Why are these Chinese people speaking Arabic? It was 2008, and passing by a restaurant in Beijing I glimpsed a TV show with what looked like Arabic subtitles and became very confused. This was in fact my first encounter with Uyghurs speaking their language Uyghur, which is written using Arabic letters. From afar, China had seemed like a very homogenous country. It wasn't until that summer in Beijing and the Olympics opening ceremony when China paraded out its 55 official ethnic minority groups that I learned about the diversity of this huge country.
The next summer, ethnic tensions flared into deadly riots in Urumqi. I watched from afar as pictures of citizens wielding hammers and knives on each other circulated, and heavy Han Chinese military presence moved in like an occupying army. The historical and racial dynamics transpiring out both fascinated and terrified me. The Uyghurs claimed that the Chinese were actively Sinicizing the area with an air of racial supremacy. The Chinese countered that they were bringing technological advancements into the area that gave the Xinjiang greater economic development than neighbors in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan. Both arguments are well-founded.
It was impossible for me to enter Xinjiang with an open mind. My liberal American value system far outstripped any sort of Pan-Chinese ethnic unity. However I have been living in the East for a while, and my outrage at the PRC oppression of Muslim minorities was chastened by my nation-neutral awareness of western hypocrisy. Xinjiang is unequivocally a modern Chinese colony, with its people and resources abused by a far away ruling power. But so are the Americas also stolen land from indigenous people, with the lack of outrage resulting not from good governance, but because the indigenous injured have been so decimated and assimilated. This doesn't excuse modern Chinese policies - limiting religious expression, encouraging Han migration to diffuse Uyghur culture and maintaining economic policies to keep a Chinese upper class - but it does make me pause before pointing one finger out and three fingers back at me.
Political backdrop aside, sitting in Guangzhou airport clutching a ticket with DESTN: URUMQI highlighted, an apprehension reared up that I hadn't felt in ages. It was befuddling - after traveling alone for over two months, now I was getting boarding jitters. Gone were the young European backpackers out to have some adventures. In Southeast Asia, nearly every destination came with a bus route and a dozen recommendations, but now I was jetting off alone entirely on my own initiative, to a land that had seen many foreign travellers in ancient times but far less in modern times. On one hand, these butterflies in my stomach were oddly refreshing. They reminded me of how I felt before I spent my first significant time abroad eight years ago, back when I was easily amazed by simple wonders. Since then I've spent too much time with people who unconsciously display their worldliness by acting matter-of-factly with new places.
We flew across the vast Gobi desert, which historically has been responsible for so much of the geopolitical history of the region and the intermittent relationship between the Han Chinese people and the Uyghur people. The sheer difficulty of journeying across deserts and mountains resulted in only the stablest of Chinese Dynasties interested in relations with their western neighbors. The Han Dynasty kicked off trade along the Silk Road, the Tang Dynasty resumed and furthered it, and the Mongolian Empire (Yuan Dynasty) facilitated it. It was really the Qing Dynasty though that extended Chinese territorial domain to Xinjiang, forming the basis for China's current self-proclaimed geographic mandate. I am certainly not alone in believing that Xinjiang and Tibet are not traditional lands of the Chinese people, but the PRC works hard to spin history to match their political agenda.
*****
Urumqi is a majority Han Chinese city, and the arrival experience at the airport felt like previous arrivals in Chinese airports. It is not nearly as old as the city I would fly into the following day. At the taxi line being hounded by black cab (unlicensed cars) drivers, I found myself unintentionally engaging in racial profiling - I'm not sure what it says that I was thrilled that my first cab driver in Urumqi was Uyghur. He initiated conversation by asking me where I was from, in strongly-accented Mandarin that unexpectedly sounded a lot like an American exchange student. "你是什么国家人？" We conversed about what he knew of America (very little), his travels outside Xinjiang (Beijing and Shanghai), his experience with other foreigners (entirely Russians and Kazakhs) and commerce in the city (more and more prosperous). He willingly teaches me a bunch of basic Uyghur words, most of which I've already looked up on omniglot but have never heard pronounced. "Rakhmat" he says, with a deep and guttural kh sound that I struggle to replicate. "谢谢。Thank you." "Men. 我。Sen.你。" We pull up in the middle of a crowded, dirty, poorly lit intersection and my driver takes another look at the address written in Chinese. "是这个。" This is it. At first glance I only see a despondent office building which looks like it couldn't gain a single LEED credit, but upon reading the upper level signs I realize my hotel is hidden somewhere above the 15th floor.
*****
Urumqi is the major city closest to the pole of inaccessibility, the point on this planet's landmasses that is furthest from any ocean. Yes despite the heavily populated coastal regions, China's borders also contain some very inland areas. Its latitude is around that of Portland, Maine which presented quite a shock to my body having flown in from Singapore, right at the equator. I was packed for a couple months of Southeast Asia backpacking, but amazingly I was able to scrounge together enough layers to not freeze. My underarmor proves extremely clutch underneath four layers of fleeces and shirts as I explore central Urumqi, where clumps of dirty snow still gathered on the sidewalks in late March.
Wikitravel had been a great guide throughout my travels but the wisdom of the crowds appeared to dissipate in Xinjiang. The article for Urumqi is noticeably less informative and grammatical as the one for Luang Prabang. I only have a morning to explore though and I choose to seek Erdaoqiao Bazaar. I read Rob Gifford's China Road as pre-trip research. Gifford visited Urumqi twice and was shocked to discover the second time around that this bazaar had been transformed from an incredible traditional Islamic market to an awful generic Chinese faux cultural block. Still, Wikitravel reports that the "surrounding area is the heart of the traditional Uyghur community" so I feel like it's worth a couple hours rather than my next best alternative, a hike up Red Mountain. The Erdaoqiao Bazaar actually looks quite interesting, with decorative Islamic arches spanning the upper level and a huge screen broadcasting loud Uyghur language programming. If I hadn't known it was "fake," built because of top-level Chinese directives, I would have thought it was a cool modern take on a traditional market. The doors were still locked, leaving me to meander through the surrounding streets, shivering.
And what cool meandering this was. Massive smoky metal ovens churned out discs of naan while everywhere people were at work skewering raw lamb. I passed by numerous mosques with crescent tipped points towering into the sky. At one point I turned the corner and faced a stack of giant carpets and spent a moment in genuine wonderment expecting one to curl up and hover. I searched for the Tartar Mosque, supposedly at the southern end of Jiefang Road where I currently was. I found a couple of mosques in the area but they were rather unremarkable and didn't seem to match. Asking bystanders was met with confused responses. With a bit of guesswork and luck I found a large ornate mosque to the south of the Jiefang Road.
I caught a taxi back to the hotel. Even before asking, I suspected that my driver was from somewhere in Dongbei, Northeast China. In her thick accent, she told me she had been in Urumqi for 30 years and quite liked it. She seemed like a kind good natured woman. I offhandedly asked her if she had many Uyghur friends. "MEI YOU" she replied unexpectedly aggressively. No Uyghur friends. I was caught completely offguard. "There are communication problems," she elaborated. "Really? I've been able to talk to Uyghurs here, and your Mandarin is much better than mine," I replied. "They just don't understand us," and she left it at that. This perceived lack of communication both baffled and troubled me, as every Uyghur I met in my brief time in Urumqi had no trouble speaking Mandarin. I took a different look at her. She was most likely not highly educated and not received much cultural enlightenment. Perhaps I was experiencing the equivalent of asking a racist white driver in West Virginia if he had any black friends. Perhaps this isn't a fair comparison. Either way, it reminded that a progressive China was so very far away.
*****
In Kashgar, I settled into my former-Russian-consulate-turned-hotel, then quickly set out on foot towards the old town. My phone was a jumble of applications slow to load because of the wifi and applications that won’t load because of the Great Firewall. The Firewall has been beefed up significantly in the past years, now fully swallowing Google Maps, so for the first time in this 21st century Asian odyssey, I ask for a map.
The roads surrounding my hotel were unremarkable, just low density Chinese streets, until I walked past a clearing and glimpsed the old city wall, and a stable of camels quietly placed in front. Unexpected. The city wall was crumbling and surrounded by modern developments - while tall, it was remarkably unremarkable. The Old Town had a few actual marked entrances leading off into very different, triangularly tiled meandering paths. The lanes were quiet, with a few kids playing and the odd motorcycle humming by. Knee deep into the old town, I realized I'd never been anywhere like this. That's the simplest way I could summarize my experience. We don't get exposed to a lot of Central Asian culture in the United States. We hear about the Russians to the northwest, the Chinese to the east, the Indians to the south and the Persians to the southwest - we even went to war in nearby Afghanistan. Ironically the people in the middle of so much cultural development are eventually drowned out by those from the fringes. This position at the junction of so many civilizations very much shapes the city, as well as the lens I used to view it.
The Silk Road was not a road, but more like a series of routes that facilitated transcontinental trade from around 100 BCE to AD 1450. It obviously covered a lot of ground, but if you were to associate any one city with it, it would probably be Kashgar.
It is as close to the geographic center of the trade domain as you could pick, with routes leaving the city to the northwest, southeast and northeast. Trade items passing through the city included silk, jade, gold, frankincense, myrrh and religion carried by people from China, Arabia, Persia, Armenia, India, Tibet and many other Turkic or Indo-European people from the region.
In Kashgar I grasped around for memories in other places that can help me understand this place. The mosques and stately minarets were like elsewhere in the Islamic world, the lawless motorcycle driving like in Southeast Asia, and the chaotic outdoor market where Bluetooth sets were sold next to naan bread stands reminded me of India. There were herbal tea shops, meat butchered and hung out in the open air, buns steaming outside in baskets, and alleyways that conjured up cousins in Lijiang or Xianggelila. And there were some obvious signs of modern China, the white metal road barriers, the double strip of yellow rubber tiles on the sidewalk, the ubiquitous propaganda. But really nowhere I've visited really connected. The closest experience I could really compare with was actually a series of photographs I saw documenting the Russian Far East in the early 20th century (link). I wasn't expecting this obscure memory to resonate, but the silk babushka scarves, the thick wool hats, the timeless but plain stonework, the hand crafting and the aged Eurasian features all echo here. Kashgar did not feel like a Chinese city - and I hope it never does.
*****
I had to resist the urge staring at every face. Growing up in a society where we are taught to demarcate between white, black, Asian and Hispanic, people who defy categorization fascinated me. Central Asians are often described as a mix between Caucasians and Asians, and certainly I found many features that did look halfway between East and West. What surprised me was the diversity of the people. There were people that looked straight up Russian, and others who were darker than many Indians. I summoned up the courage to ask many of these people if they were Uyghur, and they all said yes. There were others who looked more Chinese, and some who looked rather Arab. Overall though, most people did not look half-white half-Chinese - their features were simply unique. Sometimes we forget that human appearances cannot be broken down into constituent parts.
*****
All roads in the Old Town lead to corners of a main square, with China's largest mosque the Id Kah Mosque situated at the head. Some modern trappings include a very touristy set of camel statues, a knockoff KFC, and neon strips highlighting the arches of a few major buildings. The square was not overly touristy though, due to the fact that there were almost no tourists. On my first day, I saw no westerners save for one German family, and less than two dozen odd Chinese acting like tourists. The stores selling kitschy souvenirs were untrafficked, while people actually engaged in real commerce next door, purchasing socks and hats. Kids ran around the square yelling and flying kites, reminding me of the book The Kite Runner. The book is set in Kabul, but the movie was actually filmed in Kashgar. For some reason, filming in Afghanistan has been difficult in the 21st century, and Old Town Kashgar 500 miles away is apparently as well-preserved a Central Asian Islamic city as exists. Walking around the stone and dirt streets, I felt like I had entered a time warp. So many factors in the Old Town combined to create a 19th century atmosphere - the lack of motorized transport, the market bartering, outdoor craftwork and an incredibly low proliferation of modern clothing. My just wearing jeans was enough to stand out as a 21st century time traveler (basically no one mistook me for being Uyghur).
I turned the corner on a quiet residential alley and saw a grey wooden ladder leading onto the flat roof of a house. I immediately thought of Aladdin running through being chased by palace guards. Back out into the larger streets, a bunch of middle-aged men chatted while one of them hammered on an iron pot on an anvil. I stopped and stared at him work. I didn't know that anyone anywhere still made pots by hand, especially in this country with more factories creating these sort of goods than any other. He couldn't possibly be doing this for tourism reasons, because there is no tourism.
This New York Times article detailed a trip to Kashgar in 1994. It's amazing how much of the account matches my experience in 2016. In a country where cities are changing exponentially, I'm stunned that I've found a place so frozen in time.
*****
The pilgrim monk Xuanzang, the leader of the pack in Journey to the West, went through Kashgar on his return trip from India in 640. Marco Polo came by around 1273. Xuanzang used a Sanskrit name for the city, Srikrirati, which the Chinese than obliterated in transliteration to Shule. Marco Polo called it Cascar. Though they came so many years apart, Kashgar was a major oasis trade center, by far the most magnificent city around, throughout this time frame. When Xuanzang came by, the area was probably Indo-European speaking, but the region had become Uyghur speaking by the time Marco Polo stopped by. I wonder if there remain any single stone on which these two travelers may have stepped. Probably not. (I have walked across the Lugou Qiao, or the Marco Polo Bridge, where Marco and I probably have shared stepping stones) Kashgar still feels like an old town, but was this main square even here during the Silk Road heyday? Xuanzang and Marco were both very multilingual, and probably could have communicated to the inhabitants here. I wonder if I could have communicated to either one. Xuanzang's Tang dynasty Chinese is the common ancestor of modern Mandarin and Cantonese, but probably largely unintelligible. I also have a basic grasp of ancient Latin and modern Italian, which might average out into Polo's medieval Venetian? There probably would have been a lot of hand gesturing going around.
*****
On the topic of communication, Mandarin ability among the Uyghurs ranges greatly, especially in Kashgar. One salesman told me "Zooey pianyi!" It took me a minute to realize he was butchering zui pianyi, or "cheapest price." Incredible. Do the Uyghurs learn Mandarin from reading Pinyin with English pronunciation rules, just like first year American students?
An entire restaurant staff didn't understand Mai Dan. I've never been anywhere in China where Maidan wasn't understood. I then said "check please," and the waiter returned with a pot of tea.
The English writing is universally terrible, which is hard to excuse in this age of decent machine translation. The writing on the "Fregrant Comcubine Tomb" looks like a google translate printout, from several versions ago with typos thrown in. It ends with "the German journal Bright Mirror goes: love between this Uygur maid and the emperor is evidence for greatunity among different ethnic groups in China. This structure is ranked as a key cultural relic unit under the protection of Xinjiang Uygur people's government."
Walking down the old town streets, almost everything was closed. I found one restaurant that seemed slightly open, but a woman stands right in front of me before I enter. She seems stunned and inadvertently blocking me, like I was a health inspector. I asked, "Can I sit?" and everyone immediately became more polite and pointed me to a table opposite a little kid slurping noodles. "Do you have a menu?" I asked. The waiter pointed to a piece of paper stuck on the wall with 8 lines in Uyghur. I looked back to him haplessly and he informed me, "We have two foods. 拉面，炒面. Pulled noodles, stir-fried noodles."
I checked my WeChat photos and found one of the guys watching over my shoulder. He asked/exclaimed that the photos were of Kashgar. I told him I was a tourist from the US, and we started a basic conversation. When he asked me something more complicated, I couldn't understand. He shook his head and started speaking in Uyghur, and I thought he'd given up until I realized he's talking to the kid. The kid looked up from his noodles and asked me, "你在美国干什么？" I'm flabbergasted. His accent was flawless. I'd not talked to a single 7 year old kid since I started traveling because none of
them could speak English. I asked, "gong zuo? Occupation?" The guy nodded. I decided not to say I was an unemployed aspiring data scientist, and simply said gong cheng. I expected to have to explain this as “make buildings”, but amazingly the kid translated immediately. I'm not sure if he really understood me, I had no conception of engineering at the age of 7, but I didn't press the point. I continued conversing with the restaurant staff, with the kid serving as a very disinterested translator. They asked me all these questions about America, like what's the weather like, that only made sense if you thought of America as a single place. I told them that like China, the US is large and diverse. I showed them the pictures I had on my phone of US and Hong Kong, and could only imagine the reference points they used to perceive these far off lands. “Nice car!” the kid exclaimed in a picture of DC townhouses. I hadn’t even noticed a car at all, but sure enough a BMW was parked in the foreground.
I asked them if they'd ever had a Han Chinese customer in the restaurant before. The staff shook their head emotionlessly. I honestly wasn't expecting this response. This restaurant was on a street just blocks from the main square. The Old Town was very much Uyghur area, but I would have thought at least one Chinese tourist would have grabbed a lamb skewer and sat down inside at some point over the years. "Rakhmat," I said leaving. Of all the times I've learned bits and pieces of a foreign language, never had I elicited greater smiles.
*****
I was doing a lot of walking and not a lot of drinking. I'd never been more isolated from drinking establishments in my life. Even though the Uyghurs are very devout Muslims, Chinese law prevails in town and there is nothing forbidding alcohol. I could walk down the Old Town streets drinking out of open bottles if I didn't mind antagonizing everyone around. However it seemed that an understanding had been reached and even in the Chinese parts of town, there was not the same open-Tsingtao-bottles-on-the-sidewalk culture as you'd find elsewhere in China.
LonelyPlanet directed me to Karakorum Cafe, which was closed, and Wikitravel told me of John's Bar in the "ancient british consulate." I make my way to the hotel that had also taken over this site and asked for John's Bar. I was met by an utterly flummoxed concierge. The hotel was uncharacteristically high-end, but after consulting with three other staffers, no one could direct me to a bar. I asked them where the old British consulate is, learned that the original building was just around the corner, but that I didn't want to go there. Ignoring their advice, I made my way in darkness to an empty old building, looking certainly haunted. Undoubtedly those ghosts may have had some amazing stories, but they were unlikely to have any beer for me.
I walked into a fancier restaurant looking for a bar. The first person I spoke to recoiled in fear and referred me to another waiter, who then referred me to yet a third waiter. This waiter then pointed outside and said quzhu. Minutes of wrangled communication ensued before I realized he was saying chuzu and telling me to take a taxi to a bar.
*****
We learned a bit about the Great Game in school, the political match between the British and Russian Empires for control over Central Asia. This explains the former Russian and British Consulates here. I never knew that China played a role in this game as well, and ultimately the crucial role in Kashgar's fate. Kashgar has been ruled by a lot of different nations over its history, and one of the last non-Chinese ruler in the 1870s was this opportunistic Tajik named Yaqub Beg whom Wikipedia just calls an "adventurer." By now, sea routes had replaced the Silk Road and westerners would attract a lot of attention in Kashgar. Yaqub Beg was coy with the great powers, playing them off each other. Eventually the Russians backed away and he tried to appeal to the British, but before any alliances materialized, the Qing Dynasty armies swooped in and deposed him.
***
If you visit Kashgar, try to be there for a Sunday, when people from all over the region gather to an enormous livestock market outside the city. There are probably four nationalities present trading four species - cattle, sheep, goats and a few packs of camels. I planned to wake up earlier and grab a taxi to the market before 11, and alertly responded to my alarm at 9:30. China is weird though in its insistence on one time zone. Kashgar is the westernmost city in China, more than 2 time zones behind Beijing, and thus the place in the world most screwed by illogical time zoning. Official "Beijing Time" was still used, but people utilized a local time two hours back for basic affairs. The sky was unusually bright that morning, and upon checking the time in different world cities, I realized that my phone had overnight somehow switched from Beijing time to informal Kashgar time, and what I thought was 9:30 Beijing/7:30 Local was actually 11:30 Beijing/9:30 Local. Scrambling my many layers of clothing together, I hurried to the lobby and ran into Abdul, the founder of a local tour company and one of two fluent English/Uyghur speakers I found in the city. "Going to the livestock market? I'm about to go myself to take pictures for my website." I jumped in the car with him and an older driver named Irkhan.
It's hard to say whether the Livestock Market is crazier because of the people or the animals. On the massive flat dirt field off the side of the road, organized chaos stretched to the horizon, making it difficult for me to gauge numbers. The coats of the cattle and sheep ran the greyscale gamut with some brown in the mix. The livestock were tied with gentle ropes to sticks running down the market, while trucks would drive down in between and offload new cargo. Cattle were forcefully pulled down from the pickup trucks, but that did not compare at all to the challenging and often brutal upload process. I saw a truck driver overly optimistic about how many cattle he could drive away, and after much convincing of a reluctant cow, managed to fold her legs and squeeze her in with 7 other cows. It was udder madness. The market was at once both pandemonium and systematic - though the absence of signs and price tags left me confused, the challenging logistics of gathering all these farmers and livestock from miles away were made to look easy.
Amidst the bleats, baas and moos, a dozen or so camels had a row in the back of the market. They were fairly neglected, allowing me an opportunity to take a decent camel selfie, and I wondered what their use was to modern farmers. Surely they were no longer used for long range transport - perhaps they had more touristic end goals? It appeared that people may have been bartering livestock for livestock, but I also saw stacks of red Chairman Mao's in the mix. How odd it seemed to me that the man from Hunan was watching over the sales of goats between Uyghurs and Kyrgyz people in this field in Central Asia? I asked Abdul if he owned any livestock, not sure if this was even an appropriate question. He shrugged and said, “yeah, my family in the north have about 40 sheep. And a few cows.”
*****
The Old Town can maybe be walked in 20 minutes, if you walk quickly, which is difficult because of all there is to see. A bustling multi-lane modern road cuts it in half, under which tunnels lined with stores facilitate pedestrian traffic. A ring road essentially surrounds this main part of town, and another one around the greater urban area. Going south from the Old Town you reach the main east-west artery of Renmin Road, which is full of both new stores and street fruit vendors, with lots of Uyghur-Han commercial exchange. A bit further south though and Uyghur signs disappear almost entirely, and the area quickly transforms into a generic Chinese city downtown. Minarets vanish from view, replaced by Communist-style housing blocks with characters like 天南尚居 jutting into the sky. The city hall is on the south side of Renmin Road, situated behind a giant square that looks an awful lot like Tiananmen Square, with the red Chinese flag waving over everything. On the opposite of Renmin Road is a colossal concrete statue of Chairman Mao resting atop a colossal concrete block, reaching a height of 24m. The symbolism of placing such a large statue of a Chinese figure here is very in-your-face and a technique the British employed in many of their colonies. For maybe the first time in my life, I felt poignant Yellow Guilt. I felt pain for the attitudes and policies of people of my ethnicity, regardless of my lack of connection with the directly culpable.
I felt like I was traveling with a cheat code. This Central Asian culture with its bizarre bazaars should be off limits to me. Yet through a geopolitical quirk, the people of Xinjiang could speak Chinese, and even had adopted some Chinese mannerisms. Accustomed though I was to foreigners speaking Mandarin, I was still continually mindblown by seeing a mass of people casually dropping “aiyas” and “bukeqi” around.
The Chinese part of town had familiar supermarkets, bakeries and a very appealing hot pot restaurant. Uyghur food was great, but there wasn’t much variety beyond the noodles and lamb. Not many vegetables grow out in the desert. The hot pot place tempted me, but then I thought to myself I would have some great Chinese food in my next stop, Beijing. And in the stop after that. And for the rest of my life. I ate local again that night.
*****
I made out the words “Orange Street Bar” on the 2nd floor above street level behind some construction. Finally! My drunk slump was over. The bar was discreet, with no open windows or loud music seeping out. It was a Chinese-style sit down place with a karaoke stage. I ordered a Tsingdao and watched as a Han woman went onstage to perform. To my surprise, she opened with Sam Smith’s “Stay With Me.” When she finished and walked off, I approached her and told her, “Your English is great!” She instantly disproved me by asking, “pardon?” I translated my compliment, and she told me she loved singing in English but wasn’t quite comfortable conversing in it. She sat down and told me her story. She was from northern Xinjiang, but had moved here to teach music at a local elementary school. I asked her if she ever considered moving to the bigger cities out east, but she told me people of her 户口, registered residency, have a hard time finding jobs outside of Xinjiang. She told me all her students were Uyghur and that she could hold a basic conversation in Uyghur. “Most Chinese don’t want to. Relations aren’t very good,” she mentioned. From her tone I could tell she was an “ally”, doing her part to improve social issues. From the corner of my eye I saw a male manager gesture to her, and she abruptly said goodbye and left. I finished the beers by myself, reassured and glad I had this conversation.
*****
I hustled out for a run the next morning. Like every city I’ve been to in Asia, Kashgar did not accommodate for outdoor runners. I dodged sidewalk stalls and errant motorcycles, despite their dedicated lanes. Electric motorbikes dominated the scene, which was great for emissions and noise pollution but bad when I couldn’t hear them sneak up on me. As I ran past a park populated by playing children, a Han cop waved his hand at me. I warily made my way over, and he asked me what I was doing. Elsewhere in Asia, I had tried to hide my Americanness, but here with underlying racial dynamics, I pulled out my American card very hard. In English, I told him that I was a tourist and running. The cop asked in Chinese if I had ID. I told him I just had my hotel keycard and showed it to him. To my surprise, the cop inspected it carefully. A Uyghur cop joined in the fray and asked if I was a student. “No…I’m old..can I go now?” The Han cop gave me back my hotel key and I ran off. It seems this shakedown was more out of curiosity than anything else, but it never feels good to be pulled over by a cop for no reason.
****
Back at my compound, I found a sign for “John’s Information Service & Café.” It pointed to a very cluttered storage room. Apparently the café only opened during the summer – it didn’t make business sense to rely on the offseason patronage of the odd Chinese American alcoholic backpacker. I shrugged and set off for an exit in the back of the compound. Suddenly I glanced back and saw a pillared building….that looked suspiciously like a drinking establishment. What else was hidden in this former Russian compound? Dead bodies, AK47s and remnants of the Sino-Soviet split perhaps.
I returned to the suspected bar that night and found a club jumping so hot I couldn’t believed I only discovered it on my last night. All those blocks walked for a bar seemed pretty ill-conceived on hindsight, but such is life without GoogleMaps. Everyone inside was Uyghur. Aha! Perhaps the populace wasn’t as orthodox Muslim as I’d thought. A live band played traditional Uyghur music and the dance floor was very active. I nervously tiptoed to a table and scrolled through a menu of whiskey bottles, settling on two bottles of Stella Artois. The scene was so outlandish and dazzling that I never got properly grounded in my surroundings. The interior decoration included lamps and panels with intricate mosaic panels. Smoke and colored lights filtered the dance floor, while tables came standard with a hookah. All in all, the place was a pretty sweet venue.
I studied the dance floor closer though and saw that everyone looked at least a generation older than me, wearing what I can only describe as “granddad clothes.” Couples were dancing in pairs – a few women were dancing together. Something about the way they danced was odd though. After every song, they would break and file back to their seats, and the band would resume five or so minutes later. I looked around at the tables, studying the orange drink in the glasses, and suddenly I realized that quite possibly no one was drunk. The drinks may have all been tea or energy drinks. When the dancing resumed, I felt convinced that no one on that floor could possibly be inebriated. I felt ashamed for doubting the piety of these Kashgari Muslims. I briefly considered venturing onto the dance floor purely for the sake of this blog, then realized that there was nothing I’d less like to do, and hurried out of that place.
 |
| Not Arabic |
The next summer, ethnic tensions flared into deadly riots in Urumqi. I watched from afar as pictures of citizens wielding hammers and knives on each other circulated, and heavy Han Chinese military presence moved in like an occupying army. The historical and racial dynamics transpiring out both fascinated and terrified me. The Uyghurs claimed that the Chinese were actively Sinicizing the area with an air of racial supremacy. The Chinese countered that they were bringing technological advancements into the area that gave the Xinjiang greater economic development than neighbors in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan. Both arguments are well-founded.
It was impossible for me to enter Xinjiang with an open mind. My liberal American value system far outstripped any sort of Pan-Chinese ethnic unity. However I have been living in the East for a while, and my outrage at the PRC oppression of Muslim minorities was chastened by my nation-neutral awareness of western hypocrisy. Xinjiang is unequivocally a modern Chinese colony, with its people and resources abused by a far away ruling power. But so are the Americas also stolen land from indigenous people, with the lack of outrage resulting not from good governance, but because the indigenous injured have been so decimated and assimilated. This doesn't excuse modern Chinese policies - limiting religious expression, encouraging Han migration to diffuse Uyghur culture and maintaining economic policies to keep a Chinese upper class - but it does make me pause before pointing one finger out and three fingers back at me.
Political backdrop aside, sitting in Guangzhou airport clutching a ticket with DESTN: URUMQI highlighted, an apprehension reared up that I hadn't felt in ages. It was befuddling - after traveling alone for over two months, now I was getting boarding jitters. Gone were the young European backpackers out to have some adventures. In Southeast Asia, nearly every destination came with a bus route and a dozen recommendations, but now I was jetting off alone entirely on my own initiative, to a land that had seen many foreign travellers in ancient times but far less in modern times. On one hand, these butterflies in my stomach were oddly refreshing. They reminded me of how I felt before I spent my first significant time abroad eight years ago, back when I was easily amazed by simple wonders. Since then I've spent too much time with people who unconsciously display their worldliness by acting matter-of-factly with new places.
We flew across the vast Gobi desert, which historically has been responsible for so much of the geopolitical history of the region and the intermittent relationship between the Han Chinese people and the Uyghur people. The sheer difficulty of journeying across deserts and mountains resulted in only the stablest of Chinese Dynasties interested in relations with their western neighbors. The Han Dynasty kicked off trade along the Silk Road, the Tang Dynasty resumed and furthered it, and the Mongolian Empire (Yuan Dynasty) facilitated it. It was really the Qing Dynasty though that extended Chinese territorial domain to Xinjiang, forming the basis for China's current self-proclaimed geographic mandate. I am certainly not alone in believing that Xinjiang and Tibet are not traditional lands of the Chinese people, but the PRC works hard to spin history to match their political agenda.
*****
 |
| Bizarre |
Urumqi is a majority Han Chinese city, and the arrival experience at the airport felt like previous arrivals in Chinese airports. It is not nearly as old as the city I would fly into the following day. At the taxi line being hounded by black cab (unlicensed cars) drivers, I found myself unintentionally engaging in racial profiling - I'm not sure what it says that I was thrilled that my first cab driver in Urumqi was Uyghur. He initiated conversation by asking me where I was from, in strongly-accented Mandarin that unexpectedly sounded a lot like an American exchange student. "你是什么国家人？" We conversed about what he knew of America (very little), his travels outside Xinjiang (Beijing and Shanghai), his experience with other foreigners (entirely Russians and Kazakhs) and commerce in the city (more and more prosperous). He willingly teaches me a bunch of basic Uyghur words, most of which I've already looked up on omniglot but have never heard pronounced. "Rakhmat" he says, with a deep and guttural kh sound that I struggle to replicate. "谢谢。Thank you." "Men. 我。Sen.你。" We pull up in the middle of a crowded, dirty, poorly lit intersection and my driver takes another look at the address written in Chinese. "是这个。" This is it. At first glance I only see a despondent office building which looks like it couldn't gain a single LEED credit, but upon reading the upper level signs I realize my hotel is hidden somewhere above the 15th floor.
*****
Urumqi is the major city closest to the pole of inaccessibility, the point on this planet's landmasses that is furthest from any ocean. Yes despite the heavily populated coastal regions, China's borders also contain some very inland areas. Its latitude is around that of Portland, Maine which presented quite a shock to my body having flown in from Singapore, right at the equator. I was packed for a couple months of Southeast Asia backpacking, but amazingly I was able to scrounge together enough layers to not freeze. My underarmor proves extremely clutch underneath four layers of fleeces and shirts as I explore central Urumqi, where clumps of dirty snow still gathered on the sidewalks in late March.
Wikitravel had been a great guide throughout my travels but the wisdom of the crowds appeared to dissipate in Xinjiang. The article for Urumqi is noticeably less informative and grammatical as the one for Luang Prabang. I only have a morning to explore though and I choose to seek Erdaoqiao Bazaar. I read Rob Gifford's China Road as pre-trip research. Gifford visited Urumqi twice and was shocked to discover the second time around that this bazaar had been transformed from an incredible traditional Islamic market to an awful generic Chinese faux cultural block. Still, Wikitravel reports that the "surrounding area is the heart of the traditional Uyghur community" so I feel like it's worth a couple hours rather than my next best alternative, a hike up Red Mountain. The Erdaoqiao Bazaar actually looks quite interesting, with decorative Islamic arches spanning the upper level and a huge screen broadcasting loud Uyghur language programming. If I hadn't known it was "fake," built because of top-level Chinese directives, I would have thought it was a cool modern take on a traditional market. The doors were still locked, leaving me to meander through the surrounding streets, shivering.
 |
| Steamy |
And what cool meandering this was. Massive smoky metal ovens churned out discs of naan while everywhere people were at work skewering raw lamb. I passed by numerous mosques with crescent tipped points towering into the sky. At one point I turned the corner and faced a stack of giant carpets and spent a moment in genuine wonderment expecting one to curl up and hover. I searched for the Tartar Mosque, supposedly at the southern end of Jiefang Road where I currently was. I found a couple of mosques in the area but they were rather unremarkable and didn't seem to match. Asking bystanders was met with confused responses. With a bit of guesswork and luck I found a large ornate mosque to the south of the Jiefang Road.
I caught a taxi back to the hotel. Even before asking, I suspected that my driver was from somewhere in Dongbei, Northeast China. In her thick accent, she told me she had been in Urumqi for 30 years and quite liked it. She seemed like a kind good natured woman. I offhandedly asked her if she had many Uyghur friends. "MEI YOU" she replied unexpectedly aggressively. No Uyghur friends. I was caught completely offguard. "There are communication problems," she elaborated. "Really? I've been able to talk to Uyghurs here, and your Mandarin is much better than mine," I replied. "They just don't understand us," and she left it at that. This perceived lack of communication both baffled and troubled me, as every Uyghur I met in my brief time in Urumqi had no trouble speaking Mandarin. I took a different look at her. She was most likely not highly educated and not received much cultural enlightenment. Perhaps I was experiencing the equivalent of asking a racist white driver in West Virginia if he had any black friends. Perhaps this isn't a fair comparison. Either way, it reminded that a progressive China was so very far away.
*****
In Kashgar, I settled into my former-Russian-consulate-turned-hotel, then quickly set out on foot towards the old town. My phone was a jumble of applications slow to load because of the wifi and applications that won’t load because of the Great Firewall. The Firewall has been beefed up significantly in the past years, now fully swallowing Google Maps, so for the first time in this 21st century Asian odyssey, I ask for a map.
The roads surrounding my hotel were unremarkable, just low density Chinese streets, until I walked past a clearing and glimpsed the old city wall, and a stable of camels quietly placed in front. Unexpected. The city wall was crumbling and surrounded by modern developments - while tall, it was remarkably unremarkable. The Old Town had a few actual marked entrances leading off into very different, triangularly tiled meandering paths. The lanes were quiet, with a few kids playing and the odd motorcycle humming by. Knee deep into the old town, I realized I'd never been anywhere like this. That's the simplest way I could summarize my experience. We don't get exposed to a lot of Central Asian culture in the United States. We hear about the Russians to the northwest, the Chinese to the east, the Indians to the south and the Persians to the southwest - we even went to war in nearby Afghanistan. Ironically the people in the middle of so much cultural development are eventually drowned out by those from the fringes. This position at the junction of so many civilizations very much shapes the city, as well as the lens I used to view it.
The Silk Road was not a road, but more like a series of routes that facilitated transcontinental trade from around 100 BCE to AD 1450. It obviously covered a lot of ground, but if you were to associate any one city with it, it would probably be Kashgar.
In Kashgar I grasped around for memories in other places that can help me understand this place. The mosques and stately minarets were like elsewhere in the Islamic world, the lawless motorcycle driving like in Southeast Asia, and the chaotic outdoor market where Bluetooth sets were sold next to naan bread stands reminded me of India. There were herbal tea shops, meat butchered and hung out in the open air, buns steaming outside in baskets, and alleyways that conjured up cousins in Lijiang or Xianggelila. And there were some obvious signs of modern China, the white metal road barriers, the double strip of yellow rubber tiles on the sidewalk, the ubiquitous propaganda. But really nowhere I've visited really connected. The closest experience I could really compare with was actually a series of photographs I saw documenting the Russian Far East in the early 20th century (link). I wasn't expecting this obscure memory to resonate, but the silk babushka scarves, the thick wool hats, the timeless but plain stonework, the hand crafting and the aged Eurasian features all echo here. Kashgar did not feel like a Chinese city - and I hope it never does.
*****
I had to resist the urge staring at every face. Growing up in a society where we are taught to demarcate between white, black, Asian and Hispanic, people who defy categorization fascinated me. Central Asians are often described as a mix between Caucasians and Asians, and certainly I found many features that did look halfway between East and West. What surprised me was the diversity of the people. There were people that looked straight up Russian, and others who were darker than many Indians. I summoned up the courage to ask many of these people if they were Uyghur, and they all said yes. There were others who looked more Chinese, and some who looked rather Arab. Overall though, most people did not look half-white half-Chinese - their features were simply unique. Sometimes we forget that human appearances cannot be broken down into constituent parts.
*****
All roads in the Old Town lead to corners of a main square, with China's largest mosque the Id Kah Mosque situated at the head. Some modern trappings include a very touristy set of camel statues, a knockoff KFC, and neon strips highlighting the arches of a few major buildings. The square was not overly touristy though, due to the fact that there were almost no tourists. On my first day, I saw no westerners save for one German family, and less than two dozen odd Chinese acting like tourists. The stores selling kitschy souvenirs were untrafficked, while people actually engaged in real commerce next door, purchasing socks and hats. Kids ran around the square yelling and flying kites, reminding me of the book The Kite Runner. The book is set in Kabul, but the movie was actually filmed in Kashgar. For some reason, filming in Afghanistan has been difficult in the 21st century, and Old Town Kashgar 500 miles away is apparently as well-preserved a Central Asian Islamic city as exists. Walking around the stone and dirt streets, I felt like I had entered a time warp. So many factors in the Old Town combined to create a 19th century atmosphere - the lack of motorized transport, the market bartering, outdoor craftwork and an incredibly low proliferation of modern clothing. My just wearing jeans was enough to stand out as a 21st century time traveler (basically no one mistook me for being Uyghur).
I turned the corner on a quiet residential alley and saw a grey wooden ladder leading onto the flat roof of a house. I immediately thought of Aladdin running through being chased by palace guards. Back out into the larger streets, a bunch of middle-aged men chatted while one of them hammered on an iron pot on an anvil. I stopped and stared at him work. I didn't know that anyone anywhere still made pots by hand, especially in this country with more factories creating these sort of goods than any other. He couldn't possibly be doing this for tourism reasons, because there is no tourism.This New York Times article detailed a trip to Kashgar in 1994. It's amazing how much of the account matches my experience in 2016. In a country where cities are changing exponentially, I'm stunned that I've found a place so frozen in time.
*****
The pilgrim monk Xuanzang, the leader of the pack in Journey to the West, went through Kashgar on his return trip from India in 640. Marco Polo came by around 1273. Xuanzang used a Sanskrit name for the city, Srikrirati, which the Chinese than obliterated in transliteration to Shule. Marco Polo called it Cascar. Though they came so many years apart, Kashgar was a major oasis trade center, by far the most magnificent city around, throughout this time frame. When Xuanzang came by, the area was probably Indo-European speaking, but the region had become Uyghur speaking by the time Marco Polo stopped by. I wonder if there remain any single stone on which these two travelers may have stepped. Probably not. (I have walked across the Lugou Qiao, or the Marco Polo Bridge, where Marco and I probably have shared stepping stones) Kashgar still feels like an old town, but was this main square even here during the Silk Road heyday? Xuanzang and Marco were both very multilingual, and probably could have communicated to the inhabitants here. I wonder if I could have communicated to either one. Xuanzang's Tang dynasty Chinese is the common ancestor of modern Mandarin and Cantonese, but probably largely unintelligible. I also have a basic grasp of ancient Latin and modern Italian, which might average out into Polo's medieval Venetian? There probably would have been a lot of hand gesturing going around.
*****
On the topic of communication, Mandarin ability among the Uyghurs ranges greatly, especially in Kashgar. One salesman told me "Zooey pianyi!" It took me a minute to realize he was butchering zui pianyi, or "cheapest price." Incredible. Do the Uyghurs learn Mandarin from reading Pinyin with English pronunciation rules, just like first year American students?
An entire restaurant staff didn't understand Mai Dan. I've never been anywhere in China where Maidan wasn't understood. I then said "check please," and the waiter returned with a pot of tea.
The English writing is universally terrible, which is hard to excuse in this age of decent machine translation. The writing on the "Fregrant Comcubine Tomb" looks like a google translate printout, from several versions ago with typos thrown in. It ends with "the German journal Bright Mirror goes: love between this Uygur maid and the emperor is evidence for greatunity among different ethnic groups in China. This structure is ranked as a key cultural relic unit under the protection of Xinjiang Uygur people's government."
Walking down the old town streets, almost everything was closed. I found one restaurant that seemed slightly open, but a woman stands right in front of me before I enter. She seems stunned and inadvertently blocking me, like I was a health inspector. I asked, "Can I sit?" and everyone immediately became more polite and pointed me to a table opposite a little kid slurping noodles. "Do you have a menu?" I asked. The waiter pointed to a piece of paper stuck on the wall with 8 lines in Uyghur. I looked back to him haplessly and he informed me, "We have two foods. 拉面，炒面. Pulled noodles, stir-fried noodles."
I checked my WeChat photos and found one of the guys watching over my shoulder. He asked/exclaimed that the photos were of Kashgar. I told him I was a tourist from the US, and we started a basic conversation. When he asked me something more complicated, I couldn't understand. He shook his head and started speaking in Uyghur, and I thought he'd given up until I realized he's talking to the kid. The kid looked up from his noodles and asked me, "你在美国干什么？" I'm flabbergasted. His accent was flawless. I'd not talked to a single 7 year old kid since I started traveling because none of
I asked them if they'd ever had a Han Chinese customer in the restaurant before. The staff shook their head emotionlessly. I honestly wasn't expecting this response. This restaurant was on a street just blocks from the main square. The Old Town was very much Uyghur area, but I would have thought at least one Chinese tourist would have grabbed a lamb skewer and sat down inside at some point over the years. "Rakhmat," I said leaving. Of all the times I've learned bits and pieces of a foreign language, never had I elicited greater smiles.
*****
I was doing a lot of walking and not a lot of drinking. I'd never been more isolated from drinking establishments in my life. Even though the Uyghurs are very devout Muslims, Chinese law prevails in town and there is nothing forbidding alcohol. I could walk down the Old Town streets drinking out of open bottles if I didn't mind antagonizing everyone around. However it seemed that an understanding had been reached and even in the Chinese parts of town, there was not the same open-Tsingtao-bottles-on-the-sidewalk culture as you'd find elsewhere in China.
LonelyPlanet directed me to Karakorum Cafe, which was closed, and Wikitravel told me of John's Bar in the "ancient british consulate." I make my way to the hotel that had also taken over this site and asked for John's Bar. I was met by an utterly flummoxed concierge. The hotel was uncharacteristically high-end, but after consulting with three other staffers, no one could direct me to a bar. I asked them where the old British consulate is, learned that the original building was just around the corner, but that I didn't want to go there. Ignoring their advice, I made my way in darkness to an empty old building, looking certainly haunted. Undoubtedly those ghosts may have had some amazing stories, but they were unlikely to have any beer for me.
I walked into a fancier restaurant looking for a bar. The first person I spoke to recoiled in fear and referred me to another waiter, who then referred me to yet a third waiter. This waiter then pointed outside and said quzhu. Minutes of wrangled communication ensued before I realized he was saying chuzu and telling me to take a taxi to a bar.
*****
We learned a bit about the Great Game in school, the political match between the British and Russian Empires for control over Central Asia. This explains the former Russian and British Consulates here. I never knew that China played a role in this game as well, and ultimately the crucial role in Kashgar's fate. Kashgar has been ruled by a lot of different nations over its history, and one of the last non-Chinese ruler in the 1870s was this opportunistic Tajik named Yaqub Beg whom Wikipedia just calls an "adventurer." By now, sea routes had replaced the Silk Road and westerners would attract a lot of attention in Kashgar. Yaqub Beg was coy with the great powers, playing them off each other. Eventually the Russians backed away and he tried to appeal to the British, but before any alliances materialized, the Qing Dynasty armies swooped in and deposed him.
***
If you visit Kashgar, try to be there for a Sunday, when people from all over the region gather to an enormous livestock market outside the city. There are probably four nationalities present trading four species - cattle, sheep, goats and a few packs of camels. I planned to wake up earlier and grab a taxi to the market before 11, and alertly responded to my alarm at 9:30. China is weird though in its insistence on one time zone. Kashgar is the westernmost city in China, more than 2 time zones behind Beijing, and thus the place in the world most screwed by illogical time zoning. Official "Beijing Time" was still used, but people utilized a local time two hours back for basic affairs. The sky was unusually bright that morning, and upon checking the time in different world cities, I realized that my phone had overnight somehow switched from Beijing time to informal Kashgar time, and what I thought was 9:30 Beijing/7:30 Local was actually 11:30 Beijing/9:30 Local. Scrambling my many layers of clothing together, I hurried to the lobby and ran into Abdul, the founder of a local tour company and one of two fluent English/Uyghur speakers I found in the city. "Going to the livestock market? I'm about to go myself to take pictures for my website." I jumped in the car with him and an older driver named Irkhan.
It's hard to say whether the Livestock Market is crazier because of the people or the animals. On the massive flat dirt field off the side of the road, organized chaos stretched to the horizon, making it difficult for me to gauge numbers. The coats of the cattle and sheep ran the greyscale gamut with some brown in the mix. The livestock were tied with gentle ropes to sticks running down the market, while trucks would drive down in between and offload new cargo. Cattle were forcefully pulled down from the pickup trucks, but that did not compare at all to the challenging and often brutal upload process. I saw a truck driver overly optimistic about how many cattle he could drive away, and after much convincing of a reluctant cow, managed to fold her legs and squeeze her in with 7 other cows. It was udder madness. The market was at once both pandemonium and systematic - though the absence of signs and price tags left me confused, the challenging logistics of gathering all these farmers and livestock from miles away were made to look easy.
Amidst the bleats, baas and moos, a dozen or so camels had a row in the back of the market. They were fairly neglected, allowing me an opportunity to take a decent camel selfie, and I wondered what their use was to modern farmers. Surely they were no longer used for long range transport - perhaps they had more touristic end goals? It appeared that people may have been bartering livestock for livestock, but I also saw stacks of red Chairman Mao's in the mix. How odd it seemed to me that the man from Hunan was watching over the sales of goats between Uyghurs and Kyrgyz people in this field in Central Asia? I asked Abdul if he owned any livestock, not sure if this was even an appropriate question. He shrugged and said, “yeah, my family in the north have about 40 sheep. And a few cows.”
*****
The Old Town can maybe be walked in 20 minutes, if you walk quickly, which is difficult because of all there is to see. A bustling multi-lane modern road cuts it in half, under which tunnels lined with stores facilitate pedestrian traffic. A ring road essentially surrounds this main part of town, and another one around the greater urban area. Going south from the Old Town you reach the main east-west artery of Renmin Road, which is full of both new stores and street fruit vendors, with lots of Uyghur-Han commercial exchange. A bit further south though and Uyghur signs disappear almost entirely, and the area quickly transforms into a generic Chinese city downtown. Minarets vanish from view, replaced by Communist-style housing blocks with characters like 天南尚居 jutting into the sky. The city hall is on the south side of Renmin Road, situated behind a giant square that looks an awful lot like Tiananmen Square, with the red Chinese flag waving over everything. On the opposite of Renmin Road is a colossal concrete statue of Chairman Mao resting atop a colossal concrete block, reaching a height of 24m. The symbolism of placing such a large statue of a Chinese figure here is very in-your-face and a technique the British employed in many of their colonies. For maybe the first time in my life, I felt poignant Yellow Guilt. I felt pain for the attitudes and policies of people of my ethnicity, regardless of my lack of connection with the directly culpable.
I felt like I was traveling with a cheat code. This Central Asian culture with its bizarre bazaars should be off limits to me. Yet through a geopolitical quirk, the people of Xinjiang could speak Chinese, and even had adopted some Chinese mannerisms. Accustomed though I was to foreigners speaking Mandarin, I was still continually mindblown by seeing a mass of people casually dropping “aiyas” and “bukeqi” around.
The Chinese part of town had familiar supermarkets, bakeries and a very appealing hot pot restaurant. Uyghur food was great, but there wasn’t much variety beyond the noodles and lamb. Not many vegetables grow out in the desert. The hot pot place tempted me, but then I thought to myself I would have some great Chinese food in my next stop, Beijing. And in the stop after that. And for the rest of my life. I ate local again that night.
*****
I hustled out for a run the next morning. Like every city I’ve been to in Asia, Kashgar did not accommodate for outdoor runners. I dodged sidewalk stalls and errant motorcycles, despite their dedicated lanes. Electric motorbikes dominated the scene, which was great for emissions and noise pollution but bad when I couldn’t hear them sneak up on me. As I ran past a park populated by playing children, a Han cop waved his hand at me. I warily made my way over, and he asked me what I was doing. Elsewhere in Asia, I had tried to hide my Americanness, but here with underlying racial dynamics, I pulled out my American card very hard. In English, I told him that I was a tourist and running. The cop asked in Chinese if I had ID. I told him I just had my hotel keycard and showed it to him. To my surprise, the cop inspected it carefully. A Uyghur cop joined in the fray and asked if I was a student. “No…I’m old..can I go now?” The Han cop gave me back my hotel key and I ran off. It seems this shakedown was more out of curiosity than anything else, but it never feels good to be pulled over by a cop for no reason.
****
Back at my compound, I found a sign for “John’s Information Service & Café.” It pointed to a very cluttered storage room. Apparently the café only opened during the summer – it didn’t make business sense to rely on the offseason patronage of the odd Chinese American alcoholic backpacker. I shrugged and set off for an exit in the back of the compound. Suddenly I glanced back and saw a pillared building….that looked suspiciously like a drinking establishment. What else was hidden in this former Russian compound? Dead bodies, AK47s and remnants of the Sino-Soviet split perhaps.
I returned to the suspected bar that night and found a club jumping so hot I couldn’t believed I only discovered it on my last night. All those blocks walked for a bar seemed pretty ill-conceived on hindsight, but such is life without GoogleMaps. Everyone inside was Uyghur. Aha! Perhaps the populace wasn’t as orthodox Muslim as I’d thought. A live band played traditional Uyghur music and the dance floor was very active. I nervously tiptoed to a table and scrolled through a menu of whiskey bottles, settling on two bottles of Stella Artois. The scene was so outlandish and dazzling that I never got properly grounded in my surroundings. The interior decoration included lamps and panels with intricate mosaic panels. Smoke and colored lights filtered the dance floor, while tables came standard with a hookah. All in all, the place was a pretty sweet venue.
I studied the dance floor closer though and saw that everyone looked at least a generation older than me, wearing what I can only describe as “granddad clothes.” Couples were dancing in pairs – a few women were dancing together. Something about the way they danced was odd though. After every song, they would break and file back to their seats, and the band would resume five or so minutes later. I looked around at the tables, studying the orange drink in the glasses, and suddenly I realized that quite possibly no one was drunk. The drinks may have all been tea or energy drinks. When the dancing resumed, I felt convinced that no one on that floor could possibly be inebriated. I felt ashamed for doubting the piety of these Kashgari Muslims. I briefly considered venturing onto the dance floor purely for the sake of this blog, then realized that there was nothing I’d less like to do, and hurried out of that place.
