Far, Far Away

And now, for some thing completely different……………..

Xinjiang (pronounced “sin-gee-yong”), is one of twenty-three provinces in China. It’s way in the west; the capital, Urumqi (said as oo-rum-chee) is five hours by air from Shanghai. Kashgar (or Kashi in Chinese Mandarin) is another ninety minutes by air from Urumqi, in the extreme west of Xinjiang, less than 200 miles from Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and one or two other “Stans,” pretty much in the middle of nowhere. That part of China is supposedly the one spot on the planet furthest from any saltwater shoreline – more than 1,600 miles in any direction.

If you look at a map of China, the part that sticks out furthest in the west is Xinjiang, the province or Uighur Autonomous Region above Tibet and extending further west. And at the tip of that place, all the way to the west is Kashi (as the Chinese say it), or Kashgar in English and in the local language, Uighur.

It’s one of those places in China where Chinese-looking people (Han Chinese) are in the minority. The majority of the province’s 21 million people are “Turkic,” look like Europeans or Middle Eastern people and most have been known as Uighurs (We-Grrrrrs) since the 1930s. They’re a distinct group with many middle eastern customs including being Muslim, building mosques, forgoing pork in favor of lamp, sheep and goats and have a written language that looks a lot like Arabic. There are quite a few Han Chinese Muslims in Shanghai and a few Uighurs. The Chinese Muslim men in Shanghai all wear little round white caps and the women cover their heads with scarves. They usually can be found operating small restaurants that feature home made noodles that are prepared to order while you wait which is an even in itself. Uighur people are most often found selling raisins, nuts or dried apricots and other fruits from pushcarts on the street. I first learned of Xinjiang from big murals pasted to the walls of almost all the small Muslim restaurants around town. I like the cooking in these places so often found myself staring at the pictures. The photos looked beautiful and I put Xinjiang on my list of places to go.

Early in October, coincident with China’s “Golden Week” National Day holiday, I went.

I arranged the trip with a local tour guide service, one of the Uighur (or Uyghur) people…there are a variety of spellings. My cost was about US$1,200 for five nights and six days, plus a few hundred for airfares from Shanghai and between two cities in Xinjiang. Watching the money flow between the guides, hotels, restaurants and tourist-site entrance cashiers, the actual cost was probably just over half what I paid. But I had a guide, driver and a car and wouldn’t have had a clue as to what was where had I tried this on my own.

Xinjiang is big – about the size of western Europe. Virtually every Chinese to whom I mentioned this trip in advance told me it was dangerous and to be careful. In 2009, there were riots in the province, largely in the capital Urumqi, after some Uighur migrant laborers in Guangdong province were roughed up by majority Chinese workers and bosses. Two Uighur migrants were killed and the resulting protests and riots in Urumqi killed nearly two hundred people when the Uighur locals and Han Chinese mixed it up. Some people reported that many of the young Ughur migrant workers were impressed by threats to their families in Xinjiang and that’s why they went in such large numbers to fill factory jobs so far away.

I had no idea what to expect, but my experience was that a lot of things in life are overblown and since I was going to travel in the company of locals, I went. In the event, the place was calm and peaceful with a smaller police presence than in Shanghai. The Han ethnic Chinese stay in the cities pretty much and the countryside and smaller villages are all Uighur. The only military presence I saw were two transport planes parked on a ramp in Kashgar. I saw guns in the hands of police in two places – at the Urumqi airport and at a natural chokepoint in a mountain pass not far from the Chinese border where police checked passports and ID for people traveling along the single highway. There were a couple of other manned and unmanned police checkpoints along the road some of which had a small wall of sandbags around them – that was pretty much it as to the unrest or danger.

Alternate stories came from my Uighur guides who told me that Han Chinese dominated the government, the police and the Army and were expanding the ethnic Chinese population in the province by design. In Kashgar, a town of 500,000, Beijing has a plan to double the size to more than a million and only more ethnic Han Chinese can add those kinds of numbers given the birthrate and native population of the Uighurs. There’s a lot of construction and some of the old parts of cities are being razed – under the premise that they are unsafe – to make way for new apartment blocks.

Schools are bi-lingual with an emphasis on Mandarin and like in Quebec Province in Canada, all the roadsigns and stores have bi-lingual writing in Mandarin and the Uighur language, but I noticed that the Mandarin Chinese characters all seem to be of a larger size than the local language. The farther one gets from Urumqi or Kashgar into the countryside, the less Han Chinese/Mandarin influence.

China is supposed to be on one time-zone even being as wide as the USA. Since Beijing is so far to the east, that makes early morning, Beijing time, pretty dark in Urumqi. So Xinjiang people keep “local time” which is two hours behind the time in Beijing. Big ticket items like airlines, fly on Beijing time, but local busses, shops, hotels, restaurants and tourist sites all use local time. It’s kind of a don’t ask, don’t tell policy that subtly defies Beijing’s insistence on controlling everything.

I visited Kashgar in the west, Urumqi in the center of Xinjiang and Turpan, the grape growing region about two hours from Urumqi. On the way to Turpan, I saw more wind turbine electric generators I knew existed and more were being erected all over the place. There is a constant wind (and sandstorms) in that region and the Chinese are taking advantage of every gust. The turbines and their mounts are just huge. A friend of mine told me that a lot of Inner Mongolia is seeing the same phenomenon.

Most of Xinjiang is desert surrounded by mountains. They’ve adopted a Central Asian practice of tunneling irrigation ditches to carry water from the mountains to the flatlands creating oases where fruits (grapes mostly, but some others I didn’t recognize) and all kinds of nuts are farmed. The tunnels can be thirty kilometers long and deep underground which stops most evaporation. There’s a museum to this hundreds of years old engineering feat in Turpan.

It gets very hot and very cold – plus 40 degrees C or more to minus 40 degrees C which is more than 104 F to -40F. They grow grapes for raisins and ship tons of them. Before winter, the vines are buried in the dirt to protect them and dug up again in early spring. There are grapes all over of all kinds, but few wineries because of the Muslim dominance. the few wineries there are are operated by Han Chinese – non-Muslim people.

People live in Yurts or Gers, which are felt or canvas covered round single story buildings; or in stone or mud and straw made houses. They make and use the “oriental rugs” that are sold everywhere. Hand-made ones can take a couple people two or three months for ones of small room-size and cost $1,500 or so depending on the material and patterns. These are put on slightly elevated platforms in dirt-floored houses and that’s where people hang out.

Uighurs and Han Chinese seem to get along, but don’t mingle. The Muslim Uighur are reverent to their faith and rarely intermarry with Han Chinese. One can sense in conversation, however, the feelings of an oppressed people. There is an ornate tomb in Urumqi dedicated to the “Fragrant Concubine” who, as the story goes from the Han Chinese side, had a natural scent that was captivating to the then Emperor of China in some dynasty. She supposedly fell in love, became the number one concubine and played a major and heroic role in Beijing until her natural death when she was returned to her homeland. It’s a well-known romantic story among Han Chinese, subject of a film not too long ago. The Uighur story is a little different and say the girl, while still fragrant, was kidnapped and dragged off to Beijing, where she secreted knives in the sleeves of her garments intending to kill the Emperor. Details are few from that point. In any event, nobody except tourists believe the girl’s remains made it back to Urumqi, but her family’s tomb is revered under the premise that they did.

Most of the countryside is dry, dusty and tan. Where there is greenery, it’s from a small river or more often from irrigation using water from snow covered mountains. The scenery is striking and the two lakes I visited were stunning – the first, Black Lake 200 Km west of Kashgar on the way to Pakistan is crystal clear and cold in the middle of desert and snow-capped peaks. The lake is at more than 12,000 ft. elevation which it doesn’t take long to feel. The other lake, Heavenly Lake is near Urumqi and sits in a bowl high up in mountains above the desert. The elevation and water changes to landscape to resemble the Northwest of the US a little or Germany.

Five days in a place the size of western Europe is a little too short to see much so I hope to get back there again. But I recently heard from a student I had who is now attending college in the UK. Turns out she is from Inner Mongolia which I didn’t know when I was teaching accounting to her cohort. She’s invited me to Inner Mongolia and promised to show me around next summer. That’s a hard invitation to ignore.

: Mosque in a dusty town – grape drying laticed buildings abound

: Chunk coal for heat and cooking

: Wind Turbines in a sand storm – between Urumqi and Turpan, Xinjiang, China

: Tourist photos with costumed local girls at the “Fragrant Princess” tomb in Urumqi.

: Huge wind turbines under construction for miles between Urumqi and Turpan

: It’s unwise for girls in diaphanous clothes to stand in front of the bright sunlight — even the modest Muslim girls overlook this fact from time-to-time.

: Ancient town cut out of a mountain near Turpan, Xinjiang Province, China

: Tunnels 30 kilometers long some of them, carry water from the mountains to the otherwise desert making artificial oases.

: The Xinjiang Museum has a number of these and others are in glass cases still in the tombs where they were discovered. Some of these were looted by westerners in the early part of the 20th Century, particularly Germans.

: There are four (4) girls here, one encased in the Burka. A minority of women and girls wear the full cover, most are in various western dress with some kind of headscarf.