Shimiankuang is the saddest little bird in China. The entire world, maybe.
She’s not the saddest because of her location at the top of the windswept Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. The town lies at nearly ten-thousand feet of elevation, northeast of the twenty-thousand-plus foot Kunlun Mountains, east of the ferocious Taklamakan desert, and south of a gebi, a dry, pebble-and-scree filled expanse. A dusty wind regularly whips in from the west, leaving Shimiankuang chilly in summer and outright frigid in the winter. The surrounding landscape is a uniform brown, with no grass, no trees, no birds, no animals; desert dust regularly obscures the sun even at midday, casting an apoplectic pallor across the sky.
But many hamlets lay in such a desolate landscape.
She’s not the saddest because of her isolation. Only one road runs through town, west to east. To the east, it scrambles in serpentine arcs for a hundred kilometers to the mining town of Huatugou, new-yet-old concrete apartment buildings, trucker restaurants, hookers, then another day’s journey to Xining, the only town of size in western Qinghai, a region with twice the area of Texas. Xining has grown since the 1950s to become the de facto capital of an immense jail for political prisoners. Particularly from 1949 to the 1970s, and to some extent today, enormous numbers of political prisoners were deposited in the province to harvest minerals, to make deserts bloom, to break rocks.
Compared to the east, the road heading west is truly desolate. Unpaved, it forces hardy vehicles to bounce their way across wide canyons, dry except for the summer snowmelt, an empty landscape of boulders and broad vistas. A half day from Shimiankuang is the first village, on the border of Qinghai and Xinjiang, named Work Regiment 36. The few people scattered here are the descendants of prisoners sent half a century before, in an impossible effort to create farms in a land without water. There is one gas station, a few drips of petrol available, and a tiny general store, nothing more.
Two hours drive west of Work Regiment 36 is the town of Ruoqiang, pleasant enough, a sometimes-base for Xinjiang’s oil workers and government functionaries. The roads to Ruoqiang are now nearly all paved, but as recently as the late 1960s, reaching this site involved a thirty-day overland journey, camels and headdresses and Silk Road regalia; it has never been confused for accessible. For good reason, China’s main nuclear test site is located not far from Ruoqiang. The town’s one moment of fame came with the discovery of the Loulan Beauty, a fair-skinned, light-haired mummy from second millenium B.C. that is generally considered to represent the easternmost prehistoric settlement of Caucasians. The archaeologists wonder how she and her compatriots arrived in such an inhospitable environment, so far from the orchards of the Caucasus, leaving no trace of great cities.
But many towns are isolated.
Shimiankuang is not the saddest because her people, her town center, are the saddest, though these claims are true. The residential precinct consists of one hotel – no electricity, a mud-floored kitchen – a police station, and a series of dirt-walled, one-story buildings running down two streets. A basketball court, unpaved, with rims lying many degrees off the level plane, is at the north end. Litter peppers the open spaces. The grocery store is a dark, damp grouping of three shelves, covered at intervals with dusty packaged goods: no fruit, no chocolate, few colors.
And the people. There is a great Chinese character, tu, technically meaning “earth”, which has no precise translation in English when applied to a person. Uncultured or uncouth, perhaps, though tu specifically refers to peasants. Maybe the adjective “country” - as in, that boy right there is country! - but country might have a positive connotation - them country boys sure are polite – whereas tu is rarely positive. If someone asks you whether you were raised in a barn, then you’ve done something tu.
Everyone is Shimiankuang seems a bit tu.
Mopeds with the mufflers removed. Oversized army camo. Greasy mullets. An overreliance on honor, on this woman is mine, glaring eyes distrustful of strangers, ten-year-olds with cigarettes, unfiltered, brother, spewing black smoke like a steam engine with each puff, self-important police, bad music bumping from handhelds with the volume way up, thump, thump, oh yeah.
But many towns are too dusty, with people too dusty. Shimiankuang is not the saddest solely for these faults.
No, the real reason Shimiankuang is China’s saddest lies in its name. Shimian means asbestos. A kuang is an open-air mine. The town is actually named open-air asbestos mine, and it’s not some clever poetic allusion.
From a distance, the town looks to be backed by enormous, white, mountain peaks. These are not mountains of rock, but mountains of asbestos. Heading south from the residential district, the locals all with flimsy facemasks, the landscape, for miles on end, has the appearance of a snowglobe, roofs and power lines covered in early-winter white, missing only a few notes of Bing Crosby.
The roadside slowly shifts from houses to machines, great demonic machines, steampunk machines, fragments of Industrial Revolution dreams. These are gorgeous, giant machines, the type that give proof to human progress, the type that pronate through a series of gears with unnatural speed, that lift with superhuman strength, that look powerful even when they languor, a set of modern day dinosaurs. These machines, all likewise covered in their carcinogenic snow, are well scattered across white moguls, waiting patiently for the next shift. Machines wait for production, not for smiles, not for laughs; they are not romantics.
There can be no redemption for Open-Air Asbestos Mine. It is not the type of town that will slowly develop green parks and statues of founders, red-bricked schools and avant-garde authors and Rotary clubs. Its purpose will someday be complete, all its rocks removed and shipped off, and its population slowly moved away, its houses returned back to dirt, its machines rusted, relics of another age, to become Beauties for future archaeologists, its open mines covered again with sand and snow, its peaks a newer, purer white. For history remembers its great lions, not its saddest birds.
Just South of Shimiankuang