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Wednesday 2005-09-28 - Xunhua, China
A bit of Central Asia
On our long trip to Ta’ersi we stop in Xunhua for lunch in a Muslim restaurant. The lunch is a wonderful meal, with Muslim tea, and many different dishes with mutton and chicken, vegetable dishes, and very nice local bread. Our host (we later find out his English name is Andy) also brings some apples, and tells us they’re from the family’s own apple tree, freshly harvested. Every family has one or more fruit trees in their yard, he explains.
Then he tells us about Xunhua: there are about 10,000 inhabitants here, most of them Muslims of a Turkic people who still speak their own language called Tala. Alas, the language is set to disappear: while older people speak it fluently and every day, younger people are already speaking a mix of Tala and some Chinese, in a much simpler form. At school they learn Chines, at the Koran school some Arabic, but there is no written form of Tala.
There is a famous legend about the origin of Xunhua and the people that live here.
During the great trek of Turkic peoples across Asia, this people were coming through here looking for a place to settle. Two men went looking for a good place, with a camel and a Koran, praying to God for guidance. One evening, the camel disappeared; the walked around looking for it until it was dark but still couldn’t find it so they went to sleep. The next morning they went looking again and found the camel — turned into stone, with the Koran sitting on its back — near a spring; this they took as a sign of God that this was a good place to settle.
Of course, the spring still exists, and our host Andy (who speaks excellent English and is also an official tour guide) offers to take us to the Camel Spring. We have time enough,m so we take him up on his offer. The spring water, coming from the mouth of a stone camel head, is somewhat salty and supposed to have healing properties; behind that there’s an enclosure (Andy’s father comes along to unlock the gate for us) with a nice pond and trees and flowers all around. One special type of plant grows here, and nowhere else, Andy tells us. The other flowers were planted by the Chinese who wanted to make a tourist attraction out of this spot — successfully resisted so far by the local Muslims. At the other end of the pond sits a stone camel (the stone camel) but it is much smaller than life-size. There’s another legend about that: each year the camel seems to shrink a little.
Next, Andy takes us to the Camel Spring Mosque, the 2nd largest mosque of the province, which can hold 1,500 people. We’re not allowed into the mosque proper but can have a look into the wash room, where the same camel spring water flows through. Two groups of Muslims use the mosque together: Shiites and Sunnites — the Imam is Shiite — each group prays on their own side of the mosque though. Women are not allowed in the Mosque here, they pray at home. Across the street they’re building a new much larger mosque which will hold 2,000 people.
Andy also tells us that most families here, traditionally very big, now have an average of four children — simply ignoring government regulations. Families used to be a lot larger than that: in his parents’ generation families had nine to twelve children.
