Imagethief

Note: Because it’s taking me a while to write this, I am serializing it. This is the second instalment. All the accompanying photos are here.

Previously:
Part One: The town at the far end of China

Part Two: A Roaring Trade in Fat-Assed Sheep
After rambling Kashgar’s urban Sunday market for a while, we headed for the livestock market outside of town. This was, we were told, where the real action was.

Mohammed Ali, the young, English-speaking Uighur man we had met that morning, had told us that the way to get there was to ask any taxi driver to take us to the “lao basha”, or “old bazaar”. We had noticed many of the locals being driven around in small, battery-powered three-wheeled carts. This seemed like a much better way to get around Kashgar than a regular taxi and there were several parked by the main entrance to the market. It took exactly no time at all to find a father-and-son team of two carts willing to take us to the livestock market. While the locals were often crammed eight or even a staggering ten per cart, we broad-hipped foreigners felt a little legroom worth the extra expenditure of a second cart.

No sooner had our two carts set off, however, than we were hastily shooed back onto our feet by the nervous drivers and made to walk a hundred meters past a traffic police post near the market. It seems that hauling locals around is fine, but hauling foreigners is likely to get you unwelcome attention if you are not properly licensed and bonded. Moments later, safely beyond the gaze of The Man, we were under way again.

It turns out that three-wheeled, electric cart is indeed a pretty pleasant way to get around Kashgar in spring. The weather was good, the air was clear, and as we drew away from town there wasn’t much traffic on the road. A hint though: negotiate the fare in advance. On the way out to the market we paid 10 RMB per cart, having negotiated in advance. On the way back we all piled into one cart without setting a price first and got socked for an outrageous fifty.

It was about a half-hour ride to the livestock market, which is has been moved well away from downtown, where, we gather, a surfeit of livestock is increasingly unwelcome. We could tell we were getting close to the market when the normal semi-rural traffic started to be dominated by families walking flocks of goats and the occasional cow to market and entire trucks full of various manner of livestock.

The market itself was not hard to spot. A huge crowd of men and sheep spilled from a small lane out onto the edge of the road. While entire families came to the market, the actual trading seemed the exclusive province of men. No hat, no beard, no service. Men haggled, felt, prodded, bought and sold, gathered together in little knots around groups of sheep that been tied together. And this wasn’t even the actual market. It was just the spillover of people who didn’t have the paperwork or who couldn’t be bothered to pay the fee to enter the market.

The market proper was down a disorderly lane of stalls selling livestock supplies, bridle goods, snacks and piles and piles of manure. The street was a tangle of goats, haggling Uighur men, three-wheeled electric carts and enormous trucks bearing entire flocks of sheep and goats and, occasionally, a few head of cattle. Every now and then a sheep would break loose from its minders and go catapulting down the road pursued either by a harried looking woman or a gaggle of delighted children or both. At the side of the road one man carefully pulled roosters from a bag, evaluating each for various signs of roosterly quality that were beyond my suburban ken. It occurred to me that he might be sizing them up for fighting quality as opposed to breeding quality, but I am not sure if cockfighting is a Uighur pastime.

The livestock market occupied a huge field behind the buildings lining the road. At the main gate a squad of harried looking police inspected the paperwork of people entering the market. One of the cops, a man of Central or South Asian descent, had the unlikeliest Bollywood good looks of any Chinese cop I have ever seen, with swarthy skin, blown-back hair and an absolutely styling pair of sunglasses. I was disappointed that, during our entire day the market, he never once exploded into a colorful musical number. I am not sure what paperwork the police were checking. It wasn’t ID cards, but sheets of chopped paper.

The market field was crossed by long rows of wooden poles to which were tethered cattle, horses, donkeys, two camels and flock after flock of sheep. It wasn’t exactly chaos --  everything was in its place -- but it was definitely chaotic as people haggled and argued in huge knots, unloaded trucks full of livestock and tried to get countless stubborn, bleating, braying, bellowing animals from point A to point B. Live sheep were literally being hurled from trucks, and reluctant cattle dragged off by tethers. Here two horses were in a fight, there an immense bull was enjoying a scratch on the fender of a parked truck, and doing untold damage to the suspension in the meantime. Fresh animals were arriving constantly, individually, in small groups, by the truckload. It was a deep and liquid market, as long as you were in the market to trade sheep. Flocks of longhaired angora goats were tethered in some areas and, under canopies of plastic cloth, goats and sheep alike were been shorn and the wool assembled into enormous mounds.

Through some inquiries, we got a sense of the prices at the livestock market. A sheep will set you back between 10 and 400 yuan depending upon the age and quality. A donkey will run between 300 (bad donkey – I’m not sure exactly what that means) and 500 (good donkey). Cattle can be upwards of 1000 RMB for a full grown animal and a camel, the invaluable ship of the desert, will set you back a cool three grand. Camels, we were told, were not an everyday item at the livestock market.

Sheep were the main attraction. There were thousands of them, almost all of the local Kashgar variety that is prized for its mutton. These sheep have been bred over the years to have comically large deposits of fat on their rumps. When the sheep are shorn the rump fat gives their posteriors a disconcertingly human aspect, raising some jokes for which the punch lines are best left uncommitted to print. But funny looks notwithstanding, the rump-fat is prized and much of the assessment of any given sheep’s quality has to do with the size and quality of the rump fat. From what we observed, no Uighur sheep trader worth his hat would make a deal on a sheep without a full assessment of its rump fat, involving much palpating, squeezing and hefting.

At one point I stumbled across a sheep that had had its throat cut moments before and was lying in a spreading pool of blood. No one was paying it the slightest attention, and we couldn’t figure out why it had been killed. Injured? Defective? Uppity? It was a mystery. It was the only dead or injured animal we saw. Slaughtering was carried out elsewhere and the sheep carcasses on display at the market’s food stalls had all been cleaned and elsewhere.

And the sight of all that hanging mutton can make a person hungry. Having had our feast of girde-nan that morning, it was time to graduate onto the local hand-pulled noodles. The edge of the market was lined with food stalls, each operated by a single family. Women would provide the table service while men hand-pulled noodles and did the cooking. We had delicious six bowls of laghman, thick noodles with tomato, garlic and mutton for three yuan a bowl, with tea thrown in. While we were dining one of the proprietor’s two young sons took a break from his job as assistant-waiter to ask if we had any ballpoint pens. One of our traveling companions, Michael, instantly endeared himself to the boy by handing one over. This immediately caught the attention of the other boy, who had to have a ballpoint pen as well. Unfortunately, this exhausted the surplus pen supply, leaving a daughter empty-handed and us feeling slightly guilty. I’m not sure why ballpoint pens are so precious. Pencils had no charm.

For those not in the mood for noodles, other foods were being sold as well, including sweet, sliced watermelon and a chilled apricot nectar finely tuned to appeal in the hot, dusty atmosphere of the market. One vendor had gathered an immense crowd with a winning combination of maroji (handmade local ice cream, a thrifty 5 mao a cone) and a television turned up to skull-collapsing volume.

The attractive power of an overly loud television was something we would see throughout Xinjiang. Household televisions must still be relatively rare among the Uighurs as any publicly displayed television was liable to gather a crowd, even downtown. They were often used as a form of advertising for food stalls and restaurants, a way of luring in customers. Of course, advertising is only good if it catches people’s attention, so every television was cranked to unimaginable sound levels to ensure that everyone within ten square kilometers was aware of its presence. Of all the sounds I will associate with Xinjiang, the sound of blown television speakers is number one, with the bleating of sheep a distant second. One sound I never heard, to my surprise, was the call of a muezzin summoning people to prayer. Perhaps the televisions drowned them out.

As for all those fat-assed sheep being traded, I had no illusions about where they were headed. No charmed lives in green fields for them. Most were destined to be hanging from meat hooks in the markets or in front of restaurants within a few hours.

In Kashgar, and everywhere we went in Xinjiang, refrigeration of meat appeared to be treated as some kind of imperialist plot. Instead, the practice was simply to hang that day’s carcass or carcasses from hooks, usually in front of the restaurant where potential diners could see for themselves the quality of your stock, and to slice meat from the carcasses as needed. (When I first moved to Singapore in 1995 pork sold in Singapore’s wet market was not refrigerated. In fact many aunties thought refrigeration was bad for the flavor. It was only after the nipah virus crisis in Malaysia, when slaughterhouse workers started dying, that refrigeration was required.) Sometimes the prized rump fat would be sliced off and kept closer at hand so that small chunks could be used to grease skewers and other dishes. I ate a lot of skewers out there, and I have to say that they put the Beijing back-alley variety to shame. If that’s what ass-fat does for skewers, then I am an ass-fat man all the way.

On our way out of the market I remarked to my friends that I had never seen such a furor devoted livestock trading. “You’ve never been to a county fair,” said one of my companions. That’s not strictly true. I have been to county fairs. I’ve also been to other rural Asian markets where various forms of livestock have been traded. But never have I seen such organized chaos all in the name of sheep.

The rest of the afternoon was devoted to lingering over a long meal and various cold beverages and to slow walks through some of Kashgar’s traditional Uighur neighborhoods. It would be easy to walk down the main streets of Kashgar and think you were in any provincial Chinese town. But a cut into the side streets can quickly change your impression. Here are peaceful, narrow lanes shaded by birch trees and fronted with the brown, mud walls of Uighur courtyard houses.

Those local neighborhoods reveal one of the most pleasing things about Kashgar: despite being a tourist destination, it has not yet been completely wrecked by tourism. This sets it apart from Lijiang and many other Chinese tourism destinations, where old towns have been converted into overly-precious backpacker destinations lined with hostels, bars and “western” restaurants. The old-town around the mosque is as close as you can come to a “touristy” area, with a row of merchants hawking local souvenirs and carpets. But the hawking is low key and the tourist shops are only a thin veneer lining the fringe one of Kashgar’s most pleasant local areas, a dense warren of alleys and courtyards overrun with children and gentle women conversing on doorsills. This was the district of brown houses I had been able to see from my hotel room that morning. From a distance I’d thought they were slums, but up close they were tidy and charming, and far nicer than the grimy, modern Chinese apartment blocks on the other side of our hotel.

At one point in our wanderings through the old neighborhood we became innocent bystanders caught in the middle of a fierce water-fight being waged by young boys armed with plastic soda bottles. A furious five seconds of splashing would be followed by a two minute lull as everyone ran back inside to re-fill. The boys would re-emerge fully armed, there would be a brief face off -- who unloads first? -- followed by another five seconds of giggly wet madness. I had to wonder if some of the collateral damage we sustained was not entirely accidental.

Throughout Kashgar’s traditional neighborhoods people were friendly, if a bit curious about the occasional foreigner who comes wandering through. The worst mobbing we got was by children who begged to have their pictures taken with digital cameras and would them clamber over one another and us, hanging from camera straps, hair, or anything else convenient, in order to see the images on the camera. My wife became an instant hit when she ratcheted up the technology standard by taking a brief movie of several children clowning around and then showing them the video. Suddenly everyone was a swanning movie star or budding comedian, and still pictures, even instantaneously delivered, seemed like dull old hat.

We also paid a visit to the Id Kah mosque, adjacent to Kashgar’s old-town, shortly before the evening prayer. The mosque grounds were leafy, serene, and park-like, positively inviting one to enjoy a pleasant, contemplative sit. But a sign at the main entrance reminded us that the mosque’s serenity camouflaged a sometimes-turbulent relationship between Xinjiang’s Uighurs and the distant government thousands of kilometers to the east. The sign gave a potted history of the six-hundred year old mosque, but concluded with the following bit of propaganda in Chinese and this broken English:

[The gazetting of the mosque as a historical site] shows fully that Chinese government always pays special attention to the another and historical culture of the ethnic groups, warmly welcome [the Party’s] religious policy. It also shows that different ethnic groups have set up a close relationship of equality, unity and helps to each other, and freedom of beliefs is protected. All ethnic groups live friendly together here. They cooperate to build a beautiful homeland, support heartily the unity of different ethnic groups and the unity of our country, and oppose the ethnic separatism and illegal religious activities.

Well, perhaps.

Coming next: The hell of yurts.