In Kashgar, Clinging to an Exotic Past

The train rumbled rhythmically across the northern rim of the Taklimakan Desert, just ahead of the breaking dawn. I awoke at first light and stepped from my bunk onto a floor littered with melon rinds and raisins. Everyone else was asleep. I filled a flask with hot water from the coal-fired samovar and sipped sesame tea while staring out the window at the already searing, silent expanse of scrubby sand, and I imagined covering it on foot as Silk Road travelers had for centuries.

Across eras and cultures, their accounts of reaching isolated Kashgar, or Kashi, resonate with relief at completing the trek. Getting here was none of the fun; walking through Kashgar’s gates safely was all of it. As such, this may be one of the most anticipated cities in the world.

As the train slowed, I stood at an exit, pressing against the glass, eager to end this 24-hour ride from the provincial capital and explore the medieval alleys of what Beijing colleagues had called “the least Chinese of Chinese cities.”

As I rode into town on the bus, we passed a billboard showing a collage of native Uighur (WEE-gher) people, a central Asiatic race, that urged, “Strengthen the bonding of nationalities, safeguard the motherland’s unity.”

I disembarked at the heart of town, where the only one awake to greet me was Mao Tse-tung--or at least his solitary statue, looming above the treeless granite expanse of People’s Square and waving west, over poplar trees, toward the Pamir Mountains.

Nearby was the most incongruous sight of all: a Ferris wheel. I asked a local cabdriver how to say “Ferris wheel” in Uighur, a language that is similar to Arabic. “We don’t,” he said, laughing. “We call it the ‘Chinese wheel.’”

Depending which way your body and imagination face, Kashgar is positioned at the beginning of China or at its end. The city is nestled in the far west of the nation’s Xinjiang (“New Frontier”) province, an area the size of Alaska that borders Tibet to the south, Mongolia and Kazakhstan to the north and Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the west.

Officially, Xinjiang is dubbed the “Uighur Autonomous Region,” in deference to the Turkic Muslim nationality that makes up the majority of the population here. In recent years the Communist Party’s “Open and Develop the West” campaign has encouraged Han Chinese--the country’s ethnic majority--to immigrate here, illustrating the region’s strategic and economic importance. The result is an encroaching modernization that is altering Xinjiang’s landscape far beyond mere Ferris wheels. A decade ago Uighurs made up 90% of Kashgar’s population; today they are about half.

Since moving to China in 1995 as a Peace Corps volunteer, I had seen the country’s regions change rapidly, often symbolized by the ubiquitous automobile, Big Mac and faces of U.S. celebrities as pitchmen. From a traveler’s point of view, these may be unflattering or unnerving reminders of home. Yet they own a larger place in snapshots of “real China” than the pictures of wizened old men in Mao suits, acrobats spinning plates or the Great Wall. China wants to be as boring as any other prosperous country. Its slogan for the 2008 Summer Games: “New Beijing, Great Olympics.” Since the capital won the bid, it has shaken from bulldozers tearing down the old and photogenic. “Development,” as a billboard there proclaims, “is an immutable truth.”

So I came to Kashgar last summer prepared for a modicum of Westernization, even in a city closer to Moscow than to Beijing, but I also was prepared for the opposite. It took Marco Polo three years to arrive at Kashgar’s caravansary, and he spent only 250 words on his stay, calling the Uighurs “a wretched set of people who eat and drink in a miserable fashion.”

I anticipated any of these combinations of new and old, Han Chinese and Uighur. But I didn’t expect one of my first sights there to be a Ferris wheel. Nor did I expect a cockfight to be among the last.

Kashgar’s teahouse is in the Uighur, or “old,” section of the city, at the apex of a network of tangled, narrow pedestrian streets lined with restaurants serving mutton-and-pickle rice, noodles and fresh bagel-like breads. The food, and the people eating it, looked anything but wretched or miserable. The scents of saffron and lamb led me inside the teahouse and up the stairs to a balcony overlooking the central bazaar. Veiled female merchants and craftsmen clogged the oasis world below, selling nuts, vegetables, melons, grapes, handmade clothing, shoes, knives, stringed instruments and doppas, the embroidered four-cornered hats that Uighur men balance on their heads. Hand-painted signs for dentists, showing colorful cross-sections of the human jaw, competed for my eyes’ attention, while my ears strayed to the tinny tinks of copper being pounded into teapots, candlesticks and tools.

I sat on the veranda, cross-legged in stocking feet on a threadbare red rug. I ordered tea and a plate of noodles in Chinese. The man looked at me expectantly. I tried again.

From behind me, in fluent Chinese, a man said, “You should try using Uighur language in Kashgar.”

To my surprise, he wasn’t ethnically Chinese. Mahmud moved closer to me. At 75, he had a wispy white beard, a mouthful of gold teeth, a flowing robe and a bald head covered by a doppa. A former journalist, Mahmud began a career a decade ago that had netted him more wealth than a lifetime of writing articles. He sold insurance to Uighurs for the People’s Insurance Co.

“Uighur life expectancies keep getting higher, so the policies mature!” he said, as though this were a secret only he knew.

Mahmud had lived his entire life in Kashgar. As with everyone I met in China, I asked his age, then considered his profession and language ability and filled in the blanks with the history-making events he had lived through: the birth of the new China, the unsuccessful uprising of the Xinjiang warlord Osman against Beijing rule, famine, Cultural Revolution, recent ethnic tension and clashes, and Muslim life under a government that is officially atheist.

But Mahmud didn’t want to talk about any of it, at least not then. Business was good, and life, he said, motioning off the balcony to the market below, was better than he had ever seen it. Health care was standard, food was clean, the streets were safe and the economy was developing. He didn’t understand what young people complained about nowadays. Then he stood to leave. He had life insurance to sell, and people were buying.

The red tea arrived in an ornate small copper pot on a silver tray. Next to it was a painted porcelain bowl holding powdered sugar and a single tiny ceramic cup. Overflowing their own bowl was a mass of thick, hand-pulled noodles seasoned and fried with green beans, tomatoes, onions, peppers and mutton. I had eaten laghman (lamian in Chinese) every day since my arrival in Xinjiang and would continue until I left. It was nutritious, hot, filling, delicious and cheap. My bill with the tea came to about 62 cents.

I first saw the teahouse when I cut through the old city in search of my hotel. The area had been bisected by the concrete girth of People’s Avenue, which fronted the yellow, graceful Id Kah mosque, one of China’s largest and architecturally more akin to a house of worship than a shopping mall, which most of the country’s renovated mosques resemble. I turned past a billboard of a young Uighur girl putting a piece of paper into a trash can: “Pay attention to sanitation; beautify the environment; be a civilized citizen.”

Following the twisting, nameless covered alleys past open piles of garbage and two-story dwellings made of wood, straw and mud, I quickly lost my place on the city map. I passed one small mosque, then another and another. Cheerful children emerged from a doorway and waved, a scene that was repeated as I passed each mosque. After a half-hour of meandering I realized I had been walking in circles; they were the same kids, at the same doorway, next to the same mosque.

I flagged a cab at an intersection and asked the driver to take me to the Qinibagh Hotel. He laughed.

“Are you sure that’s where you want to go?”

“Yes,” I said, confident that I wanted to head to the former British consulate that’s now a hotel.

He flipped on his meter, drove 10 yards across the street and stopped at a pair of tall white gates. “Here you are,” he said. “That’ll be 10 yuan”--about $1.20.

So much for using a map in Kashgar.

You won’t find beer in the old town, part of the Muslim influence. In the new town, the Chinese part of the city, it’s everywhere, along with Internet cafes charging 4 yuan (48 cents) an hour and telecommunications offices full of Han migrants keeping in touch with family back east. The new part of Kashgar does its best to imitate the main streets of any Chinese city. If I closed my eyes and listened to the beeping taxis, cell phones ringing to the tune of “The East Is Red,” and the cheerful chatter of grandmothers sitting on storefront steps, I could imagine I was in Beijing.

But the heat and unforgiving sun suggested otherwise. The new section of the city is treeless or lined with seedlings that show the area’s youth. The only shade on the main roads comes from the ever-present billboards, which exhort civilization and compliance, as in, “Study from Zhang Jiagang, be a civilized and polite Kashgarite,” and “Total citizen participation, sweat the real sweat, work hard to create a clean and civilized city.” These sorts of messages appear throughout China, but never had I seen such a concentration of them as I did in Kashgar.

I went to a film about an altruistic doctor and bought a soda, choosing the local brand, Feichang (Extraordinary), instead of Coke (which sold far better). On one side of the bottle, in Chinese, was the slogan “Chinese people’s own cola.” On the other side, in English, it read, “Future will be better.” I laughed at how the translations didn’t match. Then it dawned on me that they weren’t meant to; they formed a complete message.

The Qinibagh Hotel retains nothing that would suggest the British set up shop in 1908. (The Seman Hotel, on the site of the former Russian consulate, fares little better.) Both are essentially standard Chinese hotels whose best feature is an absence of character that urges you to stay outside and explore. Officially, Kashgar follows China’s one time zone, set to Beijing, akin to Los Angeles aligning its clocks with New York. In summertime this far west, the sun rises around 7 a.m. and sets at 11 p.m.; practicality calls for an unofficial yet widely observed time zone set two hours behind Beijing. Bus stations quote schedules in Beijing time, movie theaters in Kashgar time, hotels in Beijing time, restaurants in Kashgar time. On some days they do the opposite, just to keep things interesting. So you must ask whether it is local or Beijing time. The one true clock in the city is Id Kah mosque, where the call to prayer reverberates from the minarets, a sound seldom heard in greater China.

To my surprise, the mosque welcomes tourists. It was built in 1442 and has since been razed and rebuilt several times; its grounds remain open throughout the day. When it’s closed, a hand-painted sign in Chinese and English says, “Please don’t visit the mosque. It’s praying time now.”

The structure holds 4,000 worshipers, and its ornate, colorful ceilings and beams offset the dusty pomegranate trees in the central courtyard. I spent an hour inside, learning from two patient little girls how to pronounce words in my Uighur phrasebook.

Id Kah is one of Kashgar’s few “sights.” On the outskirts of town are a couple of fraying tombs, one for the “fragrant” concubine, Xiangfei, who led a Uighur uprising against the Qing dynasty but was forced to marry its emperor when the rebellion failed. (The explanation on site said she “lived madly by his side” before being forced to commit suicide.) The tomb, like much of Kashgar, tells two sides of the same story. On the one hand, Xiangfei is a representation of Uighur nationalism. On the other, she is a reminder of China’s feudal, concubine-taking past, ended by the Communists.

In Kashgar, the main attraction is becoming part of Kashgar. Every morning I began at the teahouse, and every night I ended with my shadow blending with that of the minarets, sitting in the square fronting Id Kah, watching scribes write letters for illiterates, the parade of weddings and funerals, and artisans shaping metal, sewing hats and rolling out brightly colored bolts of silk for crowds of interested women. The time in between flowed languidly away. Or not at all.

Scenes repeated themselves, the temperature stayed above 100, noodles were served for every meal, and people called me by name, just as would happen in a small town. This was life at an oasis, an isolated patch of nourishment, and I stopped thinking about the world beyond.

Until I met Wei, whom I came across in one of Kashgar’s markets. He was a student at an engineering institute and worked part time as a guide. He had brought a group of Danish women wearing loose-fitting embroidered pants to the International Trade Market of Central and Western Asia, a sprawling Sunday affair that brought in merchants from bordering counties and countries, and tens of thousands of shoppers.

It was a Uighur Ikea. In one area you could buy sheep and donkeys; in another carts and harnesses; and in another carved wood furniture, housewares and electronics. The largest section of the acres-wide market was given over to hand-sewn shoes, clothing and luxuriant carpets. Traders arrived on horseback, on foot, on bicycle and in their own cars. It was a cross-section of Kashgar society.

Wei said the Danish women wanted more “minority pants.” He couldn’t figure out why foreigners always bought those ridiculous pants, but he told them to meet him in two hours. That’s how long we would be gone to the cockfight, he said. That seemed like a long time to me. “You haven’t seen a Kashgar cockfight,” Wei said.

On Fridays and Saturdays the new Sporta City arena was the Toy Box “Shake Your Soul!” Disco, and on Sunday it was a cockfight ring. The bar sold Cointreau, coconut milk, Sprite and Remy Martin XO. From the ceiling hung inflated lips that said “Kiss” in English and an assortment of T. rexes, life rafts and bottles of Miller Genuine Draft. A spray-painted mural showed a blond woman in a bikini entering the surf. We paid about $1.20 each and entered.

Sixty-five middle-aged and elderly Uighurs hunched over the railing, staring at a green carpet littered with feathers and chicken droppings. The men wore long robes and four-cornered doppas, and all smoked. The men with money smoked Kwangchow filtered cigarettes, which came in a box and cost 3 yuan (about 35 cents). Others puffed on tobacco rolled in the People’s Daily.

A small round table with two chairs sat in the middle of the dance floor-cum-fight ring. On the tabletop was a microphone. Wei and I sat in the first tier of seats as large, scabby roosters strutted around us. Sometimes one would crow, and another would answer. The spectators leaned forward and stared at the green carpet.

It was then that I realized there really was a cockfight going on. In a nation where gambling is prohibited and anything smacking of peasant tradition and backwardness is banned, I blinked in disbelief. Wei said that since the Communist liberation in 1949, the cocks weren’t allowed to kill one another. That’s what the umpire was for--to call the fight when blood was drawn and declare one cock the winner. Progress of a sort. I wondered if low-contact cockfighting was as bad as the standard battle. Would the roosters wear protective headgear?

Across the arena, a man raised a rooster high in the air. Wei poked me, and we got up along with everybody else to crowd around the man and stare at his rooster. The animal was a specimen--downy black feathers, sharp cream beak and sturdy yellow legs. He didn’t have a scratch on him. I nicknamed him Tyson. His challenger was an animal I called the Big Pif Paf, after the popular roach repellent sold in Kashgar’s bazaar. Blood was caked on his feet, an eye was scabbed shut and hunks of feathers were missing.

Everybody got out 10-yuan notes and seemed to give them to the person next to him. I handed mine to Wei and said I wanted the Big Pif Paf.

Two handlers came into the ring and washed their hands in a bucket of water. Then they scooped up each bird and rubbed water on it.

The umpire snapped awake, lighted a cigarette and stood up. It had been one hour since we entered the center, an hour of sitting in stifling heat that smelled like chickens. I had the feeling that we had left China, that we had passed its billboards for civilization and spiritual construction and continued down an ancient road.

The announcer spat out a sentence, and the two handlers brought the roosters to the center of the arena. The crowd split in two, one cock’s backers on the left, the other on the right. Tyson and the Big Pif Paf faced off. The fight began. I told Wei I had to go.

Back in the bustle of the Kashgar International Trade Market of Central and Western Asia, I bought a Feichang cola and some salted almonds. The soda bottle promised it was Chinese people’s own cola and that the future would be better. The cellophane bag holding the almonds read, “Enjoy the sunshine. Enjoy your life.” I sat in the warm, timeless Xinjiang sun, savoring the nuts, watching the crowd, and did exactly as it said.

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Guidebook: Calling in Kashgar

Getting there: Connecting service to Urumqi from LAX is available on China Southern. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $2,354. From LAX, you also can fly to Beijing nonstop on China Eastern Airlines and Air China International and connecting service (change of planes) on United, Air Canada, China Southern, Northwest, Korean, Asiana and Thai. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $670 in April, increasing for late spring and summer. You can then take a 24-hour train ride on the new railway that traces the northern rim of the Taklimakan Desert. The air-conditioned train departs in the afternoon and arrives the next day. A ticket for a hard-sleeper berth (padded bunks stacked facing one another in groups of six) costs $50.

Telephones: To call the numbers below from the U.S., dial 011 (the international dialing code), 86 (country code for China) and the local number.

Where to stay: The Qinibagh, also called Qiniwake, Hotel, 144 Seman Road, 998-284-2299, fax 998-282-3842, is on the grounds of the old British mission. A double room with bath and a fan (though without air-conditioning) is about $15; a dorm bed costs $5. The concrete structure is drab, but its ambience is enlivened by busloads of Pakistani traders and Chinese tourists.

The more popular option for backpackers is the Seman Hotel, 337 Seman Road, 998-255-2129, fax 998-25-52861. (John’s Cafe, information central and an Internet cafe, has its local branch here.) The hotel is a 10-minute walk from the heart of town and borders the new Chinese city. Dorms are from $4, including the ones upstairs in the grandiose former conservatory, and doubles are from $10.

Where to eat: I ate at the Chakhana Teahouse, near the Id Kah mosque (no phone), for less than a dollar. Kashgar’s central bazaar is home to numerous noodle (laghman) and saffron rice stalls; you’ll see the giant woks smoking atop brick kilns. Mutton is the meat of choice here, often marinated in a sesame batter and eaten from long metal skewers. Dumplings, doughier and greasier than the Chinese variety, are stuffed with lamb and onions and fried.

For more information: China National Tourist Office, 600 W. Broadway, Suite 320, Glendale, CA 91204; (818) 545-7507, (818) 545-7506, www.cnto.org.

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Mike Meyer lives in Berkeley, where he has completed a memoir of his travels through China.