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The two girls were sitting in a train from Beidahe to Beijing. Having just grown out of childhood themselves, they disliked children and commented on the crying and shouting that was going on in the train in a language that sounded distinctively non-Chinese, more like Russian. When one small child put his hand on the leg of one of the girls, she brushed it off with repugnance. The Chinese friend I was traveling with said that they might be from Xinjiang, or from one of the former Soviet republics. I called them Mädchen aus den Westlanden (Girls from the Countries in the West), because this vagueness made me think of Yasushi Inoue’s Reise nach Samarkand [1], in which he tries to recollect the earliest Chinese literary sources about the legendary “Countries in the West”. While in the famous “Journey to the West” [2] the “Countries of the West” included India and Persia, the term was later mainly used for Turkistan, and would today include Xinjiang and Uighur on the Chinese side (formerly East Turkistan) and Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan (former West Turkistan) on the side of the former Soviet Union. The West has traditionally been a source of sorrow for the Chinese, and even today the Han Chinese feel they are quite different from the people from the predominantly Muslim western provinces. Xinjiang is the Chinese province with the most upheavals and unrests (“terrorist attacks”).
[1] Yasushi Inoue, Reise nach Samarkand, Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main, 1998; orig. Inoue Yasushi, Seiiki monogatari, Fumi Inoue, 1990 [2] The Journey to the West (Hsi
- yu Chi) is one of the classics of Chinese literature.
The fantastic tale recounts the sixteen - year pilgrimage of the
monk Hsüan-tsang
(596 –664), one of China's most illustrious religious heroes, who
journeyed to India with four animal disciples in quest of Buddhist
scriptures.
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