Pictures by André Eichman
WAR-WEARY KASHGARIS welcomed the ‘peaceful liberation’ of their city in China’s far west by the People’s Liberation Army in 1949. Years of civil war, inter-ethnic conflict between the Hui and Uighur Muslims and Han Chinese, the brutality of pro-Kuomintang warlord Sheng Shicai and the threat of expansion by the then Soviet Union had taken a heavy toll. Sixty years later, little is left of the ancient city of Kashgar that sat at the confluence of the great northern and southern Silk Roads. A pall of red dust now follows the bulldozers as they steadily demolish two millennia of history that ties East with West.
‘Our way of life is coming to an end,’ says an elderly Uighur woman, who asks that she not be named. Her head covered by an intricate white shawl, she clearly recalls the coming of the Communists – she was thirty-seven – and says in a hushed voice, fearful of being overheard, ‘From then on, our lives were never to be the same, for better or worse.’
She recalls electricity coming to the city in 1958, which transformed centuries-old traditions of work, and, ten years later, the Red Guards, who charged through the old lanes, tearing off women’s scarves, smashing ancient relics and mosques, burning books and pillaging homes. ‘We survived that,’ she says. ‘That was easy compared with what came next.’
In the 1980s, much of the ancient city wall – an imposing earthen structure standing ten metres high – was torn down and the city’s moat filled to make way for a ring road, from which the monotonous roar of cars and trucks is amplified by the blue-and-white patterned tiles that decorate this woman’s lifelong home.
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Architect and historian George Michell wrote in Kashgar: Oasis City on China’s Old Silk Road (2008) that Kashgar was ‘the best-preserved example of a traditional Islamic city to be found anywhere in Central Asia’. The city is also host to an extraordinary interplay of cultures, with the influences of Hinayana Buddhism evident in the artwork, music and dance of the Uighur people.
In 644, the travelling Chinese monk Xuanzang recorded not only the widespread practice of Buddhism, but also the vibrancy of Kashgar’s bazaar and the multi-ethnicity of its people, some with ‘blue eyes’ and ‘yellow hair’, perhaps of Sogdian or East Iranian origin. Manichaean and Zoroastrian influences and early Nestorian Christian practices also marked the city as it grew rich from trade in China’s silk and jade, and the furs, rugs and spices of Central Asia.
Kashgar is at the far western edge of the Xinjiang Uygur Automonous Region, which is larger than Western Europe and shares borders with eight countries. Due west from Kashgar is Tajikistan, to the northwest is Kyrgyzstan, and southwest, along the soaring Karakoram Highway that passes K2, lie Afghanistan, Jammu and Kashmir, and Pakistan.
The city first came to prominence in western minds around the end of the nineteenth century as the Russian and British empires squared off for supremacy in Central Asia, London and Moscow each convinced of the other’s diabolical intent. It was ‘The Great Game’, as the two empires engaged in regional bluff and counter-bluff, with both Russia and Britain mounting hazardous expeditions to Tibet to enlist its feudal support. Kashgar was a vital listening post and both maintained consulates. Explorer and adventurer Peter Fleming recorded in his dramatic 1936 travelogue News from Tartary: ‘The [British] Consulate was a pleasant house with a lovely garden, standing on a bluff outside the city. From its terrace you looked across the green and chequered valley of a small river towards the too seldom visible mountains.’ The consulate is now a restaurant at the back of a drab hotel built in the neo-Soviet style well within the sprawling city limits, the views urban grey, ‘the green and chequered valley’ a vast expanse of concrete.
Most Uighur claim descent from the Uighur kingdom of Karabalghasan, which was conquered by Kyrgyz tribesmen in 840 and now lies in Mongolia. The Uighur fled south and dispersed among the oasis towns surrounding the Taklamakan desert before establishing Turpan as their new capital and Kashgar as one of their most important trading centres. The regularity of the caravan trade between the oases of Marv, Balkh, Bukhara, Samarkand, Kashgar, Turpan, and Khotan, and from the distant European and Asian capitals, placed Kashgar in a central role. The city flourished as an economic broker and cultural mediator until the coming of the Mongol hordes in the twelfth century.
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‘Because many houses were built privately without any approval, the life of residents is not convenient and the capability against earthquakes and fire is weak,’ says a report in the local state-run newspaper. ‘Our target is every family has a house, every family has employed members and the economy will be developed.’
Since 1949 Xinjiang has been of strategic importance to Beijing, for its minerals and as a buffer with the former USSR and India, and the erasure of Kashgar’s heritage is not a new phenomenon; in recent decades the city has been populated with the indistinguishable white-tiled accommodation blocks found throughout urban China.
‘What do [the Han] know about desert life?’ asks the elderly Uighur woman, waving a small wrinkled hand dismissively and patting the hard-packed earthen wall behind her. ‘We know how to live in the desert. These walls are cool in summer and warm in winter.’ No matter; the authorities announced earlier this year that eighty-five per cent of what remains of the Old City will be razed.
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Kashgar is closer to the Mediterranean Sea than to Beijing; it has always looked and felt the least Chinese city in the Middle Kingdom, but with the influx of Han, the legendary Silk Road city in the shadows of the Pamir mountains is being transformed into just one more sterile utilitarian centre.
‘They might be able to bulldoze our houses, but not our culture,’ a carpet seller on the edge of the Old City says. At his feet is a black brick path, worn down and polished by time. New, hexagonal-shaped bricks mark the path of progress, as old adobe-style homes – some standing more than five hundred years and with walls nearly a metre thick, behind which hides often splendid Turkic opulence and intricate courtyards – are replaced with uniform brick-and-tile structures.
Mark Smith, who organises tours of Xinjiang, says, ‘Kashgar has not been a true Uighur city for more than twenty years. Soon it will just be a smaller version of the provincial capital, Urumqi, a staid set of identical, uninspiring concrete boxes.’
The afternoon arrival of a wrecking ball usually means that by next morning, another quarter-hectare of history has been reduced to rubble. Police are on hand to restrain angry Uighur, one of whom wails, ‘Why? Why?’
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The railway came to Kashgar from Urumqi in 1999, cutting the more than 1,500 kilometre, thirty-six-hour bone-jolting journey by bus to a relatively sedate train ride of twenty-four hours, the Tienshan mountain range on one side and the Taklamakan, one of the world’s cruellest deserts, on the other. The train is staffed by Chinese, the constant piped music is Chinese, the signs are in Chinese, the food is Chinese and the passengers, almost to a man, are Chinese.
Xinjiang as a whole has seen huge Han immigration. Ethnic minorities make up less than ten per cent of China’s 1.3 billion people, but the autonomous regions, led by Xinjiang and Tibet, account for sixty per cent of the land mass. Xinjiang also accounts for nearly three-quarters of China’s mineral wealth. In the 1950s, Mao Zedong formed the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a vast organisation that can claim to be the world’s largest company, employing about three million people and effectively controlling a geographical area the size of Scotland. Han migration has been an important component of its operations and an estimated fifty-five million Han will settle in the region between 2000 and 2025.
In Kashgar stands a white marble statue of the Great Helmsman, arm aloft. It is the second-largest statue of Mao in all of China. In the unrelenting sun, it casts a large shadow. Around it, the signage proclaims: ‘Follow the Communist Party for 10,000 years’, ‘Give up superstition, embrace science, embrace modernity’, ‘The many peoples of China are one: Hate separatism from the Motherland’.
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Once a glory of the Silk Road, Kashgar’s bazaar – now the Kashgar International Trade Market of Central and Western Asia – carries on the city’s commercial traditions: intricate, rich red carpets from Turkmenistan; handcrafted Uighur guitars; pointed felt hats from Tajikistan; almost luminescent spices from Pakistan; Afghans, Russians, Kyrgyz and Uzbeks, haggling and hawking.
Down an alley of maze-like stalls, a sack of flour is emptied onto a table; a fist sinks a well at its centre, into which goes a handful of salt and a large bowl of water. The flour is gently folded in on itself and a pair of hands mashes the mixture, strong fingers kneading the dough, more water, more kneading. There is a poster of the mosque of Medina on the wall of the stall.
Den Den, a man of middle age, pushes the mixture to the side of the table, some oil is splashed onto the shiny-smooth wooden surface, and the dough is rolled back, kneaded again. He repeats the process twice more, and pumps the dough with a technique usually associated with restarting a stopped heart. He spreads the dough and folds it back into itself, spreads and folds, spreads and folds. It is then covered and left to rest for tomorrow’s noodles.
Den Den takes the dough from yesterday and begins to roll it back and forth across the table until it is a metre long, stretching and folding, swinging the rope of dough in an arc through the air, pinching off a section and swinging again, coating the thin strands with a little flour on his table to keep them separate before chopping off a handful and dropping them hissing into a cauldron of boiling water for just a minute or two.
He serves today’s noodles in a steaming soup of lamb, an Uighur staple, flavoured with garlic, cabbage, onions, tomatoes, chilli and aubergine. A nearby stall is serving glistening lamb skewers on naan. They both provide a glorious and fragrant local tea, rose petals combining with the dark, smoky leaves.
On the way out of the bazaar is a small shop selling pasta machines made by Jia Yong Ya Mian Ji. Ticket price Rmb65. Just over half that after haggling.
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The Old City had no running water until a decade ago, but already the old lanes and courtyard homes were proving a hindrance to the dramatic changes sweeping the country. In the big cities of Beijing and Shanghai, the residential hutongs are being ploughed into the ground to make way for gleaming commercial buildings, shopping malls or high-priced residential projects the former occupants of innumerable lanes could never afford. So, too, with Kashgar. Redevelopment reached the Id Kah Mosque in 2002; the bazaar and old residences in front of the mosque were replaced by a broad, dull square flanked by undistinguished commercial buildings. ‘If they could touch [the mosque], well, we knew nothing was sacred in their eyes,’ the old woman says. ‘We knew then that it would only be a matter of time before they came knocking our way.’ Her home has a red ‘X’ daubed on its outside wall.
Along her lane, a teenager makes stuttering attempts to control his rollerblades as they skip over the rough-hewn brick. Toddlers sit on a doorstep, picture-postcard cute in handmade clothing, Uighur motifs woven into the fabric. A girl, no older than nine, steps away from a group of friends and asks the foreigner, ‘What you do in Kashgar?’ Her eyes are the colour of emeralds. ‘You have come at the right time,’ she says, adding with a sweep of her hand. ‘Tomorrow – all gone.’
Everywhere is the noise of traffic from the broad thoroughfare that cuts through the heart of Kashgar. It is called Liberation Road.
