Vast Chinese Walls Series: Silk Road

Dawn’s orb brightens layered tamarisk stacks

Built to protect traders on Silk Road tracks

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Buddhism flourished along the ancient Silk Roads. We visited two major Tangut sites of the Western Xia Dynasty (c. 1100 CE) in the desert south of Ejina in Western Inner Mongolia. These are starkly beautiful ruins. Now made up of expansive, hard scrabble gravely desert floor, undulating tamarisk mounds, and windswept piles of sand, this land was long ago critical for grazing, worship, and strategic border protection.

At our first stop, groupings of wind-eroded and collapsed Tangut stupas (one, two, five) and temples run in a rough line not far from the Black Water River heading southwest to the ruins of the Tangut fortress at Khara Khoto (our second stop). As the temperature rose, the wind picked up and the sun played peekaboo. We walked a mile across what felt like an ancient sea bed between the bleached remains of these Buddhist holy sites. We silently circumambulated several stupas.

The next morning we arrived at Khara Khoto (the K's are silent) for sunrise. The alien desertscape around this famed Tangut Empire stronghold (1035 CE until Genghis Khan evicted them in 1226 CE) was itself once a lush oasis on one of the several Silk Roads controlled variously by Tibetans, Uighurs, Tanguts, Mongols, and finally Chinese. Marco Polo passed through the area during his travels in the late 13th century.

The appearance of the fortress, the sky, and the sand dunes changed by the minute as the sun climbed higher and higher. Windblown sand has swept up and over the rampart walls in several places. Our boots filled deep as we repeatedly slipped down (and then hiked back up) soft hills of sand. Sherds of ancient porcelain litter the gravely desert floor where not buried by the shifting sands.

The site lies in ruins today, blasted by time’s and man’s ravages, erosion, and collapse. Many striking Buddhist statues, paintings, and manuscripts originally sealed within a stupa located just outside the fortress walls now reside in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg following a 1908 expedition by Petr Koslov.