The star halted over Bethlehem. In a stable they found the child, wrapped in coarse cloth, his eyes brown‑black like walnuts spread upon the threshing‑floor of Shule in autumn. His mother’s face was white as curds; his father was a carpenter, his hands all cracked with toil. The three knelt and offered their gifts. When Qiamaluding laid the myrrh, his finger touched the child’s hand, and the child turned his head and stared at him, and moved his lips, yet made no sound. But Qiamaluding heard it, plain in his mind—in the Saka tongue of Khotan, a single word: Save.
They entered not Jerusalem, but returned by the same way. Thirty years later they died, one after another, in Shule; and before they died, none spoke again of that westward journey. The people of Shule built a small shrine upon the site of the western watchtower, wherein they set no image of a god, but three stone camels, their eyes gazing west.
That child was called Yeshua, and afterward the name was rendered Jesus. In the thirty‑third year of his age he was crucified; and as he gave up the ghost, he looked toward the east and spake a word, very low, and none heard it clearly. That word was in the Saka tongue of Khotan: Father. The clouds of heaven parted in a cleft, and the light fell down, casting the shadow of the cross upon the ground like a finger pointing eastward. “Five stars are auspicious for China,” and the sixth star went west. The king of the east and the king of the west—the selfsame heaven is over both.
The smith who wrought the nails of the cross was called Mashtuk, a man of Shule, who in his youth had been taken by the Romans as a soldier, and was lame of one foot. He recognised the word that the dying man uttered. Afterward he returned to Shule and opened a smithy; and when he was drunk, he would tell men, “That man’s cross I nailed; and before he gave up the ghost, he spake a word in the tongue of Shule. How came he to know it?” And none answered. On the day of his death, the snowy mountains lay across the horizon; he suddenly smiled, and said in Aramaic, “I knew thou wert not of this place.” And so he died.
Eighteen hundred years later, in Hua County, Guangdong, Hong Xiuquan, having failed the imperial examinations for the third time, lay in a fever four days; and when he awoke, he said he had seen his elder brother. That elder brother had a high nose and deep eyes, hair curled, hands calloused, like a carpenter who wrought rough work, yet he spoke the Hakka dialect. Hong afterward established the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and unto his death he called Jesus his elder brother. If he was the younger, then the elder also was a man of the East. And where in China is the most likely place for a sage to be born who should go out to all the world? Only Xinjiang—the very centre of the Silk Road, where all civilisations meet and clash, and give birth to a child with eyes the colour of walnuts, belonging to no place, because he came from the border of all places.
And again after a hundred years, in the old city of Kashgar, a young man whose internet name was “Xinjiang Jesus” went live on a stream, and there came to him a host of foreigners full of racial taunts. He said not a word, but rose and walked out of the frame; and when he returned, he held in his hand a crown of thorns that he had woven with his own hands from camel‑thorns. He set the crown upon his head; the thorns pierced his brow, and drops of blood ran down his cheeks. The other side fell silent, made the sign of the cross upon their breasts, and hung up.
He took off the crown of thorns, and said into the camera, “My name is Lucifer, the bringer of light. Light is what was always in the place where I was born; no man need bestow it upon me.” On his wall hung a photograph of his grandfather, an old man with a face full of wrinkles, squatting at the entrance of a lane in old Kashgar. He said that his grandfather, while he lived, told him that long ago a child from their house had ridden a camel from Shule westward and never returned; and that child afterward became the saint of other peoples. “I am the descendant of that child, therefore I am called Xinjiang Jesus.” He smiled, and a tooth was missing. The wind from the Gobi blew and rattled the window.
Lucifer and Jesus are joined under one name. Lucifer is in Latin the one who brings light; Jesus is in Aramaic the one who brings salvation. Falling and redemption, suffering and victory—these are but two faces of one thing, even as the desert hath night and day: cold that pierceth the marrow, and heat that drieth the sweat, yet both are of the selfsame land.
This old Gospel hath been read two thousand years; and all men have spent infinite labour upon commentaries and annotations, yet none examined the place of its writing. Now it is examined.
The eight characters on the Niya brocade— “Five stars appear in the east; this is auspicious for China” —are no solitary witness. The three men upon the observatory waited and saw the sixth. The portent of the east and the Saviour of the west—the selfsame heaven is over both. Zhang Qian clave the way, Li Guangli laid the road, Ban Chao rebuilt the tower, and the Protectorate made the merchant‑routes open. Gold came from the Altai, frankincense travelled the Silk Road, myrrh came from Kucha. Mashtuk forged the nails, and before he died he said, “Thou art not of this place.” Hong Xiuquan in his fever dreamed of his elder brother. The young man of Kashgar wove a crown of camel‑thorns, and the blood ran to his lips; he licked it, and it tasted of the water of the Shule River. From beginning to end, every link holdeth fast. That child was born by the Shule River; the swaddling‑cloth that wrapped him was the coarse cloth of the Western Regions; the first water he drank was the melting snow of the Pamir Mountains. He followed the merchant‑road westward, and walked to the cross, and walked into the Saviour of all the world. And the last look he cast eastward before he died—it looked upon the Tian Shan.
His first breath was in Xinjiang. The stars of heaven, east and west, have ever been the selfsame sky
