'If we speak out, they

shoot us. If we are

silent, they swamp us'

Geoffrey Boulton

Off to China again. Amongst other things, to complete this geologist's collection of its outer provinces. After Tibet and Xinjiang, this year it's
Inner Mongolia.

Day 1
Failure. The artist friends who were to have taken me have been ordered to a centre 200 miles from Beijing to 'sing red songs'. They were probably slack in responding to the party’s injunction for artists 'to raise a fever of singing red songs'. It started with Bo Xilai, the ambitious party boss of Chongqing, ordering local television to drop popular soap operas and sitcoms (with the consequent drop in ratings and advertising revenue) in favour of 'Love of the Red Flag' and 'Good Men Should Become Soldiers', ordering students to work in the countryside and having party cadres don army uniforms 'to deepen their experience of hardship'. The theatre that is China, whether, according to your sympathies, it is heroic drama, tragedy or farce, requires an extraordinary suspension of disbelief. Let's hope this scene isn't entitled 'Cultural Revolution mark 2'.

Day 2
Success. Inner Mongolia has become Xinjiang. Uighur friends have arranged a visit to China's most north-western province, to do some glaciology in its high mountains and geology in its torrid deserts.

Day 4
Goodbye to Beijing and its extraordinary cluster of weird sky-scrapers wreathed in the city's perennial, polluted summer mist and the streptococcus that thrives in it. Fortunately, my throat survives. It's a four-hour flight to Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital, which lies between the Tien Shan mountains to the south and the Gurbantünggüt Desert to the north. We fly in past the towering north face of Bogda Feng, an 18,000-ft mountain unclimbed till 1981. Normally we would have flown through three time zones, but the 'one-China' policy requires Urumqi to have the same time as Beijing, so the day closes early.

Day 5
Urumqi is central Asia, closer to Samarkand, Bokhara and Ulan Bator than Beijing, both in geography and atmosphere. Away from the Han district with its bright new buildings, the run-down indigenous Uighur districts have their mosques, men with long beards and skull-caps and women wearing the hejab and occasional niqab. The weddings that sashay down the streets are wild, musically noisy and inclusive. The city government has added to the fun by installing, since the 2009 riots, ubiquitous CCTV cameras that wink merrily and incessantly.

Day 6
Now the serious bit, and a drive of true terror. Into the Tien Shan, along a narrow, twisting mountain road cut into the side of a precipitous gorge, with a drop of 300m to the violent, cascading, snow-fed river below. The corpses of fallen trucks in the river below add to the drama. The real terror lies in our erratic driver, and his habit of turning to talk to us as he free-wheels round blind hair-pins.
     Beyond the gorge the flat, narrow valley bottoms also have their corpses: those of old aluminium factories and the squalid abandoned barracks for their workers. The pollution was appalling and life expectancies short. Things have improved, but the mineral wealth of Xinjiang, and its importance to the Chinese economy ensure a continuing ravaging of its environment.

Days 7-11
Arrived at headache-land, our working base at 12,500 feet. Home is to be a yurt, a wood-framed, felt-covered tent, with lodging readily arranged with several Kazakh families. The nomadic Kazakhs of these mountains pitch at high altitude in summer for the rich grazing pastures for their cattle and sheep, descending to lower altitudes during the fierce winters. I am lodged with Gulzhan (soul flow), my landlady, and Tlegen (desired) her husband, who greet me with a graceful 'Salaam Aleikum'. We communicate through smiles, grins and gestures, and indirectly through Kazakh when our Uighur friends decide that all have laughed enough at my ineffectual antics.
     We sleep and recline on a richly carpeted platform that takes up half the tent, with the earth-floored other half being for the iron stove, pots, pans and the gun that Tlegen used last week to shoot a wolf, whose pelt is now part of my pillow. One of the good things about being a geologist is that the best rocks are rarely found on the high street, so that we experience things far from the tourist route.
     To the romantic city-dweller, all this has the air of Arcadia. High mountains, green pastures for contented cows and sheep, and the simple life, easily ignoring its hardship. I ask my hosts whether they wouldn't prefer the easier life of the city. They smile pityingly, take me to the tent-flap and just gesture to the mountain peaks around us. And, says Tlegen, we pay no taxes. 'Sustainable economic growth' seems a long way away.
     I am to work on the glacier at about 14,500 ft. Setting off is hard, slow and breathless, but the young Kazakh lads have it cracked. Roaring up on their motor-bikes, they offer to take us on their pillions. Keeping face demands that we accept. So off we career, helmet-less, tense and terrified, skidding and lurching up steep bouldery hill-slopes. I can see why kismet, not health and safety, is a useful concept. If your time hasn’t yet come, you survive. So why worry?
     In the quiet times, Uighur friends take me behind the scenes of the Chinese theatre. They speak bitterly about education, which must be in Chinese, so that Uighur children, particularly those from country areas with little Chinese, hardly benefit from further or higher education. If students are found praying, they are expelled. Religion of course is incompatible with science or scientific socialism. 'If we speak out, they shoot us. If we are silent, they swamp us'. Why, they ask, does the West increasingly suspend disbelief about China and its theatrical display? Well, we know the reasons why.

Day 12
Off to the desert. But that's another story.

Geoffrey Boulton is a senior honorary professorial fellow at the school of geosciences, University of Edinburgh