Qinghai letter: following the steps of Bond author’s brother

The temperature drops sharply as you approach Qinghai Lake, covering 4,400sq km in western China, the biggest inland expanse of water in a country of superlatives. The wind whips up the Tibetan prayer flags and, at 3,205m above sea level, it’s difficult to catch your breath.

This lake is on the Tibetan plateau, in Qinghai province, and in the desolate, wildly beautiful expanses live Tibetans, Mongols, Han Chinese and Hui Muslims. It’s a stark, diverse almost-wilderness.

To the Chinese this is Qinghai He, to the Tibetans it is Tsongon Po, while for many years to westerners it went by its Mongolian name, Koko Nor. Most cultures call it “Blue Sea”.

The Tibetan legend about the formation of Koko Nor says this was a fertile valley flooded by a demon via an underground tunnel from Lhasa, before a god in bird form dropped a rock blocking the entrance to the tunnel.

Standing by the demon’s lake, in the piercing wind, the legend seems like the most practical explanation for how this expanse of water got here. We are well over 100km west of Xining, the provincial capital of Qinghai in northwest China, and the lake is in a depression of the Tibetan plateau. To the north is the Datong mountain, south of us is Nanshan mountain, and to the east is the Riyue mountain. To the west, there is just water.

Driving out from Xining, a modern city of 2.2 million people which has a strong Hui Muslim feel to it, you quickly find yourself in a different world. There are Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, Mongolian herder tents, men on horseback and motorbikes, all bundled into heavy, brightly coloured padded coats, herding sheep and yak and goats.

This is a hardscrabble land, reminiscent of the American Midwest, but it is crucial to keeping China’s ecology alive. The area is the mouth of three rivers – the Yangtze, Yellow and the Mekong, which are three of the main arteries that keep Asia’s heart beating.

‘News from Tartary’

One of my favourite books about China, and about this offcut of Asia, is

News from Tartary

, by British writer Peter Fleming, a brilliant account of a journey from Beijing to Kashmir.

He was the elder brother of Ian Fleming, the James Bond author and now the more famous of the siblings but, for a time, Peter Fleming was the celebrity. Adventurer, Times correspondent, author and war hero, he was a huge figure.

He visited Qinghai Lake in April 1935. It was frozen and no one else was there.

“It gave me a feeling of forgotten magnificence, of beauty wasted,” he wrote. “Every year, unadmired, the waters hardened into crystal, carried snow, were swept by the winds. Every year they became once more blue and dancing. None regarded their majesty; none noted their moods, their rage or their tranquillity . . . The Koko Nor might just as well not have been there.”

Today, though the lakeside has interpretative centres, tourist shops and golf carts to cover some of the distances, the cold weather means I am basically alone by the lake, and I can get a sense of what Fleming is talking about. It’s still not hugely visited, weirdly remote even today.

Accompanied by Ella Maillart, whom he called Kini, one of the great travellers of the 20th century Fleming made his way across war-ravaged China, through incredibly remote Xinjiang and the Taklamakan desert.

Time capsule

Having visited many of the places in

News from Tartary

, reading about them 80 years after its publication is like opening a time capsule.

News from Tartary has a fantastically understated opening passage which encapsulates the feeling that anyone who has embarked on a major journey must want to replicate. "Most journeys begin less abruptly than they end, and to fix the true beginning of this one in either time or space is a task which I do not care to undertake. I find it easier to open my account of it at the moment when I first realised, with a small shock of pleasure and surprise, that it had actually begun."

Four years after the trip across Qinghai and Xinjiang, in May 1938, Fleming rescued WH Auden and Christopher Isherwood after they were escorted from the front lines of what was then known as the second Sino-Japanese War.

He brought them to dinner and the two writers, of the same age but without his experience, were inspired by him. Auden wrote: “Well, we’ve been on a journey with Fleming in China, and now we’re real travellers for ever and ever. We need never go farther than Brighton again.”