Kashgar (2), Upal, Abakh Hoja and The Old Town: The Chinese Silk Road Part 6

China

Eight o’clock breakfast in Kashgar is a lonely experience; the unappealing buffet is attended by a few bleary-eyed staff and you eat alone, except for a couple of mystified Han Chinese who, like you, are working on Beijing time but, unlike you, believe Beijing time is everybody’s time.

We were in the lobby waiting for Sadeek before nine. At 9.20 I wandered into the 'business centre' and phoned his mobile. It was not switched on. At 9.30 we were planning a day in Kashgar without him when Mohammed Yusuf bustled in, his face full of peevish irritation.

We have now reached Kashgar (Kashi), in the far west of China, 4,000km from our start in Shanghai
Officially all of China uses Beijing time, but Kashgar life is often two hours behind, in accordance with its longitude

‘I have had a call from Sadeek,’ he started. ‘He says he is ill.’ Big sigh. ‘He said you were going to a village market, did you go to the Kashgar market yesterday?’ We said we had. ‘It will be much the same only smaller. Do you still want to go?’ We said we did. ‘Then I will take you.’

He may have had other plans for his Monday morning, but this had become a matter of honour and he was determined to do his duty, or, in this case, somebody else’s duty. As we pulled out of the car park he made several unkind remarks about Sadeek, the sort of remarks a devout Muslim might make about a fellow Muslim who owned a bar. ‘And,’ he added, ‘I will find you another guide for Wednesday.’

We left Kashgar heading south on the Karakoram highway. Our destination, Upal, was 50km away, another 500 km and we would reach Islamabad via the world’s highest border crossing at Khunjerab. Urumqi, the Xinjiang state capital, was 1200 km behind us, while Beijing was some 3500 km east.

The Karakoram Highway leaves Kashgar as a six-lane road. The inside lane is for donkey carts and bicycles, for old women to sit and eat melons and for small boys to lead five sheep to market on a string. The middle lane is full of heavily laden trucks thundering towards Pakistan, equally laden local buses and the odd rich person (like us) in a private car. The ‘fast’ lane is used by donkey carts and motorcycle pick-ups heading in the opposite direction.

Mahmoud Kashgari, or someone who may look like him, beckons us in to
his mausoleum near Upal

After 40 km on a road that steadily narrowed as the terrain become rockier and less cultivated, we stopped at the mausoleum of Mahmoud Kashgari. Born in 1005, he was a scion of the ruling family but was, by inclination, a scholar rather than a warlord. He travelled widely in Central Asia and compiled the first Turkic dictionary. Not only was he seven hundred years ahead of Dr Johnson, but he also untangled the huge range of dialects spoken between Kashgar and the Caspian Sea. His dictionary, including a collection of poems and maps of the Turkic world, was presented to the Caliph of Baghdad as a contribution to the understanding between the Turkic people and their new Arab allies. After an extraordinarily long and active life, he died in Upal in 1103.



I enter Mahmoud Kashgari's Mausoleum,
Upal

His grave lies in a small building at the top of a wooded slope. Beside his sarcophagus is a plate bearing a likeness of the great man, his gaze wise and avuncular. As even the Chinese do not claim to have invented photography in the eleventh century, the likeness owes more to imagination than accuracy. There is also a small mosque and a room for teaching. At the top of the hill, where the land stretches away arid and stony, lies the graveyard for Upal’s common people, their ochre tombstones blending timelessly into the ochre hillside.



The grave of Mahmoud Kashgari



A few kilometres on and we entered the village. Here the road was further narrowed by encroaching market stalls and slow moving animals. Mohammed parked by a row of restaurants and suggested he would have a cup of tea while we looked at the market. ‘It won’t take you long,’ he said, ‘it’s only a village market.’



Approaching Upal market

We walked along the road, now almost completely blocked by people, animals and carts, until we reached an earth ramp that led down to a large cleared area fringed by shady trees. From the top of the ramp the whole market was laid out below us.



Upal Market

Mohammed was right that it was only a village market, but that did not mean it was small and certainly did not mean it was uninteresting. On one single site it was possible to buy everything you might want and several you never knew you needed. There were butchers and cloth merchants, vegetable and livestock dealers, shoe sellers and the inevitable kebab stalls.



Butcher's stalls, Upal Market

There were people of all ages, dressed in bright traditional costumes, browsing, bargaining and hanging out with friends. If the people of Kashgar are two hours adrift of the rest of China, there were old men at this market who looked two centuries adrift of the rest of the world.



Upal Market

There was no way we could be a part of the market, we were as alien and exotic to the buyers and sellers as they were to us. It was enough just to be there and to feel the pulse of life around us. Tourism is forever doomed to kill the things it loves: the fishing village in a secluded cove becomes a five mile stretch of high rise hotels, slices of paradise are packaged, denatured and sanitised to suit the tastes of the rich. Kashgar is hardly Benidorm, but we were not the only foreigners at the Sunday market and it sits inside the horizon of tourism. At Upal we had slipped over that horizon, but human beings, like sub-atomic particles, are changed merely by being observed. Mixed with the exhilaration of just being there was the fear that we were the latest link in a chain of foreigners relentlessly dragging that horizon behind us.



Upal Market

We spent longer than Mohammed had expected and he had consumed more tea than a man can reasonably drink before we reappeared. He drove us back to Kashgar, but as we neared the city he suddenly swung off the main road and we bounced along a roughly made, potholed track. ‘Where are we going?’ I asked. ‘There’s a road block ahead,’ he answered. ‘It’s quicker to go round it.’ Most of the traffic from the main road had followed us. If the people of Kashgar going about their lawful business knew about the roadblock and how to get round it, then so must any potential terrorist. So, what was the road block for, if not just to irritate the locals? It was the first time I found myself asking that question. It was not to be the last.

After the obligatory visit to a silk carpet and jade warehouse, which was disappointing, at least for those hoping to sell us anything, we found ourselves back at the ‘Best Uigher restaurant in Kashgar’. Mohammed recommended mutton pie, a hitherto untried Uigher speciality. It consisted of pieces of sheep in a pastry case; my mother used to make something similar in the 1950s. It was pleasant, but hardly added a new dimension to our concept of Uigher cuisine. Around us everybody else was ordering ‘laghman’, the mutton and noodle dish that is the Uigher staple. Whenever a group of Uighers walk into a restaurant, there is an animated discussion about what they will eat. Ideas are thrown this way and that until eventually someone will say ‘laghman’ and they all smack their lips and smile and order laghman like it is a special treat, although most of them eat it twice a day, seven days a week. Usually, they will have a few kebabs on the side. Mutton pie, on the other hand, really was a special treat so we awaited the bill with apprehension. Pie for two and unlimited rose scented tea cost just over £1.50.

The best Uigher Restaurant in Kashgar

In the evening, we bumped into Sadeek as we passed through the lobby. ‘Sorry about this morning,’ he said, ‘I wasn’t well.’ We shrugged. ‘Never mind,’ he carried on brightly, ‘we’ll go to a different village market tomorrow.’ We explained that we had already seen a village market, had no need to see another one, and anyway we would not trust him to turn up for his own funeral. His face fell; he seemed genuinely hurt and surprised that we no longer had any need for his services. Lynne seemed particularly impervious to this attempt at boyish charm. He had had his chance, we told him, and he had blown it.

Later we ventured into a self-styled ‘fast food’ restaurant on the road up to Id Kah Square. We had passed it a number of times and had usually been invited in by the lad sitting outside threading sheep onto skewers. It looked reasonably clean, so now seemed the time to take up his invitation.

Perhaps I was becoming overconfident, perhaps I had seen enough chunks of mutton for one week, but I ordered a couple of kofta kebabs to go with the naan and the regular kebabs. I watched the lad dip his hand into the bowl of mince and press it onto the skewer, fat oozing between his fingers.

Lynne shook her head. ‘They’re dangerous,’ she said, adding something about barge poles and not touching. But was I listening? Of course not, I was too busy scoffing at her apprehension while watching a cockroach scuttle across the concrete floor.

What passed later is best left unrecorded. Suffice it to say, my morning began at half past three and I failed to make it to breakfast at either Beijing or Kashgar time.

The next few hours were spent watching yet more Olympic success for Zhong Guo while Lynne dealt out medication liberally and sympathy rather more grudgingly.

By eleven, I felt fit enough to face the world and we headed for the tomb of Abakh Hoja. Guided by the ever-useful card from John’s Café, the taxi took us past the market site and out to where the eastern suburbs began to melt into farmland. Turning off the main road, he dropped us in a courtyard containing the cold drink and tat stalls that surround the entrance to every tourist site.

In the 16th century the southern Taklamakan was ruled by a Khanate based in Yarkand, 250 km to the west. In the early 17th century Abakh Hoja displaced the ruling dynasty and made Kashgar his capital. He was a strong and capable ruler, but his descendants, seventy-two of whom share his mausoleum, struggled to keep Kashgaria independent, caught as they were between the Dzungor empire to the west and the Chinese to the east.

The Mausoleum of Abakh Hoja, Kashgar

The tomb is also the reputed resting place of Ikparhan, a Uigher princess known to the Chinese as Xiang Fei - the Fragrant Concubine – because of her attractive floral scent. The tale of Xiang Fei varies depending on who tells it. In the preferred Han version, she was a granddaughter of Abakh Hoja and became a concubine of the Qin emperor Qianlong. After a difficult start she won him over by her beauty - and indeed body odour - became his favourite and lived a long and happy life, exemplifying the eternal bond between the Uigher and Chinese peoples. The Uigher legend has her being abducted from her husband’s bed, or even being a captured resistance leader. The stories concur in her winning over Qianlong by her beauty (and BO), but in this account her success upset the emperor’s mother to the extent that she had either had Xiang Fei murdered or forced her to commit suicide. This version suits the Uigher sense of grievance, and is just about acceptable to the Chinese as it allows the perfidious Qin to be contrasted with the cuddly Chinese Communist Party.



The graves of Abakh Hoja and his kin, Kashgar

Constructed around 1640, the tomb is a sturdy mosque-like building, its towers and dome faced in dark green glazed tiles. That, at least, is how it looks in the brochures. In fact, although the surrounding garden is pleasant, the building itself is in disrepair and many of the tiles are missing. Inside, the tombs look dusty and neglected, while the adjacent teaching hall is only kept standing by large wooden props and is closed to the public. The roof of the open sided prayer hall is supported by a series of wooden columns, each one carved differently to display local skills. It also displays a lack of overall design and, again, a lack of maintenance. Perhaps the local government is less keen to provide funds now it is generally agreed that the concubine who inspired the Xiang Fei legend is actually buried in Hebei, several thousand kilometres away.



Prayer Hall, Abakh Joa Mausoleum, Kashgar

Sadly, the tomb was not the only thing in a poor state and we returned to our hotel for further medication, a bit of a lie down and no lunch. China continued to do well in the Olympics, showing particular skill in shooting and beach volleyball, but by mid-afternoon I had endured more than enough televised smugness and felt just about strong enough for a stroll round the oldest part of the city.

The entrance, a hundred metres from our hotel, was clearly marked. As we climbed the steps up and over the city wall, we were suddenly surrounded by a posse of young ladies all elegantly attired in dresses of what we would later learn was atlas silk. This was not, unfortunately, a result of my natural charm, but of their desire to sell us tickets to enter their quarter of the city.

Kashgar, The Old City



Old Kashgar is jumble of mud brick buildings set in a maze of narrow streets. There was little else to see and there were few people about, but those we saw were all dressed in full local costume. Several of them stopped to check our tickets.



Kashgar, The Old City

I suspect a medieval city would have smelled a lot worse, and it certainly would have lacked the spider’s web of cables criss-crossing each street and feeling its way up the front of every building, but otherwise there was nothing to say we were still in the present century. Many of the inhabitants have moved out to Chinese-style tower blocks. These may be ugly but, for their residents, running water, reliable electricity and the ability to keep warm in the bitter Kashgar winter are worth far more than the scenic charms of the old city. We cannot expect people to live in picturesque poverty for our amusement, but when most have left there will be an opportunity to create a museum town, like Ghadames in Libya. The Chinese, however, are much more likely to bring in the bulldozers, as they have done with much of the rest of Kashgar.



Kashgar, The Old City

We lost our bearings in the twisting lanes and were a little surprised to come out in a wide street of balconied buildings behind Id Kah Square.



Not quite so old Kashgar

This was the street of metal workers, and outside each shop, men sat cross-legged tapping designs onto vases and trays.



Metalworkers, Kashgar

We returned to the hotel for more medication, no dinner and an early night.

I felt better in the morning. After breakfast we went down to the lobby where a young man called Hassan introduced himself. He seemed pleasant, and if his English was not as good as Sadeek’s, he was at least there and on time, which counted for a lot more. We took our cases outside and he introduced us to our driver.

Before we left Kashgar the driver had to report to the police station to obtain a permit to leave the city. We sat outside and waited. After five minutes, he returned grumbling and moaning, rooted around under the dashboard and produced a fire extinguisher, which he took to show the bureaucrats inside. Perhaps I should have been pleased by this untypical Chinese respect for health and safety, but I was more irritated by a system that requires you to complete a box ticking exercise before driving down the road to the next town.

This incident set the tone for the day. Every time we moved from one municipality to the next, which was often, there was a checkpoint where a policeman demanded documents. Usually they were only interested in the driver and Hassan, but some insisted on seeing our passports, too. As these were largely village bobbies from some of the remotest villages in China, a British passport was a distinctly outlandish document and finding the picture inside the back page was a major challenge. As one officer took my passport, it fell open at my outdated Mongolian visa. He studied this document minutely before nodding, returning the passport and grunting wisely.

We drove through cultivated fields and occasional habitation. The road was not busy, but there was the usual assortment of carts, animals and children. Our driver’s technique for dealing with hazards was to point the car at them and accelerate hard, which was a little nerve wracking but seemed to work for him.

After 70 km we reached Yengisar, the knife capital of Xinjiang. Knife crime may be a cause of much hand wringing to the British, but to a Uigher it is a cultural statement. Since the grenade assault on the Kashgar police station the BBC website had carried news of a knife attack at a checkpoint. I suspect it was frustration rather than terrorism, but what surprised me was that there had been only one such attack.

The main street of the small town is lined with large glass fronted showrooms dedicated to the knife. There are displays of dazzling craftsmanship and scary lethality, but all is not well in the world of Uigher knife making. Security regulations mean that knives cannot be carried on buses, planes or trains and they can no longer be sold mail order. They produce the knives, there is a market for them, but regulations divide the knives from their market. We bought two rather finely made nail clippers. They are undoubtedly the best nail clippers we have ever owned, but are a rather sad reflection of the current impotence of Uigher culture.

Outside we heard what sounded frighteningly like a volley of small arms fire, though the locals seemed unconcerned. Then a funeral came into view. A truck decorated with a large rosette carried the coffin and a dozen or so relatives who were lobbing handfuls of firecrackers into the road to scare off demons. Behind them came a cortege of twenty or so vehicles of assorted shapes and sizes.



Funeral truck, Yengisar

We followed the funeral until they turned off at the edge of town. From there, our 200 km journey to Yarkand passed through a landscape sometimes yellow with sand, sometimes green with cultivation, but always punctuated by checkpoints.

Once the seat of a great Buddhist kingdom, later the capital of Chagotai Khan (son of Ghengis) and always a major city on the southern Silk route, Yarkand looked disappointingly like everywhere else in modern China. The main remnants of the old town are the Aleytun mosque – closed to foreigners - and the burial site of the kings of Yarkand.

The tomb of Sultan Saiyidhan, Yarkand



Less ambitious in scale but better kept than the tomb of Abakh Hoja, who usurped their power, the graves lie in a pleasant rose garden beside a wide, dusty street. Sultan Saiyidhan has his own mausoleum, a delicate, wooden construction covered in fretwork, but pride of place, as at Abakh Hoja, is given to a woman - though in this case to a woman who is really buried there. Amannishahan, wife of a sixteenth century khan, was a poet, musician and composer. Although she died in childbirth in 1560 she packed enough into her 34 years to still be revered as the mother of Uigher music. Twenty stone arches create a shaded veranda around her mausoleum, which is topped by a blue tiled cupola. Light and graceful, the building would be perfect if it was not for a nagging feeling that this was where Walt Disney found his model for oriental architecture.



The tomb of Amannishahan, Yarkand

Half an hour further on, we stopped at a roadside restaurant for lunch. Lynne and I ordered mutton pilaf while Hassan and the driver sat and discussed and threw ideas back and forward. Eventually the driver said ‘laghman’ and Hassan licked his lips and smiled. A decision had been made.



Roadside restaurant beyong Yarkand

After lunch, we drove through the desert, the breeze sending streams of sand scurrying across the road in front of us. There were fewer obstacles for the driver to accelerate at now, but soon he was shifting about in his seat, opening and closing the window, and doing all those things drivers do when they are struggling to stay awake. All those things except stop and rest. We ploughed on through the desert afternoon aware that, should we leave the road, we could probably career on for a kilometre or two before anybody noticed.

Eventually, at one of the rare outbreaks of cultivation around a stream rushing down from the Tibetan plateau, he finally took a breather. The driver headed off to stick his head in the water, Lynne disappeared in the bushes on the far side of the road while Hassan and I took it upon ourselves to water the nearest cotton bushes. It was here that I realised I had left my sunglasses in the restaurant.

I inspect the watered cotton

Arriving in Hotan around five, we met Khalil, our new guide, and checked into our hotel. We were surprised, even shocked, when Hassan announced that he and the driver were going straight back to Kashgar. We were relieved to have survived 500 km in daylight; I would not have wanted to take the return trip at all, and especially not in the dark with a narcoleptic driver. I hope they made it.

The Chinese Silk Road

Introduction: The Silk Road in China

Prelude: Shanghai

1 Xi'an

2 Jiayuguan: A Total Eclipse and the Last Fortress under Heaven

3 Dunhuang: Dunes in the Gobi

4 Turpan: Ruined Cities of the Silk Road

5 Kashgar (1):  The Sunday Market and the Former British Consulate

6 Kashgar (2): Upal, Abakh Hoja and the Old Town

7 Hotan (or Khotan or Hetian): City in the Desert

8 Urumqi: A By-word for Remoteness

Postscript

Kashgar (1), The Sunday Market and The Former British Consulate: The Chinese Silk Road Part 5

A Uigher City as Far West as China Goes

08-Aug-2008

Through the Tian Shan Mountains to the Edge of the Taklamakan Desert

China

The Tian Shan (Heavenly Mountains) form the northern rim of the great depression that is the Taklamakan desert. Crossing the final fringes of the Gobi, the line from Turpan ran west, north of the mountains and then, as the afternoon wore on, turned south and began to rise.

The train climbs into the snow capped Tian Shan

We climbed steadily through Alpine meadows and beside rushing streams. In an upland emptiness of austere beauty we passed few signs of human activity; just one lonely outbreak of industrial ugliness and the remains of a small town that had been entirely levelled.

An outbreak of industrial ugliness in the Tian Shan

We laboured to the top of the pass beneath snow-capped peaks and then, as the train breathed an almost audible sigh of relief, we rattled down the other side. An hour later, and with surprising suddenness, the mountains stopped and we emerged from a valley mouth into the vast emptiness of the Taklamakan.

Suddenly we emerge into the Taklamakan desert

Dusk fell as we turned south, skirting the desert via a succession of oasis towns. As we drew into the substantial city of Korla – what do 400,000 people do in this desert outpost? – the Olympics were starting in Beijing and the opening ceremony was broadcast over the in-train radio. We may still have been in China but we had now travelled so far west we were closer to Beirut than Beijing, though hardly very close to either.

9.30 in the evening and tomatoes are on their way to market in Korla

09-Aug-2008

We slept well. In the morning we were still rounding the desert; waves of sterile sand, their peaks encrusted with salt, rippled into the distance.

Kashgar (or Kashi) is as far west as you can go and still be in China

Arriving in Kashgar and Finding a Problem to Solve

Nearing Kashgar, the sand gave way to cultivation; vine draped trellises, pomegranate trees hung with deep red fruit, tomatoes, maize and cotton just coming into flower. Occasional level crossings took us across dusty lanes where donkey carts waited our passing. Twenty-two hours after boarding the train, we arrived at Kashgar, the end of the line and the most westerly city in China.

Market gardens on the approach to Kashgar

The train emptied. Several hundred people streamed from the station while behind the barriers, hundreds more called out greetings to friends and relatives. One lone lad held up a sign in Chinese, but no one seemed to be greeting us. We stood to the side of the barriers, waiting for the crush to subside and hoping the matter would resolve itself. In a very few minutes the crowd had evaporated, leaving only us, a few stragglers and the lad with the sign. Clearly, he was not our greeter, not only because his sign was in Chinese, but because even the dullest messenger could spot the only two westerners on the train.

Our choice was to phone the travel company’s local representative or take a taxi to the hotel. We decided to do both. As we were retrieving the appropriate phone number a policeman approached us with the sign-holding boy in tow. ‘Xinjiang University?’ he asked hopefully. We shook our heads. He looked unreasonably disappointed given the circumstances, but he meant well.

A Kind Man Offers Help While a Taxi Driver....

Our local contact was, we discovered, in Urumqi, twenty-four hours back the way we had come. We were discussing whether the number was worth calling when we were interrupted by a well-dressed, middle-aged Uigher man. ‘Can I help?’ he said.

We explained the situation and said we were about to take a taxi to our hotel. He looked at our piece of paper and said, ‘I used to work for a travel company and I know this person in Urumqi.’ With that, he pulled out his phone and dialled the number. There was no reply. Undaunted he went on ‘and I know who she usually works with in Kashgar.’ Another dialling was followed by a brief conversation in Uigher. ‘But unfortunately not on this occasion,’ he said apologetically.

We thanked him and made a move towards the waiting taxis. ‘I have time before my train, would you like me to accompany you to your hotel?’

We had taken up too much of his time already, and we were not helpless. We thanked him again and said it was unnecessary.

I sat in the taxi enjoying the warm glow that is kindled when complete strangers take time and trouble to rebuild your faith in human nature. Then I noticed the taxi driver had not cancelled the meter after his previous fare and was proposing to overcharge us by a factor of two, if not three. The glow diminished, but it was less than two pounds and he was a poor man so I said nothing.

Kashgar was, clearly, a different sort of city. The old centre sits on an easily defended mound, and parts of the city walls still cling to the slopes. Outer Kashgar has undergone some ‘Hanification’ but the extensive old town and the twists of the Tuman River confound any attempt to impose a grid pattern.

Modern(ish) Kashgar - not quite a grid pattern

The Problem Resolves Itself

Our hotel was on the edge of the historic area. Security demanded that the taxi stopped on the main road, so we got out and trundled our cases up the access road and across the courtyard. The lobby was crowded and checking-in laborious. As we finished, we were approached by a small Arab-looking man in early middle age. He identified himself as Mohammed Yusuf, the manager of the local travel company. He had learned about us, he said, when a friend phoned from the station. It seemed our anonymous benefactor had come up trumps with his third call. Mohammed apologised, said he had no idea why the guide had not turned up, and offered to buy us lunch in recompense. It sounded fair to me.

The ‘Best Uigher Restaurant in Kashgar’ was in the new town. It had the same polished wooden furniture, massive curving staircase and balcony as the restaurant in Turpan. The food was the same, too; mutton with rice, mutton with noodles and mutton with skewers. Like most Uigher restaurants, there was no beer but they did a pleasing line in floral scented tea.

The best Uigher Restaurant in Kashgar

After a terse phone call, we were joined by Sadeek, our hitherto invisible guide. ‘Oh well, it happened,’ he said, which seemed a less than fulsome apology. Mohammed Yusuf made it clear that Sadeek would reimburse the cost of the taxi himself, and that if he wanted lunch he could buy his own.

Aftrewards, walking back to our hotel with Sadeek, we passed some damaged trees supported by very new wooden trusses outside a small official building. This, we learned later, was the customs post where seventeen men had been killed in a knife and grenade attack the week before. It was not, as we had imagined out near the Kyrgyz border, but two hundred metres from our hotel.

Sadeek seemed keen to make amends for his earlier failings, so we agreed to go to the bar he owned the following evening and discuss what he might be able to do for us.

A Walk and a Dinner in Kashgar

Later, we crossed the broad four-laned main road and made our way into the old town. Crossing the road was easy; the traffic that was not donkey powered was largely two wheeled, the few cars were mostly green coloured taxis.

Finding our way through the narrow streets towards Id Kah Square was a trip into a different world. The dirty, dusty buildings housed all sorts of shops; there were bakers and jewellers, a small flock’s worth of carcasses hanging outside a butchers and a medieval looking carpet seller sitting cross-legged on the high wooden threshold of his darkened cavern. Kebab stalls and restaurants abounded. Men sat in the street threading pieces of sheep onto huge skewers while others fanned braziers. It is always kebab time in Kashgar.

Butcher's shop, Kashgar

The men wore shirts rather than t-shirts, often white, frequently long sleeved. They all wore hats - usually the four corner Uigher hat - or at least skullcaps. Women were in colourful, traditional dress. Most wore headscarves, though some were fully veiled and a few covered their head and shoulders with a rough chocolate brown towel; how they could see where they were going was a mystery.

Motorbikes and pushbikes jostled among the pedestrians and the occasional taxi barged through, the driver leaning hard on his horn.

Id Kah Mosque and Square, Kashgar

Kashgar - the streets round Id Kah Square

The entrance to Id Kah mosque is on the corner of the eponymous square. Although it is the largest mosque in China, the entrance, painted a dirty yellow, is neither particularly big nor well built. Beside it sits an ornate clock tower while on the opposite side of the square a huge television screen showed a Uigher soap opera.

Id Kah Msque, Kashgar

Chairman Mao

Turning right, we emerged onto the wider, more Chinese, streets by a gigantic statue of Chairman Mao. Rather over-dressed for the climate, he stood on a plinth apparently hailing a taxi. The size is the message: this might be a Uigher city, but China is in charge and do not forget it.

The Chairman hails a taxi, Kashgar

As we circumnavigated the chairman seeking out the best place for a photograph, a Uigher girl stopped her bicycle and asked if we needed help. Short of shifting the sun into a more convenient position there was little she could do, but she shared the attitude of our anonymous friend at the station. The Chinese might find the Uighers revolting (or, at least in revolt); we generally found them pleasant and helpful.

John's Café and the Olympics

After our walk, we discovered a branch of John’s Café in the courtyard behind our hotel. There are several of these backpackers’ retreats dotted around Xinjiang. They offer internet access, travel advice and ticketing, and food and drink. They also give away small laminated cards with useful destinations printed in English, Uigher and Chinese. We pocketed one for the next morning, but had a little more difficulty acquiring a cold beer as the waiter first had to be prised away from the television Olympic coverage.

John's café, Kashgar

Dinner in Kashgar

Later, after a shower and our own look at the Olympics, we set out to eat. In the hotel lobby, half the staff were gathered staring upwards at a television suspended from the ceiling, their body language urging the Chinese competitor towards a medal.

In Id Kah Square it was prayer time, and although we had heard no muezzin, men were making their way towards the mosque in substantial numbers. With intense looks on their faces they walked, alone or in small groups, with steady determined steps. The mosque is considered the centre of Uigher resistance to Chinese rule and there was a feeling of tension in the square. The big screen was obliviously blaring out another soap opera to a much smaller knot of worshippers. Uighers, whether religious or secular, seemed less concerned with Olympic success than the Chinese staff at John’s Café and our hotel.

The busy street beyond was packed with eating places, some permanent, some set up just for the evening. Here and there, rows of people sat on benches watching shop front televisions. Clearly, soap operas are important even to those who do not own a TV, though the Olympics were again conspicuous by their absence.

Watching the big screen television, Id Kah Square, Kashgar

The choice was not appealing. Neither cleanliness nor variety seemed to be huge priorities in Kashgar. There were bread shops and a hard-boiled egg stand, there was a man frying fish, and there were kebabs, kebabs and more kebabs.

We were hovering outside a restaurant that looked only moderately filthy when the young man in charge engaged us in conversation. ‘What’s that?’ I asked pointing at what looked like a meat and potato stew bubbling in a huge wok. ‘Corned beef,’ he said, though that clearly lost something in translation.

We ordered some ‘corned beef’, noodles, a naan and, because it seemed eccentric not to, half a dozen kebabs. The food was good, the sheepy kebabs were good and the ‘corned beef stew’ was nicely spiced and satisfying. The meat was tender and tasty, certainly not beef and probably not horse; maybe it was donkey, an animal with many functions in these parts.

We were charged the same minimal sum as the locals, which is always pleasing. ‘Xie xie,’ I said as the lad handed over my change. ‘But that is Chinese,’ he said, ‘I am Uigher.’ I am ashamed to say that my sole word of Uigher was ‘naan’, a word that was hardly new to me, or anyone else who has ever eaten in an Indian restaurant. I asked him the Uigher for ‘thank you’. ‘Rehmet sizge,’ he said. ‘Rehmet sizge’ I said back and resolved to use it more.

Back in Id Kah square discrete floodlights illuminated the front of the mosque. A small crowd sat or squatted to watch the news on the big screen, while others perched on low walls talking and smoking. Families strolled in the evening cool, children played with tops or chased each other across the square. The clock tower - official Beijing time - said it was half past ten, the real local time was probably about eight. Surrounded by Uigher buildings and several hundred people, none of whom were in western dress, we felt that we had finally arrived somewhere foreign and very alien to our normal experience. Globalisation makes it harder and harder to find such places, and we felt privileged to be there.

Id Kah Square, Kashgar

09-Aug-2008

Inside Id Kah Mosque

Next morning, before we set off for the Sunday market, we took a closer look at the Id Kah mosque. Our information was that it was open to non-Muslims provided it was not prayer time, though zealous locals sometimes shooed foreigners away. To maximise our chances of admittance Lynne wore a long sleeved blouse and carried a headscarf, I put on a long sleeved shirt. We need not have bothered. Chinese tour groups were wandering about in shorts and t-shirts, the only matter that concerned zealous locals was selling tickets.

Originally built in 1443, Id Kah is the oldest and most active mosque in China. It was never much of an architectural gem and has been refurbished so many times, somewhat extensively after the Cultural Revolution, that there is little sense of antiquity. Inside the walls is a pleasant rose garden, two outdoor pulpits and a large, very plain, central prayer hall rather spoiled as a place for meditation by the guardian playing tunes on his mobile phone. Ten thousand people regularly attend Friday prayers but Sunday morning was distinctly quiet.

Kashgar Sunday Markets

A little disappointed we returned to the hotel to change, hopped in a taxi and showed our laminated card from John’s Café.

The New Livestock Markets

The Kashgar Sunday Market is the region’s main attraction. Up to a hundred thousand people from a dozen ethnic groups come from cities, villages and nomad encampments to trade everything from a bull to a bolt of silk, from a tractor to a teacup. At least that is how it used to be. The authorities recently decided the market had outgrown its site, and banished all livestock to a new location outside the city.

Arriving at the Sunday Market, Kashgar

The split may have taken the edge off the excitement, but arriving at the animal market, it seemed like all the donkey carts in Asia were converging on this one place. There were carts of melons, carts of carrots and carts full of men dressed up for a day out. And there were sheep; all along the dual carriageway we passed lorries packed with dozens of them, donkey carts with four or five ewes strapped on the back, and men leading one or two on a leash.

Arriving at the Sunday Market, Kashgar

Our taxi dropped us at the entrance where would-be traders were dealing with the inevitable Chinese bureaucracy. Along the roadside, men sat in chairs, sheets round their necks, as a team of barbers wielded cutthroat razors.

Getting a shave, Kashgar Sunday Market

Threading our way through the crowd, we stood beside a mountain range of melons stretching into the middle distance.

Melon Mountain, Kashgar Sunday Market

Beside it, new carts were laid out for inspection, and a lad of about thirteen operated a makeshift smithy hammering out spare parts.

Smithy, Kashgar Sunday Market

There was a section for cattle, compact healthy looking animals, a section for donkeys, their braying audible half way to Beijing, but by far the largest area was given over to sheep. They were there in their thousands, standing side by side, tethered in long lines, with looks of patient resignation on their benign if not very intelligent sheepy faces. The local breed has no tail, but instead sports a large cuboid of fat on either buttock like woolly bookends.

Sheep, Kashgar Sunday Market

There was haggling and spitting, laughing and shouting, backslapping and, very probably, backstabbing. It was exclusively male, almost exclusively Uigher and not in the slightest Chinese

Kashgar Sunday Market

The authorities intended to separate off the livestock, but already there are vegetable and fruit stalls and kiosks selling the sort of gewgaws a farmer might take home for his children. Officialdom is no match for human nature, and it cannot be long before they discover they have not one market split in two, but two separate full-scale markets.

Vegetable stalls at Kashgar Sunday Livestock Market

The Original Market

Another taxi, another flash of John’s laminated card and we were at the original market site on a bend of the Tuman River. It is a sizeable river with a fair flow of water, all doomed to evaporate in the desert. Outside the permanent market, donkey carts were parked like cars outside Tesco’s, though in less orderly rows. Inside a huge crowd drifted along the alleys examining the produce.

Carts outside the original site of the Kashgar Sunday Market

Each trade had its own area. There was a row of spice stalls, a square of shoemakers and menders; there were areas for gold, silver, silk, jade, cheap clothes, expensive clothes, scrubbing brushes and washing powder. Whatever you needed there was a choice of vendors competing to sell it to you. There were women in this market, too. Housewives bought vegetables, veiled women haggled with stallholders, and some of the brown towels were now round their owner’s necks rather than over their heads and being used to wipe away sweat. How they ever managed to fit in a livestock market was a mystery.

Market stall, old Kashgar Sunday Market

Lunch at the former British Consulate

Our hotel which was built in the grounds of the former British Consulate where the redoubtable Sir George and Lady McCartney spent 28 years providing friendship and hospitality to the explorers, adventurers and antique thieves of the early twentieth century. They also kept a close watch on the Russian Consulate as the two mighty empires played the ‘Great Game’ of spying and manoeuvring, seeking to exert their influence over Chinese Turkestan, India and the ailing Ottoman Empire. The railway to Kashgar was completed in 1999 and the tarmacked road only twenty years earlier. One hundred years ago the city must have seemed fabulously remote.

The consulate building is still there, across the courtyard, through another wing of the hotel and into the garden at the back. The single storey house is now, somewhat prosaically, a Chinese Restaurant, and that was where we went after our morning at the bazaar.

We sat on the veranda where the great men of far eastern exploration had sipped their sundowners, and ate chilli chicken and drank Xinjiang beer. A group of four English women sat in the courtyard below, having a long and loud discussion with the waitress about the need to avoid anything too spicy, heedlessly undermining all our hard work on this subject. Under a tree, a group of well fleshed Chinese businessmen were working their way through a typical Sichuan dish that required them to hunt for little pieces of chicken in a huge mound of red chillies. They were involved in one of those Chinese competitions where each has to prove his wealth and generosity by buying more and bigger dishes than the others. They were true trenchermen, but for all they ate they left as much on the table, waiting to be thrown away.

Lunch at the former British Consulate, Kashgar

Sadeek's Bar

Later we ventured down to Sadeek’s Bar. Through another hotel courtyard, we found a small fenced off area with tables and chairs. At the end was a wooden hut with a sign saying ‘Sadeeks Bar’. It looked like a beach bar, though few places in the world are further from a beach.

Seven or eight people were clustered round a table where Sadeek held court. The other tables were empty, so we chose one and sat down. Sadeek brought some beers and sat with us for a while. A stocky character in his thirties with a baseball cap permanently clamped to his close-cropped head, he spoke excellent English and told us of how he had studied English at university and then become a primary school teacher. Finding that frustrating he had moved to Shanghai, where his Central Asian looks must have been as exotic as our pale western faces. He had returned home to marry, open a bar and do some guiding on the side. He suggested we might like to see a village market as a contrast to the big market today. We agreed a price for the trip and he arranged to pick us up at our hotel at nine o’clock the next day – Beijing time.

More Olympics and a Fish Supper

Back in the hotel, we caught up with the Olympics. A typical hotel television has some fifty channels; twelve from the national broadcaster, CTV, plus a mishmash of commercial and local, sometimes very local, stations. At any one time forty or more will be showing either a game show, a soap opera or a sword and sorcery epic – essentially a soap opera with costumes and magic. CTV9 is the English language channel, offering all the news they think you should hear, worthy but dull travelogues and the occasional studio discussion in which foreign experts are permitted mild criticism of the Chinese government, although the presenters quickly point out the errors of such thinking.

The Olympics sprawled across five of the CTV channels, though not CTV9 which, being an international station, was barred from Olympic broadcasting. The variety of sports covered was impressive, shooting, weight lifting, beach volleyball, in fact any sport in which a Chinese competitor was winning a medal. It was early days but the hosts were obviously doing well. We understood nothing of the regular Olympic round-ups, but we did notice that almost every sentence started with the words Zhong Guo – China – and clearly Zhong Guo was mighty pleased with itself.

Later we returned to the street beyond the square, although again nothing seemed particularly appealing. An old man with a dirty apron stood behind a table where chunky fillets of unidentified fish lay on a metal plate. Beside him a wok of boiling oil sat on a brazier. No bacteria could survive that seething cauldron, so we perched on his rickety wooden bench and indicated we would like some fish.

Two fillets disappeared into the oil and a few moments later reappeared on grubby metal plates being pushed in our direction. We ate with our fingers, picking out the bones and dropping them onto the pavement. It was a good, firm-fleshed river fish, not unlike Nile carp, and the oil had contained a judicious mixture of spices and seasonings.

We bought a couple of buns and strolled back to the square nibbling them. They were clearly baked the day before, or at least long enough ago to have become solid and unappealing.

We sat on a low wall in the square watching a young boy push his even younger sister in a pushchair. We suspected their parents were around, but could not see them. The lad looked at us, looked at our bread rolls, walked over and held out his hand. The smaller towns of the previous week had been almost entirely free of beggars, but Kashgar, like Xi’an and Shanghai had its compliment. This boy looked far too well dressed to be a beggar but we gave him the bun anyway. He ran off, looking remarkably pleased with something so unappetising.

The Chinese Silk Road

Introduction: The Silk Road in China
Prelude: Shanghai
1 Xi'an
2 Jiayuguan: A Total Eclipse and the Last Fortress under Heaven
3 Dunhuang: Dunes in the Gobi
4 Turpan: Ruined Cities of the Silk Road
5 Kashgar (1):  The Sunday Market and the Former British Consulate
6 Kashgar (2): Upal, Abakh Hoja and the Old Town
7 Hotan (or Khotan or Hetian): City in the Desert
8 Urumqi: A By-word for Remoteness
Postscript