The Year of Rice and Salt

Thus it was that the Indian states were often uneasily allied with China in hope of aid against their ancient foe Islam. So that when Islam and the Chinese finally fell into active war, first in central Asia, then all over the world, Travancore and the Indian League were pulled into it, and Muslim Hindu violence began yet another deadly round.

It began in the twenty first year of the Kuang Hsu Emperor, the last of the Qing dynasty, when south China's Muslim enclaves all revolted at once. The Manchu banners were sent south and the rebellion put down, more or less, over the course of the next several years. But the suppression may have worked too well, for the Muslims of west China had been chafing under Qing military rule for many generations, and with their fellow believers to the east being exterminated, it became a matter of jihad or death. So they revolted, out in the vast empty deserts and mountains of central Asia, and the brown towns in their green valleys quickly turned red.

The Qing government, corrupt but massively entrenched, massively wealthy, made its move against its Muslim rebellions by initiating another campaign of conquest, west across Asia. This succeeded for a time, because there was no strong state in the abandoned centre of the world to oppose them. But eventually it triggered a defensive jihad from the Muslims of west Asia, whom nothing would have united at that point except for the threat of Chinese conquest.

This unintended consolidation of Islam was quite an accomplishment. Wars between the remnants of the Safavid and Ottoman empires, between Shiite and Sunni, Sufi and Wahhabi, the Firanji states and the Maghrib, had been continuous throughout the period of consolidation of states and boundaries, and even with sovereign borders more or les fixed, except for ongoing struggles here and there, they were not initially in a position to respond as a civilization to the threat from China.

But when threatened by a Chinese expansion across all Asia, the fractured Islamic states pulled together, and began to fight back as a united force. A collision that had been building for centuries now came to a head: for both of the big old civilizations, global hegemony or complete annihilation were thinkable possibilities. The stakes could not be higher.

The Indian League tried at first to remain neutral, as did the Hodenosaunee. But the war drew them in too, when Islamic invaders crossed into north India, as they had so many times before, and conquered it south to the Deccan, across Bengal and down into Burma. Similarly, Muslim armies began to conquer Yingzhou east to west, attacking both the Hodenosaunee League and the Chinese in the west. All the world descended into this realm of conflict together.

And so the long war came.

'China is indestructible, there are too many of us. Fire, flood, famine, war – they're like pruning a tree. Branches cut to stimulate new life. The tree keeps growing.'

Major Kuo was feeling expansive. It was dawn, the Chinese hour. Early light illuminated the Muslim outposts and put the sun in their eyes, so that they were wary of snipers, and bad at it themselves. Sunset was their hour. Call to prayer, sniper fire, sometimes a rain of artillery shells. Best stay in the trenches at sunset, or in the caves below them.

But now they had the sun on their side. Sky frost blue, standing around rubbing gloved hands together, tea and cigarettes, the low whump of cannon to the north. Rumbling for two weeks now. Preparation for another big assault, possibly, perhaps even the breakout spoken of for so many years – so many that it had become a catchword for something that would never happen – 'when the breakout comes' as 'when pigs fly' or the like. So perhaps not.

Nothing they could see would tell them one way or another. Out in the middle of the Gansu Corridor, the vast mountains to the south and the endless deserts to the north were not visible. It looked like the steppes, or it had, before the war. Now the whole width of the corridor, from mountains to desert, and the whole length, from Ningxia to jiayuguan, was torn to mud. The trenches had moved back and forth, li by li, for over sixty years. In that time every blade of grass and clod of dirt had been blasted into the sky more than once. What remained was a kind of disordered black ocean, ringed and ridged and cratered. As if someone had tried to replicate in mud the surface of the moon. Every spring weeds made brave efforts to return, and failed. The town of Ganzhou had once been near this very spot, paralleling the jo River; now there was no sign of either. Land pulverized to bedrock. Ganzhou had been home to a thriving Sino-Muslim culture, so this wasteland they observed, stark in dawn light, was a perfect ideograph of the long war.