Warsaw to Bangkok

Well into the 30’s, Kashgar was exotica. It was beyond the back of beyond. It took five months to get here from Beijing in the mid-30s and was such a difficult haul that it was made the subject of books (News from Tartary by Peter Fleming is an excellent one). It was a closed world, beset by insurrection and the last vestiges of Great Game intrigue as the Soviets involved themselves in the fray between the Communists, the Kuomintang and mujahedeen groups.

At the time, the only outlet to the West was via British-held Kashmir, which being on the other side of the Himalaya was only reachable for a few months each summer. The situation did not improve. Sino-Soviet tensions led to the closing of the border with the USSR in 1960. The Karakoram Highway to Pakistan was but a mountain caravan trail. India’s border remains closed to this day. Coming from Mongolia would have meant trekking through both the Gobi and Taklamakan (“go in and you won’t come out”) Deserts. Rail only reached here in 1999, and then only from Urumqi, which itself is 30 hours from Lanzhou, an isolated backwater beyond the ends of remotest Sichuan.

It is, judging by the number of travellers here and the strong Han influence, not what it used to be. But whether you’re spent big bucks flying in with a tour group or whether you’ve spent days or weeks getting here overland, clearly at least a little bit of old Kashgar remains. It’s still an oasis in the middle of steppe, mountain and desert. It still takes upwards of forever to get here. It’s going to take several more days for me to get to China proper. And though my name won’t go down with the Silk Road’s famous “foreign devils” of yesteryear, I still feel pretty good about having made it to this remote outpost. My journey is halfway done. The Russian world is now behind me, and unadulerated Asia beckons.

Kashgar is by all accounts a very rapidly changing town. My first morning I walked through long stretches of Chinese luxury clothing stores and electronics shops. It didn’t seem like Central Asia at all. I finally arrived in the Uyghur old town, and it was like stepping back a few centuries. I didn’t have a map of the old town and didn’t feel like getting lost, so I just stuck to my game plan of grabbing breakfast. You could see the dirt roads being ripped up by Chinese workers, who were installing sewer pipes. The Uyghurs just sat in their chaykanas and watched. A few years ago, there were seeds of rebellion sprouting as Uyghur resentment over Chinese “invasion” of their land started in earnest. That seems to have faded to resignation now.

I ate some laghman – noodles with garlic, meat, peppers, etc, and walked back to the hotel, having in mind a grand plan to explore the area in much more depth that afternoon.

By the time the afternoon rolled around, I was quite tired and decided a nap was better. That lasted 3 1/2 hours and I felt even more tired when I awoke. Still, I set out for the old town. I didn’t make it very far before sickness took hold. I went back to my room and proceeded to spend the next two days in bed sick as a dog. I threw up in the sink a couple of times.

Why the sink? Well, squat toilets are not amenable to technicolour yawns at the best of times, but the toilets at the Seman Hotel are particularly nasty. The place is full of Western tourists but still they haven’t bothered upgrading what are surely some of the filthiest, smelliest holes I’ve ever laid eyes one. It didn’t matter how sick I was, I wasn’t going to throw up in those!

Upon my recovery, I decided to swear off Uyghur food for the duration of my trip. I’d had enough Central Asian food anyway by this point. I wasn’t in a huge hurry to dip into Chinese food, given that I am spending several weeks in the country.

One of the best parts about Kashgar is the atmosphere. It is a market town and people come from all over to trade here. Uyghurs, Han (garden variety Chinese), Hui (Muslim Chinese), Kyrgyz, Kazak, Tajik, Hunza (from near Tashkurgan in the direction of Pakistan) and Pakistanis fill the town to conduct business. There are many Pakistani restaurants to cater to that group and I decided to eat there most of the time. The curries were mild and tasty, if a little cheaply-made. I was especially impressed with the friendliness of the Pakistani clientele, and had many interesting convesations. It really made me regret that I’m not travelling to Pakistan.

One of the most disorienting things about Kashgar – well, Xinjiang Province in general – is the dual time zones. The entirety of China runs on Beijing time, but that is 2500 km east of Kashgar. So Xinjiang has its own time as well. All the “official” stuff – post office, banks, trains, etc run on Beijing time, the rest on Xinjiang time, which is two hours behind Beijing time. I thus managed to make appointments for 11am Beijing time and 9am Xinjiang time the same day.

One thing which is most annoying in many of the more touristy parts of Central Asia is “Hello!”. This is pretty much the only word of English that everybody on the planet knows, from little kids to touts and vendors. After a month in Central Asia, “hello” has gone from being a polite greeting to meaning “hey, you, whitey with the money!”. It is very annoying to be singled out from a crowd by every vendor, moneychanger, taxi driver, and tout for attention. When it is being shouted at you, sometimes by someone who has decided to follow you down the street shouting it many times, without an ounce of friendliness, it strikes me as ridiculously rude. Thank goodness the Han don’t bother which such things (author’s postscript: this comment may hold for Kashgar, but as for the rest of China…). I looked forward to hitting China proper and being singled out because I look funny rather than because everybody thinks I’m rich and want to spend all of my cash on their stupid trinkets, rotten fruit or whatever.

The Chinese influence on Kashgar was lamented by a few locals that I spoke to. Travellers, too, pointed out that a few years ago Kashgar had far less neon, far fewer Chinese people and a much better market. It is easy for us as Westerners to lament the loss of an ancient culture, but the truth is that culture is one of grinding poverty. The Uyghur people are poor, lack educational opportunities, lack plumbing and medicine, and this brings with it higher than normal infant mortality and lower than normal life expectancy.

We as a people certainly were eager to leave our 19th century lifestyle behind, and it is ultimately a little bit arrogant to wish other cultures would not do the same. It smacks of seeing places like Kashgar’s old town as little more than a human zoo. Sure, it is really fun to walk around the adobe houses and narrow laneways, but we wouldn’t want to live there ourselves.

That said, and it sort of sounds like the Beijing party line, one Uyghur in particular at the Urumqi train station argued quite vociferously that his people in fact did not receive the benefits of such modernization. When old areas are bulldozed or gentrified, the Han move in. The wealth of Kashgar has increased, yes, he said, but the wealth of the Uyghurs has not.

An example of Chinese mismanagement of modernization has to be the world famous Kashgar Sunday Market. This market has existed for a couple of thousand years. The travelling Polos traded here. However, the open-air market of yesteryear has largely been replaced by an “International Trade Centre”, with sterile metal stalls aligned in tidy little rows. The hat section is over here, the knives over there. There is no bustle here, no atmosphere. Thankfully some pockets of the old market still remain, where traders haggle over trussed-up chickens and stuff pigeons into bags to take back to their restaurants (Chinese eat the things – ew!).

At the end of the day, however, my impression was that the Kashgar Sunday Market is dying. It is a major tourist draw, not to mention the heart of the region’s economy. But people don’t come all the way to the ends of the Earth to bargain for cheap flip-flops and children’s clothing. They don’t come for an “International Trade Centre”. Aside from a few Uyghur hats and knives, there’s nothing you can buy there that you can’t buy somewhere else. Tourists go there for the atmosphere. The Chinese have killed that, and when word gets around, Kashgar will die. Hotan to the south will be the immediate beneficiary, as it too has a famous Sunday Market. Hopefully the Chinese leave that one alone.

The other thing that disappointed me about the market was harder to put my finger on. Until I left and the answer came from below. GRRRRROOWWWWLL. I’d come to the market without breakfast, and left still hungry. There was hardly any food there, and nothing you can’t find at even the lowliest bazar in the dustiest Central Asia village. In places like Osh, Samarqand and Tashkent, not only did food abound but local specialties were plentiful. There were no local specialties here. Melons, cheap candies, honey and nuts, sure. Bread, and standard chaykana fare yes. The only new thing was opke – the infamous goat head soup with intestines. I gave it a pass.

To me, markets are all about food. For a market to feed my soul, it must feed my stomach. The Kashgar Sunday Market came up completely empty in this regard. In fact, on this trip nothing has topped Riga’s market, even though that one never gets any press at all. I dream of returning to Toronto and stuffing my face in Kensington Market or at St. Lawrence Market.

Tags: Central Asia, China, Kashgar, Travel

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 4th, 2005 at 12:34 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.