Our story is set near the end of the first Millennium: For more than one thousand years, the Silk
Road has become a corridor along which people shared ideas about technology and belief. Chinese
monks have crossed the great deserts and found Buddhism in India, bringing it back and mixing it
with ancestral religions. At the same time, obscure cults, among them Gnosticism and Manichaeism
have spread East from Europe and the Middle East. Chinese Technology and goods permeated west.
The tradesmen experienced all these: their own personal identities constantly challenging the belief
systems they came across.
On the edges of the Silk Road, in the mountains and on the plateaus, live nomadic tribesmen who
practice shamanic traditions. These tribal peoples constantly threatened China’s western frontier.
Although now well within China proper, the area where the film is set, located around the Turpan
basin, was originally inhabited by an Indo European race of people known as the Jushi. From burial
practices it is known that several millennia ago these people followed a shamanist religion (one local
shaman was buried three thousand years ago with a one kilogram stash of cannabis). By the first
millennium, its capital Jiaohe was an important prefecture in the Chinese Tang dynasty. However it
wasn’t long before the Chinese were driven out to make way for the Uighur Khaganate who practiced
the religion Manichaeism, which at its height, had followers all the way from Spain, to Eastern Chi-
na’s pacific coast. This religion professed a fiercely anti materialist drive; with its followers believ-
ing that only through death, they could escape the darkness of the world and reach the eternal per-
fect sphere of light.
There is surprisingly little known about this city, except that burial finds there have shown the
people to be of Caucasian descent, and practiced medicine foreign to Chinese traditions, now thought
to be lost forever.
This capital city of Jiaohe was protected from invasion by being built on a large islet in the middle of
a river. It can be seen in the film as an ancient ruined city that our characters pass during their
journey. Other ancient city remains, and the original caves that Buddhist and other cult monks in-
habited, were all used extensively as shooting locations. The film’s climax was shot at the Subashi
Lost City, a beautiful but haunting collection of temples and great halls, a kind of mega Buddhist
monastery.