Kashgar

I came to the west because I wanted to see some bits of the country that don’t necessarily come to mind when most people think of China. This is, of course, partly because the area that’s now Xinjiang province – or the Uighur Autonomous Region – has spent a lot of its history separate from China, and has required “reunification”. (The propaganda in the museums out west is awful.) I also wanted to see something different, after the common threads in SE Asia.

As the Emin Minaret suggests, I certainly got different architecture.

I do love tasty beautiful architecture.

These are tombs in Kashgar: the Tomb of Yusup Has and the Abakh Hoja Tomb. The first is the resting place of Yusup Has, a famous Uighur poet of the 11th century, while the second contains Abakh Hoja, a former ruler of Kashgar, and many members of his family.

A closer look at the mismatched tiles of the Abakh Hoja Tomb:

I spent some time admiring this.

The entrance to the Id Kah Mosque has a quite different colour scheme.

Behind that is a large courtyard with many trees to supply shade (needed in summer), and a second building that’s currently undergoing renovations. On platforms out the front of the second building are red prayer mats.

Islam is very present in the Uighur region, most notably in the mosques and what people are wearing. Not all women wear headscarves, although in general they dress more modestly than the Han Chinese. Some women wear headscarves that don’t really cover their hair, combined with T-shirts and short trousers, which reminded me of Malaysia. Others wear clothes that fully cover the body. In Kashgar the dress code is stricter than in, say, Urumqi or Turpan, and I saw women who’d draped brown fabric completely over their heads. That I found creepy. (A ‘I hate this hiding of women’s bodies’ kind of creepy: you don’t even see the woman’s eyes.) Modified Arabic is the script, although the Uighur language is Turkic; Chinese is on most buildings, at the government’s influence, but Arabic script’s there too and in certain areas pushes the Chinese aside. Lamb is on the menu. Pork is definitely off; I even got a chocolate bar that specifically stated its lack of pig-derived ingredients. Bread, usually unleavened, is on the menu too. Lots and lots of bread. I’m drifting onto a not necessarily Islamic level of influence here, just Arabic and Persian culture coming across the Silk Road. I saw several businesses called Iskandar.

By Kashgar, most Uighurs didn’t look very Chinese. The region is very ethnically mixed – I saw people who looked close to Chinese, but darker, others who looked close to Pakistani, some who’d pass for white-ish British, and plenty in-between. Hair remained dark and never got very curly (except for the Han Chinese with perms), while I only saw two people with light eyes.

Going back to clothing, many of the men wore taqiyah, and these were on sale plentifully in the big market. (Called the Sunday Market, because it’s biggest then, but it’s open every day.) Row of hats!

This market, finally, ditched the Chinese souvenirs I saw from Beijing through to Gansu province: the Mao kitsch, the “old” coins and jade, things on red string, seal stamps, random bits of rock, Mahjongg sets and Chinese-style calligraphic art.

Instead:

Whenever I walked through this bit of the market, I got asked if I wanted to buy some fur. Why yes, I would love to wear an entire fox.

Nuts and dried fruit were very widespread.

I don’t think even this photo captured how this fabric shone.

Other items included Uighur knives (quite attractively decorated in a simple way, cannot even be carried onto an aeroplane in checked luggage according to Lonely PLanet, perhaps because they become sentient at 33,000 feet and hack their way through the plane to the pilot, but the bus and train companies in China are quite happy for me to bring them on board, raising questions about what all those X-ray scanners are for), little lamps that might contain djinn, even more colourful hats, melons, brightly painted saddles, a big bag of saffron, oh and dried starfish and snakes and bits of hedgehog and other critters at the spice stalls too, a lot of them all along a row that smelled wonderful.

Presumably the hedgehog-bits have a medicinal property, presumably you grind to a fine powder before ingesting. I have no idea.

Markets and architecture are some of my favourite things, and help make a place distinct; the people do that too; so does the land, which out here is desert and very barren, more so than the Mongolian Gobi, except for near water where suddenly there’s green. Tall, thin trees dominate. Big crops are grapes, corn, melons, peaches. The buildings and the land are far closer than in eastern China, once you’re away from the modernly developed town centres.

And there are little things that make it clear the Uighur region is a different place, like this donkey and cart of melons.