Kucha Sigil

Before my grandfather died, he left me a broken Pajero and a locked suitcase. Inside the box were eleven Song Dynasty copper coins engraved with symbols, three half-written notebooks, and an old photo from 1950. In the photo, the young grandfather stood at the mouth of a ravine called Yushugou in the north mountain of Baicheng, with his back to the camera, preparing to walk into a cave that should not exist. I am twenty-two years old, a fighting coach in Urumqi, with a monthly salary of 4,000, and life is tight. I originally just wanted to find out what my grandfather was looking for all his life. As a result, I followed the copper coins and notes all the way, from Baicheng to Kuqa, from Duku Highway to Shaya, from the Populus euphratica forest by the Tarim River to the Death Valley deep in the Kunlun Mountains - I traced out an underground channel buried underground for two thousand years, a meteorite body that can make people "immortal" but at the cost of turning into a lump of living flesh, a descendant of the Kucha royal family in the guise of an archaeologist, and a sand dune that moves along the Tarim River and advances forty meters to the southeast every hundred years. Grandpa wrote in his notes: "That thing down there is counting people. Copper coins are its tool for counting people. If you take the copper coins away, it won't know you've been here." I'm looking for the remaining copper coin. Someone is looking for me. ——Driving a Pajero, carrying eleven copper coins and half-cut stubble, chasing him all the way along the southern foot of Tianshan Mountain. I don't know what I'm chasing, but I know if I stop, there will never be an answer. Purpose: What is buried under the land of Xinjiang is never just sand. The Tarim River changed its course, oases disappeared, and the desert advanced—people thought it was climate, natural disaster, or fate. But beneath the surface, something ancient and forgotten is at work. It has been maintained by generations of people for two thousand years. The people who built the canal left themselves in the culvert, and the tombkeepers passed down the secret to six generations. The last person cut off an extra-long finger and buried it under the elm tree. After he died, he did not even want the grave, and asked his descendants to scatter his ashes in the ravine. This book is about the relay of three generations on the land of southern Xinjiang. My grandfather's generation is a surveyor and historian who walks with his feet and writes with a pen; his father's generation is a cadre stationed in the village, guarding the fate of this land on the front line of poverty alleviation; Shen Du's generation is a person who has returned to the mountains with old maps and copper coins. Every era has its own way of "seeing" this land. Every generation answers the same question: What's underneath this place? The answer lies in the sound of the Tarim River, in the moonlight of the Kunlun Mountains, and under the roots of the elm tree that has been dead for a hundred years.