to son. The song or lament of the village. How many people have seen these same exact movements, at the same exact time? How many women and men have sensed this collapsing time, bringing together ancestors of the same land? “Nuo performers adopt elements which refer to their ancestors – they perform with the presence of their exorcist/creative ancestors represented in their apparel. They literally embody their ancestors in their clothes. “chuan po, bu chuan cuo” – wear tattered, but not the wrong clothing (…) the performing body spans all time and all spaces. The events that are to happen (as they happened and as they will happen again and again ad infinitum) in the world of performance are contained in the performers’ appearance from the very moment of his entry on stage.” (source: Jo Riley)

I talk with the old women and kids to exit the trance, smoke cigarettes to know that I’m still real.

The first night at around 6h00, two young boys walk through the village beating a gong. The ritual is about to start, the offerings to Buddha are being made. We are still eating dinner, and Mr. Liu wants us to finish before we go. We shall arrive after the fall of dark to the furious explosions of thousands of crackers, entering the small wooden temple transformed into a theatre (or is the stage a wide altar?) alight with burning incense and song. Old women come in and out, very few of the villagers are attending – but the music and crackers are heard throughout the valley.

Politics
I am pulled out of the temple all of the sudden – Sarah and I must leave - two villagers say. The Village Head wants to talk with us. Angry, he asks us who we are, what we are doing here, why we are filming. (He’s obviously right to ask). Have we not thought about our security, he asks red with rage? Theo must be somewhere among the crackers – they haven’t pulled him out. Sarah and I look at each other – here we go – we pull out our best Chinese manners, our feminine smiles, our pardons and excuses, we tell them our story. Quickly enough, I’m surprised, we are finally released and told that we are now safe – they release us with only a word of warning for the crackers which could be dangerous. Indeed we enter back into the war of crackers raging in the courtyard before the temple and dodge balls of light as we zigzag to the temple door.

That night I watch the ritual bewildered and amazed. I walk back home through the dark before the end, seeking the calm of an empty house and a cup of green tea.

Revival
The Nuo Xi has been revived in four villages in this valley – hidden between the Huang Shan Mountains and the Yangtze River. There are variances in the Nou Xi rituals for each village, although Yin and Mao Dan village share the same rituals and the same set of 28 masks. Mao Dan is a 10 minute walk up-hill from Yin village.

The morning of Chu 6 we accompany the procession of the masks as they are transferred in their alter from Yin village to Mao Dan. It is a sacred procession colored by flags and escorted by fire-crackers lit in front of every door. Arriving at Mao Dan, the masks are cleaned one by one to the rhythm of a pounding gong. The effect is lessened by daylight, but the gong nonetheless brings a trance-like momentum. Theo is overwhelmed by the beat and has to step out into the mountain air. Only men touch the masks and can step onto the temple stage. This is a sacred and forbidden space – in which ancient rules and gestures have been revived. for pics of the procession: http://www.flickr.com/photos/silkroadproject/sets/72157594561811683/

The revival of the Nuo Xi ritual in Mao Dan is linked to one man, Yao Guang Bao. Now deceased, he once knew all the words and songs of the Nuo Xi. He carried the ritual through the prohibition of the Cultural Revolution and wrote it out again in 1980. Some of the theatre books were also buried during the revolution, and taken out for the revival. All but three masks however had been burned.

Talking to Yao Guang Bao’s nephew, the 55 year old Yao Sheng Li, he tells us that the villagers were able to find the old carpenter that had made the previous set of masks for the village. Living in a neighboring valley he was still alive in 1980. The old carpenter had made the first set for the village in the 1950’s after the masks and the temple had been destroyed by the Japanese who had fought around Maodan village for three nights and three days in the late 40’s. The old carpenter passed away, but Mr. Yao assures that he first taught the skill of the Nuo Xi masks to his son.

The village invested 10,000 RMB in 1980 to remake the mask collection – a veritable fortune.

The 28 masks are shared among the 10 actors, who know each role by heart. There are no rehearsals. Sometimes the younger actors forget their movements and are led by the older men – to the pleasure and bursting laughter of the audience. More people in Maodan watch the ritual, and the bigger theatre with an open-air courtyard makes the watching less suffocating. You can step out and see infinite stars.

There are so many life stories around this ritual

One of the village madmen – a deaf and dumb man – watches the whole show in Maodan, leaning against a wooden pillar. He is left-out and ignored by the villagers, almost like a nuisance. He looks crazy and reminds me of all the madmen that hang out in the village streets, talking to the passersby or being kicked and screamed at by the village kids – gentle kicks as if the kids were actually taking care of them – a bizarre tenderness in the brutality. These madmen, the idiots, are a constant in the villages we cross – the kings of village paths.

The gong announces the start of the meeting Buddha ceremony.

The village crowd gathers in the temple and each person lights an incense stick. They are led in a meditative prayer broken with the same repetitive chorus: joy, wealth and health for the village and its families. The alcohol is then poured into glasses on the altar, while children giggle at the seriousness of the ritual. The villagers kneel and kowtow in the direction of the altar. The gong starts again, pounding, guttural, and meditative. Everyone starts to leave and the fire-crackers are launched. The world splits to pieces and the ghosts run off to hide in mountain caves. Outside a war of fires – through the smoke of the crackers we cannot see across the village courtyard – just shadows moving among the noise. The gong continues, while the women take refuge in the temple. A lull in the crackers and the gong reappears, as if this deep sound was the foundation of the world – always present, always returning. We are coughing on the smell of sulfur and incense.

The food is taken from the altar – five pig’s heads, chickens, pheasants and rice cakes are taken home in baskets to be eaten. After dinner the ritual will begin again – with lighted reeds and a dance to the heavens with the colored umbrella of the universe twirling in the hands of a child.

for pics of the openning ritual: http://www.flickr.com/photos/silkroadproject/sets/72157594561834000/

Anhui – Chinese Ritual Opera - Mulian Xi

2007-05-01T23:14:00.000+08:00

Anhui – Chinese Ritual Opera
a small detour way south of the silk road, too curious to see some of China's oldest Spring Festival traditions...

Mulian Xi
Following the intrepid Sarah O once again (merci sarah) - this time as she sets out to find the rich folkloric and religious customs and rituals around the Chinese New Year in Anhui. She has 15 days until the Yuan Xiao Jie – the major celebration of the New Year’s Festival - when she must be in Shaanxi. I have a little less time before heading out to Xinjiang. Lina, Xiao Bei and Theo have come too, and nights are filled with cool beers sipped on terraces and roof-tops.

for more pics. http://www.flickr.com/photos/silkroadproject/sets/72157594559594796/

We have arrived at Mashan Cun, hitching on the back of a truck, up the hill from Ruo Kang – speeding through the valleys of the sacred Huang Shan Mountains. We walk through sinuous streets, through the winding alleys bordered by beautifully tall two-storied plaster-white houses, past the outdoor pool table and up the narrow path to Ye Zhen Shu’s house. His house stands in the green shade of the century-old magic tree that guards the village with its tenacious roots and exuberant foliage. We are tucked into the village by the giant tree’s gentle architecture and the soft rolling hills around us.

This is the center of Han China – the sacred Huang Shan Mountains – where mist is suspended on green peaks and the Confucian man can seek emptiness, the void, le souffle mediant. This is where the Guqin (traditional Chinese horizontal harp) plucked rare notes to remind the sages of the symbiotic dance of matter and emptiness. Here we could dive into ancient poems trying to find the calm cool peaceful rhythm of the elite ancients - and perhaps this is what the swarms of Chinese tourists come to find in the valley bellow?

But among this Han place of pilgrimage we have come to find one of the region’s banging, noisy, boisterous, metallic rituals – rituals of folk life – born from the grit and grime of village superstition - born from the need for faith and calming of the spirits - and more simply perhaps born of the need for stories and traditions. Here in Mashan Village Sarah has brought us to watch the Mulian Theatre. Ye Zhen Shu is the master of the ritual.

An Opera for a Village
(I need to get some precision from Sarah for this part – and will update later, but here is a brief introduction to the Mulian Xi)
The Mulian Xi (Mulian Opera) is performed every year at the Spring Festival – we have arrived on Chu 3, the third day of the Lunar New Year and the ritual play is to start tonight. We had been told that it would last three days and three nights. In previous years it could last seven days and seven nights, or up to one month – depending on the needs and wealth of the village. The Mulian Opera is composed of 15 books of song/recitation which are divided into five parts, each with three books. This could easily accommodate one month of acting, or be cut down for the three or seven-day performances.

“The Chinese words xi and ju meaning theatre performance, describe a performance art which is made up of four basic performance skills: chang (singing), nian (recitation), da (military skills and acrobatics) and zuo (doing, ‘acting’).” (note: Jo Riley, Chinese Theatre and the Actor in Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) The Mulian Xi, with its 20 to 30 actors incorporates all four skills, and the actors stamp across stage in movements that have been done for generations. “Jingju (Beijing Opera) is only one of over three hundred different styles of theatre in China and each is defined as a particular style by the type of melodic and/or percussive structure. Each form reflects, to a certain extent, the geographical and cultural influences of a particular area of China.”

In Mashan Village, the Mulian Xi has been passed down by generations for hundreds of years (need to check on the starting date – and who wrote it with Sarah). The ritual play is clearly anchored in the village’s identity; shaping the villager’s conception of the New Year’s Celebrations, their place in history and their village’s place among the mountain. In other villages, people knew that Mashan Village was preparing the Mulian Xi – they identified Mashan with the play, and though they were surprised to see foreigners in this part of the mountain they were not surprised that foreigners were interested in attending Mashan’s performance. The operatic play is one of the key rituals in the village’s New Year Celebration, a ritual that is almost as old as the village. The play clearly presents Confucian values of family, order and political hierarchies and is also a key to propagating cultural and ethical values. In a place where education is less than up-to-standard, it is also a key to learning the stories that are at the base of cultural identity.

The play is one of the village’s anchors in time, a way to trace history and meaning. (The magic tree seems to play a similar role, and the villagers believe that if the tree is healthy and continues to grow, so too will the village. as a parallel, if the Mulian Xi tradition dies, so too will the village)

Even though the villagers had already seen the play’s rehearsal the night before we arrived, everyone in the village, young and old, came out to see the play again – and there was excitement and pride taken in the performance. Firecrackers and laughter: a community at play. (It would be interesting to do interviews with some villagers who are not involved in the production of the play, to see how they perceive the play as their own/their village’s identity – and to see how they present this heritage to other people, especially other migrant workers in Beijing/Shanghai for example).

Revival
Surrounded by green hills, tea plantations and pine forests, Mashan village - if not for the newly paved road and the water-gutters full of garbage - seems unchanged and untouched by the cement chaos blasting China. Yet the revival of the village’s Mulian Opera reveals just how intertwined this remote village is with the lunges and leaps of the middle kingdom.

(pic: Ye Zhen Shu and son)

After its ban during the Cultural Revolution, Ye Zhen Shu decided to revive the play in 1988. All the production materials – sets, props, costumes, and script-books had been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, so that Ye Zhen Shu was faced with the task of reviving memory. The memory, although buried, was still alive. The play was still known throughout the village, carried secretly by the villagers and former actors, sung in the privacy of a mountain path, or hummed silently in a mind. In 1988 all the “characters” of the play were alive. Indeed here, one man/actor played only one character, and was the embodiment of the character in flesh, blood and spirit. The actors had played the same characters for decades and knew all the lines and movements by heart. If the man/actor was still alive, then so too was the character. There seems to have been only a thin line between where the man ended and the character began.

Ye Zhen Shu brought all these old-timers, all men, together and slowly revived the play. Together they wrote from memory the script and the movements: recreating the symbolic gestures and movements on the stage. Blowing life again onto the sacred stage.

This transcription work was not always easy – one of the characters refused to collaborate. He had been beaten and emotionally battered by the villagers during the revolution and felt that he did not want to help the village regain this sacred play. Why should he help the village that had shattered his life? But after drinking rice wine and hearing the pleas of Ye Zhan Shu and other village leaders, he finally acquiesced.

The villagers collected 3,000 RMB among themselves and started the work of sewing costumes, making props and cleaning one of the village’s old theatres.

Bending Rules for Survival
1988, and the villagers were already starting to scatter across the Chinese mainland in search of jobs and opportunities. Men in the village were few, and they would only come home for the week of the New Year’s Festival. Faced with this pressure, the sacred rules of the play had to be bent for it to survive. Women were thus invited to perform. Women, it was declared were now allowed to come on stage, say the sacred prayers and dress as both male and female characters. The play’s ancient taboos were broken, boundaries breached and some mysteries unveiled and lost. 30 students, men and women, participated in the 1988 revival.

But following China’s inexorable economic growth, people continued to slowly leave village life. Now both women and men were seeking out new opportunities in China’s largest cities. The characters of the Mulian Xi were now scattered across China and the New Year’s celebration depended on their return each year to the village. Today there are only 20 actors left to perform the ritual play: an unpaid hobby, the play holds on the delicate limbo of the actor’s yearly return to Mashan. The play’s two main actors and the director Ye Zhen Shu live in the village, but most of the supporting actors come home only for the celebration – leaving little or no time to practice. A three-day performance is thus almost impossible to put together, let alone a seven-day performance.

The play although revived, still depends on the whims of train-connections, factory vacations and the motivation of the handful of actors. It is still dependent on the small donations of the village spectators and the un-paid devotion of Ye Zhen Shu. (After petitioning for four years, Ye Zhen Shu was able to receive only 1,000 RMB from the local Wen Hua Guan, the Cultural Association, in support of the opera). This year, a three-day performance was planned, but was cancelled after Ye Zhen Shu was seriously hurt in a motorcycle accident and was unable to conduct rehearsals. The village thus waited for the return of the actors and put on the one-night performance they have been performing these past years.

Painted faces and stoic devotion, the play is amateur and almost child-like, with actors fumbling with unpracticed movements and words. It is like children putting on a show in a make-shift attic theatre, both clumsy and serious. The roar and laughter of the crowd brings a palpable energy to the large wooden theatre, and the painted faces of the actors bring an eerie magical feeling to the stage. But mostly the committed serious of the actors, the determination of Ye Zhen Shu and the play’s persistence against great odds, makes it a jewel among the sacred mountain. It is the hope and work of one man that have saved this village’s deepest and most sacred gestures. Perhaps even the magic tree is healthier for the noise and music of that New Year’s night.

After the play is over, life in the village returns normal. Relatives continue their New Year’s greetings and wish-giving, while some of the village men are getting ready for the mushroom season. Others continue to talk about this year’s tea harvest, while every family says its goodbyes to those returning to their hard city jobs. In 12 months the play will be on again, marking the cadence of a year.

There is interesting work to do here.

Shaanxi Province: Door Gods and Cultural Battles

2007-04-03T18:10:00.000+08:00

Pictures at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/silkroadproject/sets/72157600044892303/

Door Gods and Cultural Battles: Fengxiang Muban Nianhua
Muban Nianhua (New Year’s woodcut prints) have been thrashed, torn and battered by the campaigns and crusades of the past one hundred years of China’s history. Like all printed material, the Nianhua were political – a medium through which to propagate ideas and beliefs. Printed in mass quantities around the time of the Chinese New Year, the colorful Nianhua entered every village and were pasted in every family’s home. Some pasted around the kang (the raised wood-heated bed of Northern China) narrated old stories and histories to be retold - and finally interiorized. These innately political prints with such an extensive distribution network and reach were an obvious tool for political movements. The Nianhua was indeed an ideal propaganda tool, often brutally adopted to support new ideas and visions.

Paper Politics

In the late 1940’s the young and ambitious government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had already realized the importance of this folk art as a vector to bring the nation’s new ideology into the deepest corners of the huge Chinese territory. Building on Chairman Mao’s 1942 “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art”, the government decreed that the Nianhua must continue. “On November 26, 1948 after the founding of the PRC, the Ministry of Culture issued a directive to artists and writers about the importance and possible use in a new era of Muban Nianhua:

Nianhua is one of the most popular types of Chinese folk art. Under the feudal rule in the past, it was employed as a vehicle to spread archaic ideas. (…) New nianhua has proven to be a beloved art medium, rich in educational value. With the Chinese Lunar New Year fast approaching – the first since the founding of the PRC – local cultural and educational organizations should look upon the development and spreading of nianhua as one of their most essential tasks during this New Year’s propaganda activities.”

The Ministry of Culture’s decree goes on to describe the subjects and values the new Nianhua should transmit, and the methods to be undertaken by government officials to ensure the widespread success of this cultural takeover:

“The new prints should convey the following messages: the grand victory of the Chinese people’s war for liberation and the people’s great revolution, the establishment of the People’s Republic, the Common Program and the recovery and progress of industrial and agricultural production. To launch a widespread nianhua movement, regional cultural and education agencies, and art organizations, should mobilize artists to produce new prints, letting them known that this is an important artistic undertaking with wide impact. We oppose those artists who tend to belittle the task of popularization. Moreover, we should work with those who engage in the old nianhua trade and cooperate with folk artists, providing them with new sketches, reforming them and through them reaching a wide audience.”

(source: Chang-Tai Hung. Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Oct., 2000), pp. 770-810 “Repainting China: New Year Prints (Nianhua) and Peasant Resistance in the Early Years of the People's Republic”)

Artisans carrying on the tradition of the Nianhua were soon to become bearers of a heavy political responsibility, which often came with violent enforcement.

Although Muban Nianhua were produced throughout rural China, Fengxiang County was one of the country’s ten most famous Muban Nianhua craft centers. Inaccessible on rainy days and hidden in the hills north of the Wei River, Fengxiang County remained isolated for much of the past century. This remoteness preserved Fengxiang Muban Nianhua’s traditional gestures, sheltering them momentarily from the influence of peripheral esthetic changes. However, like in the most remote and isolated mountain villages, the idealism and propaganda genius of the Communist Party came to bid a liberating and heavy-handed hello.

In Fengxiang, the thick and heavy carved wooden boards used to make the prints barely survived the axes and fires of the Revolution, while the thin paper prints of the gods and goddesses did not resist the elements of time and seasons. What remains today of hand-crafted Muban Nian Hua are fragile relics of culture and ancient celebrations.

Histories are to be Told
Just four miles east of the Fengxiang County Center, Nan Xiao Li Cun was the epicenter of Shaanxi’s Muban Nianhua tradition. This wood-printing folk art first appeared in the Tang dynasty, but developed rapidly under the patronage of the Ming – who were eager to use this folk medium to spread support for their rule and demonstrate their ancient beliefs. In Fengxiang, the Nianhua were produced in six different varieties, including: Door Gods (Men Hua, Men Shen), The Ten Beauties (Shimei Hua), Opera Stories (Xiju Gushi Hua), Pictures of Customs and Traditions (Fengsu Hua), Six Gods (Liu Shen Hua), and Window Pictures (Chuang Hua Hua). Sold every year at the time of the Spring Festival, Nianhua were used to decorate homes and perform essential family rituals. Pasted above the stove, in the manger, the pig sty, on the well, in a home’s entrance, they served to appease the different gods whose moods and powers could affect the destiny of a household.

In the early 20th century, a dozen family workshops in Nan Xiao Li Cun worked prolifically to produce more than 600,000 Nianhua prints each year for Shaanxi and the surrounding provinces of Gansu, Ningxia and Qinghai. The Nianhua were deeply anchored in the superstition and religious practices of the Shaanxi countryside. The Nianhua tradition was so popular that from 1958 to 1964, despite difficult economic times when even paper was impossible to find, the village continued to print the Nianhua on paper bags, student’s homework, or grocery paper. Despite the bad quality of the prints, the village workshops worked night and day to satisfy the demand. They were sold out each year.

Then, suddenly the craftsmen’s homes were raided and pillaged. Old books, calligraphy, sketches, every trace of former “imperial” or “superstitious” days were stolen or destroyed. The chaos of the Cultural Revolution had started. While the Nianhua craftsmen were called on to continue their work with new revolutionary sketches and drawings, their houses were repeatedly plundered and ravaged. Old carved wooden boards were pilled into trucks and carted off to the local Wen Hua Guan, the Cultural Association, where they were put under lock and key. Other boards were burnt as kindling during the endless meetings of culpability and finger-pointing so popular during that angry time.

The Tai family was hard hit.

Mr. Tai Li Ping is the 17th generation of a long line of Muban Nian Hua makers and the only remaining master of the Fengxiang Muban Nianhua. Mr. Tai Li Ping is a pillar of passion. His house is full of light, sheltered by creativity and wrapped in calm. Coming from the dust and sweat of the countryside, I enter his home in Baoji – Shaanxi’s second largest city, 40 minutes south of Fengxiang – with a sigh. I am ashamed to take off my shoes, and display my dirty socks not washed for days. I feel like a peasant among these masters.

Mr. Tai Li Ping has just come home from a celebratory lunch for the approaching New Year and his breath smells slightly of Bai Jiu. His face is open and calm, with only some wrinkles around his eyes to divulge his battles and years of crusade to save the Nianhua. Tai Li Ping talks openly, without holding back. We sip tea and talk quietly while his daughter works by the window facing the southern sun.

Tai Li Ping’s life has been marked by the destruction and violence endured by the Nianhua and his struggle to reverse the noxious effects of destructive histories. He has dedicated his life to fight the double desertion of the Cultural Revolution and globalization and has strived to passionately revive and restore Fengxiang’s Nianhua tradition. Fighting for access to previously stolen carved boards, researching old pictures and prints he is slowly restoring and re-carving the traditions of his ancestors, and reviving one of the key gestures of China’s most important festival.

Histories are Lives
As Nan Xiao Li Cun’s most renowned Muban Nianhua makers, Tai Li Ping’s family was branded as “intellectual” during the Cultural Revolution and their house raided 17 times. The prolific artistic work of his grandfather – who not only made Muban Nianhua, but also painted temple walls and carved shadow puppets were all destroyed. The cultural armies stole over 167 of the carved wooden boards from his family’s workshop, and a total of about 400 from the village. Despite constant harassment and thievery the Tai family continued to make Nianhua according to the new dictates of the revolution. These revolutionary prints were extremely popular - everyone had to prove that they were more fervent than others – and the market for communist Nianhua flourished.

In 1979, with the start of China’s reform, the government declared an end to the chaos, the return of stolen property and the revival of ancient beliefs and traditions. Everything that had been stolen was to be returned to their rightful owners. Everything that had been burnt to ashes was meant to rise again. Although the traditional Muban Nianhua styles were already crippled and maimed, Fengxiang’s Muban Nianhua market was economically viable when the reforms finally came. China’s lunge into the world market and the pull of digital printing and globalization however would give the Muban Nianhua the decisive and deathly blow. No matter the agility of the master’s hands – the hand printed Nianhua were no match for the efficiency and speed of computer printing presses.

More Pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/silkroadproject/sets/72157594535738570/

In the early 1980’s there were still 70 families in Nan Xiao Li Cun making Nianhua. In 2000, there were suddenly only 30 families struggling to profit from the craft, and by the end of 2001 only 3 families remained. Today, Mr. Tai Li Ping is the only remaining craftsmen still carving and printing the Muban Nianhua. Mr. Tai Li Ping’s wife is also versed in the craft of printing. Their daughter is the first woman in 18 generations of Muban Nianhua makers to both carve and print Nianhua. Like Ni Su, the clay figurines in Liu Ying, the carving and printing of the Nianhua were family secrets: family secrets to be kept by the men in the blood line. If the craft was taught to a girl, when married she would inevitably bring this knowledge to another family who could potentially compete for business. To keep the specialized knowledge in the family, women were kept in the dark about most of the production process, and were able to help only in final printing steps. Confronted with the potential extinction of Fengxiang’s Muban Nianhua, however, Tai Li Ping had no choice but to teach his craft to his daughter – who unlike his eldest son – was interested in the craft. Sometimes saving traditions comes with quiet revolutions.

Two students are also learning the craft with Mr. Tai, studying on weekends and vacations. The students sit curved over their wooden boards attentively carving and chipping the boards, while Mr. Tai occasionally looks over their shoulders with comments and advice.

Together, the three Tai’s have revived 320 of the most traditional Muban Nianhua prints and designs, which represent more than 2,000 woodcuts – each character having several woodcuts – one for the black outline of the character and one for each color added to the print (tao se). This masterwork of revival and rebirth is the result of a bitter battle Mr. Tai has fought for almost 30 years, collecting old boards, researching older prints and battling with the Fengxiang Wenhua Guan, Cultural Association, to return the 167 wooden boards stolen from his family.

Fighting the Fengxiang Wenhuaguan, he soon discovered was a deceptive battle of decadence and lies that could never be won. Mr. Tai found himself confronted with the double hypocrisy of bureaucracy and corruption. His family’s boards were being sold by the Cultural Association or given as gifts to high government officials as the faked proof of Fengxiang’s great artistic renewal. The wooden boards, the only templates left of the traditional pictures, were being liquidated by the same people who were supposed to be rebuilding and reviving the Nianhua. The Cultural Association was receiving large budgets to revive local crafts, but instead of applying themselves in this work they were using the booty of the Cultural Revolution to further enrich themselves and buy-off criticism from higher-ups in the government. Tai Li Ping had no chance to regain possession of his family’s boards. Instead one day, with the help of researchers from Xian’s Academy of Fine Arts, he was able to spend several days in the Cultural Association’s storage room making copies of the boards that once colored his family’s home.

From 1980 to 1986 he used these precious printed copies to carve new boards: carving, with the help of his daughter and students the more than 2,000 wooden boards to revive 320 of Fengxiang county’s traditional Muban Nianhua prints and designs.

This is Tai Li Ping’s life work; a passionate homage to the 16 generations of Muban Nianhua carvers that came before him, a reverence to the traditions of the past. With the close collaboration of his wife, he has compiled this extensive work into a hand-printed, hand-bound four volume encyclopedia of Fengxiang Muban Nianhua. Published in 1,000 examples, it is not only testimony to the rich traditions of his country and the traditional craft of his village huddled among Shaanxi’s northwestern mountains, but is also a daring bold printed trace of his own life story.

Shaanxi Province: Mountain Mud, Lions and Pepsi-Cola

2007-03-04T21:55:00.000+08:00

Mountain Mud, Lions and Pepsi-Cola
It’s 7h45am and I am in a slow tractor of a bus. The thick morning mist still clinging to the soft new cement road, we are inching away from Zhouzhi towards Fengxiang – the ancient homeland of the Zhou dynasty emperors and a passage in the Chinese Classic Xi You Ji, The Journey West. Stepping in, stepping out, early morning workers become shadows on the tree-lined road. There are less mad trucks in the morning, and were it not for the pulse of the tractor’s motor and the rattling of its breaks, there would be a certain calm on the road. Behind me, women are talking about celebrations and wedding gifts: this year it will be a motorcycle for the groom. The bride’s family is paying. We inch ahead.

A little swerve – op-op-swoosh-honk-op-op! – we are overtaking a truck in a turn with little visibility, and of course the on-coming car is not slowing down – we make a last-second lunge back into the lane: a small reminder that every road in China is a hazard. Here highways are mass murders and small routes bandits always ready to ambush the weary driver. I have been told that road accidents are the second cause of death in China – with respiratory problems being the first, and suicide the third. But movement is necessary, not just for travel, but for development and the rising dragon that is China.

Roads and Religion
Pushing westward, I am entering the Da Xi Bu, China’s western more rural and underdeveloped provinces. Here, you start to remember the importance of roads – of pavement and easy access and departure from a place. In these ancient mountains on the border with Gansu Province, villages remain unconnected, distanced and thus left behind by the economic growth and flux of ideas that is changing China. A road is opportunity, it is ideas and information, an adventure with great potential. Recognizing the need to spread China’s new wealth, the Chinese government prioritized the development of the countryside in 2005 with the goal of building an equitable society and a “new socialist countryside”. This political effort has already been translated into concrete projects underway throughout the country. Everywhere roads are being built, connections made. I have been given a map of Fengxiang County by a friend in the provincial government. This is a futuristic map of the county painted with the more than 20 roads and highways set to be built within the next five years. Villages will be connected and neighboring counties will increase their porosity and exchange. Change does not come slow in China these days. My bus is now plowing through clouds of dust on the improvised side road, while the main road is being paved.

In the bus, my illuminated neighbor is driving me crazy. She is so excited that I am Catholic and has started to preach to me about love and Jesus – she is chanting – trancelike, repeating that Jesus has given her a new life. She feels connected with me. With the screech of the bus and the mass of people around us, I am starting to suffocate and want to tell her off. But, I pull myself together and kindly nod and acquiesce. She is part of the underground church and is an adamant missionary for her group. She asks me to join her the next day for prayers – she wakes everyday at 5:00am to pray for China. I kindly decline, wondering how God could possibly hear her prayers over the rattle, hum and bang of China’s thunderous growth. The factories that never sleep.

Some divine force has sensed my hostility and the bus suddenly pulls over on the highway. The driver tells me that we have arrived at my stop. Here - in the middle of nowhere, on an endless strip of cement busting through fallow land. This is the great highway drop-off. He points to the city beyond what seems to be miles of somber fields. There, he says, I can get my connecting bus.

Mountain Spirits and Roadside Crafts
Arriving in the late afternoon in Fengxiang, there is a good feeling in this ragged, lively town. Motorcycles and three-wheeled motorized cyclos race through the center’s four main streets, while night food stalls are filling up with customers. There is the bustle of Klondike days. Stores here sell all sorts of provisions – axes, ploughs, thick rope, canvas bags and seeds. There are Shi Huo drums and handmade crafts being sold on the streets – a good omen. I set out before nightfall to talk to some of the craftsmen.

The fifty year old Mrs. Fan is chatting with some customers on the wide sidewalk of Fengxiang’s main thoroughfare where she sells her wares. She comes to Fengxiang every year before the Spring Festival to sell her handmade paper-cuts, and this year she has prepared about 400 pairs depicting tigers, flowers, sparrows, children playing and other more intricate scenes of country life. Mrs. Fan sells four pairs of paper cuts for 1RMB (less than 20 cents). These same paper-cuts could easily be sold in Beijing for 20RMB, and perhaps up to the equivalent of 80RMB (10USD) in the States. Mrs. Fan will live with her relatives in the county center until she has sold all her cuts and will return to her village 40 minutes south of Fengxiang in time to celebrate the Chinese New Year. In a week’s time, she will have made a precious couple hundred Renminbi.

The Business of Ancient Traditions
The first barrier of mountains west of Xian, Fengxiang is the mythical homeland of China’s Zhou Dynasty – the warrior people who brutally conquered the Shang more than 1,000 years before the Christian era. It is one of the legendary heartlands of ancient China, a land of divination and inscriptions carved on turtle shells. This used to be the western frontier of ancient China, the edge of the empire. Today, it now sits on the eastern edge of the Da Xi Bu, but has retained its position as a boundary, a border – a place beyond which everything is different: the last green threshold before the Hexi Corridor and the Gobi. Only recently connected to China’s economic boom, it is also a region thirsty for growth and ideas. There is a palpable hunger and enthusiasm. It is a county full of ancient histories facing the pull and attraction of the modern.

20 minutes outside of the county center, the village of Liu Ying Cun has dug into its rich past of traditions and boldly entered China’s fierce commercial market. They have transformed the village’s talent for crafting traditional clay figurines into a flourishing business. Today, Hu Xin Ming is at the helm of the Nisu clay figurine market, selling more than 200,000 figurines in 2006.

The Nisu making tradition originated sometime between the Qin and Han dynasties, around 100 AD, and flourished some hundred years later during the Tang dynasty in 600AD. Originally made as funerary ornaments (zun zang), the clay figurines evolved into household vessels, story-telling figurines and later into children’s toys.

Nisu depicting gods and spirits such as Tudi Shen (the God of Earth), the Fu Lu Shou triad with the Gods of Happiness, Emolument and Longevity also known as San Xing (Three Stars), Cai Shen (the God of Wealth), Zheng Kui, Guang Yin (Buddha), and many others were placed around the house as auspicious objects at the time of the Spring Festival. The figurines were thought to help to bring peace, wealth and happiness to the home in which they were placed. Nisu also evolved to reproduce mythical figures from China’s history as well as characters from tales such as the Xi You Ji, The Journey West, or the Sanguo YanYi, the Three Kingdoms. These figurines were 20cm to 50cm in height, and were sold as a story-telling set, used by parents and elders to recount the ancient stories to their children.

Today, the story-board figurines and religious deities are very hard to find. The extraordinary market that the village of Liu Ying has created for its Nisu has not developed these older more superstitious objects. These figures are also more delicate and time-consuming to make: crafted one by one, hands must be agile and gifted to roll, punch and pinch the soft wet clay into lively evocative figurines. In Liu Ying Cun, Mr. Du Ying is one of the few artisans who can still make these figurines. He can make a full set of these hand-made beauties with several weeks advanced notice, the price of which must be negotiated directly with him.

As more parts of the sacred slowly evolved into the secular, Nisu makers also began to depict countryside animals such as cows, horses and pigs, while still continuing to make mythical animals such as dragons and phoenixes. Made in all different shapes and sizes, these animal figurines are called Za Huo, sundries or assorted merchandise. A smaller, more refined version of the Za Huo emerged particularly for children, and included rattles, small bird and tiger figurines, as well toys depicting the 12 animals of the Chinese Zodiac. These smaller more intricate and refined Nisu are called Yao Huo.

Today in Liu Ying, the most frequently found Nisu are of the decorative variety – they are hollow figures made by pouring clay into thick flat molds. If the clay figurine is three-dimensional, two molded pieces are glued together with small strips of clay before baking next to the charcoal oven. Once heated and dried they form a soft white shell, smooth like plaster. The dried product depicting lions, tigers, dragons, or the 12 Zodiac Animals are then painted in bright colors and shipped to destinations around China. This year, Liu Ying Cun was invaded by thousands of ceramic pigs, some lying outside to dry, while others were being hastily painted inside the village workshops, to be shipped in time for the new year of the pig.

The economic viability of the Nisu has insured that future generations are actively learning the trade, and in most of Liu Ying Cun’s workshops there are three generations working together to craft the clay lions and colorful pigs. The heads of the most successful workshops have become definitive heroes in Fengxiang County – they are the entrepreneurs that have effectively revitalized one of the county’s oldest traditions.

Craftsmen as Entrepreneurs
The 77 year old Hu Shen is one of these heroes – whose renown was further expanded in 2001 when his clay figurines were featured in a nationwide series of postal stamps – of which he will very happily give you a commemorative postcard. Mr. Hu’s family has been in the Nisu business for 600 years and before the Cultural Revolution, the Hu family ran the town’s most prolific and renown Nisu workshop. They would make Nisu only in the wintertime when the planting and harvesting was over. Nisu was a supplement to their family income, and was never considered a year-round job. During the Spring Festival or to celebrate a baby’s man yue – first month, villagers would come to Hu Shen’s house to buy the figurines, or go to the Miao Hui, the temple fairs, where Hu Shen and his brothers would go to sell their family’s Nisu.

Specializing in the creation of mixing ping, superstitious wares, Hu Shen’s family was naturally targeted during the Cultural Revolution. He and his father were forced to stop their craft and work everyday in a county factory, after which they had to perform self-criticisms on a nightly basis. At that time however, Hu Shen and his father continued to secretly mold clay into all sorts of shapes and figurines. Because they could not produce too many pieces, each piece was made to perfection, twisted and turned, folded and kneaded with precision: ten years of patience and endurance.

Hu Shen takes me to his workshop’s attic and we snoop around piles and piles of papers, broken clay figurines, sheets covered in thick white dust in search of the family’s old molds and figurines. Hu Shen finally finds a box of old figurines, dating from the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1912). They are intricately crafted and are the characters in an opera story – whose name I unfortunately didn’t understand. Behind each figurine, Hu Shen’s grandfather has written the name of the character in red ink. Hu Shen tells me that there are three important reasons behind the making of these figurines: the first is to keep the story alive he says, the second is to inspire artistic creation, and the third is to help recount the stories to children. The figurines are the vessels of these ancient stories and beliefs, replicated and remade generation after generation.

Hu Shen laughs and tells me that if I had come when he was a young man, he certainly would not have shown me these figurines, or the molds and heating techniques that he uses to make the Nisu. These were family secrets he says: family secrets to be kept by the men in the blood line. If you teach your daughter the craft, he explains, when she marries she will bring this knowledge to another family who may steal your business. To keep the knowledge in the family, women were kept in the dark about most of the production process, and were able to help only in putting on the final color touches. Today, he says much has changed and all his daughters and daughters-in-law are key parts in the family’s Nisu business.

Down the street from Hu Shen’s workshop are the headquarters of the 42 year old Hu Xin Ming, the actual King of Nisu who runs the most prolific and successful of Liu Ying Cun’s Nisu workshops. Hu Xin Ming tells me that creating a successful business was not a piece of cake. In 1979, with the start of reform in China, there was no sufficient infrastructure or technology to make or sell enough Nisu to make a living. There were only 10 families still making Nisu. He remembers that in 1979 a group of French researchers came to visit Fengxiang for one day, and the county built and paved a road for their arrival. Each village had to “clean-up” and get ready for their visit. At that time, the Nisu market was still very local, with no business beyond the county limits. Between 1980 and 1988 however more families started to make Nisu, until the Nisu market suddenly collapsed in1988: few people in the local market were buying the figurines, and the final product was too brittle to be exported to other cities. On arrival in Beijing or other cities too many of the figurines were broken. In 1996 however, with the support of the government, Hu Xin Ming created a new better clay technology and built a little workshop to revive the Nisu craft. By 2006, more than 80 families in Liu Ying Cun were making Nisu.

Hu Xin Ming now employs 30 people in his workshop, each making at least 10 pieces a day. In the early 90’s he was making 50,000 to 60,000 pieces a year. Today he makes up to 200,000 pieces a year. He is building a new factory at the entrance of the village where he will at least double his production. When I enter Hu Xin Ming’s workshop, he is sending a fax to clients. He does not need to go seek out his clients; they come to the village or go on-line to make orders. His biggest clients are large companies, who buy his decorative figurines to send to clients. In 2003 for example, Pepsi-Cola China bought 60,000 clay figurines packaged in red felt gift boxes. Hu Xin Ming is in the handicraft business, but his workshop is a modern apparatus with a global reach.

The Fengxiang Nisu production is the county’s showcase for craft-revival, and the pride of the local Cultural Association (Wen Hua Guan). I think mostly that it shows how one passionate man can revive a tradition through successful entrepreneurship and feeling out the changing appetite of current and potential customers. The craft has brought an impressive vitality to Liu Ying Cun, bringing wealth, opportunities and exchange with people from all over China. Hu Xin Min’s new factory will certainly continue to bring wealth to the village, and perhaps even help them to further diversify their offering.

Shaanxi Province: Hands and Needles, Threads and Machines

2007-02-19T14:16:00.000+08:00

Shaanxi Province – Ancient Crafts and Mass Production
My first interviews with artisans are set around the traditional start of the Silk Route: Xian, the capital of Shaanxi Province. Below is the THIRD of the series on Shaanxi Province.

Yabai Zhen: Hands and Needles, Threads and Machines
“Yabai Zhen is the unchallenged center of embroidery in northern China,” I had been told. “It is the heartland of needlework, the capital of stitching and sewing.” With the help of these descriptions and a large heap of optimistic naiveté, I had imagined the town alive with color and chockfull of old women’s handiwork: a bustling hub of traditional crafts. So when the next day I cruise into this decadently dusty and garbage-strewn town, I have to remind myself that sometimes places are hard to pierce, that the surrounding villages need to be discovered, that I should not despair yet. This town feels as if it has fallen from grace. Tall buildings, once freshly painted are leaning towards the gutters, their facades sagging with the rusted rivers of last year’s rains. It feels like a deserted ballroom invaded by uncomely squatters: dusty, dirty and unwelcoming. The bleak whole is traversed by a dangerous thoroughfare down which buses howl and honk, not giving the town’s streets a second glance. I decide to get off the bus anyways.

Small Computerized Workshops – The Town’s New Entrepreneurs
I walk down the desolate main street, derelict and almost abandoned but for a few shops open for this Friday afternoon’s slow business. I am wishing that Mr. Liu the talkative shoupolar garbage collector I had met in Mafang village was still working here. At least I could have some company to slurp noodles or doufu nar, tofu soup. I sit down to lunch at a low table in a dent of a restaurant and eat pickled vegetables and a plate of dumplings. There is a collective gasp of surprise among the restaurant’s customers and everyone turns to stare – they too are wondering what the hell I am doing here. First some basic questions, some praise at my use of chopsticks (yong de hao de hen!) – and then everyone in the restaurant is conspiring to help me find handicraft embroidery. Each person has a plan and firmly-set ideas; they are battling about where I should start looking. I am finally taken hostage by the winner, an old woman who takes my arm and pulls me out of the restaurant. She knows a handmade embroidery workshop on the outskirts of town, and parades me through town until we reach it together.

This is how I meet Mrs. Zhou, in her one room workshop attentively watching the buzzing needles of her 12-headed computerized sewing machine. True, she does occasionally manually fix the threads and notches of the machine, but there is no hand-sewing to be found. She and her husband left their work at a local factory two years ago to buy this 3-meter long computerized sewing machine and set up their own business. They invested RMB 70,000 for the machine whose computerized designs they now sell for RMB 1.5 per piece, each piece having up to eight three square inch flowers or other designs. Jiu shi ku de hen she says, this work is really hard and time consuming. They are able to make about RMB 200 (USD 18) per day; just enough to support their family and reimburse their substantial initial investment. Electricity only costs about RMB 300 per month. They communicate with their clients by phone and have enough regular clients that come seek them out, so that they do not have the additional pressure of attracting new business.

After talking with the soft Mrs. Zhou, I decide to give Yabai Zhen a couple of days to explore its sewing business and hopefully find some of the traditional handmade crafts which I still stubbornly contend must survive in the surrounding villages. Mrs. Zhou insists on helping me to find a hotel, and we zip off on her scooter to the town’s top lodgings. The three story hotel is on the thoroughfare and the receptionist tells me the quality of the rooms is comparable to Xian’s best. I need a shower, so I willfully believe it. Marketing is in the eye – or this time, the armpit - of the beholder. Mrs. Zhou helps me to bargain a RMB 20 discount and I book into the 50 kuai room complete with TV, heating, and private bath – this place is wonderful, despite its lack of hot water. It is easy to find a decent hotel in Shaanxi’s county centers and small towns – a fact that I greatly appreciate after days in the villages. I could find much cheaper rooms, the 10 to 20 kuai variety, but I’m happy with a little bit of luxury. It’s hard to break old habits.

A Sewing Economy
Everyone in Yabai, I soon discover, has something to do with embroidery. Indeed the whole economy of this town is centered on sewing – from threads, to sewing machine equipment, to needlework, to finished products like sewn blankets, door hangings, comforters and pillow-heads. Here is where all of China’s kitsch bed-wear originates. The wealth of Yabai’s 15 outlying villages and its population of 5,000 persons once fully rested on the bustling sewing economy of Yabai town-centre.

Ms. Zhang Zai Fang, who with her husband brought the first computerized sewing machines to Yabai from Shanghai two years ago, explains that the town’s peak economic success was in the early 1990’s. Between 1990 and 1995, Yabai was supplying all of China with its embroidered bedding. She tells me that everyday truckloads of sewn goods left Yabai to be delivered to stores throughout the country. At that time, the town was ablaze with energy, and visitors and businessmen came from every province of China. How to explain today’s barren streets and empty lots? Ms. Zhang tells me that Yabai’s specialized know-how and savoir-faire was quickly learned by business partners and assistants from other provinces, who rapidly exported their acquired knowledge to other towns and cities. As a result, people now no longer need to go to Yabai to find embroidery. The town was not able to preserve its monopoly or innovative environment, and so over the past 10 years the town’s sewing economy has slowly faded and dwindled to a small almost inaudible hum.

Ms. Zhang and her husband however have been adamant and successful entrepreneurs – taking advantage of the remaining embroidery market, while also diversifying to other more promising markets. Over the past two years the couple has sold 30 of the 40 computerized sewing machines in Yabai. They have also set up a customer service store where they sell the thread and repair parts needed for the machines. They have a small factory in the back of their home, where 10 workers help to dye and package the thread they then resell in town. This is a lucrative business, and the couple and their son have traveled to China’s key tourist destinations every year for the past four years. They still however do not have a shower in their home, and go to the County Center every third day to shower together. Today, they are getting on board China’s growing “green economy” and are looking to plant trees and shrubs to sell to China’s cities as they start to beautify their streets and parks. This has already very successfully started in some of the villages around Yabai, and they want to get into the action.

The couple is also wagering substantial cash into the production of embroidered patches figuring the 2008 Olympic mascots. They do not have an official agreement with the Olympic committee, and will be using the mascot logo illegally – like thousands of workshops around China. I imagine that over the next 18 months, thousands of computerized sewing machine heads will be working in a frenzy to produce the mascot accessories to be sold around the world in the summer of 2008. Perhaps there will be enough embroidered mascots to build a path to the moon: 1.3 billion pieces at least.

Hand-Embroidery?
I continue to look for hand embroidery and ask the director of the Wen Hua Guan, the Cultural Association in Zhouzhi County (the county under whose jurisdiction Yabai village is under) for some leads. He tells me in a surge of honesty, that even though Yabai is called the heartland of embroidery, the name reflects a modern phenomenon started in the1980’s. “The embroidery here,” he says, “is not outstanding; it is just like in any other part of China: a long tradition of woman preparing their dowries.” This fact he has conveniently omitted from his official report to the provincial government, a report of which he has given me a copy. In the report the Zhouzhi Cultural Association asks for RMB 900,000 to save the embroidery tradition of the town and its surrounding villages. I am astounded by the substantial amount of this four-year budget (2006-2010). Having visited and observed the Cultural Associations of several counties, I have seen that their work is minimal and almost derisory – their’s is a political hide-a-way, a joke of a responsibility, a comfortable vantage point that comes with chauffeured car and endless banquets. To top it off, this is the budget the association has asked for only one craft – they have of course also drafted budgets for all the other crafts of which traces are found in all the surrounding villages! Who will drink and eat this money away, I wonder? I doubt that it will ever sift down to the countryside and those people that can save and teach this ancient tradition.

Back in Yabai, when I ask where I can find people who still hand embroider, everyone insists that no one continues to hand-sew in Yabai. One woman tells me that the oldest embroidery technique used here is the foot-powered sewing machine. But when I ask Zhang Zai Fang’s 54 year old mother-in-law if she has any pieces that she has hand-embroidered herself, she proudly says yes. 10 minutes later, she comes out of her back store-room with a beautiful hand-sewn menliar or decorative door curtain. She sewed the intricate flowers, birds and trees on this door curtain for over one month in preparation for her wedding. At the time, each woman was meant to sew a door curtain, several pairs of pillows, a duster and a comforter for her wedding-day. These dowries were hand-sewn treasures. “Woman then had time,” she says. “We would sit at home with friends chatting and sewing. When there was no farm work, we would sew.” As little as three decade ago, there was no notion of market deadlines, no stress, no rush, no production quotas and targets. There was only time and the movement of needles. Today, due to her bad eyesight and arthritic hands, the fifty four year old no longer embroiders. None of her daughters have learned to embroider. There is no market they say. No one is interested in hand-sewn products anymore. The computerized sewing machine is king.

Yabai’s Countryside: Kiwis and Celebration
Motivated by this first hand-sewn discovery, the next morning I decide to borrow a bike and peddle around Yabai’s countryside. I have given myself two days, and am determined to find women who continue to sew by hand.

The countryside around Yabai is bustling with activity. Everywhere people are cleaning, cooking, and getting ready for next week’s Spring Festival. Villagers are flocking to the county center to buy new clothes for their kids, firecrackers, fruit and other New Year’s gifts and luxuries, while their family members are returning from the big cities where they have gone to work or study. The whole country is alive with movement. This week the trains are running packed and at full throttle through the great Chinese Mainland: Iron Dragons connecting cities to the countryside. The world has shifted from the Roman calendar to the traditional Chinese Lunar calendar, in which the Spring Festival marks the first month of the year. There is a palpable excitement: families reunited, stories told, and nights filled with color and light. The countryside has visibly dug into its bag of traditions – emerging are paper-cuts for the windows, painted deities for the houses, and the village troupes are getting ready for the festival’s Shi Huo, the crazy drum accompanied dances and songs performed on the fifteenth day of the first lunar month for Yuan Xiao Jie. One village I ride through has put up a giant swing for the kids to play on. The first crackers are lit, and the villages are animated with the sound and color of celebration.

I am surprised by the plentiful religious and superstitious symbols around the villages. (I am not sure here where religion ends and superstition begins. but perhaps this is not important). There are alters to deities in front of each house, the wells and public places. The temples charred and destroyed during the Cultural Revolution have been rebuilt and freshly painted. In one village, the temple keeper opens the doors and lets me explore the newly renovated temple. This small temple perched above the village was 500 to 600 years old before being burnt to ashes 35 years ago. Today, the gods and goddesses are back in place and histories and myths have once again been painted on the walls. Riding through the villages, I also pass several churches – one still being renovated, and several traditional burial celebrations doused with rice wine and the continuous banging of drums, cymbals and the piercing voices of opera singers.

The villages I ride through are surprisingly clean and orderly. Only 30 minutes from Mafang village, they have a distinctly different style and are clearly more affluent. Yabai’s successful sewing market has clearly shared its achievements. It was only three years ago however that each village got a cement road, leading from the village’s center to the main Zhouzhi to Yabai road. The villages are arranged radially from this central and economically powerful axis – I imagine that it has been this way for centuries. Roads have always been the most basic necessity for trade, commerce and economic subsistence. Next year each village in the county will be able to choose one additional road to be paved by the county government. Road by road, economic growth is reaching the countryside, boosting its connectivity and the speed of movement and ideas.

Yabai’s countryside hides another sweet surprise: kiwis. In almost each village, there is a courtyard full of people frenetically packing kiwis into bright jazzy Spring Festival packaging. These tasty kiwis were first picked ripe in October and have been kept in the warehouse’s cooling rooms for 5 months, waiting to be sold at the high prices enabled by the Spring Festival. Les malins! Huge trucks are waiting in the villages to deliver these kiwis to festival tables throughout the country: Jiangsu to Liaoning. This is a lucrative business for the kiwi field owners – which are often joint-ventures run by several village families together.

The workers packing the fruit however, are the poorest from the surrounding villages. The women earn RMB 15 a day, a little less than USD 2. The men, who perform the more strenuous work of lifting and carrying the crates earn a double wage set at RMB 30 for their more than 10 hours of work. This is the countryside’s harder side - the underbelly of the world. These are the people without growth opportunities, the ones who have not yet reaped the benefits of cement roads and the past 30 years of growth. These are the people who will not pause at the Spring Festival, for which work is still basic survival. These people are the hard reminders that despite all of China’s growth and success, there is still work to be done, there are still growth opportunities to capture.

Yabai’s Countryside: Dowries and More Recent Math

The village doors open. I am taken into houses while women sift through their closets and piles of old pillows, comforters and blankets looking for their old embroidered handiwork. They pull out the remaining pieces of their dowries, sewn thirty or more years ago. They are beautiful and speak of older times – times when these villages were still isolated geographically and economically. They speak of time and rest and communities at work. Almost every woman I meet is eager to sell these pieces to me, and they are disappointed when I tell them that I am not looking to buy. Many of the women in the villages tell me that they have already sold off most of their most beautiful pieces: antique collectors have already scavenged through these villages, buying beautiful pieces at meager prices. One woman tells me that three years ago she sold her mother’s dowry door curtain for only RMB 20. Her mother had worked several months on the piece, and the daughter now regretted having sold it. The regrets were not for the sentimental value of the lost piece, but rather for the higher price that she could have captured for it today.

An intricately embroidered door-curtain in good condition can reap up to RMB200 in the villages these days. They are then sold, I imagine, for triple that price in urban and foreign markets. I ask some of the women if they don’t want to keep these pieces for their daughters, for future generations – but they are not interested in such inheritance. They want to give their daughters economic and educational opportunities, not the antiquated symbols of former hardships and darker days.

Today, door-curtains still hang in every villager’s house. But they are the bright fluorescent modern variety, computer sewn for the masses. Why do women not continue to embroider by hand, I ask. The reply is brute: it’s simple math. It takes one month to sew a door-curtain which in the local market she can only sell for RMB 200. A woman packing kiwis in the village however can earn around RMB 450 per month. The math is indeed simple: more kiwis, no more hand-embroidery. There is no time to think of heritage, of traditions: there is no value for cultural capital set into the equation. Here survival, education, growth, and “getting out of here” are the keys.

Retirement and Tigers
Many of the formerly prolific embroiders I meet, old women in their 60’s and 70’s no longer embroider because of their deteriorating eye-sight. However, this retired community of creative women is still active, sewing thicker, simpler toys, tigers and shoes for their grandchildren and village kids. Some of the old women I meet also continue to sew the colorful pillows and feet-holders made to assure the comfort of the dead in their wooden caskets. This is a market that never fades: anchored in birth and death.

These women go down to Yabai’s market held every three days to sell their wares. A pair of baby shoes is sold for RMB 5, a felt tiger stuffed with corn stalks, to celebrate the newly-born’s manyue first month goes for RMB10; a pair of hand-sewn shoe-soles are RMB 1 – the price of a bus ride home. All these prices can be tripled in Beijing, and again quintupled in New York and Paris.

In Yabai, I’m learning that keeping these traditions alive is math, geography and movement.

A clear obstacle to the perpetuation of hand-embroidery is that these creative women lack the links and connections to the wider – city and international markets – in which their hand-embroidery could reap more interesting prices. To link their local supply market to outside demand would be enough to create a flourishing trade for the ancient craft, enough to save some of these ancient gestures, and teach them to new and younger hands. Again, where is the Wen Hua Guan, the local Cultural Association? I’m thinking that I should send them a business plan for their RMB 900,000. With that much money, we could hit the international market within 6 months.

Shaanxi Province: Art for the People

2007-02-17T00:22:00.000+08:00

Shaanxi Province – Ancient Crafts and Mass Production
My first interviews with artisans are set around the traditional start of the Silk Route: Xian, the capital of Shaanxi Province. Below is the SECOND of the series on Shaanxi Province.

Art for the People
A cultural revolution needs art. But, how do you find art without looking to the elite, to the group of people with the time and leisure to think and create? Most importantly for the new Chinese communist nation in the early 50’s – how do you find art without history – without the history you are trying to negate or obliterate?

The answer, like many for the Party, came from the countryside. For centuries, farmers and their families had colored their lives and celebrations with traditional painted crafts – drawings on the walls of the newly-weds’ room, paintings on the temple gates and colors splashed on spring festival doors. It is these ancient creative gestures that the communist party appropriated and transformed as their own, as the people’s. Mingjian Yishu – Popular Art. A twist of names and the trick is done. Adding a qualifier to the word art, and its history and innate elitism vanishes.

Of course, these traditional crafts could not be taken in their entirety. The superstition, the gods and goddesses, the remnants of religion, ghosts and goblins had to be purged. People had to be trained in the new language, be taught and assembled with a collective goal – a movement had to be created. Huxian County and its Huxian Nongmin Hua, Huxian Peasant Painting, became one of the epicenters of the movement, and professor Ding was one its passionate leaders.

An Unknowing Politician
What is most surprising when talking to Professor Ding is the total absence of politics. He loves peasant painting and seems almost oblivious to the strong political will behind the creation of the Nongmin Hua. He was clearly not the architect or mastermind behind the creation of this national symbol, and reveals himself rather as the unknowing, almost naïve implementer of a new political language. Born in Chenggu about 50 miles west of Xian, Professor Ding was country folk himself. After graduating from his home county’s teachers college in 1955, he was sent as a young cadre to teach in Huxian, where he continued his hobby of painting. One year later, he was chosen as one of the first leaders of the Huxian cultural organization and embarked on the important task of creating a mass art movement.

This mass art movement was to turn the gestures of folklore into a national art – into propaganda. The Huxian cultural organization first gathered all those men and women in the surrounding countryside that were renown for their traditional crafts. It then gave the new group a name, and along with this nomenclature an official existence and national recognition. Through this organization, traditional crafts would now be raised to the status of art, and its craftsmen and women would be recognized as people’s heroes. Professor Ding than took on the task of peyang he yindao, training and guiding.

Speaking about this time, Professor Ding is proud and still conveys the full-hearted enthusiasm and optimism with which he embarked on his task of teaching and leading the peasant painters. Professor Ding talks about his countryside students with great esteem and notes the simplicity and beauty of their painting. Tamen hua de shi yuan wer de he repeats in his thick Shaanxi accent, their paintings are naïve and pure – strokes uncorrupted by kuankuan tiaotiao, rigor and rules. The paintings his students created were soon reproduced throughout China – their purity and honesty transformed into one of the communist party’s most powerful tools: propaganda posters.

In Professor Ding’s apartment on the 6th floor of a 15 story building built in the early 90’s in western Xian, we are looking at pictures of the early days of Huxian Nongmin Hua. Flipping through the pages of his album, he stops at each photo and exclaims Zhe Zhang A! At first, I’m not quite sure what he is saying – the Shaanxi accent is like speaking with a mouthful of marshmallows – but almost in a fit of laughter I quickly understand that he is saying - and look, here I am! The pictures depict Prof. Ding, a drawing board in hand teaching his students how to depict the new nation. His students surround him, attentive and respectful. He stops at many of the pictures and proudly explains that they have been published by the country’s leading newspapers. One picture of the him surrounded by his countryside students was reproduced by the Jiefang Jun Bao, the Liberation Military Weekly in 1958, another was printed in the Zhongyang Xinhua Bao, the Capital Xinhua Times a few years later. Huxian’s peasant painting movement was clearly part of the nation’s political machine.

Paintings of a green and blossoming country-side, with peasants happily squatting down to rest, or energetically harvesting their fields were created to build cohesion around the nation still arrested and torn by the damage of wars, poverty and famine. The paintings portrayed the economic prosperity promised by the 1958 Great Leap Forward, and could soon be found pasted on walls throughout the country. One painting of Chairman Mao among a field of green cabbage speaking tenderly with peasants won the national silver medal for art in 1975. Another depicts children outside next to a cherry tree field in blossom, learning how to use a new modern metal machine. Yet another painting shows a crowd of farmers watching a revolutionary opera in the village square.

Professor Ding seems truly disinterested in politics – perhaps he has seen too much – or perhaps he is truly taken away by the simple esthetics and beauty of the peasant paintings that have been his life for the past 50 plus years. Professor Ding tells me that I should go to the countryside and see for myself. He has prepared a paper for me on which he has written directions to Huxian and the phone numbers of the head of the Huxian Peasant Painting Museum who will meet me there upon my arrival. The next day, he calls me several times to make sure that everything is alright: have I found the bus station? Have I met the director? Is everything going smoothly? - he is worried that I am traveling alone. The following week he continues to call to make sure that I am well and gives me advice on how to stay safe.

The Countryside
At the Huxian Peasant Painting Museum, I am bored stiff. My thin guide Mr. Wang, the third assistant secretary to the director of the museum, asks me if anything is wrong. I tell him somewhat awkwardly that I am not interested in the museum and would rather go to the surrounding villages and talk to the painters themselves. Without hesitation, Mr. Wang surprisingly says hao, zuo ba! great, lets go! He phones a friend, and a few minutes later a van packed with old men pulls up to the museum. We are headed to a wedding, the son of one of the older painters is tying the knot and many other painters will also be present. My visit to the museum was keeping Mr. Wang from some good times with his friends, and he is relieved and happy that he will finally join in the fun. A close call.

We are soon slurping noodles in the effervescent courtyard of Zhao Sheng Tao’s home. I have become an impromptu guest of honor and must give a few words of congratulations to the newlyweds in front of the crowd. They burst with hilarity when, despite having written out what I am supposed to say, fumble and mess up my few lines. Have I said something completely vulgar and grotesque? probably, it seems quite funny and definitely breaks the ice with the painters assembled at my table. Three cheers for peasant painting! I am soon unable to ask any cohesive questions. Rice wine and the Shaanxi dialect is a potent brew.

I am lucid enough to see that these painters are greatly respected and treated like an elite among the crowd. They have wenhua – culture, and gain status from their creative profession. More simply, they now also have money. Many are still living off their former days of glory, and have taken on administrative tasks in the museum and the painters association. All however have recognized that the nation’s new king is capitalism, and have entered the peasant painting art-market with revolutionary zeal. They now paint for the millions of tourists that pass through Xian each year, reaping high returns from the sale of their abundant and cheaply made copies. Although he laments the lack of skill and talent in these reproductions, Professor Ding himself has joined this entrepreneurial crowd and runs a peasant painting stall with his daughter in Xian’s famous tourist bazaar near the Great Xian Mosque.

As the next bottles of rice wine are opening, we thankfully leave the wedding. Mr. Wang must accompany journalists from the Liaoning TV station to get footage of someone doing paper-cutting – they are preparing their Spring Festival programming. Mr. Wang tells me to come along. We are going to visit Liu Jin Hua, a 73 year old woman known for her paper-cutting and peasant painting. She was part of the first group of student, assembled in 1956. The TV journalists quickly take their shots and leave. I stay and spend two days with Liu Jin Hua.

Liu Jin Hua
Liu Jin Hua is in constant movement. Cooking, cleaning, feeding her rabbits, barking at her German Sheppard. She is soft and funny - a wide face framed by a grey wool hat and a bright blue mesh of a scarf. Her husband is the Paul Newman of Mafang village, calm and photogenic, quietly sucking on his pipe throughout the day. Together, they are an incredible couple – tender, tough and humorous. Liu Jin Hua is so excited that I am interested in her craft and welcomes me with the concern of a parent and the energy and bustle of a celebration.

Liu Jin Hua and her husband live mid-way down the second alley of Mafang village when coming from the main road in the direction of Zhouzhi. Their alley, which is about 3 meters wide (and so must probably not be called an alley – but is so because of the dry earth and dust that constitutes its path) is lined with houses facing each other on both sides. Each house touches the next and the alley has become an extended courtyard and meeting place for the residents. The alley is pilled high with bricks and sand, as many families are slowly getting ready to renovate or rebuild their homes. Houses here are status symbols and are frequently renovated and improved to reflect the wealth its owners. Here in Mafang there are three well defined social echelons. The first and lowest echelon is a house that was rebuilt in the 1980’s or before. It is a simple, single-story edifice made out of clay and straw supported by a wooden beam structure. The entry way which does not have a door is a low rectangle painted in black, leading into a large entry room where the kitchen and its corn-stalk burning oven are located. The kitchen oven is connected to the kang in one of the side rooms, and provides heat for the winter bed. (A Kang is a brick bed heated from underneath for northern China’s long winter nights.) Behind the house is a walled garden where there are random semi-permanent structures for keeping animals, tools and kindling – this is the domain of ferocious dogs. For some odd reason, these angry guard dogs are always stationed next to the latrine -- I’m trying to drink as little tea as possible.

The second and most common house on the alley is very similar to the first – but with some key and visible differences. These houses have been rebuilt within the past ten to fifteen years, and have a cleaner fresher feel to them. Their clay walls are supported by both wooden beams and bricks and are about half a meter taller than their older compatriots. Their doors are taller and wider and framed by bricks, making their larger central room more visible to the passerby. Some of the houses have brick floors, rather than beaten dirt floors, but like their lesser versions, these houses do not have heating other than the kitchen oven. Surprisingly, considering the cold winter weather there are no chimneys to be found. Steaming hot bowls of noodles are the only comfort for frozen faces.

The third and glaringly luxurious houses are entirely made of brick and tile. Once starch white, they have multiple stories and tower over the alley. Liu Jin Hua lives in such a home, and the small gated garden in front of her house makes it the most opulent residence on the alley. Her living room’s high ceilings are adorned with dusty electric fans and neon lights, none of which are used. In the living room there is enough room for a large round dining room table, similar to those found in every aspiring restaurant in the country. Liu Jin Hua and her husband, however still prefer to sit on low stools and use the tea table to dine. They never use the second floor and have locked all of its obsolete rooms. Their main activity and movement happens between the kitchen and the winter kang in the adjacent room. Liu Jin Hua also has a small painting room on the ground floor, but no longer paints much during the winter cold.

Agile Hands
Liu Jin Hua’s house is filled with color. In the entrance is a large and messy table-alter, strewn with candles, incense and a bright new statue of a Buddhist deity. Behind the alter hangs a one-meter high painting Jin Hua painted about 10 years ago. It is riddled with coagulated layers of bright blues, pinks and yellows depicting the many divinities she worships. It is a thick brute painting that reminds me of the kitsch and beautiful Mexican alters worshiping the Virgin Mary. Nothing here of the Great Leap Forward or the depiction of the new China. She has returned to the roots of traditional painting – the religion and superstition of the Chinese countryside. She once again paints for the village temple.

Liu Jin Hua’s paintings are a collage of the countryside’s traditional crafts. She pastes paper-cuts on paintings, and adds bright colorful paints to her paper-cuts. It is a creative mix of mediums, which she says is not her innovation - it has always been done this way she claims. She paints the colorful scenes of the village market, Spring Festival dances and temple celebrations. She transforms every scrap of paper she can get her hands on: a calendar, cardboard, instant noodle wrappings, the traditional thin red paper used for paper-cuts. She is a prolific creator.

We spend the afternoon sitting on her warm Kang, bundled in blankets. She is telling me stories while gently unwrapping and proudly showing me her many awards. Some half dozen of her paintings were exhibited by the Huxian Peasant Painting Museum and other cultural institutes around China, and she has received a memorial certificate for each time they were displayed. She fires away in her Shaanxi dialect, talking for hours, laughing and eating peanuts. I understand a small 30% of what she is saying and doze off leaning against the wall. When she lifts up her shirt and layer upon layer of long-johns to show me her flabby belly, I have no idea what she is talking about. But I feel that easy proximity and complicity that women often have with each other through their bodies and femininity.

Her husband, who I respectfully call old grandpa, comes in with the family’s photo album, and we talk about their visits to Beijing for a Peasant Painting exposition, and travels to the county center. Being part of the Huxian painting movement has clearly boosted Liu Jin Hua’s livelihood and enabled her to be the family’s biggest earner. Her husband worked the family’s fields – 1 Mu (0.17 acres) of land for each person in the family who has an official residence (hukou) in the village. With the support of the peasant painting movement, Liu Jin Hua has traveled once to Beijing, multiple times to Xian and has built the family home. She says that she was thrilled to be part of the movement, and reaped many of its benefits.

At noon Liu Jin Hua makes noodles, fried this time with some pork meat and a few bitter and delicious greens. She spices up my bowl with salt and lajiao (hot spice) and tastes it with her chopsticks to make sure the proportions are right. slurp. This is the first time someone eats from my noodle bowl, and it makes me feel like a kid. I am surprised at how much Liu Jin Hua and her husband eat, I can barely finish my bowl. They each finish two large bowls. After eating, we sip some of the water that was used to cook the noodles – it has become a thick tasty glutinous broth. I want to clean the dishes, but Liu Jin Hua doesn’t let me do anything. Finally I am glad that she doesn’t let me because I would have thrown away the meat that I had not finished in my bowl. She keeps it for the next day’s sauce, stored in a little wooden cupboard where all the food is kept. There is no fridge here. Despite her relative wealth in the village, life here is still counted in fen and mao, and everything is kept, reused and recycled. The left over noodle broth is fed to the dog, who is surprisingly not skin and bones. The rabbits get dried leaves from the courtyard.

Liu Jin Hua tells me that she learned paper-cutting and painting from her mother and other women in the village. Hers are ancient gestures passed down for generations from mother to daughter. I asked her if she had prepared paper-cuts and paintings for her wedding. She says that she had prepared some, but very few. Her husband laughs and tells me that Jiefang qian, before Mao Zedong and his Red Army created the People’s Republic of China in 1949, their families were utterly poor, barely eating enough to quell their hunger. He tells me that I probably can’t understand. Liu Jin Hua continues, saying that at their wedding their were no mian hua, the traditional steamed bread kneaded into beautiful shapes and forms, no musicians or shadow-puppet plays. Her husband’s family could simply not afford it.

These traditions call for some basic ingredients, tools and materials which mean they necessitate some monetary investment. Mafang village today is as rich as it has ever been in the past century. In comparison with former years, it is a land of plenty, a land of opportunity. Finally crafts and traditions can be fully indulged in, celebrations can be bountiful and full of magic. But despite these conditions, many of the younger generation are no longer interested in these crafts and ancient forms of entertainment; they are pulled towards the modern and the new, towards cities and their Western-influenced cultures. In Mafang village, no one is learning Liu Jin Hua’s craft, she has no students and none of the village kids come to watch her paint. The young are leaving the village for school and work, they no longer have the time or interest to study these “outmoded and archaic” gestures. Perhaps the loss of these traditions is but a little sacrifice next to the gain in prosperity, and the wealth of opportunities that have come to the village. Perhaps this is the small price to pay for rising up from poverty.

The second day in Mafang some of the village kids follow me into Liu Jin Hua’s home – this is the first time they see so many of her paintings strewn out on the Kang and they really like her stuff. They are making a mess touching everything and laughing. It’s a nice voluptuous mêlée, which makes me think that these traditions still resonate, are still potent and beautiful. Will some agile hands remain when these kids, ten or twenty years down the road want to recall and reclaim these traditions?

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(I think of UNESCO and the work of the Wen Hua Guan – the Cultural Associations who have an office in each county center of China – where is there work? what are they up to? – there are so many entrepreneurial projects to undertake here; projects that are both profitable and could help to preserve the invaluable historical and social capital of these traditions. Many ideas and business plans in my head. I feel like only small-businesses and entrepreneurship has the potency to save the ancient gestures of these crafts. There is an urgency for them to be built and developed)

Shaanxi Province: Light and Shadow

2007-02-07T07:27:00.000+08:00

Shaanxi Province – Ancient Crafts and Mass Production
My first interviews with artisans are set around the traditional start of the Silk Route: Xian, the capital of Shaanxi Province. Many thanks to Wang Gang (Sabrina) for giving me a wonderful book on the region’s crafts, and to Sarah for setting out on the first travels with me. Below is the first of the series on Shaanxi Province.

Episode 1: Light and Shadow
Speeding on the highway in northern China, the countryside is all alike – an endless colorless plain of dust, a wasteland carved out and worn down by centuries of use and decades of madness. It is a torn blistered land aching for green. It is hard to imagine that this was the soul and heart of ancient China, the wide fertile plain of the mighty Yellow River, the homeland of the Zhou dynasty, the capital of the Tangs, the majesty of the terracotta soldiers.

Today there is a soporific rhythm to the countryside, a suspended grayness in which everything is both luminous and without detail. Here time decelerates, expands and is lost, as if endlessly refracted in clouds of dust and smoke: an impenetrable, yet somehow curiously welcoming prism. It is as if all of the sudden the land will erupt with color and noise. It feels like anything can happen.

Sarah has brought me here to look for the memory of shadow magic: the craft of the puppet-maker Wei Jin Quan.

“Shadow puppet” is a misleading name. Viewed through a white screen illuminated from behind, the puppets are not just shadows, but colorful and sharp transparency. Carved from thin translucent cow or donkey-hide the puppet’s shapes are refined and their color bright and visible through the screen. If the puppet player moves his figurines away from the cotton screen, only then does the puppet become a shadow, a fuzzy indistinct shape.

The skill of the puppet player is many-fold. He (because all the puppet-players we hear of and meet are men) must not only learn how to manipulate the puppets, but must also memorize the songs and rhythm of about 60 plays – which can each last up to three hours. It is an act of coordination and practice. For optimum effect, the movements of the puppets must coincide with the bang, bust and lulls of the energetic opera-like singing that accompanies the play. In a battle scene, for example, the punches and sword thrusts of the puppet warrior must be synchronized with the yelps and screams of the musicians. All this, while handling multiple puppets and characters.

The nimble-fingered Wei Jin Quan is currently the only one in his troupe to handle the puppets – the other five members constitute the orchestra. Mr. Wei can adroitly maneuver more than 10 puppets “on stage” at a time. During battle or parade scenes in which dozens of characters stride on stage and interact, this is quite a feat. Mr. Wei is a master of the show.

Masters and Apprentices
We have come to Huaxian, the supposed birthplace of shadow puppets, about 80 miles east of Xian in this year’s mild mid-winter to seek out Mr. Wei. Sarah had heard of his talent through a French friend and puppeteer, Jean-Luc Penso. The strapping and burly Jean-Luc (Mr. Wei’s description) studied puppetry in Taiwan, living with his master for several years before returning to France to start his own troupe, “Le Theatre du Petit Mirror” in the Parisian suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux. Jean-Luc later also studied with Mr. Wei for several months in Huaxian – and his boots and bicycle are still in Mr. Wei’s courtyard awaiting his return.

Sarah Oppenheim, my travel partner, is a petite French woman with a fierce character. Working on her masters in Chinese theatre, she is also learning the art of puppet play in Beijing. Rehearsing every day with her troupe members in a run-down shack huddled around a coal oven, she is learning how to “walk” her puppets. To learn the art of Dongbei puppets (from Northeastern China), her master insists that she needs to “walk” her puppet for at least one year to gain the dexterity of a professional. There are many walks he claims: a calm and serene character must have a slow stride, like deep breathing, up and down, slow and steady. A clown however, must be in constant movement, his head bobbing up and down, tripping occasionally – ready to make the crowd laugh. Sarah’s master insists that she can be initiated to other puppet movements, only after learning all the walks. From her almost four months of daily practice, Sarah has calloused hands and a protruding new thumb muscle. She is fed up with “walking”.

Mr. Wei laughs at Sarah when she tells him what she is learning, and says that in Beijing people are too caught up on details He tells us that it only takes a month to learn the basic puppet techniques of the Huaxian shadow play and only about one year with the troupe to learn multiple dramas and most of the techniques. In past decades this apprenticeship took longer as most people were analphabet, and had to memorize the words and music for each play, which could take around three years. Sarah is excited to learn about today’s accelerated learning and Mr. Wei invites her to study with the troupe this spring. One month of study to become an ambulant puppet player. Sounds enchanting.

A Family Tradition
Wei Jin Quan comes from a long line of shadow puppet players. His grandfather and father were both part of puppet troupe orchestras and are still remembered throughout the county for their deep resonant voices. Today, Mr. Wei is the leader of Huaxian’s Guang Hua Shadow Play Troupe, made famous by Zhang Yimou’s movie “To Live”. Although he is the youngest in the troupe, Mr. Wei is the only troupe member who has learned all the skills involved in the shadow play: instrument playing, singing, performing, carving and painting the puppets and transcribing the plays. He is the renaissance man of the puppet world.

Sarah and I meet Mr. Wei in the new residence his puppet troupe has been awarded by the Huaxian government. The government is finally recognizing the importance of this 2,000 year old art-form, and clumsily attempting to help it survive. The troupe is housed on the outskirts of the city within a former military compound that has been converted into a school. The troupe has a large empty courtyard with single-story cement barracks on three sides. The rooms inside are at least five degrees colder than outside, so Sarah and I occasionally sneak out to go to smoke a cigarette in the sunlight - warming up in the winter sun. There are fragrant trees planted in the dry earth along the main barrack and this place seems blissful and quiet. The sound of a student’s music rehearsing in an adjacent barrack enhances the magic. The troupe’s wrinkled and grouchy erhu player sits on the barrack steps and watches us talk, counting time with the cigarettes he inhales.

Recognizing a Master
Inside, in his room, Wei Jin Quan is excitedly pulling puppets out of every niche and corner. He pulls them out of drawers, his wooden chest, his closet, and in a final comedic gesture lifts up his mattress to reveal more puppets hidden there. His life is peopled by painted emperors and goddesses, ghosts and goblins. He has at least 100 puppets scattered throughout the formerly barren room. Against the white wall, he shows Sarah some “moves” for a battle scene. He is proud and happy – this is his passion on display. This abundance of figurines however, is but the tip of the iceberg - for the troupe’s repertoire of more than 50 plays, Mr. Wei regularly uses 100 puppet-bodies onto which he can add the 300 to 400 heads of different characters.

Later that afternoon we drive to Mr. Wei’s house in the village of Jiang Cun Dong, 45 minutes south of Huaxian. There, he continues to pull out hundreds of puppets from the thousands that he has saved and collected throughout the years. He lays down piles of puppets on the ground and returns to his chest to dig more out. He was able to buy many of the puppets from other troupes around the county before they disappeared. He also bought antique Ming and Qing dynasty pieces as well as old scripts from old-timers in surrounding villages. We hold the puppets against the light of the open door and his home becomes an unexpected theatre, alive with color and stories.

Wei Jin Quan has also saved some of the puppets his father played during the Cultural Revolution. At that time, shadow puppet troupes survived as long as they performed “culturally acceptable” plays that “helped to build the communist nation”.

Any of the old imperial, superstitious, or feudal dramas were trashed - literally. Mr. Wei says that many of his father’s spirit puppets for the traditional ghost dramas were destroyed. He has not been able to recreate them as he does not have any pictures or diagrams of those puppets. Some plays have thus been lost – but this is perhaps the normal advance of time and history? Some stories stay and are retold, others are lost to time and memory.

Craft and Commerce
Wei Jin Quan shows us a series of 70 puppets that he recently made for a play called “Nao Shi” or “Effervescent Market” – it is a parade of animals, people and activity. He tells us that he can make a set for us for about 2,000 Euros, a cheap price for a year’s work. The Nao Shi play takes only 20 minutes to perform, but is a lively ballad and ode to the Chinese love of renao: activity and bustle.

To craft his puppets, Mr. Wei uses many traditional techniques, including the use of a thicker cowhide, which makes the puppets more easily maneuverable. He laments the fact that today’s paint is not as beautiful as the natural plant-derived dyes they used in older days, but says that he does not have the time or the knowledge to paint the puppets in this way. He tries nonetheless to use high quality paints, which capture light and create the magic of the shadow play. Beyond crafting all the puppets used by his own troupe, Wei Jin Quan also carves puppets for Jean-Luc, the French puppeteer, following the designs sent to him by Jean-Luc.

Mr. Wei and his wife, by necessity have become master puppet carvers. Despite the presence of multiple puppet workshops in Huaxian, none of them produce puppets of a high enough quality to be used for performances. The bustling workshops around the county produce puppets that are destined only for sale and display.

While the traditional art form is dying, the economy behind the craft is taking off. Puppets are on sale in every souvenir shop from Xian to Shanghai and are a common site at Beijing’s Panjianyuan antique market. Ironically, Huaxian County has recently been named the heartland of China’s shadow puppets – a label that may be powerful enough to secure a higher price for the county’s souvenir exports, but may not be enough to save the shadow play from disappearance.

An Uncertain Future
Puppet troupes were once very active, playing almost every day throughout the Shaanxi countryside. Before the Cultural Revolution, Mr. Wei tells us that there were 46 shadow puppet troupes in Huaxian County, with ample work available for each troupe to play every day of the year. After the Cultural Revolution during which time many puppets were destroyed and troupes dismantled, only 10 troupes remained. However, Mr. Wei recalls that in the early 1980’s they were still extremely busy, playing every day without pause or rest. In the mid to late 80’s however, this changed abruptly. Today the three troupes remaining in Huaxian County are lucky to play once a week and all await the Spring Festival to feel the adrenaline and activity of former days. Mr. Wei explains that every since the television entered village life, young people are no longer interested in the shadow plays. The young he says, have a thirst for the outside world and modernity, and would rather watch TV, play video games or go on-line. Shadow puppets no longer provide the excitement and entertainment they were once sought out for. In Heyang County north of Huaxian, the same inactivity weighs on puppeteers, and only two troupes of a former 80 remain active.

Despite these somewhat depressing conditions, Wei Jin Quan remains optimistic and unremittingly happy. He loves his art and is passionate about puppets. When I ask him about the fragile future of shadow play, he answers decisively, bu shi wo de shi – that’s not my concern. He can not single-handedly fight the changes in the world – puppets are a small country next to the empires of TV and Hollywood entertainment. Mr. Wei loves his work, and is happy to take on apprentices and students, but this is perhaps not enough to change the course of his craft’s disappearance. The troupe currently has no students studying puppetry – no one is interested in this art form, he says, people want to go to the big cities and dream of lucrative careers. However, despite its lack of popularity among the young, the troupe did recently recruit one 30 year old student to study puppet play music. The student still works part time in a government job.

Despite his apparent nonchalance about the future of his craft, Mr. Wei remains a non-proclaimed ambassador for shadow play. He has been invited to perform all over China, and has brought his troupe as far as Germany and France. He says, however that these performances will not help ensure the future of the drama form. As of yet, no one is assuring the next generation of puppeteers. According to Mr. Wei, more people abroad know about traditional Chinese puppetry than the Chinese. Maybe, he says these foreigners will return to China to teach puppetry to future generations. Globalization come full circle?

Perhaps this journey can be productive, infusing the craft with new ideas and talent, enabling it change, adapt, and evolve with the world? Indeed, shadow play has already evolved in many ways during Mr. Wei’s own lifetime, adapting to technology and changing for example from the use of oil lamps, to gas lamps, to today’s electric lamps.

Mr. Wei is not anxious or worried about transformation, this is course of things - the world will turn, revolve and change. The lucrative decorative souvenir puppets will thrive until the real craft and performance art returns.

Islam in the Northern Capital

2007-02-02T15:16:00.000+08:00

Faith in the Middle Kingdom
Spirituality, faith and religion are probably not words you expect to hear associated with China – perhaps it would make more sense to talk about “made in China”, cheap consumer goods or A and B shares? Yet, since 1978 and the start of China’s reform years, religion has flourished here at startling speeds. With the end of the chaos and repression of the Cultural Revolution, religious communities once broken and silenced were slowly revived and new converts flocked to the five officially recognized religions in China (Buddhism, Catholicism, Islam, Taoism and Protestantism). According to official Chinese figures, by the turn of the century China was home to more than 200 million religious believers who worshiped in eighty-five thousand authorized venues – a figure which still fails to capture the millions of participants in non-official, underground religious groups and non-official gathering places.

In this context, it seems less incongruent to speak of the growing importance of faith and spirituality – and of interest to me as I step out onto the Silk Route – of Islam.

Lamb Kebabs or a Spiritual Community
Asking people at random what they think or know about Islam does not engender many interesting conversations here in the Northern Capital. Inevitably, people answer “bu chi zhu rou, chi yang rou chua’r ah” or “They (Muslims) don’t eat pork, only lamb kebabs”. No mention of the spiritual or historical Islam, no allusions to Xinjiang, China’s Uyghur Autonomous Region home to 8.4 million Uyghurs (a Muslim community known (and feared) in China for their separatist ambitions), no mention either of the 9.8 million strong Hui community, China’s largest Muslim group – let alone mention of the beautiful 600 year-old mosques scattered around Beijing. Indeed to the average Beijing resident, Islam is relegated almost entirely to eating habits.

I imagined that for the 21 million Muslims practicing in China, including the 200,000 in Beijing (stats from China’s 2000 census), this stereotype would be frustrating, perhaps even insulting. And yet, this stereotype of Islam as adherence to Halal rules has been adopted and transformed by Beijing’s Muslim community in many innovative ways.

First, by commercial success. Most of Beijing’s 200,000 Muslims own or work in restaurants – selling Yang Rou Chua’r (lamb kebabs) and Xinjiang’s thick noodles drenched in tomato paste. All claim to follow “Qing Zhen” or Halal standards and provide an interesting alternative to typical Chinese food. Hui minority food stalls – who hawk dishes more familiar to the Beijing palate - are often praised for their cleanliness and are packed with “non-believers”. The Muslim community in Beijing has clearly gained economically from the association of their culture and religion with the rigors of Halal regulations and cleanliness.

In Beijing, Halal eating etiquette and other rules for daily living and religious practice have also created a unity among the different Muslim communities living in the capital. Such rules have created a common platform of practice and understanding for China’s ten Muslim minorities – the Hui, Uyghur, Kazak, Kirghiz, Uzbek, Tatar, Tadjik, Dongxiang, Salar and Bao’an minorities – all represented (although disproportionately) in Beijing. This unity seems to be particular to Beijing’s relatively non-denominational environment, and a harmony difficult to maintain in other regions of China. In Xinjiang for example differences between Hui and Uyghur are deeply felt and constitute borders which are rarely crossed. (note: Rudelson, Justin Jon “Oasis Identities: Uyghur Nationalism Along China’s Silk Road”. Columbia University Press, 1997 p.63). However, faced with the demographic pressure of the capital’s 17 million Han “non-believers”, Beijing’s small Muslim community understandably down-plays minority identities, religious denominations and other differences, and stands by the unity of some key gestures and rites.

Hussein, a shy and beautiful 30 year-old who works in the small family-run Xinjiang restaurant in my neighborhood is from the Salar minority, one of the few Shiite communities in China. He however attends the mosque in Dongzhimen (across from the old long-distance bus station), and is surprised when I tell him that the mosque follows Sunni rituals and practice. Although Islam in China is not monolithic and has been and continues to be influenced by many movements, the majority of Muslims in China are Sunnis of the Hanafite rite (note: Alles, Elisabeth, “Muslim Religious Education in China”; China Perspectives. February 2003 pp 21 to 29). Hussein had noticed some differences but was not really aware of the denominational distinction. Hussein tells me that the difference in rites is not important for him, so long as everyone follows the basic rules of praying, washing and Halal eating. He says that only for funerals and weddings would he want to make sure that he followed the Salar community’s traditions. He further notes that there is not a feeling of minority identity in the Beijing mosque – everyone is Muslim and unified by that fact. He had not realized that the imams at the Dongzhimen mosque were all of Hui minority, and saw no interest in the distinction. This is radically different from Xinjiang, where mosques are often delimitated according to minority and rite (note: Rudelson, Justin Jon “Oasis Identities: Uyghur Nationalism Along China’s Silk Road”. Columbia University Press, 1997)

In Beijing’s Huashi mosque – an early Ming dynasty mosque built in 1414, four years before the Temple of Heaven – the plump Li Ahong (Ahong is Chinese for Imam) tells me that he and his fellow imams do not look to convert non-believers and teach non-Muslims about Islam. He is not shocked or worried that the majority of his fellow Chinese citizens know little to nothing about his faith. Indeed, it makes an all the more tightly knit and exclusive community, whose members can move around freely and anonymously among the city’s masses. As a Hui Muslim (with Chinese Han physical characteristics), Li Ahong can step outside the mosque walls and blend into the city around him. He has no exterior mark of his belonging to China’s thriving Muslim community. Sitting before me sipping green tea from a paper cup on Monday morning, he does look like any Dongbei Ren - a Chinese from the north-eastern provinces: a round, good-humored epicure. Leading prayer last Friday afternoon however, wearing his bleached white turban and flowing coat, it was harder for Li Ahong to conceal his faith, which inexorably differentiates him from other Chinese citizens. Li Ahong explains that he does not want to conceal or hide his faith, but maintains that it is better to have one’s community be associated with Halal rules than terrorism or fundamentalism. Indeed, such a harmless stereotype offers the community in Beijing some anonymity and space to flourish.

We are still in Beijing
Unfortunately, unlike its citizens the Chinese government seems to be acutely aware of Islam’s organic social and political power, and knows that the Islamic faith can be far stronger than mere adherence to Halal rules. Religion, the Chinese government fears could break the symbolic cohesion and order of a society unified under the CCP (note: Kindopp, Jason “Policy’s Dilemma in China’s Church-State Relations”; Brookings Institute). Indeed, Xinjiang and its separatist groups seem to be a constant and irritating reminder to China’s communist party leaders that religion can have a political agenda. China officially blames the East Turkestan Islamic Movement in Xinjiang for more than 200 terror attacks between 1990 and 2001, causing 160 deaths and 440 injuries. Hussein (from neighborhood Xinjiang restaurant) confides that the toll must be much higher and whispers that there is much that happens in Xinjiang which is muffled by the media. After looking over his shoulder to make certain no one is listening, he tells me that Xinjiang could be considered an entirely different and autonomous country. He exhales as if a weight has been lifted from his shoulders. A recent gun battle this January in Xinjiang’s Akto County near the border with Afghanistan, which resulted in the death of one Chinese People’s Armed Police and at least 18 Uyghurs (branded by the government as “terrorists”), acts as a more current reminder that the question of Islam in China is perhaps not simple.

Within this more complicated context, the Chinese state endeavors to firmly establish control over Muslim clergy, controlling religious education and institutions (note: Kindopp, Jason “Policy’s Dilemma in China’s Church-State Relations”; Brookings Institute). At a work conference on religion held by China’s top leaders in December 2001, then President Jiang Zemin insisted that, “the Party’s leadership in religious work and the government’s management of religious affairs must be strengthened and must not be weakened.” (quoted in Kindopp, Jason). The Chinese state finds itself in a difficult position – at once embracing today’s large religious revival, while also struggling to maintain control and restrain religion’s potential social and political role.

Behind the rapid growth and effervescence of Beijing’s Muslim community stands the constant weight and shadow of authority and central institutions – subtle, but we are still in the capital. “The question of religious education has preoccupied the Chinese authorities since long before September 11th.The increase in the number of schools, the growing numbers of students returning from Muslim countries, the circulation of the writings of reformers from the beginning of the century, which are now banned, the situation in Xinjiang and also the activities of other movements such as those of the Christians and of the Falungong have prompted the authorities to increase surveillance.” (note: Alles, Elisabeth, “Muslim Religious Education in China” China Perspectives. February 2003 pp 21 to 29). All the imams I meet in Beijing are graduates from one of the two Koranic Schools in Beijing, where beyond studying Arabic language, the Koran and other holy texts, they also attend a social studies class on the government’s legislation and religious policy. The imams must also attend regular meetings at the China Islamic Association, as well as frequent inter-faith meetings. Meetings, the imams tell me, that serve to further promote the deep understanding and tolerance China has for all religions – a noble cause indeed.

The China Islamic Association is the institutional and regulatory platform for Islam in China. Founded in 1952 by leading Chinese Muslims it quickly went into hibernation in 1958 (date implied in the association’s 50th anniversary book - needs a double check) to be reborn in 1980, with the start of more open religious legislation. In the words of its charter, the association is today in charge of “Assisting the People’s government to carry out its policy of religious freedom (…) guide Islam to be compatible with China’s socialist society; motivate Muslims to take an active part in the material, political and spiritual progress of the nation, and work for the construction of a harmonious and well-to-do society; strengthening national unity; maintaining interfaith harmony, social stability, and the unification of the motherland and world peace.” The sing-song charter of this still communist land clearly highlights the fears the government harbors as to Islam’s inherent strength. The leaders of the China Islamic Association have a difficult task set out for them - to juggle the needs of a growing and increasingly globally connected community with the pressures of tight-fisted and unpredictable domestic policy.

One of the imams I befriended and talked with on multiple occasions confided that he does not have much respect for the China Islamic Association. We are in his “cell” – the room he keeps in the freshly-painted mosque. It is a small and sober room, whose monastic charm is broken only by the flashing screen-saver of his shiny new PC. Above his bed hang an Arabic inscription and a papyrus painting – remnants of his study abroad in Egypt’s Al-Azhar University. He tells me that many of the China Islamic Association’s representatives are political cronies and that the Association is a hide-away for Hui minority politicians that no longer have influence elsewhere: a cushy retirement lot for out-of-service crooks from another era. He thinks that today’s Association lacks real spiritual commitment, or Islamic knowledge. But he believes that this will change over the next generation, as young more committed Muslims like himself grow to become part of its leadership.

In line with the demands of China’s Communist Party, the Association regulates China’s ten Koranic Schools. These schools are the official centers of Islamic religious education and have been established throughout China in Shenyang, Lanzhou, Yinchuan, Xining, Kunming, Beijing, Urumqi and Zhengzhou. Over the past fifteen years, the China Islamic Association has compiled the general text books for all of these schools. The association, in effect, provides China’s Muslim community with a reinterpretation of the scriptures in which denominations and sectarian differences are diluted. In the Association’s own words, its work provides “explanations and offers solutions to the problems emerging in the contemporary age in accordance with the spirit of the Holy Qur’an, Hadith and other Islamic scripture, positively guiding Islam to be compatible with the socialist society.” The Association seems to be constantly appeasing the Chinese government’s fear that Islam is destined for jihad.

This rigid regulatory framework and power does not only target Koranic students. Indeed minors under the age of 18 are not allowed to pursue religious studies. Talking with Liu Jia Ping, an administrator at Beijing’s leading Hui School, the Beijing Huimin Xue Xiao, this regulation becomes clear. Although the school was recently rebuilt with Arab-inspired architecture and its classrooms adorned with Arabic inscriptions and Muslim symbols, Mrs. Liu tells me that religion is not allowed to enter school premises. There are no religion classes and teachers are not allowed to breach the subject. The only clear sign of belief and faith is again found in the cafeteria – where all 2,200 students, whether Muslim or not eat food prepared according to Halal rules. The school once provided an extra-curricular Arabic-language class, but this too was rapidly closed as the students were already overwhelmed by the very demanding nation-wide Chinese curriculum they must follow.

Mrs. Liu’s father was one of the school’s leading members, a religious man and reformer who worked with the founding imam to expand the school in the late 1920’s. He was passionate about bringing education to his Hui community, and went as far as Mecca to collect funds for the school. Mrs. Liu, the second of his three daughters grew up among the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. She remembers looking from the window of her apartment into the courtyard of the neighboring mosque and watching the imams being beaten and forced to perform self-criticisms. She married a Han non-Muslim and no longer goes to the mosque. She still follows Halal eating etiquette as do her children, but that is the meager trace left of her religious background.

Demography of Control
The demographic composition of Beijing’s Muslim community – with a large Hui majority - simplifies the government’s work of control in the capital. The Mandarin-speaking Hui (in comparison to the Turkic-language speaking Uyghur, for example) are traditionally more integrated in Chinese society. Although the Hui do have a history of repression in China, they do not hold separatist or radical political agendas. This strongly impacts the overall atmosphere of Islam in the city, creating a less radical, “soft”, more diplomatic and perhaps diluted version of Islam. In Beijing’s Muslim community, for example, the existence of Islamic opposition in the northwest of the country is translated not by fervent support or compassion, but by a reticence to talk about Xinjiang and the presence of fundamentalist Islamic groups in the world today. The Beijing clergy almost ubiquitously announce within the first few minutes of conversation that Islam supports the harmonious growth of Chinese society. They are averse to hearing about Islam’s growing-pains in China.

Zhang Ahong in the Majian Mosque located near the Olympic Stadium compares the Huis to the global Jewish community: “da fensan, xiao ju ju” or “spread over wide regions, but maintaining close-knit communities”. He tells me that the Hui like to protect their community and traditions, have a strong minority-identity, but also like to remain discreet. The Hui community has adapted to the new realities in China, and seems to flourish in the status-quo. They are indeed perfect mediators between the government and the wider spiritual community of Islam in China. This is clearly visible in the large number of political appointments given to Huis in the China Islamic Association in which they hold an unquestioned majority position (Yang Ahong from the Dongsi Mosque tells me that it is more than 90% Hui – figure needs to be checked out).

Upheaval, Silence, and Controlled Rebirth: A Chinese History
Today, Beijing’s more than 75 mosques abound with activity. The Friday mosques are packed with hundreds of people – and Islam is clearly attracting a wide community of worshipers and adherents. Ding Ahong from the Qinghe Mosque in Haidian, north of Tsinghua University, told me that for the recent Eid al-Adha (Feast of the Sacrifice – and date on which Saddam Hussein was recently executed), there were more than 300 people in his tiny mosque, including around 70 foreign students from surrounding universities. He had to lay plastic grass rugs in the courtyard to accommodate the crowd. The worshippers remained in the courtyard, barefoot, as it began to snow. The same day there were more than one thousand worshippers at the Niu Jie mosque, Beijing’s most famous mosque.

There is a palpable effervescence to Beijing’s Muslim community. Most of the mosques I visited had just been renovated, with largess and pomp. The beautiful Huashi mosque just reopened this October after two years of renovation, and its red-lacquered Ming-style “si-he-yuan” interior and new Arab-inspired entrance boasted luminous color and renewed pride. The Dongsi Mosque was renovated two years ago for more than RMB 1.3 million, including gold-plated paint in the central prayer room and the construction of a new library for their prized possession - a 1,000 year-old Koran from China’s Yuan (Mongol) Dynasty. The Majian Mosque has also just been freshly painted with stunning reds and protected by a new fence adorned with the Arab crescent and star.

Funds for this startling renovation come from a wide variety of domestic and international sources: the Chinese government, the wealthy China Islamic Organization, the World Islamic Development Bank and the generous donations of wealthy Muslim countries, such as Saudi-Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and others. (I need to do more research here into the amount, reach and regulations of international donations to China’s Muslim community, but it seems that substantial funds are flowing in from abroad). Indeed with China’s opening to the world, these countries have been able to more freely support the growing community of worshipers in China. An imam I spoke with, who works in one of Beijing’s leading mosques, tells me that these donations are still closely regulated, and that no faith-based investment organizations are allowed to be directly active in China. In Beijing, much of the money is ciphered through the China Islamic Organization, although the imam tells me that there are also very informal donations made directly to individual mosques. He tells me that if a foreign dignitary visits a mosque he will often speak with the imams and donate substantial sums directly in cash (the imam cites, USD 10,000). On the occasion of his visit to the Daxuecang Mosque in Xian, the King of Saudi-Arabia left an endowment of USD 500,000 to the mosque. Some donations are thus more than substantial.

That money is pouring into this community is clear - it is visible in fresh paint and the many pictures of visiting foreign dignitaries hung on mosque walls. Beyond the early 2006 visit of the King of Saudi-Arabia, Mahdi Karoabi, a speaker from Iran’s parliament visited in 2002, and the late Yasser Arafat met with the China Islamic Association leaders in 1998 - even Libya’s Kaddafi has recently visited China.

In 2001 the King of Saudi-Arabia invited, all-expenses paid, 200 Muslim dignitaries from China to perform the Hadj. Earlier, Saudi-Arabia also funded the construction and launch of the Beijing Koranic School which opened to its first group of students in 1994. The Chinese government donated the land on which it now stands (an old factory west of the Temple of Heaven). A graduate from the school told me that text-books used in the school were not of the Wahhabi rite. Although more research is needed here – it could point to the fact that donating and supporting the Muslim community in China is very different from supporting for example those communities in Central Asia who have not only received funds, but have also been flooded with books, commentary and analysis from the different rites and dogma of the specific donors. (Note: Ahmed Rashid, “Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia). Muslim countries, I imagine must be engaged in a difficult funambulist act, balancing energy deals signed by the atheist and oil-hungry CCP with the demands of their spiritual brothers in China.

Despite the delicate balance, their money, language and spiritual strength have infused China’s Islam with fervor and economic means.

Further adding to the charisma of Islam in Beijing is the youth of its imams. In every mosque I entered, the imams are in their early 20’s and 30’s, young and ambitious. Ding Imam from the Qinghe mosque jokingly suggests that the Cultural Revolution eliminated two generations of Muslims, thus explaining the youth of all the imams. Indeed – during the Cultural Revolution, all mosques in Beijing were closed, imams chastised and all religious practice strictly banned. Numerous imams, I am told committed suicide under the daily pressure of self-criticism sessions and ceaseless violent reprimands. During the Cultural Revolution, only the Dongsi Mosque was kept open for foreigners. The China Koranic School in Beijing was also closed during the Cultural Revolution and did not fully reopen its Koranic studies department until 1982.

The rebirth of the Muslim community is all the more stunning and important within this historical context.

An Inevitably Global Community
In Beijing, Koranic studies are seen as an opportunity - an opportunity to pursue higher education, to find a job and to go abroad. Ding Ahong from the Qinghe Mosque did not have a strong “religious calling”. From a moderately religious family in Dongbei (China’s North East), as a child he attended services only for important celebrations. But when at 18 he was not accepted into universities, the chance to go to the China Koranic School in Beijing seemed like an interesting opportunity. Ding Ahong says that becoming an imam has helped substantially, giving him opportunities to grow intellectually and take an active role in his community. With a humorous grin he says that it also helped him find a wife.

Han Feng a recent graduate from the China Koranic School, tells me that one third of his fellow classmates have gone to study or work abroad in Egypt, Yemen, The United Arab Emirates, Pakistan and other destinations, each student staying abroad for about two to three years. None of his classmates went to Central-Asian countries. When I ask why, Han Feng explains that the language barriers and the lack of strong Muslim education opportunities in Central Asia are clear deterrents. The students are clearly oriented towards the Arab world. Han Feng himself is currently looking for an opportunity to go abroad, through a Chinese company active in the Middle-East or as a translator. He wants to go somewhere he can improve his Arabic.

The constant stream of Chinese religious students going to study abroad is only rivaled by the amount of students from the Arab world who come to study in China (I have not found stats citing the exact number, but they must exist). These exchanges inevitably bring flows of ideas and new streams of thought, exposure to different doctrines and religious practices. The imams I talk to in Beijing maintain that the students returning from study or work abroad do not bring back any radical thought or new doctrines, and would not have the power or freedom to change a whole community. I wonder if this is just the official line, and imagine that in a small community in China’s north-west, such new knowledge and world experience could bring about substantial change.

The growing exchange, links and support from the international Muslim community is a China-wide phenomenon. Students from each of China’s ten Koranic schools are seizing opportunities to go abroad, and those opportunities are increasing. In 2003, while traveling in Gansu province in a remote underdeveloped town, I bought some crisp sugar cookies from a quiet very stately Hui woman. She reassured me that she would not “rip me off” with western tourist prices. When I asked why, she told me that she was a Hadji - had completed her pilgrimage to Mecca. She told me that her daughter had also found an opportunity to leave the hardship and trials of the town with a scholarship to study in Malaysia. In a town close-by, as I stumbled into a newly built mosque a sole male student about 10 years old was using his summer vacation to study Arabic with the local imam. The imam told me that this way his student could hope to receive scholarships to study abroad. While most of the other students in this town could barely dream of going on to study in Beijing’s universities, the imam’s young student was already aiming for the Middle East. Islamic learning is clearly creating opportunities for growth, learning and study abroad for believers throughout China.
With its five pillars of faith – and most notably the call to perform the Hadj - Islam inevitably creates a global community. China’s Muslims are turned to Mecca in the West in both the physical orientation of the Mihrab and the dream of pilgrimage. Today with the opening of China’s economy and increasing financial support from the global Muslim community that dream is all the more accessible and real.

10,000 Chinese Muslims perform the Hadj each year. These 10,000 Hadji return each year to their mosques, communities and families throughout China bearing witness to a powerful experience of faith and the knowledge of the global Muslim community. They return with new religious commitment and global contacts that will doubtlessly have a deep impact on China’s Muslim community. What role the community will play in China’s international relations and the extent of penetration of foreign Islamic movements remains to be seen, but the next few years will perhaps bring interesting shifts and turns.

….if you have read this far, thank you! I promise that there will be more succinct entries in the future...