The Economist October 30th 2021 Books & arts 93ans. But the snippets about Chen Quanguo,
an architect of Uyghur misery today, are
much richer for being considered along
side the region’s precommunist rulers.
Unfortunately Mr Millward has not re
vised his entire book. This grates, particu
larly when outdated projections or exam
ples remain. (The predictions for the “dry
port” of Khorgos, for example, are jarring
to read almost two decades later, now that
the transport hub is an established stop on
the “New Silk Road”.) But it is useful to see
how the author has changed his tone.
In the first edition of “Eurasian Cross
roads”, Mr Millward dispassionately sur
veyed the chauvinistic debates which dog
scholars in his field, particularly in China:
the possible IndoEuropean origins of the
Xinjiang Stone Age; the contested begin
nings of a Uyghur nation. The goal is not to
be political, he says in his original preface,
but to offer an overview of history. He has
both Han Chinese and Uyghur friends, he
tells the reader. Profiles of thosewhoat
tempt to balance their Uyghur andChinese
identities close out the book.
In the intervening years MrMillward
has been dragged into the politics he
sought to avoid. In 2011 he and 12otheraca
demics said they were denied Chinese
visas after publishing a fairly innocuous
book about this “Muslim borderland”.The
balancing act proved to be an illusion.Chi
na has “lost its balance” too, MrMillward
asserts, by forgetting the lessonsofhistory.
The Qing and the Kuomintang wereableto
implement policies effectively whenthey
accepted that Xinjiang was differentand
governed accordingly. Today thepartyex
erts total control over the regionprecisely
because it fears this diversity.
Like the fallout from the CulturalRevo
lution, which also convulsed Xinjiang,the
consequences of this policy aredevastat
ing. Qeyser, a young Uyghur whomMrByl
er later helped to escape, never saw a
phone until he was 15. When officialsan
nounced that they would be searchingall
students’ smartphones, he wasterrified
that they would find an articlebyIlham
Tohti, the Uyghur intellectual towhomMr
Millward’s book is dedicated, andwhowas
sentenced to life in prison in 2014for“sep
aratism”. Mr Tohti’s crime was toarguethat
the country’s development hadnotsuffi
ciently benefited Uyghurs.
Xinjiang today is a different kindof
crossroads from the one Mr Millwardfirst
described 15 years ago. China’s visionofa
homogenous nation is more inkeeping
with the European empires of the19thcen
tury, but in Xinjiang, these ideasfromthe
past merge with the technologyofthefu
ture. Americans may write the firstmain
stream accounts, but trapped in themiddle
are the Uyghurs. China is tryingtoerase
Uyghur culture, discourage birthsandcow
the entire people into submission.n
“ThePotatoEaters”Earthy delights
E
veryone thinks they know Vincent
van Gogh until they see “The Potato Eat
ers” (pictured). Painted in the Netherlands
in 1885, it is as far in tone as could be imag
ined from the blazing sunflowers of his lat
er work in the south of France. Five mem
bers of a farming household huddle round
the table, sharing a meal of potatoes and
coffee. The mood is cramped, the colours
mostly muted greens and browns. Outside
the circle of lamplight the dark presses in.
It was one of the few group scenes he paint
ed, and nearly everyone who saw it in his
lifetime hated it. Van Gogh told his sister
that it was the best thing he’d ever done.
This autumn the Van Gogh Museum in
Amsterdam has made it the focus of an ex
hibition, under the rubric “Mistake or Mas
terpiece?” The title is a bit of a tease, but
Bregje Gerritse, who curated the show, says
viewers should take the question seriously.
The painting is marred by errors: funny
torsos, gazes that fail to meet. Some may be
intentional, but Van Gogh acknowledged
others were bloopers. Still, he thought his
critics missed the point. With “The Potato
Eaters” he was reaching for a new authen
ticity, an appreciation of misshapen beau
ty that refused to romanticise its subjects.
It started with a deadline. Van Gogh’s
brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris, wrote
in February 1885 to ask whether he had any
thing for that year’s salon. Vincent was living in Brabant, in the southern Nether
lands, drawing the local farmers. He had
nothing suitable, but threw himself into
the project. Van Gogh greatly admired
JeanFrançois Millet’s depictions of rural
life and was influenced by Jozef Israels, a
Dutch painter of workingclass scenes. He
was also studying colour theory and phy
siognomy, the pseudoscience of reading
character from facial structure. But most of
all he was obsessed with the farmers. He
wanted to capture their rough bodies and
their honest relationship to the earth.
His drawings from the period, the jag
ged lines already recognisably his own, are
full of hunched shoulders and angular tree
limbs. He sought out “raw, flat faces with
low foreheads and thick lips”. He seems
transfixed by one model’s protruding jaw.
When the flesh tones in his first go at “The
Potato Eaters” came out too light he shifted
to “soapy” hues, “about the colour of a good
dusty potato, unpeeled of course”.
The Dutch have a genius for this sort of
thing: celebrating the ordinary, often with
a nosethumbing defiance. You can look
back from Van Gogh to the Old Masters,
with their minute attention to cheese, pets
and drinking games at the expense of gods
and saints. This is what Pieter Bruegel dis
plays in his “Landscape with the Fall of Ica
rus”: the farmer going about his plough
ing, unperturbed by the tragedy. You canA MSTERDAM
The Van Gogh Museum showcases a rejected early masterpiece