Preface 

The noisy autumn in the Mu Us Desert 

Chapter Ⅰ 

Eagles fly over Huishaliang， my home 

Chapter Ⅱ 

The Mu Us Desert， a cloud floating afar 

Chapter Ⅲ 

Herdsmen dream of distance lost in blue haze 

Chapter Ⅳ 

The most appealing flower in the grassland is the May rose 

Chapter Ⅴ 

Horses neigh and run across the grass 

Conclusion 

Poet Guo Xiaochuan

Late autumn has come in the Mu Us Desert. White clouds float across the azure sky, taking your mind somewhere faraway. Stretching along the shiny-black road, the immense grassland wraps the dunes tightly and turns to light yellow, with only a sheet of white frost shining on grass tips. Patches of juniper present a lustrous dark green, covering the desert with a thick, green blanket. All over the slopes pine trees stand tall in the autumn breeze. Beneath the azure sky there are groves of noble and elegant willows and poplars. Flocks and herds, like floating clouds, leisurely saunter amid waves of grass. The Mu Us Desert unrolls to visitors in the late autumn like a brilliant Russian painting.

When the frost comes and the grass and trees stop growing, the grazing ban at the Mu Us Desert in Ordos is slightly lifted. Herdsmen unbolt sheds and folds and release their animals to the Mu Us Desert and grasslands. Horses, cattle and sheep ecstatically enjoy their unusual freedom, like prisoners favored with amnesty.

......

Writing about Uxin frequently reminded me of Guo Xiaochuan, a respectable poet. His works, which are always full of heroism, passion and readability, nourished my teenage life. What’s more important, he visited Uxin Town and wrote beautiful articles about it in 1960s.

Talking about the poet, Baoriledai said: “He stayed in Uxin Town for more than four months.”

It’s said that it Baoriledai learnt the Han language because of Guo Xiaochuan. Since Guo was a well-known poet, cheerful and humorous people always accompanied him. However, at the time, Baoriledai knew little about the Han Language and could not understand what they were talking about. He decided to learn more.

Then, Guo wrote a long news dispatch titled Uxin Town: A Big Pasturing Town, which was published by the People’s Daily on the front page with an editorial. It was this work that made Uxin Town, the town hidden in the center of the Mu Us Desert, widely known.

When tracing the Mu Us Desert and the history of desertification control of China, I had been thinking that Guo and his article helped the whole country pay attention to desertification. Guo also wrote a long reportage titled Heroic Herdsmen, with more than 30,000 Chinese characters, published by Inner Mongolia Daily in spring 1966.

I found the reportage during the process of writing about Uxin. I carefully read it and found that Guo had deep affection for Inner Mongolia. The use of Mongolian proverbs and the details about the life the local people in the reportage proved it. Later, I learnt that Guo was born Rehe Province (now Fengning, Hebei), an area with both Han and Mongolians, and then moved to Beijing with his family in 1930s due to the invasion of the Japanese. He once studied at the Mongolian and Tibetan School when he was young. At that time, he named himself Keshige (“luckiness” in Mongolian).