By Lisa Carducci

"Return to the East" is both a period of Mongol history in China and the title of a huge painting by Lindai. When Lindai was a child, his father told him the story of their Xinjiang ancestors who were dispersed in the 18th century. Readers, it is necessary that I summarize here the saga that up to this day influences the life and the work of the man I will introduce to you.

The Mongols are one of the 13 most ancient ethnic groups established in Xinjiang. They arrived after Genghis Khan in the 13th century in an expedition north of the Tianshan Mountains. During the Ming Dynasty, the Mongols were divided into two groups: the Tartars in the east and the Oryats in the north of the desert. In the mid-16th century, the Oryat people were divided again into tribes: Turgut, Dorbüd, Huxut, and Junggar.

Lindai is painting. [Foreign Languages Press]

In 1630, to avoid the threat of the increasingly powerful Junggar, the Turgut tribe commander led his people and army in what is today the Volga Basin. But Tsarist Russia rapidly turned their lives into a living nightmare. Not only were the Turgut made to pledge allegiance to the tsar, Russia had interfered in their internal affairs.

In 1761, Wobaxi became the Turguts' commander. A great number of them had been forced to fight for Russia and sacrifice their lives in the battles. The distressed Turgut people yearned for the day when they could be liberated from the tsarist yoke. Wobaxi took advice from other commanders and decided to accomplish his people's dream: return to the East. At the end of 1770, Wobaxi diverted Russia's attention and gathered his people for the great departure. On January 1, 1771, he launched his elite forces in a surprise assault against the enemy garrison. Then, heading 33,000 families, or 170,000 persons (according to various sources, the numbers ranged from 50,000, 80,000, and 100,000), he headed east, crossing the frozen Urals and then the snow-covered Kazakhstan grasslands, despite the Russian cavalry that dogged them. Eight months later, after a succession of ordeals and losses, the Turgut contingent finally reached motherland Ili, north of Xinjiang. The Qing government (a Manchu Dynasty close to the Mongols) sent representatives to welcome them and to help them become established. A group continued south to Hejing County in Bayangol (Bayingolin) Autonomous Mongol Prefecture, an area equivalent to one-third of Xinjiang. To pay homage to the hero Wobaxi, the Emperor invited him to his summer residence in Chengde and conferred upon him the title of "khan." Wobaxi died from illness in 1775 at the age of 33. Wobaxi's remarkable exploits shook and excited the world at the same time. The Turgut people have contributed enormously to the development and prosperity of multiethnic China.

Lindai painted several independent pictures related to this historical period, but his major work is a 6.35 m × 2.1 m panorama, which include 200 characters: the elderly and children walking painfully in the snow; men and women bearing luggage on their shoulders and dying from cold and hunger; people on foot or horse or camel, dragging cows or goats; people carrying the sick and wounded on their backs; and all trudging along with individual expressions of misery – the whole reflecting the ordeals encountered on their journey.

In 2002, to celebrate the third anniversary of Macao's return to the motherland and the 230th anniversary of the Turgut people's return to Xinjiang, Lindai was invited to exhibit this work in Macao. It is now kept at the local museum of Hejing County.

"Return to the East" ("Dong Gui" in Chinese) is becoming Hejing's "trademark," as well as a commercial trademark, I noticed.

Lindai, born in Hejing in 1966, belongs to the Turgut group. With a portfolio of about 400 paintings, he is one of the youngest Mongolian artists and one of the more representative of the Mongol style. Seventh of eight children of a herdsmen family, he used to look after sheep from the ages of six to 14. Predisposed to art even then, when he was on the pastureland, he drew on the earth or snow and made little clay animals. Only at 14 did he attend school and was put in the third grade. He studied in the Mongolian language before going to the local art school for three years. Diploma in hand, he started to work in 1988 with the Hejing Bureau of Industry and Commerce. Four years later, he became the curator of the local museum and is presently employed by the Hejing Bureau of Culture and Sport.