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Shadows of Old Araby
The ports of Arabia once traded gold and frankincense. Now Pico Iyer finds Indians peddling makeup and wontons
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ANTHONY SUAU FOR TIME
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The people of Salalah hold a traditional wedding celebration
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The chopsticks restaurant in salalah, the capital of the Omani province of Dhofar, is no longer open, its "passable" food and "awful" service (as one unsympathetic guidebook had it) now just a sweet-and-sour memory. Yet only a few doors away, the splashiest new eatery in the forgotten, once glorious town is Chinese Cascade, which serves Mandarin prawn toast, cauliflower Manchurian and vegetable wontons. It's "The Authentic Chinese Restaurant," if you believe the sign, but when an unsuspecting visitor steps in, he finds that the waiters, the diners, the owners—everyone is Indian. "Here there are so many Pakistani restaurants," shrugs the amiable proprietor, laughing at the thought that there might be Chinese faces in a Chinese restaurant. "The locals go bonkers for that food. This is something different."
What was once the center of the world now seems to lie on the remotest margins. It's hard to believe that this torpid, sand-colored town, with its bored Indian shopkeepers sitting outside foodstuff-and-luxuries stalls and camels grazing outside the (largely empty) Hilton Hotel, was once the Dhofar that Zheng He's ships (though not, it seems, the admiral himself) sought out, in 1432 on their seventh voyage. The Salalah Holiday Inn slumbers near the spot where old Chinese coins were once discovered. The classified section of the Oman Daily Observer reports that someone named Zou Shichui has lost a Chinese passport—and one wonders which part of limbo the unfortunate now inhabits. To retrace the Chinese travels in Arabia is to see how the world is not always growing more connected, as we like to think, but often less so: the ports the Chinese visited in the 15th century are obscure today, unglamorous and almost impossible to get to for even the most enterprising traveler.
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MORE STORIES
Arabian Twilight
The cities that were once the center of the world now hover at its remotest margins—but a few traces of their glory days linger on
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"Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" was the message that a headless torso in the desert delivered to hopeful innocents in Shelley's poem Ozymandias, and a similarly humbling lesson faces down anyone who travels around the Middle East in search of the cities whose wealth and fame drew Chinese treasure ships 580 years ago. A Manhattanite looking at Dhofar might wonder whether his own city, a few centuries from now, will look like the film A.I.'s buried metropolis. Aden, the greatest port in the world outside of Manhattan half a century back, is now a scrappy wasteland. Jeddah, though thriving, welcomes few foreign visitors except those on pilgrimages to nearby Mecca. And Hormuz, the center of unparalleled wealth that drew the Chinese, is now an almost deserted island whose main trade apparently consists of smuggled American cigarettes from Oman.
Once upon a distant time, the southern stretches of the Arabian peninsula were known as Arabia Felix, or Happy Arabia, thanks to their strategic location overlooking the sea-lanes linking Asia to Europe; and thanks, too, to the frankincense trees nurtured by their summer rains. In those days it really might have seemed that money was growing on trees (or at least in them). Frankincense, coveted for religious ceremonies in Rome, Egypt and Jerusalem, was more valuable than gold. In the 1st century A.D., Pliny the Younger called the area the richest in the world; even in 1347, when the Muslim traveler Ibn Battuta visited, though finding Dhofar's markets "the dirtiest in the world," he was stunned by its "extremely fat sardines."
When the Chinese sailors arrived in what is now southern Oman, proud perhaps to have traversed the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean, they were greeted by master Arab navigators who had been traveling to Asia for centuries, and who monopolized the largest and most lucrative trade routes on the seas. Omani ships regularly made the trip to Guangzhou, with crews hundreds strong and cargoes of several hundred tons, completing the journey in 120 sailing days; the seven excursions of Admiral Zheng He would have seemed nothing next to the seven journeys of Sinbad the Sailor, whose heroics were inspired by real Middle Eastern captains.
By the middle of the 20th century, however, what Milton called "Araby the Blest" was regarded by such traveling memoirists as James Morris (later known as Jan) and Peter Fleming as remoter than Tibet. After Oman's last Sultan retreated into his huge palace by the sea in 1958, he forbade Dhofaris from buying bicycles, radios and even sunglasses. The result was the rise of the Dhofar Liberation Front, whose guerrillas were sent for revolutionary training to—of all places—Beijing. ("There is no Allah but Mao," as Sir Ranulph Fiennes, the British explorer who fought with the British against the rebels in Oman, dryly put it.) Trained in northern China, where the terrain was similar to their own, the fledgling revolutionaries were handed multiple copies of Mao's Little Red Book in Arabic, given tours of Ming palaces and tombs and told that Allah was the invention of British imperialists. Their uprising petered out a few years later.
Today, Dhofar has woken up a little to the world. After the current Sultan overthrew his father in 1970, he brought new facilities to a country that, 30 years earlier, had no secondary schools, one hospital and just 10 km of surfaced road. Nowadays, at night, the coastline is dominated by the lights of a huge new port, built to receive large container ships. And they come, the port's register says, from Colombo, Jeddah and Bombay, on their way to Zanzibar, Mombasa, Cochin.
Yet even as Muscat, the capital of Oman, glitters like a fairy-tale Las Vegas, new white buildings arising across the desert sands, the capital of Dhofar, Marco Polo's "great and noble and fine city," looks like a neglected suburb of Cochin or Calicut. By one local's account, 70% of Salalah's traders—the fruit juicers, coconut sellers, hairdressers and peddlers of ladies necessities—come from India. The title of the weekly show at the local cinema, starring Twinkle Khanna and Govinda, is scrawled on a wall in chalk, like graffiti. When James Morris was in Muscat, he was told that all foreigners had to carry lanterns after dark because "a Chinese seaman got himself into trouble one night." Today, if you look in the phone book that serves the entire country, you will find only three Chinese Lees (as opposed to, for example, 10 Iyers).
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China
Photographer Fritz Hoffmann finds a country on the move
Indonesia
John Stanmeyer explores the jostling peoples, religions and cultures that define the country
India
The grandeur of Cochin and Calicut has long disappeared
Middle East
The cities that were once the center of the world now hover at its remotest margins -- but a few traces of their glory days linger on
Africa
In the 15th century, Zheng He's fleet went to Africa seeking exotic treasures. The Chinese still do
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CHINA: In the Wake of the Admiral
SOUTHEAST ASIA: Disunited Nations
INDIA: Misplaced Majesty
THE MIDDLE EAST: Arabian Twilight
