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| KASHGAR |
| Kashgar remains a visible bastion of old Chinese Turkestan, though gradually the more "authentic" parts of the town are being cleaned up as tourist attractions, and its residents moved to modern highrises on the city limits. Nonetheless, despite Han migration into the city, its population is still overwhelmingly Muslim, a fact you can hardly fail to notice with the great Id Kah Mosque dominating the central square, and the Uigur bazaars and teashops, the smell of grilled lamb and, above all, the faces of the Turkic people around you. If you can choose a time to be here, catch the Uigur Corban festival at the end of the Muslim month of Ramadan, and again, exactly two months later, which involves activities such as dancing and goat-tussling. And don't miss Kashgar's extraordinary Sunday market, for which half of Central Asia seems to converge on the city and which is as exotic to the average Han Chinese as to the foreign tourist.
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| A large part of the excitement of KASHGAR lies in the experience of reaching it. Set on the western edge of the Chinese empire astride overland routes to Pakistan and Kyrgyzstan, Kashgar is fantastically remote from eastern China: as the crow flies, it's more than 4000km from Beijing, of which the thousand-plus kilometres from Ürümqi is for the most part sheer desert. As recently as the 1930s, the journey time to and from Beijing ran to a number of months. And yet Kashgar today, an oasis 1200m above sea level, is a remarkably prosperous and pleasant place, despite being, in part, an essentially medieval city.
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| Kashgar's history is dominated by its strategic position. There was already a Chinese military governor here when Xuanzang passed through on his way back from India in 644. The city was Buddhist at the time, with hundreds of monasteries; Islam made inroads around 1000 and eventually became the state religion. More recently, the late nineteenth century saw Kashgar at the meeting point of three empires – Chinese, Soviet and British. Both Britain and the Soviet Union maintained consulates in Kashgar until 1949: the British with an eye to their interests across the frontier in India, the Soviets (so everyone assumed) with the long-term intention of absorbing Xinjiang into their Central Asian orbit. The conspiracies of this period are brilliantly evoked in Peter Fleming's News from Tartary and Ella Maillart's Forbidden Journey. At the time of Fleming's visit, in 1935, the city was in effect run by the Soviets, who had brought their rail line to within two days of Kashgar. |
| During World War II, however, Kashgar swung back under Chinese control, and with the break in Sino–Soviet relations in the early 1960s, the Soviet border (and influence) firmly closed. In the wake of the break-up of the Soviet Union, however, it seemed that Kashgar would resume its status as one of the great travel crossroads of Asia, but this recovery sadly stalled after the events of September 11, 2001, and the ensuing conflict in Afghanistan. The town is still experiencing something of a downturn, with neither traders nor tourists as plentiful as they once were. |
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