"On our last, long leg back to Xian, on the road between Qiemo and Ruoqiang we stopped at a roadside eatery and had "pulled" noodles for lunch. The place was run by a Uigur woman in a red dress and a blue kerchief who
told us that on a good day maybe eight or ten cars, including the Chinese
mail truck that you see in the photograph, would stop along their route,
which was more or less the same followed by travelers on the southern
branch of the ancient Silk Road. We spent four days getting from Khotan to
Dunhuang, the site of perhaps the greatest of all the Buddhist cave temples
and a place that was inside the borders of China proper. Near Dunhuang, we
stopped at the Yumen Guan, the Jade Gate, where the Silk Road caravans were
inspected by Chinese border guards and through which Chinese armies passed
on their way to fight Huns, Turks and other 'barbarians' in the West. We
found a man sitting in the attached tea shop who, eager to impart a sense
of the melancholy of history, the extremity of the bloodshed that had taken
place on the Western side of the Pass, recited a Tang Dynasty poem:
Don't scorn them
They who drunken fall upon the field.
In ancient days or now,
How many return who go to war?"
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