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Published: August 9th 2010
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Kashgar
Typical Kashgar male, sunburnt and with white beard It is funny how lines on a map can have such a huge effect on the ground. In this case the line in question was the border between China and ex-Soviet Central Asia. Up until then I hadn't realized how much has been destroyed in Central Asia, down to the peoples souls. When you reach Kashgar you discover to your amazement that you only entered Asia after crossing that border and that so far you have been somewhere in between, some kind of weird twilight zone. The Soviets did an amazing job at eradicating a lot of the cultures in their sphere of influence and substituting it with nothing in particular. The former Soviet states of Central Asia are neither here nor there, not belonging to Asia or to Europe.
Arriving in Kashgar your senses are suddenly bombarded with the familiar smells, sounds and sights that remind you that you are back in Asia. It is hectic and chaotic and fantastic and the markets are full of produce and the pungent aroma of spices fills the air as men haggle and vendors scream to get your attention. Your eyes are treated to a visual spectacle of colours and shapes, and
Kashgar
Cooking some food your ears are put to the test as only Asia can do. Everything seems so alive and the Central Asia you left behind seems drab and lacking in comparison. And with this sensation it dawns on you what exactly was missing so far and why there was this nagging feeling in your head that Central Asia was just not quite right. Central Asia in a sense seems to have had the life sucked right out of it by the Soviets and is still recovering from it.
Uzbekistan for instance is rather disappointing for many travellers, simply because the exotic images that are conjured up in our minds when hearing the names of such cities as Samarkand or Bukhara or of the Fergana valley never materializes into reality. The buildings are there and they are beautiful, but it isn't bustling, it is all subdued. The people are quiet and hushed, the colours somehow drained from them. There are markets, but they miss the elements that make them interesting.
When seeing Kashgar I started to wonder what Central Asia would have been like in other circumstances. What a fantastic region it might have been, how the bazaars could have been
Kashgar
Taking a nap!
teeming and heaving with people and exotic products, the streets thronged with rickshaws and bikes and buses all blaring their horns at each other, while old craggy men with sun burnt faces and big bushy beards, would sit and sip tea, resplendent in their robes and turbans.
Of course all the advantages the Soviets brought would also not have happened and the fate of the women in the region would most likely have been more similar to their counterparts in the neighbouring countries. I guess it is easy for a traveller like me to wish for a different turn of events, which would have made a trip through the region more exciting and interesting for me; but life for the locals perhaps worse in some ways. In the end it is no use musing all these things; it happened and nothing will change that, so instead I will return back to Kashgar, to Asia, to China.
Kashgar, another stop on the Silk Road, another exotic image in my mind. And as long as you don't have too much of an expectation of Kashgar it doesn't disappoint. It has all the elements of a trade city along the famous
Kashgar
Friday prayers Silk Road, merchants from the region and beyond meet and talk, and the markets are full. It is hot and dusty, there is an overload of men and women with interesting features and clothes, there are bazaars with strange and familiar sights and smells, and it is hectic as only an Asian city can be.
But don't expect to see much old around, don't expect arches and minarets, madrases and mosques, crumbling mud bricked houses and twisting alleyways. Old Kashgar is all but gone, razed to the ground in the name of progress. A small section of it still survives sitting incongruously between shining new apartment blocks. Most of Kashgar looks like any other mid-sized Chinese town. It is layed out in a grid pattern with big streets lined with trees and shopping malls, interspersed by pleasant parks and at least one big central square lorded over by Mao.
This after all is China, and China is determined to prove it and show it to all that come out here. There might be few Chinese, but the city definitely looks like it is; it has been copied and pasted onto old Kashgar from one of the many other
Kashgar
Beggar at the mosque after the prayers towns of the same size somewhere else in China. Luckily the spirit remains the same, and that is the most important thing. You can take away the buildings, but that doesn't mean the people disappear as well. In fact everything that has been going on here for the last thousand years is still going on, only in a new setting.
After a couple of days of soaking it up in Kashgar it was time to go to Hotan to experience the Sunday market there. And what a market it was! Huge, fascinating, crowded, noisy, smelly, interesting and refreshingly lacking of tourists. Hotan is called the Jade city, because that is what has been traded and sold here for an untold number of years. One section of the market was dedicated to jade, though most of it was given over to the fruit and vegetable sellers, the meat market, the cloth merchants and shacks selling and repairing hardware. In between all this was an abundance of food stalls and restaurants, serving up all that you could ever want. Yes, Hotan market was quite an experience indeed.
Hotan, like Kashgar looks Chinese on the outside, but its heart like Kashgar's
Kashgar
Two jolly old men!
is still Uighur. Hotan sits on the southern Silk Road and though my original plan was to follow this route, I had heard that the road wasn't passable due to wash-outs and landslides so instead I decided to cross the Taklamakan dessert and head up to Turpan. The route I had in mind didn't pan out, the journey that seemed exotic turned into a small nightmare, after being dropped off by the bus in the middle of nowhere at three o'clock in the morning amongst the gas and oil fields of Luntai, having to take an expensive taxi to the nearest town and trying to flag down full buses on their way to Urumqi, which wasn't even my destination.
Eventually of course I did get to Turpan even if it was with a slight detour, and nightmares always evaporate with the coming of dawn. Turpan sits on the northern Silk Road, near the lowest spot of China. It is also purportedly the hottest town in the country. The valley or basin it sits in is irrigated and lush and full of vineyards and grape vines, and being situated as it was in an oasis it has been an important
Kashgar
Selling naan at the market
city for a long, long time.
As such it has several sights scattered around the town, ancient cities, old Buddhist caves, and plenty of small Uighur villages. The Chinese are cashing in on all the tourist dollars by putting a fence around anything that might interest us and charging a significant fee for it. Whole valleys and villages have been turned into tourist sights, and tour buses are a very common sight in and around the town. Being a tourist myself I did a few of the sights, those that interested me in one way or another, and left the other ninety percent to the Chinese package tours.
Finally another night bus away I arrived in Dunhuang, where I was only six month ago in winter. Then I went to see the Mogao caves, this time I wanted to see the western most section of the Chinese wall, though officially that claim is made by Jiayuguan. Since Jiayuguan is about four hundred kilometers more east of Dunhuang and I most certainly saw with my own eyes the remains of the Han dynasty wall about eighty kilometers west of Dunhuang I can safely say this is the most western
Kashgar
Taking a ride to the bazaar
part. Perhaps though since this part was not built by bricks, and was abandoned after a couple of hundred years, it is not included in the Great Wall. And just as the last vestiges of the Han wall fade away into the distance, so does this story come to an end... For now!
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spox
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place I want to go
it is an essence of Kashgar for me, you got it right Ralf ! The place's name sounds good to me as well, as reminds me Dvorcevoy's movie Tulpan, with great cinematography by Jola Dylewska...