Shazi Lake

Shazi Lake

Shazi Lake

Shazi Lake — almost all of its stories are retold in Kazakh oral tradition, again and again, with the coming of spring and summer. Its extreme openness allows the vast grasslands of this grand flatland to reveal a kind of magnetism or tension. Cattle, sheep, and herders are drawn here, and so are desires. The poet of the Kerey tribe, Madaniyati, faced the lake and described, in my barely comprehensible Chinese, a repeatedly won — or perhaps lost — battle filled with “annotations,” broadly an ancient struggle (though he was quite certain about the period and the specific people involved), akin to how the Central Plains once waged wars to conquer cities and territories. The Shazi Grassland has always been a rich summer pasture, and Shazi Lake is the moon-like mirror within this grassy haven. In any dynasty, whoever occupied the Shazi Grassland gained access to land abundant enough to graze countless livestock. Its remote geography and obscure paths have kept it away from written records, preventing it from gaining the so-called fame it might otherwise have had. Precisely because it has been seldom documented, Shazi Lake has preserved its virginal beauty intact, becoming a myth under the starlit and moonlit skies of the steppe — fresh, fragrant, and mouthwateringly vivid.

Describing Shazi Lake in words is different from portraying it in paintings. Structure, color, and rendering can all intuitively present Shazi Lake to the reader. But when it comes to writing about Shazi Lake with a pen, I feel that anyone who comes here will face a kind of linguistic collapse. Its beauty encompasses a wealth of simple line sketches, quick drawings, and even more — the techniques of fu (rhapsody), bi (metaphor), and xing (evocation).

The summer scenery is brought to its most vivid expression by Shazi Lake. The Shazi Grassland, extending in all directions opened up by the vastness of Shazi Lake, stirs all kinds of startling lakeside wonders. If time would allow me to leap across eras, I would be the first to lift the earthen mounds at the lake’s edge, uncover the stories hidden beneath the grass, unfold some of their details, and let the gold buried for many years — or the many other long-faded tales —, intoxicated under the wondrously subtle haze of Shazi Lake, melt into today’s sunlight. These mounds, built thickly back in the pre-Qin period, have been labeled as Wusun burial sites by archaeologists, and are still accompanied today by the soaring notes of the dombra.