Note: Because it’s going to take me a while to write this, I am going to serialize it. I expect anywhere from one to three more instalments, depending upon my time, probably weekly. All the accompanying photos are here. Part two is here.

Part One: The far end of China
I had been shivering under the blanket for hours, dropping in and out of shallow sleep. Three things kept me from drifting off completely: I was fully clothed, with a woman’s scarf tied around my head for extra warmth; I couldn’t feel my feet; and I was engaged in a test of wills with my slowly expanding bladder. In the freezing, pitch blackness of the tent it seemed too daunting to fumble into my hiking boots and stumble out into the windswept, mountain night for relief. Kidney damage was a small price to pay for what heat I could eke from my dusty blanket.

My wife, Olivia, had slipped off her thin mattress and ended up on the cold ground at the edge of the tent. When our friend Yeen lit a candle to help Olivia get rearranged, I sensed my opportunity. With the dim light from the candle I could locate my boots and make it out of the tent without stepping upon any of my five traveling companions.

Moments later I was standing behind the tent, savoring relief tinged with regret at the precious heat draining from my body. The wind had died down and the previous day’s clouds, which had dumped an unseasonable afternoon snowfall on us, had vanished. As my ruthlessly stretched bladder slowly emptied itself, I looked up. On the shores of Lake Karakul, high in the Pamir Mountains on the Tajik Border, the sky was the deep black of jewelry store velvet brushed with more stars than I had ever seen. The gauzy, luminous band of the Milky Way stretched from horizon to horizon along the axis of the lake, following the curve of a ludicrously three-dimensional sky. A lone shooting star rocketed from the zenith toward the peak of Muztagh Ata, towering 4000 meters over the lake.

As I gazed awestruck at this magnificent spectacle, with my face toward the sky, all memory of the cold was banished, leaving me with just one thought.

Don’t piss on your feet.

Go west, young man
Bali or China? This was the question that my wife and I had been debating in the run up to the Mayday golden week holiday. The previous year we had spent a pleasant week in Bali and we desperately wanted to scuba dive again, a passion we had both sacrificed to live in Beijing. But we were also working on getting pregnant and the month-to-month uncertainty made diving risky. We also both felt guilty about the limited traveling we had done within China in the two years since arriving. A trip to Heilongjiang with my father, a frigid weekend in Shanhaiguan and separate trips to Yunnan constituted the totality of our China tourism outside of the Beijing area (discounting my work-related trips to a few other cities).

Nevertheless, there is something about living in Beijing that makes you want to find appropriately de-Sinofied holiday options. Why not the exotic west?  A flip through the guidebooks suggested plenty of possibilities, and a straw-poll of China-veteran friends yielded plenty of enthusiasm for Xinjiang. It wasn’t hard to round up four other people interested in tagging along: two Malaysian friends from our Singapore days and a US Embassy couple we had recently befriended (who’s diplomatic passports we thought could be either our ticket onto the rescue helicopter or into a starring role in a hostage video in the event of any Central Asian “difficulties”). We spent a lunch haggling over the guidebooks and came up with a plan. Eight days: Kashgar, Karakul, Urumqi, Turpan. A whirlwind tour of the Silk Road, to be sure, but little time to get bored with anything.  

It takes about four hours by air to cover the distance between Beijing and Urumqi. The flight is due west, and if you sit by a window you begin to understand Beijing’s dust problem. It’s not that there is a desert to the west of Beijing. It’s that it’s all desert; 2000 kilometers of uninterrupted, desiccated, brown scrub, interrupted by the occasional patch of sand dunes. It starts right outside Beijing and lasts until you encounter snow-capped mountains near Urumqi.

Beijing isn’t the only city that gets sandstorms. Urumqi gets them as well, and it was having a whopper when we landed. The ride in was bumpy and visibility was poor, and grit filled our mouths the moment we stepped out of the airport in search of a nearby restaurant. Fortunately, with only three hours layover, we weren’t staying long. The onward leg to Kashgar was also bumpy, with cloud cover all the way and a steep descent into the airport. As a slightly nervous flyer, I had irrational visions of the mountains I knew were nearby suddenly looming out of the dense cloud and consuming us. But moments later we were at the tiny airport.

The city at the far end of China
The great joy of traveling somewhere new is not knowing what to expect, and I certainly didn’t know what to expect from Kashgar. My head was a swirl of notions from our pre-trip research: Han resettlement; ethnic tension; Uighur separatism; Tajiks, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks and Pakistanis; the Silk Road. What are they like? How will Americans be received? What will it look like? Invariably, the mental picture that develops before you go bears little relationship to the reality.

The ride in from the airport told us little. Like all of China, Kashgar is officially on Beijing time despite being 3400 kilometers to the west. The result is a late sunrise and, in spring, a pleasant 10 PM sunset. If you’re taking an airplane or a train you follow Beijing’s schedule. In daily life, however, people tend to set their clocks two hours behind Beijing. Although we had arrived at nearly 11PM the streets were still lively. When we told the hotel desk that we wanted to go see the markets the following day and were planning to set out at about nine in the morning (Beijing time) they told us that was far too early. The breakfast service didn’t even begin until 9AM.

The following morning I rose with the sun, which is to say late. Looking out of my  ninth floor window, I got my first sense of Kashgar as a town. In the foreground was standard Han post-industrial tedium, leading along Renmin Xi Lu clear past an immense statue of Mao, clearly visible from my room. It could have been any other second-rate Chinese town. But on the far side of Renmin Xi Lu was a sprawl of brown adobe houses unlike anything I’d seen in China, and beyond them the unmistakable minarets of a mosque. In the background, at the edge of the town, was a cordon of smokestacks that would have been at home in Daqing, and in the distance an echelon of dramatically weathered hills, all hard shadows and highlights in the pristine air.

A Silk Road trading town and Central Asian entrepot, Kashgar has a legendary Sunday market. Redevelopment has diluted the appeal somewhat, moving many of the merchants into charmless, purpose-built concrete pavilions and shunting the famous livestock market outside of the city. Nevertheless, a decade of prowling Southeast Asia and Indochina has taught me that local markets are one of the best ways to glimpse the inner workings of a community. I wasn’t going to miss Kashgar’s.

The walk to the market took us down Renmin Xi Lu and past People’s Square. (It seems that every Chinese city has “People’s Square”. Urumqi also does, along with a “People’s Park” for good measure.) Augmenting the conspicuously revolutionary imagery, Kashgar famously has one of China’s largest statues of Chairman Mao. He towers over the square from a memorial on the opposite side of Renmin Lu (yes, People’s Street). At first glance it is something of a mystery as to why the Chinese should choose to put one of the country’s largest effigies of the Great Helmsman in this remotest outpost of the empire. But during the cold war Kashgar was a spying outpost close to what was then the Soviet border (now the Kyrgyz border). It may also be a not-too-subtle reminder to the Uighurs—especially their uppity separatist movement—of where power in China lies. Further down the road another fixture of many Chinese cities was visible: an enormous Ferris wheel.

A Labor Day rally was being prepared under Mao’s blank, concrete gaze. Dozens of schoolchildren in gaudy, idealized ethnic costumes were filtering into the square. A phalanx in blue sweatsuits carried red flags. Stagehands wrestled with a backdrop banner, unruly in the morning breeze. It was all properly socialist, as one would expect on wuyi, but the large audience of students gathered before the stage revealed Kashgar’s original character. Headscarves and Muslim skullcaps permeated the crowd. A cordon of disheveled aunties and uncles waited on the sidelines.

We didn’t stay for the show. As we moved away from the square and toward the market the streets became livelier and the proportion of Han diminished. Large markets have a penumbra of activity as the flows of traffic and people bringing goods in and out consolidate and tendrils of commerce extend out from the center. Shoppers were beginning to arrive and street food was abundant. An old man with a skullcap and a long, white beard led three goats through the paralyzed traffic.

At an intersection, a young Muslim man accosted me with a familiar proposition. “Hello! Do you speak English?” Two years in Beijing has made me suspicious of this gambit. In the capital it’s often—though not always—the opening line to a sales pitch. The first time I responded to it, in Tian’anmen Square two weeks after arriving, I ended up getting a tour of the “student art exhibit” in a back room of the Revolutionary Museum building where, oddly, everything was for sale. In the mall below my office building in Beijing a beglittered and lip-frosted young Chinese woman has recently taken to accosting foreign men with that opening and relentlessly badgering them for a few minutes of their time. Suspicious of her conspicuously tarty look and forced poutiness, I’ve always begged off, which is easy when you’re wearing a tie and look like you have someplace to be.

So I was noncommittal when Mohammed Ali asked if he could join me in English conversation for a few minutes. But he spoke clearly and didn’t seem to have any agenda except for chatting and satisfying his curiosity. A student of Central Asian history at Kashgar’s university, he had the standard questions about who we were, where we had come from and what we thought of Kashgar. He also explained that he and many of his fellow Uighur students were much more interested in improving their English than their poor Mandarin. He helpfully updated us on one important fact: Kashgar’s livestock market had been moved out of town, a shift that our guidebook predated. We would bump into Mohammed Ali a couple more times while we were in Kashgar.

The main part of Sunday market was interesting but not captivating. There were household provisions, staples, and piles of fragrant spices in warm shades of red and brown. Dingy noodle joints lined a thoroughfare cutting through the pavilions, each fronted by the ubiquitous charcoal brazier supporting a line of roasting mutton skewers and attended by a man vigorously fanning the coals with a flat piece of metal or cardboard.

The most interesting part of the covered market was the textile area. As is common in the Islamic world, Uighur women tend to cover up and headscarves are common though not universal. (At the conservative end, fully covered faces are also rare, though in evidence. Given the various Central Asian nationalities represented in Kashgar this may be an ethnic difference I don’t recognize.) But while properly conservative, Uighur women have no truck with Saudi or Pushtu asceticism. They love bright colors and sequins. The textile area was a spill of crimsons, golds and yellows, spangled with glitter and heaped in disorderly bolts and folds pulled at and squawked over by gaggles of iridescent women.

As is often the case, the most interesting area of the downtown market was at the fringes. The market spilled out of the pavilions and into a broad, dirt gully where the livestock bazaar was once located. The abandoned space had been taken over by nan bakers, vegetable sellers and Uighur barbers offering beard trims, head-shaving and scalp-massages for ridiculously trivial prices. I was beckoned down for a shave and trim and briefly considered it but demurred after anticipating the horror with which my fabulously coiffed Chinese stylist back in Beijing would react.

Beyond the barbers a baker was pulling a fresh batch of bagel-like girde nan from his tandoor-style oven. Attended by his wife and children, he used a long stick to pull the small loaves from where they were stuck on the earthen walls of the oven, grinning for our cameras while he worked. Five mao a piece bought us fresh ones that scalded our fingers with steam when we broke them. They were exquisite. As well as being bagel shaped, girde nan are sprayed with water before they baking, giving them a chewy, bagel-like crust. They shame all of the doughy, characterless “bagels” sold in Beijing. What they have in consistency they lack in variety, however. To paraphrase Henry Ford, you can have any flavor you like, so long as it’s plain with sesame seeds. But to taste one fresh out of the oven is to concede that one flavor might be all you ever need.

The only hint of livestock in the gully was a laagering area for the diminutive donkeys that are the draught animals of choice in Kashgar. At the laager merchants had tied off dozens of their tiny, crabby donkeys for the day, and periodic rounds of tetchy braying echoed above the normal susurrus of market noises.

Coming next: Part Two: The livestock market and the fat-assed sheep of Kashgar.