Travel
Travel
PEOPLE STILL LIVING AMONG THE RUINS PICK THEIR WAY CAREFULLY AROUND THE HEAPS OF BRICKS, PAST DOORS ALL DAUBED WITH THE SINGLE CHARACTER “拆”. IT MEANS DESTROY. SOME STAND STARING WISTFULLY AT THE HUGE CRATERS WHERE BULLDOZERS AND CRANES GO BUSILY ABOUT THEIR WORK IN CLOUDS OF DUST
If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like living in a war zone without the danger of being bombed, you should go to Kashgar. Here are all the images we have seen on grainy documentaries from WWII: The half walls gaping naked against the sky, the single doorframe left standing in a heap of rubble as an afterthought; the beams sticking out supporting nothing, scraps of wallpaper, pieces of ornately decorated skirting boards and a lonely sink balancing desolately on the four remaining floor tiles. People still living among the ruins pick their way carefully around the heaps of bricks, past doors all daubed with the single character “拆” . It means destroy. Some stand staring wistfully at the huge craters where bulldozers and cranes go busily about their work in clouds of dust. Nobody wants to talk to me, not even when I ask if they live here or how they feel about being moved into a spanking new 45th floor apartment which they can’t afford. Only a Chinese worker on his way down into a crater doesn’t mind chatting: ”Yes we had to tear down these awful old things to build new ones.” He points proudly to a monster highrise in the background: “We’re helping the minority people get a new place to live.” And have you asked them what they want? “Asked them? Everybody wants to live in new houses!” Really? That’s not what I’ve heard. “We Uyghurs feel most comfortable living with only the sky above us and only the earth below,” is what I’ve read Uyghurs saying in interviews earlier this year. All right, so they said Allah says they should live like that. But that’s the way they want to live, and I, for one, can’t blame them. This is my first trip to Kashgar so I never got to see 38
THE CORRESPONDENT
Left: Some traditional Uighur dwellings still remain but stand as exceptions amongst vast vistas of rubble. Above: Today, the once ubiquitous camel is rarer than the now ubiquitous soldier. Modern Kashgar folklore says there are seven soldiers for every local.
the reason for its popularity: a medieval city largely unchanged since Mohammed wore short trousers; a warren of back alleys, buzzing bazaars bursting with home-grown produce; camels, donkeys and flowing robes. All, in short, images from One Thousand and One Nights that people are drawn to simply because it feels good to walk down some street imagining that you’re in a streetscape of hundreds of years ago, on the same stones upon which mysterious ancestors’ sandalclad feet walked, your eyes seeing what theirs saw. But you can’t call the Chinese insensitive to tourists’ needs. Where before lay the above mentioned bustling markets, hub of the Silk Road trade, there are now gleaming new shopping malls with “arabesque” features like mosaics as a nod to days of yore, but with green windows in aluminium frames – we can’t go completely overboard with the romanticism. The impractically narrow alleys have been replaced by wide, open streets which can easily accommodate for example four tanks driving side by side. To help tourists, known to be stupid and not particularly favoured with the gift of sight, new, garish signs are everywhere, proclaiming things like: “Folk Speciality Andarts Craf Works For Tourist,” “Street Display for sale to tourist items as civil Hall” and “Panoramic View Tourist Map of Eidgah Folk Custom & Cultural Scenic Spot.” Just a pity there are no tourists. For unfortunately, as a result of the sealing-off of the province communication-wise and also because everywhere you go there are soldiers in full combat gear, the river of tourism dollars has dried up. The shops stand with metal grilles rolled down, the “Cultural Scenic Spot” – formerly the plaza outside Eidgah, (Id Kah) the heart of Kashgar and the biggest mosque in China – now only sports two bored camels standing touristless between a gigantic TV screen showing adverts for Nokia 3G, and an empty shopping mall. Oh, and dozens and dozens of soldiers who have set up camp under the trees outside the mosque. There must have been particularly hard fighting going on here during the “uprising” I presume, because this is the biggest military congregation I’ve seen in the whole province, where road blocks and checkpoints normally don’t have more than five to ten soldiers. On the steps of the Eidgah mosque, recently dolled up in eye-watering yellow, is an old geezer feeding doves with breadcrumbs. I sidle up, and the irony isn’t lost on the non-Mandarin Uyghur when the soldiers get visibly uncomfortable and start rattling their weapons at the sight of a lone foreigner taking photos of white doves. He raises his eyebrows wordlessly in a world-weary expression that can only mean one thing: “Idiots.” THE CORRESPONDENT
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