Emin Minaret

As said in my last post, I spent a couple of days in Turpan (or Turufan). It’s an old Silk Road stopping point in the world’s third lowest depression – reaches 154m below sea level – and, apparently, it gets hot. I didn’t really notice the heat, what with its delicious lack of humidity, but my guidebook tells me that temperatures as high as 49C have been recorded there. To protect walkers from the sun, some streets are covered with vines. The grape-producing kind. The tasty grape-producing kind – small, sweet green grapes featured in my Turpan diet.

The grape trellises and shiny pavements drop away quickly at the end of Qingnian St, as the non-developed Uighur part of town begins.

Houses the colour of the earth, some with those brightly painted doors. The mosques, too, are bright.

Fields of grapes began appearing, some with people crouched among them, picking or just talking. No signposts said ‘Emin Minaret’ (at least, not in English), so I kept going straight, hoping for the best. Passed geese. Women washing clothes in a roadside stream. People sitting on carpeted beds out the front of their houses. A man leading his donkey, which pulled a cart of cut vines. The road curved and I followed it, and saw the minaret above a field of vines.

This is what it looked like, once I found the compound’s entrance:

(More to the right of the boxy entrance is under renovation.)

The interior didn’t wow me – basic columns supporting the ceiling, floor covered in prayer mats, no people – but that minaret! I love minarets – and mosques as a whole – for their variety across the world. This Malaysian mosque to the blue and white Iznik tiles of Istanbul’s Blue Mosque, the Chinese pagoda-style minaret in Xi’an’s Great Mosque to the little Uighur street mosques to this, founded in honour of General Emin Hoja by his son in 1777/8.

Just look at that minaret!