Kashgar - an oasis in the Gobi desert

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Oct 1990.

Kashgar is the biggest oasis in the Gobi desert in Xinjiang. The town its people, the market, the mosques and the back streets have earned it the rightful expression of 'the cross roads of Central Asia'. The streets and the surrounding fields are lined with tall poplar and eucalyptus trees giving shade and checking the advance of the sandy desert on the outside. Donkey carts, bicycles and the colourful Uighur people fill the streets. Most of the population here is Islamic, belonging to both the Sunni and the Shiite sects as well as the Shafee sect which is mostly found amongst the Uzbek and the Uighur people. The family planning programme of one child per couple does not apply to the Uighur minorities and so one can see lots of kids wherever you walk around in Kashgar.

We stayed at the Seman Hotel, which used to be the former Russian consulate building. Kashgar was apparently the site of a recent uprising of the Uighur people against Chinese rule. The official line was that it was a clash over money between some Han and Uighur traders here, resulting in a fight and a few people getting killed as a consequence. The police had to intervene to restore order. But the Australian journalist we met here said that it was an ethnic revolt and the Red Army got involved and as many as seventy Uighur rebels were shot dead. One does not know what the truth is.

The food in that restaurant opposite to our hotel was some of the best we had eaten in China. The vegetarian dishes were excellent and the thin fried noodles were a treat. Fried peanuts, chips and coffee were the other combination we used to enjoy some hours before dinner time.

Uighur women, except for a few old people, do not wear the purdah. They like to link their eyebrows with a line across the forehead and even small girls sport the line, often looking quite beautiful. Most of the Uighur men wear the blue outfit and a blue cap. It is the same Maoist outfit you see elsewhere in China. I don’t know whether the Uighur people wear it as a result of gentle coercion or on their own. But the women are very colourfully dressed. The proper attire for men seems to always include a skull cap which is why shops selling caps and hats are found all over the town.

Sunday is the one day Kashgar comes alive. The market is said to still reflect the glory of olden days as a Central Asian bazaar on the Silk Road. We were quite fascinated by what we saw on the one Sunday that we spent in Kashgar and we were game enough to stay on for another Sunday. There is no doubt that it is worth hanging around in Kashgar for the bazaar but I would have thought that its heady days of the great past are no longer there today. The entire town seems to flock to the market on Sunday morning on their bicycles or donkey carts or on foot. The donkey carts move so close to one another that it is a miracle that they do not entangle themselves in such a mess and bring all traffic to a stop on the way to the bazaar. But, nothing of that sort happens and the traffic moves along to the constant sound of 'poch, poch' which probably means 'move, move'.

The market building is another story. Every available space is taken up by the vendors and the customers and there is little room to move from one spot to another. But a different concept of time is the key here. It is only necessary to stick it out there from morning till evening. Somehow, motion takes place and you get to seeing all the market and all the goodies it has to offer. It is the embodiment of the free-market in China. Everything is available in plenty and heaped one on top of another and the vendors vie with one another to attract customers. Spices, dry fruits and nuts are heaped up in voluminous quantities at every corner. Clothes, hats and caps are a nice attraction. Especially, the fur caps that one is used to seeing on the heads of the Kazaks, Tajiks and the Kyrghiz people are really beautiful. Carpets, rugs and sweaters are some of the other items over which locals haggle over the quality and price. Shoe makers, knife traders, leather repair merchants were also there in the market. Blacksmiths and other artisans fashion many other needs of the people by working away on their hammer, steel and wood. Then there are the tea shops which are said to make tea from the water in the nearby ditch! The meat market is as gruesome a sight as it is elsewhere in much of the third world.

A big trade goes on in the sale of livestock. Camels, goats, donkeys and horses are on sale but I could see no cows. Perhaps they have eaten away the lot. I enquired about the price of a camel and it was about 800 yuan (160 dollars). We speculated that it was probably worth buying it and hiring a Uighur guide for our return journey across the Taklamakhan desert to Urumqi!

Christina Dodwell writes in her book ‘A Traveller in China’ :

'The herbalist in the Kashgar market was quite happy to let me investigate his potions and tell me their uses. Dried snake is for chest pains, though for a cough remedy he recommends dried lizards mixed with some green pellets. Powdered armadillo is given for relief of morning sickness while for a stomach complaint he would advise elkhorn. He had racks of snake skins, pungent smelling roots (snake venom anti-dote), tortoise shell, sea porcupines and bats pinned up with their wings outstretched. Also dried birds' heads, mushrooms, bottles of leaves and slimy looking things in oil...'

Sounds like the Kashgar market can be a gruesome one.

With one billion Chinese using such unscientific remedies for common ailments, it would be no surprise that China is eventually stripped clean of all its wildlife. I wonder whether the communist party has ever carried on a campaign against such practices in China. It does not look like it. Paul Theroux also writes in his book ‘Riding The Iron Rooster’ that often the Chinese kill owls and other rare birds thinking that consumption of these birds are good for your eyes and things like that.

Food shops stacked up huge quantities of the Uighur bread called biao which is similar to the Indian Naan bread. Just like the naan, it is baked plain or stuffed with vegetables and meat and done in a clay oven very much like the tandoori oven. Just like elsewhere in Asia, the bread is stacked up one on top of the other in the open. Flies and other insects feed on them but generally they are consumed hot and I suppose one can have an attack of diarrhoea or dysentry sometimes from eating the bread. But we have been eating such bread for the previous three weeks in Xinjiang and I never felt healthier.

The Idgah mosque which dominates the central square of Kashgar, is the biggest in China. It is about two hundred years old and is one of the monuments of tourist attractions in Kashgar. The charm of Kashgar is simply to stay in the lovely Seman Hotel, eat at the restaurant opposite and wander about in the oasis town and its environs.

We met a number of people in Kashgar at the restaurant. Hans and Koen are the most likeable. They are two young Flemish-speaking Belgian guys from Antwerp, always happy-go-lucky and relaxed. In Kashgar, both of them suffered from severe diarrhoea but they made no bones about it. They handled it like seasoned third-world patients. In fact, I was more worried for them than they were about themselves! Talking of diarrhoea, my friend Gilson also suffered from the problem but he was just as good about it, outlasting it by sheer silence.

Dan and Chili were two English guys who came in from Pakistan. Dan had spent a year in Pakistan on some British government aided project near Karachi. But he didn't seem to have picked up any Urdu in such a long time. They were good company as well.

Then there was the Kiwi girl who 'sold mystery' to use Gilson's expression. One evening, Annie talked her into sitting at our table. She was young and quite good-looking. But her answers to any question were evasive to say the least. Tony was the only one who got to talking with her. Some of the conversation ran as below:

'So you are here from Pakistan?' asked Tony.

'Well, not really. I was in India. Before that in Pakistan and even before that in Africa...'

'So where are you from originally?'

'Well, I left New Zealand five years ago. I am just wandering around. I have been to places'. She implied that she was Kiwi without exactly saying it.

'What is your name?'

'Well, what name would you like?'

'...............'

That was probably the end of Tony's attempts to talk to her.

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