Reflections from a Tapchan

We gain wisdom in three ways:

By reflection which is the noblest
By imitation which is the easiest
By experience which is the bitterest

After our journey to to Otrar and Turkestan we spent a pleasant night in Shymkent (Chimkent) and the next day looked around this strategic silk route town. Not much of the of the pre-Soviet period here.

I wanted to slow down on our return journey, and reflect a little. My mind was packed with information, my camera loaded with images and my note book with lots of words. I wanted to make some sense out of it all. I had now completed virtually every strand of the Silk Route through the Himalaya,.Pir Panjul, Daula Dar, Pamir, Tienshan, Karakoram and Hindu Kush, Kopet Dag mountains separating Turkmenistan from Iran.

Buddha found enlightenment under a tree, poets had moments of clarity sitting by streams, and many oriental writers got flashes of brilliance in Chai Khanas (tea houses) sitting on Tap Chans, the traditional four legged platform on which you sit on cushions and eat from a table placed on a Tapchan. My old friend from Kabul Steve Masty wrote a classic song “ Chai Khana on the Kandahar Road which has a wonderful line about ‘ how you kept your country ree' over thousands of year mainly by, accidentally or otherwise, disabling conquerors and invaders by food poisoning.

The Persian word Ab, water, has always fascinated me. When living in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, India and other parts of Central Asia, it is a suffix to so many words.

Panjab ( Five Rivers) Fariab, Doab, Surjab Murgab etc. they generally are towns situated on rivers or lakeshores. Also the Kazakh word ‘su’ for water also helps ones vocabularly as rivers and towns such as Ak Su.

Back to the journey home. As we were coming down a hill side 45 minutes east of Shymkent, and just after Ak Su, I saw an idyllic spot that surely must have been a stop for travellers by horse, camel or whatever means they travelled in ancient times. There was a stream, trees and from the spot, you could see from where you had come and where you were going.
And hey presto ! There was a Chai Khana behind the trees.
We parked at the road side and walked down the stream to the Chai Khana. The name of the tea shop was written in Russian, and I could recognise the last two letters – ab.
Translated into English it was called Masab. Suin spoke to the waitress who said it meant water or stream by the undulations. It sounded OK to me as we had been travelling over an undulating road and had just dropped into a depression with a stream.

And there in front of me was something I have never seen on the silk route in over 30 years, a large tapchan straddling a stream.

This is the nirvana poets dream about.
.

The words from various writers came to mind:

We travel not for trafficking alone
By hotter winds are fiery hearts are fanned
For the lust of knowing what should not be known
We make the golden journey to Samarkand

Man (woman) is a wanderer from birth.

We are pilgrims master and we will always go
Across the last blue mountains barred with snow,
Across the angry and glimmering s

And Robert Service’s poems are stacked with the race that don’t fit in.


There’s a race of men who don’t fit in
A race that can’t stay still
As the break the hearts of kith and kin
As they roam the world at will

In Victor Frankl’s book about concentration camps, he talks about the excitement when they moved by train from one camp to anothor and how inmates looked through cracks to search of recodnisable features that would give a clue for life or death tomorrow.

The Maori of New Zealand were incurable ‘Vikings of the Sunrise’
As they pushed from remote islands of Tahiti to almost Antarctica, and settling in New Zealand where they adapted to snow and ice as they crossed high mountain passes..

Over the last blue mountains barred with snow
Across the angry and glimmering sea

I am now back in Almaty with Naila and our two boys. Yesterday I dined with my extended Kazakh family. The faces were silk route faces. From the round Mongolian to the almost bluish eyes that are common amongst the Naiman tribe of Kazakhstan, who are Mongolian by descent. After all, they gave refuge to the wandering and persecuted Nestorian Christians who were drummed out of Eastern Europe for daring to be the first real offshoot of Christianity.

Sitting on the tapchan I found that this journey had helped me understand more fully who the Kazakh people were. The poetry of Abai had helped me greatly as did Tom Stacey in his introduction to the book, Silent Steppe by Mukhamed Shayakhmetov from which I have borrowed a little.

The Kazakhs are all Moslem faith, converted at various times since the 7th century but they are still have trappings of their shamanistic past and strands of Buddhist, Zoroastrian, and Nestorian, comprising today what we call ‘tengrism’ a faith in the unity of creation with Man at its centre and in communion with it, and of Man as the inheritor of a potential gift of ecstatic enlightenment. All this is exercise was mystically exercised among the Kazakhs in the rituals of their immensely ancient nomadic and transhuman existence, based upon their horse and camel-borne economy of herding sheep and goats across the vast breadth of steppe, and subject to a climate of extreme conditions, especially in winter. With it came an oral tradition of song and saga and poetry, and a flowering in the written corpus of work of the Kazakh poet Abai.

I am now back in Almaty relaxing, reading and travelling by trolley buses and trams with my nephew Dimash and son Ablai. This is a great city.

Turkestan (Part two)

Some make pilgrimages to Mecca, Jerusalem, soldiers to battle fields where they fought. For me me this journey has been a pilgrimage to Otrar and Turkestan. The last two places for me to visit on the Silk Route in Central Asia, Pakistan and India. The last posting was on our trip to Otrar, the spiritual capital of Kazakhstan and cradle of Kazakh civilization.

After being so impressed by the Otrar civilization it was with a sense of excitement that we crept north on the true right the Syr Darya River, with a freshly butchered sheep in the back of our car It was 43.5 o C but the dry heat was quite tolerable.

I had travelled extensively along the banks of the other great Central Asian River, the Amu Darya (Oxus) in Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Turmenistan and almost reached its source in Afghanistan’s Wakhan corridor. So it was a delight to be driving alongside the Syr Darya (Jaxartes) for some time. The reason I labour on about these two rivers as some of the most notable cities on the Silk Route are situated on these two rivers,

The road from Otrar to Turkestan is quite rough and took us an hour and a half. This is an ancient land and people here use horse and carts, camels, donkeys/mules and tractor for transport. Unlike Almaty that boasts the most modern cars in the world, old Soviet Volgas and Ladas ply the route with bales of hay in their trunks or on a roof racks. This is a back-water and occasionally you see families living in Yurts. Time has stood still here. Camel and mares milk is plentiful and I never saw a Coca Cola sign for more than an hour, a modern day expression of remoteness. Suin and Erlan were quiet. We swung into Turkestan via a dusty side road and suddenly saw the impressive Turkestan University that still produces scholars of a high calibre, carrying on the learning tradition of Al-Farabi the scientist and Abbas Zhaukhari mathematician and astronomer who were born in Otrar in the 9th century.

Soon we could see the Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasavi, dominating the skyline.

This structure was commissioned in 1389 by Tamerlane to replace a smaller 12th Century mausoleum of the Sufi master, Khoja Ahmed Yasavi,(1103-66)

It was every bit of what it was cracked up to be.
In the West and in New Zealand and Australia we learn rather negatively of Tamerlane, Timur- the-lame as a bit of a Barbarian, something of a butcher, but how many have seen the works his dynasty, that brought us the history the splendour, the knowledge of the Timurid Empire ? Architecture, art, calligraphy, astronomy, mathematics, philospophy. When Oxford and Cambridge were fledging, universities they used the astronomical charts of Ulig beg, the grandson of Timur

We sat and marvelled at what was before us. But with Suin and Erlan having limited English and my Russian even more rudimentary, the architecture, the man, the satellites needed detailed answers. And then Aisulu appeared. Trained in English at the University of Turkestan, she had not only impeccable English, but a training and knowledge of this historic site and the Silk Route.

Aisulu explained how the great architect from Persia, Kwaja Hosseiin Shirazi, erected a 39 metre high rectangular building in ganch, i.e., fired bricks mixed with mortar and clay, and crowned with the largest dome ever built in Central Asia. This double dome, she said, “measures 18.2 metres diameter and 28 metres in height.”

I walked about stunned by the beauty and sense of history. She showed me the tomb of Khoja Ahmed Yasavi and told me how the dark jade tiles that cover his tomb, came from northern India. Aisulu and I soon found we had something in common. I told her I needed to see the vault where Ablai Khan was buried. She enquired as to why this was so important and I said my eldest boy is named after him as I believed Ablai Khan was one of Central Asia’s most outstanding statesmen and warrior. Taken by surprise, she said, “ So is my husband.”. She said Ablai Khan’s burial chamber is being restored and is locked. However, she quietly took me to the door and prised the chain ajar enough, so I could see the tomb. This man was Kazakhstan greatest leader. He lived from 1711 to 1781 and had the combined qualities of an astute diplomat, organiser of the liberation struggle of the Kazakh people against the oppressive Jungarian trrops and was also known as a far-sighted and wise politician, who united the three hordes in Kazakhstan into a one country. With astute diplomacy, he kept Russia from colonising Kazakhstan by having Chinese diplomats at his court.

After viewing the interior, we went outside and Aisulu explained how the other impressive Mausoleum in the complex was built for the daughter of Uligh Beg, ruler of Samarkand and probably the world’s best astronomer.

The last place to visit as the sun begin to dip in the dusty west, was to see the underground house that Khoja Ahmed Yasavi lived his final days. With such respect for the Prophet Mohammed, PBUH, Yasavi did not want to outlive the prophet. So he decided that the day before he reached the age of the Prophet’s death on earth, he would go underground and live in darkness, thereby not outliving him above ground in the sunshine. You can still see the original place he spent his last days.

We lingered by the rose garden in front of the Mausoleum as we watched a Kazakh gardener, lovingly plucking dead roses and leaves from the bushes. The symbolism hit me. From the first Mogul Emperor Babur, and throughout the Timurid and Mogul dynasties, rose gardens were an ascetic part of the landscape.

Finally, we had a sheep to give away. Erlan and Suin sought the poorest part of Turkestan city, and found a poor family. The head of the house accepted the sheep with dignity and in return gave us a large circular piece of nan.
Our final duty completed, we drove back to Shymkent nibbling on the home baked bread.

At night we dined in a replica of an ancient caravan serai, named Afriasiab, the ancient name for Samarkand, and were served by a Kazakh woman and an Uzbek man dressed in thousand year old dress. As we lay tired at the tapchan, we reflected on our journey thus far to Otrar and Turkestan. What would tomorrow bring ?

Once at Turkestan, I needed a good English speaker to tell me the story of Turkestan. Aisulu came to my rescue. See my next posting for the full story.

Erlan and Suin at Turkestan

Unfinished work in Central Asia

Unfinished work.

Nazira is a fascinating woman. She was born on the Silk Route at Shymkent, Kazakhstan, close to the Kazakh – Uzbek border. Shymkent is close to Turkestan and as a child and teenager, Naziri frequently visited the Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasavi and the tomb of Ablai Khan at Turkestan. It was at this holy site that a Mullah in the Mosque regocnised her gifts for healing and seeing the past and future.

So Naziri was born and lived her younger days on the route the Chinese pilgrims took on their way to India via Samarkand, via Termez and Balkh before visiting Bamiyan, Gandhara, Jalalabad and Taxilla. She is a strong featured and pretty women her late 40’s and once worked with Mother Teressa, in Calcutta and now runs an Ashram in Pupathi, Andhra Pradesh in India close to the guru Sai Baba. People from all over the world come to be healed by Naziri. She married Jagadesh, who was born in Agra, another great city on the Silk Route. Sai Baba arranged the marriage. Jagadesh was brought from Agra to Pupathi as a dead child by his Mother. It took her 48 hours travelling in a third class carriage on a train to reach Sai Baba, Although clinically proved dead two days earlier by doctors in Agra, Sai Baba bought Jagadesh back to life. The couple stayed in my house many times during the six years we lived in India. I modestly heard these and many stories as we chatted over Chai. These are just a few of the thousands of stories I have heard in my travels.

Nazira told me one night, “in your last life you were a Tibetan Holy Man and when I look into your past I see you in Chapan, wandering the mountainous regions of what looks like Tibet and Northern India.” She went on to tell me that I was completing unfinished work.

Do I believe this sage woman ? When you think of the millions of people who have travelled the Silk Route with storehouses of knowledge, wisdom and spiritual gifts, it is hard to disbelieve.

Off to Central Asia tonight

Finally I am off to Kazakhstan tonight, and then along the golden road to Samarkand.