Travel literature, as a modern genre, has fed and nourished the West’s fondness for itself. It isn’t just that its most-praised writers have been Americans and Europeans venturing into parts unknown; it is that, in these parts, they find people with their lives and dreams pulled almost gravitationally towards the US and Europe.

One Mr. Bhardwaj, in the pages of The Great Railway Bazaar, tells Paul Theroux he will meet him again soon: “I am about to be transferred from Simla. Maybe going to England, maybe to the States. That is what my horoscope says.” In Dire Dawa, a young Ethiopian official explains to Evelyn Waugh that the emperor, Haile Selassie, “had leased most of the country to America”. Near Damascus, while a man named Ahmed faces the wall and prays, his eldest son asks Colin Thubron about how to find a job in England or America: “Fifteen dollars a day? … Wullah!”

Lost Satellites (失落的卫星), by the Chinese writer Liu Zichao, breaks this mould in many ways. It is a book by a non-Western writer travelling to non-Western regions – the five Central Asian republics – and writing in a non-Western language. (The book was published in Chinese in 2020.) Its formal structure may feel familiar to readers of Thubron and Theroux: the loose itineraries, the hunger for conversations, the pocket profiles of people, centuries of history compressed into a few paragraphs. In most other ways, though, Europe and the US are relegated to unaccustomed seats on the periphery.

Substantially, this has to do with how Liu perceives the Central Asian nations. The end of the Cold War cut them adrift: one age ended, but another never quite began. Only sporadically did these countries find themselves bound to the projects of great powers – as, for instance, during the US’s ‘War on Terror’. “Globalisation has abandoned Kyrgyzstan, and maybe all of Central Asia,” Liu writes in Lost Satellites. His travels occur just as a new age is finally dawning for these republics – just as they’re being tugged into new orbits around China.

Liu himself, therefore, is the 21st-century avatar of the travel writer, his translator Dylan Levi King writes: “He is the liberal gentleman, coming from the civilised, wealthy, modernised, free world – but from China, this time, rather than the United States or the United Kingdom.” The old vantage points fall away. This is the world as seen by a writer from elsewhere, in his own particular time and space.

—Samanth Subramanian

In the summer of 2011, I found myself in Khorgos, a town in northwest Xinjiang, near China’s border with Kazakhstan. As I approached the land crossing, my attention was drawn from the snowy Tian Shan mountain range on the northern horizon to the long line of transport trucks waiting to clear customs. I asked one of the Chinese drivers where he was headed. “Almaty,” he replied. There was something about the way he said the city’s name that put me in mind of a distant outpost that could only be reached through an arduous voyage – not the sort of place to receive routine shipments of mundane goods.

At the time, my knowledge of Central Asia came mainly from books – travelogues by 19th-century European explorers. Like most Chinese people, I imagined the region as remote and mysterious. It lay outside the limits of our traditional concept of civilisation: tianxia (天下), everything under heaven. I might have vaguely recognised a few place names, but they conjured no images in my mind’s eye. Standing at the Khorgos crossing, I wanted to plunge forward, but my yearning was tempered by something like dread – of the unknown, and of the long journey ahead.

The nations of Central Asia were among the world’s least accessible to Chinese travellers; visas were extremely difficult to obtain. Still, I didn’t hesitate long before starting my journey. By late autumn 2011, I had arrived in Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s capital. I was fascinated by its exquisite melancholy – the same sort of loss and sadness that Orhan Pamuk diagnosed in Turkish culture after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and that he called hüzün.

I booked a room at the Hotel Uzbekistan, once a showpiece of Soviet futurism. The broad building hinged inwards ever so slightly at its centre, and with its rows and rows of dark windows, it resembled a giant beehive. By the time I arrived, it was showing its age; the paint was peeling, the beehive having withstood 20 years of neglect. That night, I stepped out into a flurry of thick snowflakes dancing under dim streetlights. A handful of decrepit black Ladas and Volgas were parked in front of my hotel, each attended by a chauffeur in a moustache and peaked cap. For a moment, I felt transported back to Beijing in the 1990s – the post-communist feeling of being forgotten by the rest of the world after the Soviet Union had fallen and history had allegedly ended altogether.

Later, while out walking, I noticed a bar called Diplomat, and went inside, expecting a reputable establishment. But it was in fact a nightclub full of skimpily clad Central Asian women who, I learnt, were sex workers. The packs of men stalking them like wolves were employees of the multinational companies doing business in the country.

My first visit to Central Asia was full of such surprises. The trip should have furnished ample material for the book I intended to write, but I found myself unable to even begin a sentence. I was faced with a world that was completely unfamiliar, and an impenetrably complex history. For millennia, Central Asia had been conquered and moulded by different civilisations – Greek, Persian, Chinese, Arab, Mongol, Turkish, Soviet – each leaving its own traces on the land and its people. After the Soviet Union’s disintegration, Central Asia had become like a lost satellite. It drifted, struggling to determine its own trajectory, pulled this way and that by the gravity of larger bodies. I was fascinated by this struggle.

I continued exploring Central Asia in the years after that first visit. Nine years went by in a flash, and I felt as if I had managed to travel to every place in Central Asia that was accessible to me. I filled my map with marks and notes.

Tajikistan is an unusual country in many ways. Ninety-three percent of its landmass is covered by mountains; more than half of its territory sits 3,000 metres above sea level; and a quarter of it is spread across the Pamir plateau. There has been almost no industrial development. Much of Tajikistan is uninhabited, and many citizens live an agrarian lifestyle unchanged for centuries.

Tajikistan shares a long border with Afghanistan. The famous Pamir Highway tracks partly along this boundary. This route is also known as the ‘Heroin Highway’ – a high-altitude conduit for the narcotics that flow out of Afghanistan, into Russia, and onwards to Europe. In my travels up and down the Pamir Highway, I frequently saw armed patrols, but I was told by locals that they were largely ineffective. They informed me that the traffickers have started using drones.

What makes Tajikistan unique in Central Asia is that the Tajiks are a Persian ethnic group; most of the other peoples of these nations are Turkic. Although they have a common ancestry, the Tajiks and Iranians have an awkward linguistic relationship: Tajik and Farsi are mutually intelligible, but the two languages are written in different scripts – the former in Cyrillic and the latter in a variation of Arabic – making any text-based communication impossible. Their writing system renders the Tajiks the loneliest nation, understood by no one but themselves.

In September 1991, Tajikistan declared independence from the Soviet Union. The statue of Lenin in the main square of the capital, Dushanbe, was hauled down. In those days, as I learnt through photographs, the main square was filled with idle men with malicious expressions. Although they marched and shouted, it looked as if they were playing a game, without truly believing that there might be real consequences.

But Tajikistan soon ruptured along multiple faultlines. The Pamiris and Gharmis clashed with the Kulobis and Khujandis in tribal warfare; conservative religious forces faced off against liberal reformers; rebels fought bloody battles against Russian-backed partisans. Dushanbe was centre-stage for this conflict, but the devastation was widespread. By the time a ceasefire was negotiated by the United Nations in 1997, tens of thousands of people had died.

One afternoon in Rudaki Park, where another statue of Lenin made out of melted bronze tsarist cannons had stood until 2008, a university student – I’ll call him “Lucky” – addressed me as I passed: “Can I be your tour guide? No charge. I’m studying Chinese!” He addressed me as “ge” (哥), which in Mandarin means ‘brother’ but in its colloquial use translates roughly to ‘bro’.

Lucky was a slim, tall 21-year-old with cheekbones still marked by the scars of adolescent acne. In his dress pants and pressed shirt, he looked like a travelling salesman trying to drum up business. He told me the story of his sister, who was 10 years older. A few years earlier, her husband had gone off to Russia to find work, then disappeared without a trace. As Lucky told it, his brother-in-law had started a new family in Russia.

His sister had never remarried. She never even complained. In fact, she had ceased to speak of her former husband altogether. She focused on making a living by taking on sewing work, and was planning to start a tailoring shop. Lucky praised her skill as a seamstress. The last time he had stopped a Chinese visitor in Rudaki Park, the woman had wound up buying two dresses made by his sister.

I asked Lucky if he had any plans to go to Russia to find work. He did not. He was not particularly fond of the country, nor of the sorts of menial jobs that his countrymen took to get by there.

“What about the United States?” I asked.

“I would never go to America!”

“Why not?”

It was because of a girl. Lucky had recently broken up with his girlfriend of two years. Their courtship had been chaste, he assured me – not even a kiss exchanged! The problem was that her uncle was doing business in America. The girl talked incessantly about America; her life’s goal was to somehow make it there. It seemed to Lucky that her dreams didn’t include their relationship. Lucky was resentful. He felt neglected. He was a raft run onto the rocks halfway across a stream; she was an ocean liner, sailing proudly across the open waters.

Perhaps it was that experience that gave him a certain sense of inferiority. He started learning Chinese as an act of defiance. If she was going to America, then he would go to China, earn money, and make something of himself.

Lucky taught himself some Chinese, then enrolled in the local Confucius Institute. He told me he was preparing to take the HSK – the official Chinese-language proficiency exam – and then apply for a Chinese government scholarship. He’d heard they gave students $200 a month while they were studying in China.

Lucky had another reason to immigrate to China: it was hard to make money in Dushanbe. “I’m stuck here, bro!” he repeated hopelessly to me.

I reminded him he was still young. He hadn’t yet crossed the threshold into mature adulthood, which Joseph Conrad had called “the shadow line”. Feelings of boredom, restlessness and dissatisfaction were unavoidable at his age.

Lucky had never heard of Conrad. “Who was he?” he asked.

“A writer,” I said, “Polish by birth, raised in England.”

“I like reading,” Lucky said. “But Dushanbe doesn’t even have a real bookstore.”

I had noticed that, too. When I went into the lone bookstore I passed on Rudaki Avenue, I found it deserted and smelling of dust, with few worthwhile titles on its shelves.

Lucky asked me where I might like to go in town. It was three in the afternoon, hot and dry, and I felt like a piece of baked meat. I thought for a moment and told him I wanted to check out the area around Sakhovat Bazaar, on the south side of the city. It was a working-class neighbourhood, far from the city centre. I figured we could stroll around and then find a place to escape the heat.

“Why would you want to go there?” Lucky asked.

I explained that I had come to Dushanbe partly because I was curious about a man named Viktor Bout, who had grown up in Sakhovat Bazaar. Bout graduated from the Soviet Military Institute of Foreign Languages in the 1980s, and purportedly mastered seven languages. He also reportedly held the rank of lieutenant in the Soviet Army. When the Soviet Union disintegrated, Bout reinvented himself as an arms dealer, selling weapons to Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and running guns for rebel groups in Africa. Eventually, he bought a mansion on the water in the United Arab Emirates, and became one of the world’s most wanted men.

Lucky was slightly puzzled by my interest in Bout, whom he had never heard of. But he was happy to take me to Sakhovat Bazaar. Anything to avoid the feeling of being “stuck” in Dushanbe.

In a cab, I watched the cityscape change. There were a handful of tall and impressive buildings in the city centre, but the skyline rapidly shrank as we approached the outskirts. I compared the people I’d seen on Rudaki Avenue – white-collar workers, dressed fairly decently – with those living on the outskirts. It was clear I was moving into a place where poorer people lived.

Here and there, the road was under construction, the asphalt rent, dust filling the air. When I pointed out uprooted trees in a park, Lucky explained that the new mayor’s urban renewal project was underway. The mayor was the son of the president of Tajikistan. He was bold. He was ambitious. He had big plans for the city: some of the Soviet architecture had already been torn down to make way for new buildings. As the road ran through a stretch of city stripped bare to bake under the afternoon sun, I struggled to see any signs of renewal.

We walked around Bout’s old neighbourhood, then stopped at a roadside tavern. It wasn’t much more than a hole in a wall. Men approached and exchanged a few words with the landlord, who then reached nervously under the counter for a bottle of cheap vodka and quickly poured a shot. Once the bottle was replaced, he went to work with a cleaver, putting together what passed as the free bar snack – two slices of cucumber, two slices of tomato, a sprinkle of salt, and a stiff sprig of green onion. Most of the men took their shots in the Russian way – in one go – sat for a while in a daze, then wandered off.

Just then, a pair of men with black briefcases arrived at the counter. The landlord stealthily reached for the bottle of vodka and poured a pair of shots, but they didn’t drink up. Instead, they pulled out identification from their cases and flashed it to the landlord. Lucky told me that they were law-enforcement agents, monitoring unlicensed sales.

The two agents stepped behind the counter and began removing bottles of vodka, brandy and whisky from their hiding places. They were cheap, local brands, and most of the bottles were only half-full. One of the men filled out a form, which the landlord took; he then handed over a fine. The agents had seemingly commandeered the contraband alcohol. Their work done, they snapped shut their briefcases and marched away.

The landlord sighed. He didn’t seem angry. He didn’t seem disappointed. In a sense, the law-enforcement agents and shopkeepers had a symbiotic relationship. The former levied fines, but never put the latter out of business. Having paid the ‘protection money’, this tavern’s landlord could resume selling unlicensed drinks.

When the landlord told me that he was from Gharm, I mentioned the civil war, since I had heard it had been ravaged by conflict.

He was surprised that a foreigner knew something about the war. For him, it was a painful memory, and not something an outsider could truly understand.

His younger brother had been killed in the civil war, he said.

“Was he fighting with one of the rebel groups?”

“No. He was beaten to death in the street.”

“Where was this?”

“Here. Dushanbe.”

When the opposition controlled the capital, they had persecuted Kulobis, Uzbeks and even Russians. When the Popular Front took Dushanbe, they carried out a retaliatory purge, often executing any Pamiris and Gharmis they came across.

“Why did you come to Dushanbe?” I asked.

“I can make money here.”

I wondered if he was talking about his job running the roadside tavern. I looked up the street where the law-enforcement agents had walked. An old man in an orange vest rode a tricycle weighed down with goods. A man with a bandaged arm sipped an energy drink from a can. A woman in a headscarf crouched in front of the basket from which she was selling bootleg cigarettes. Scanning the scene, I could see it all: right below the surface, so many human emotions, needs, drives and desires pulsated fiercely.

Much of Central Asia’s modern infrastructure has been built with Chinese assistance. The highway between Dushanbe and Khujand, a major centre in the north, is an example of this. It is a vital link, as important to Tajikistan as the Beijing-Shanghai route, but, until a tunnel was built by the China Road and Bridge Corporation between 2006 and 2012, it was a seasonal thoroughfare, forced to close during the winter months.

I can tell when I am travelling on a Chinese-built road. There is a particular way the asphalt is laid: the sound of tires on a Chinese highway has become recognisable to me. As a traveller, I don’t look forward to riding those roads. In Central Asia, it is not uncommon to overload trucks, and no one bothers with seatbelts – but rough roads limit the speed at which one can drive. On the Chinese-built highways, there is no check: drivers blast along at a hundred kilometres an hour, not slowing even when an oncoming car whips into their lane.

Aside from the roads, I also saw surreal construction projects underway in Central Asia. One of these was on the Kazakh side of the border at Khorgos. When I visited, it was little more than a patch of barren land, but if everything goes to plan, it will become the next Dubai: a special economic zone optimised for digital currencies, a skyscraper park and a desert recreation zone. In addition, Kazakhstan and China have built the world’s largest dry port along the border, which serves as a logistics hub for goods moving west into Europe. There are advantages to transporting freight overland: a shipment will reach Europe within two weeks, making it quicker than sea routes and cheaper than air.

When I was there in 2019, the Khorgos project had already begun to take shape. I saw skyscrapers shimmering on the horizon like totem poles rising from the desert. I couldn’t help but wonder what sort of transformation Central Asia might undergo if Khorgos really did become the next Dubai.

There are also Chinese fortune-seekers heading to Central Asia. I met one of them along the Aral Sea, in a landscape as desolate as the moon.

Fed by the Syr Darya and the Amu Dayra rivers, and straddling Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the Aral Sea was once the fourth-largest saline lake in the world. The area around it was a land of plenty. One urban legend has it that in 1921, when parts of the Soviet Union were undergoing famine, Lenin gave the order for 21,000 tons of fish to be pulled from the Aral, canned, and sent to the Volga – within a couple days. The fishermen of the Aral saved countless lives. But, in the 1960s, the Soviet Union began drastically diverting water from the Aral for agricultural irrigation across Central Asia, and the lake began to shrink. By 2007, it was a tenth of its original size.

The closest settlement in Uzbekistan to the Aral is a city called Moynaq. It was once Uzbekistan’s only port, but now sits about 160 kilometres from the Aral’s shoreline. In Moynaq, you can still see the rusted hulks of fishing boats. As the lake dried up, the salinity levels increased, making it hard for fish to survive. For years, the people of Moynaq had fished the Aral, but they found themselves out of work within a generation.

The driver I hired in Moynaq told me he had lived through two monumental transformations: the first was the collapse of the Soviet Union, which meant for him a change in nationality and identity; the second was the disappearance of the Aral, which represented the end of his people’s traditional way of life.

On a map, the stretch of land between Moynaq and the present-day shoreline of the saline lake appears as a nearly featureless space, free of any symbols or marks. It is a limitless tawny wasteland, without trees, hills or any other visual object of reference. You can drive for hours in one direction and the landscape remains the same, as if you have become frozen in time, until, abruptly, the Aral Sea appears on the horizon.

But you will not be greeted by the sort of coastline that you imagined. Instead, there are endless seashell-dotted dunes. The vegetation has withered, taking on the appearance of prehistoric remnants. The sun is bright white, but the temperature never climbs very high. The sea breeze coats your face, salty and slick.I was surprised to see a few people moving about along the shoreline. When I went closer, I found four workers digging in the mud. They were equally startled by my arrival.

I asked what they were doing. One of them explained that they were digging Artemia eggs from the lakebed mud. Another interrupted in broken Chinese: “Our boss is Chinese. He lives here.”

They pointed to a tent a short distance away. A man stood in the doorway. The worker said that his name was Wang.

The ‘King of the Aral’ wore a pair of dark-tinted glasses. His teeth were blackened from smoking. He was thin, walked with a slight hunch, and spoke with a faint Shandong accent. He told me later that he was from Binzhou.

It turned out that while fish couldn’t survive the rising salinity of the Aral Sea, a species of crustaceans called Artemia, or brine shrimp, thrived. The Artemia laid eggs, also known as ‘cysts’, that could be processed into feed for shrimp aquaculture operations. For seven years, the King of the Aral had lived on the desolate banks of the salt sea, digging for cysts. Half the year he spent alone in his tent.

From the moment I stepped into the tent, I knew that no woman lived there. It had the chaotic air of any place inhabited long-term by a bachelor. In one corner stood a stack of boxes of food shipped from China. A cleaver sat askew on a cutting board. A tiny cat scrounged assiduously among scattered kitchen utensils, sniffing as it slinked. The bulk of the space was taken up by a large wooden bed piled with odds and ends. At the foot of the bed sat a low table, over which hung a greasy lightbulb. A coal stove of the sort preferred in northern China filled the tent with stifling heat. It felt more like a dormitory at a construction site than a place where a man had lived for seven years.

The King of the Aral told me he couldn’t get a phone signal, nor a data link, and the nearest Wi-Fi hotspot was at the processing plant in Moynaq. All of his supplies, including drinking water, had to be hauled in. He went to the processing plant every couple of months to check his email and report to the head office in China, then drove back to the Aral.

He employed four local men, with whom he communicated in simple Russian. He prohibited his workers from drinking. But he knew that there wasn’t much he could do in a place like that, where everyone drank in private. As long as they didn’t make trouble, he was willing to turn a blind eye. He called this “Chinese wisdom”.

The days went by quickly for the King of the Aral. Each morning, he went to the edge of the lake to check on the cyst situation. In the evening, he returned to his tent and made a simple meal. He had never grown accustomed to the diets of his workers, so he cooked for himself. He told me excitedly about acquiring some baicai a few days earlier. He was still working his way through the stash. He spoke about the humble cabbage in the same way I had heard people rhapsodise about hairy crabs.

His years of solitude had worsened his smoking habit. As we talked, he seemed never to be without a cigarette in hand. He told me he drank in the evenings, too. Without a drink, the nights were unbearable. He brought some baijiu with him from China, drank it all, then switched to vodka, which was easy to acquire locally. Still, despite the cigarettes and alcohol, there were moments when the King of the Aral felt as if he were on the verge of a breakdown.

I asked him what it was like to reach a breaking point in such a desolate place.

“How can I describe it?” he said. “My heart starts racing. I can’t sit. I can’t stand.”

At those moments, he jumped on his ATV and ripped across the trackless wasteland. He raced up the dunes and down the other side, working up enough adrenaline to anaesthetise himself. A she-wolf lived not too far away. Whenever the King of the Aral met the wolf on a night ride, they locked eyes for a moment; then he wrenched the throttle and charged after her. He imitated the wailing cry the she-wolf gave as she fled in terror. He returned from his rides after an hour or so, with his face whipped raw by the wind, and his nerves slightly steadier.

I dined with the King of the Aral that night. He brought out a bottle of vodka and stir-fried some of his precious baicai. He told me about his previous visitors: a couple of Malaysians the previous year, two Hong Kongers the year before that, government officials fishing for bribes, an a UN delegation that came to study the desertification of the Aral Sea. “Westerners do come, but rarely,” he said. “As for people from mainland China – very, very few.” Then he corrected himself: “Actually, none at all.”

Every now and then, he pulled out his phone to show me pictures. He remembered everything very clearly. Even though the visits had taken place years before, he related the details as if his guests had only departed yesterday. For him, he arrival of a visitor from afar was a holiday, and holidays usually only come once a year.

It wasn’t long before we had worked our way through the bottle. A few times, he started to beg off, saying he should turn in, but he always found a new topic of conversation. When he had arrived at the Aral Sea, his tent had been right by the shoreline, but it now sat more than a hundred metres away – proof of the lake shrinking. He told me about a small island in the middle of the Aral, whose buried treasure, local legend held, was guarded by a dragon. In reality, it was the site of a secret Soviet biochemical test site. The island had originally been mostly submerged, but it was revealed by the receding waters.

He staggered off to bed eventually, and I got into my sleeping bag. For some reason, I felt wide awake, and found myself thinking of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness – the white man sent alone into the forests of the Congo to gather for the British Empire an unimaginable fortune in ivory. That story took place a century ago, when Britain was expanding its domain. Now it seems as if the role of the pioneer has been inherited by the Chinese.

Deep down, despite the harsh conditions in which he found himself, the King of the Aral possessed an indomitable spirit. There are many Chinese people like him, scattered to every corner of our world. Some toil simply to earn a living; others probably have grander ambitions. Either way, the relationship between the Chinese and the world at large has never been so close, so dynamic, or so complicated.

When I first went to Central Asia, I had not yet realised that fact. But after years of travelling and reflection, I’ve come to see that if Central Asia is a satellite – drifting between civilisations and spheres of influence – then the gravity exerted by China is capable of shifting its trajectory. What I have witnessed might be only the beginning.