KASHI
Uyghur Please
Kashi sits in the far northwest, nestled against the Taklamakan Desert in the Xingjian Uyghur Autonomous Region. In its Silk Road heyday merchants converged on this oasis city from Central Asia and China on heavily-loaded, slow-moving caravans.
Travelling from the east in 2012, you’re much more likely to be viewing the baking expanses and sharp, scuffed-looking ranges through the window of a modern Chinese train. In place of spices and fabrics its load will be a mixture of Uyghurs--the region’s longtime ethnic minority--and the more familiar Han Chinese. The other Chinese name for Kashi is Kashgar and the two are used interchangeably. The Uyghur have their own name for the city, but you won’t find it on your ticket.
Language is only one point of distinction. Long before you hear or read it—sounding unmistakably un-Mandarin and written in Arabic-esque curls of ribbon dotted with grapes—you’ll notice other things:
Take the faces. Darker, sharper and Turkic-featured, the Uyghurs are hardly what springs to mind when most people think ‘Chinese’. Here the men sport thick moustaches and dated bowl cuts, while the women pencil themselves monobrowed.
Then there’s the clothing. The men sweat through stifling summer heat and dusty farmers markets in a uniform of patterned rimless hats, leather shoes and worn dress suits; combine with their offbeat hair and Middle East/Asia crossroad confluence and it becomes a fashion wholly theirs: Weather Oblivious Magic Carpet Salesman. The women wear colourful headscarves or look between the weave of brown fullface veils that belong to a faith (-concurrent tradition) as foreign to most of China as the mutton, handmade noodles, shish kebabs and bread served in teeming Uyghur markets.
Face or fold, man or woman, Uyghurs might ride the same electric trikes and pull RMB from the same shoebox tills, but they’ll never be mistaken for one of the Han Chinese bringing China Inc. to their door.
The appeals of tradition don't carry much weight against the consolidation of a one-size-fits-all China. Like the lot of the Uyghurs in Urumqi--where there are even greater numbers of Han settlers--or the denizens of Tibet--whose cultural erosion seems to make for better vigils and more established travel difficulties to the new kid on the block hassles of overlanding through Western China--the Hanification of Xingjiang is a zero-sum game of competing cultures.
Minority identity-vs-majority progress is a saga played out worldwide. In Kashi it’s as subtle as a Han/Uyghur spot-the-difference: it’s the standardised apartments sprouting across from the earthquake-referenced demolition of most of the labyrinthine mud-and-straw Old Town; the 30 m-high Mao statue; the appropriation of Islamic architecture for package tour destinations; and the limited mingling, as revealed by the three helpful China Post employees who must walk past hundreds of Uyghur men each day, but still found the one traditional hat I wanted to send so strange, so other, that they took turns modelling it while laughing.
There's tension, of course. It’s clear as the rubber footfall of youthful baton and rifle-clad Han troops marching their daily show of force through the Old Town, or the power of security types who ID-check angry-eyed Uyghurs in front of such sensitive areas as public parks.
And there’s conflict, like the 2011 spate of Uyghur knife attacks and bombings that made international news, sealed the region and triggered a heavy-handed response.
Sad as it might be, it's not a hard bet to call. The Uyghurs are the sprouting of a windblown culture that’s now being squeezed by Han expansion, an out-of-place timewarp punctured by a 21st Century trainline; they want to hold on to an identity as far from China as they once were. Good luck. Han China holds all the cards and works from an unsentimental mission statement; their engineers plan whole cities in anticipation of growth and lay tracks over 550 km of permafrost and a 5,000 m-high pass to open up transport to Lhasa.
Kashi Time might continue to be measured in ethnic riots and fragile truces for a while yet, but from where I was sitting, enjoying kebabs and yoghurt, they're bucks against inevitability.
Autonomous Zone is an imperfect translation. It doesn't necessarily mean what you first imagine. Kashi is Kashgar, Kashgar is China, and the far corners of China are always drawing closer.
Kashi sits in the far northwest, nestled against the Taklamakan Desert in the Xingjian Uyghur Autonomous Region. In its Silk Road heyday merchants converged on this oasis city from Central Asia and China on heavily-loaded, slow-moving caravans.
Travelling from the east in 2012, you’re much more likely to be viewing the baking expanses and sharp, scuffed-looking ranges through the window of a modern Chinese train. In place of spices and fabrics its load will be a mixture of Uyghurs--the region’s longtime ethnic minority--and the more familiar Han Chinese. The other Chinese name for Kashi is Kashgar and the two are used interchangeably. The Uyghur have their own name for the city, but you won’t find it on your ticket.
Language is only one point of distinction. Long before you hear or read it—sounding unmistakably un-Mandarin and written in Arabic-esque curls of ribbon dotted with grapes—you’ll notice other things:
Take the faces. Darker, sharper and Turkic-featured, the Uyghurs are hardly what springs to mind when most people think ‘Chinese’. Here the men sport thick moustaches and dated bowl cuts, while the women pencil themselves monobrowed.
Then there’s the clothing. The men sweat through stifling summer heat and dusty farmers markets in a uniform of patterned rimless hats, leather shoes and worn dress suits; combine with their offbeat hair and Middle East/Asia crossroad confluence and it becomes a fashion wholly theirs: Weather Oblivious Magic Carpet Salesman. The women wear colourful headscarves or look between the weave of brown fullface veils that belong to a faith (-concurrent tradition) as foreign to most of China as the mutton, handmade noodles, shish kebabs and bread served in teeming Uyghur markets.
Face or fold, man or woman, Uyghurs might ride the same electric trikes and pull RMB from the same shoebox tills, but they’ll never be mistaken for one of the Han Chinese bringing China Inc. to their door.
The appeals of tradition don't carry much weight against the consolidation of a one-size-fits-all China. Like the lot of the Uyghurs in Urumqi--where there are even greater numbers of Han settlers--or the denizens of Tibet--whose cultural erosion seems to make for better vigils and more established travel difficulties to the new kid on the block hassles of overlanding through Western China--the Hanification of Xingjiang is a zero-sum game of competing cultures.
Minority identity-vs-majority progress is a saga played out worldwide. In Kashi it’s as subtle as a Han/Uyghur spot-the-difference: it’s the standardised apartments sprouting across from the earthquake-referenced demolition of most of the labyrinthine mud-and-straw Old Town; the 30 m-high Mao statue; the appropriation of Islamic architecture for package tour destinations; and the limited mingling, as revealed by the three helpful China Post employees who must walk past hundreds of Uyghur men each day, but still found the one traditional hat I wanted to send so strange, so other, that they took turns modelling it while laughing.
There's tension, of course. It’s clear as the rubber footfall of youthful baton and rifle-clad Han troops marching their daily show of force through the Old Town, or the power of security types who ID-check angry-eyed Uyghurs in front of such sensitive areas as public parks.
And there’s conflict, like the 2011 spate of Uyghur knife attacks and bombings that made international news, sealed the region and triggered a heavy-handed response.
Sad as it might be, it's not a hard bet to call. The Uyghurs are the sprouting of a windblown culture that’s now being squeezed by Han expansion, an out-of-place timewarp punctured by a 21st Century trainline; they want to hold on to an identity as far from China as they once were. Good luck. Han China holds all the cards and works from an unsentimental mission statement; their engineers plan whole cities in anticipation of growth and lay tracks over 550 km of permafrost and a 5,000 m-high pass to open up transport to Lhasa.
Kashi Time might continue to be measured in ethnic riots and fragile truces for a while yet, but from where I was sitting, enjoying kebabs and yoghurt, they're bucks against inevitability.
Autonomous Zone is an imperfect translation. It doesn't necessarily mean what you first imagine. Kashi is Kashgar, Kashgar is China, and the far corners of China are always drawing closer.
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