On The Silk Road: “Where Horses Fly Like The Wind” is a documentary about the descendants of the Mongols in Northwest China. It is very rural there and does not resemble the China that most Westerners envision. I knew that this part of China was different than Eastern China so I was surprised that it was very different. The landscape is very mountainous with beautiful lakes and rivers.
The people of Northwest China are nomads. They take part in agriculture involving domesticated animals. Horse meat and horse milk are staples of their diet. They also eat sheep and mine salt. The Silk Road led from this region of China all the way to Rome and enabled trade between East Asia and the West.
The people of Northwest China don’t look like the ethnic Chinese Han. They come from many minority groups. They are descendants of the ancient Mongol invaders of China. They look more like the people from places in Central Asia such as Uzbekistan who have a Mongol admixture than East Asians. Their faces are different than the ethnic Chinese and their eyes from a Western perspective look similar to East Asians but not exactly like East Asians. They may have some admixture of Eastern Europeans from the Barbarian invasion of places such as Hungary by the Huns. They share linguistic similarities since Hungarian and Finnish are Ural-Altaic languages not related to other European languages, most likely a result of the Hun invasions of Eastern Europe. This diversity of peoples has led to the political impact of Western China having many ethnic minority groups with their own heritage and culture.
The peoples of the Silk Road area seem to resemble Middle Eastern and Central Asian areas in their lifestyle. The way of life as nomads resembles the ancient nomads of the Middle East and the modern day Bedouins. Their style of music sounds Middle Eastern as well. Their houses resemble the tipis of the American Indians or the igloos of the Inuit. They also have an interesting courtship ceremony in which young men and women ride after each other on horseback. In their marriage, the groom and bride don’t come together. The bride is veiled as she is led to the marriage ceremony. Their main entertainment is horse riding. All in all, they are a fascinating people in a fascinating region of China.
Topic: I wrote this for Chinese Civilization class. (Read 4038 times)