On the road to ruins

When John asked this man if he'd ever heard of Marco Polo he replied, "Well, I have not seen him myself but I heard about him on the radio."

October 12, 1999
Web posted at: 1:30 p.m. EDT (1730 GMT)

By John Fox

"Have you heard of Marco Polo?" I asked a gnarled, old, Uighur man on the street. I imagined him a wise elder.

He thought hard, stroking his beard and mumbling to himself, recalling perhaps an ancient tale of a traveler from the West.

"Well, I have not seen him myself," he replied finally. "But I heard about him on the radio."

Obviously I had to look elsewhere for clues!

I'd arrived in the desert oasis of Yarkand after a long, hard bike ride from Kashgar. We broke through the city to poplar trees and cotton fields, and eventually to the desert, the forbidding Taklamakan Desert to be exact.

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The road ahead was as straight as a bowling alley, with telephone poles lined on either side like marching soldiers. We pointed our bikes straight and pedaled hard for six hours, breaking for lunch in a dry, but shady riverbed. In even the most remote sections, donkey carts rolled by filled with cotton bales, textiles, and other goods.

John and Christina on the way to Yarkand

Strangely, Marco Polo says nothing about his journey from Kashgar to Yarkand and on to Hotan. He makes it sound like he took a short flight, when in reality it was a grueling three-week journey through the desert. A thousand years before Marco Polo passed this way, Chinese explorers and merchants passed through and goods began to move between East and West, leaving us detailed descriptions of the rich oasis kingdoms of the desert.

Trade along the Silk Road began almost 2,000 years ago, reaching its peak during the Tang Dynasty (618-907). The Chinese capital of the time, Xi'an, was the richest city in the world, with a population of almost two million. London at that time was a truck stop by comparison. Caravans heading east toward China carried glass, precious stones, gold, and other metals. Silk, spices, furs, jade and many other exotic goods made their way from China to the West. The oasis towns of Yarkand and Hotan got rich as middlemen in this trade.

On the streets of Yarkand, I made a discovery. As I ate lunch a woman passed with her neck terribly swollen, like she had swallowed a tennis ball. She was suffering from goiter, a disease caused by iodine deficiency from poor water sources. Seven hundred years ago, Marco Polo said of the inhabitants of Yarkand, "a large proportion of them have swollen legs, and great crops at their throat, which arises from some quality in their drinking water." Here was a direct connection between past and present, and a solid piece of evidence that Marco might indeed have walked these streets!

From Yarkand to Hotan I took your advice (from last week's Get a Clue!) and zoomed ahead by bus. Good thing too, since it gave me time to venture into the desert fringes of town to explore the ruins of Yotkan, once the ancient capital of the area. In 1901 Sir Aurel Stein, a British archaeologist, discovered Roman coins from 364 AD and Buddhist paintings with Indian influences. As we plodded through the barren desert looking for ruins there was nothing to be seen. Time had washed Yotkan's greatness away, and everyone was disappointed- except me.

Deborah turned to me, hot and tired from plodding through the ankle deep sands.

"Where is this site?!"

I just smiled and pointed down.

"You're walking on it."

Beneath our feet were millions of pottery shards, once the dinner ware of thousands of common people whose traces have all but disappeared- along with any memory of our friend, Marco Polo.

Dig it,

John Fox