The Exiles of Samarkand

In a year long forgotten, the members of a single Turkic tribe set out from the outskirts of Samarkand. There is no consensus, even among themselves, as to why they left their ancestral pastures, but it is known that they crossed the cool Zarafshan River and the freezing passes of the Heavenly Mountains, trailing their fat-tailed sheep through the dust between the Kunlun range and the dreaded Taklamakan.

Some say they followed a white camel; others say they fled in haste, carrying a leather pouch filled with a small measure of Samarkand’s blessed soil. There are those who tell of how they camped at a clear spring where the camel stopped to drink and turned to stone—or perhaps where it simply dropped dead. Others add that they drove their tent pegs into the ground only where the earth perfectly matched the dust in that Samarkand pouch.

It must be noted that the small region they chose—with its parched earth and the meager, pitiable hills that adorn it—seems an unfortunate choice, a riddle known only to the former camel. Yet they have been there ever since, rooted like a withering thistle at the headwaters of the Yellow River, on the threshold of Tibet.

The Salars are a strange and foreign breed, even within the ethnic jumble that surrounds them. They dwell one ridge north of the crossroads between China and the Islamic world, between Mongolia and Tibet, surrounded on all sides by fragments of nations much like themselves.

There are Muslim Mongols and Tibetanized Mongols, all of whom have forgotten the taste of mare’s milk; soot-faced Bonan bladesmiths and Yellow Yugurs whose future is shrouded in mist. And all around, an endless, dusty, reddish sea of Han and Hui, Tu and northern Kazakhs, and Tibetans speaking the Amdo dialect.

The Salars possess a peculiar Turkic tongue, and their linguistic kin dwell far to the west, beyond the seas of sand, grass, and cloud—in Ashgabat, in Baku, and in magnificent Istanbul.

There the Salars have remained for at least six hundred years, solitary upon the craggy hills, jealously guarding the lonely scrap of earth they earned by the grace of the Creator and one dying camel.

Six hundred years of meager grazing, of plowing cracked loess soil, of piloting leaky ferries across the Yellow River, and of driving mules laden with grain and coarse hides toward the holy city below.

It was from there—from the “Mecca” of the Tibetan foothills, with its mosques, Sufi shrines, and smoky alleys—that the call went out. In a broken holy tongue, heavily seasoned with Chinese, it summoned the frontier Muslims, and the tough Salars in particular, to a terrible rebellion against the dynasty, the echoes of which shook the high heavens and the distant Dragon Throne itself:

“Husband, do you hear? And you, Su*, as well? You meddle with the Emperor, and you will be dealt with!

You bring only trouble, a heavy crime indeed; when his wrath is kindled, he will cut short your time.

The Emperor’s men are burning like the sun, and you Salars are but vanishing clouds.

When the sun rises, the cloud is defeated. Has this not entered your wretched head?”

Much water has since flowed down the Yellow River. The echoes of the rebellion have faded, and with them the sufferings of the entire twentieth century.

But the Salars still sit upon the craggy hills, sharing Hongta cigarettes. In their distant tongue, they talk of new trucks, spare parts for machinery, and the season’s lack of snow. Occasionally, they will draw out the Holy Quran, whispered to be the oldest in all of China, born from the pen of the finest scribe in lost Samarkand.

And they will tell the story of the miraculous camel and the blessed bag of earth.

And the sun will set over the sources of the Yellow River.

In the photos: A boy holding a camel bone intended for memorizing Quranic verses; Ferries on the Yellow River, the operation of which was traditionally a Salar occupation; An early 20th-century photo of a Salar man; Xunhua County, currently home to about half of China’s 150,000 Salars; Tombs in the city of Linxia, China’s “Little Mecca” and the country’s most important Muslim center, not far from Xunhua.