I talked about the Dutars a couple of days ago. We got to see them ‘in action’ at this tourist friendly restaurant, the Uighur players sitting around a plate of some sort of traditionalish breaded noodles.
The Tomb of Yussof Khass Hajip was in a quiet, leafy part of town, south of the city center. The entrance to the tomb was lined with grape vines, with shaded arbors on either side of the main passageway. At the entrance, there was a hulking block of carved chalk looming, for some reason, behind …
Galen’s father is an amateur luthier, so Galen has a natural interest in stringed instruments and the people who make them. It was not surprising that, when Galen and I split off for ten minutes in the center of Kashgar’s old city, I found him trying out instruments in a Uighur luthier’s shop.
This photo is widely available throughout China, largely seen in restaurants selling Uighur food. It is a ram, completely cooked and its marbled meat is browned. It sits in a position that it might use in life, legs folded underneath its torso. The only thing I find strange about it, is that it has a …
“During this time, I have witnessed many of the so-called great national events; but, in my heart, they left little impression…but there was one small matter which did mean something to me.” – Lu Xun, A Call to Arms, “A Small Matter” The mother was short, but she wore strappy, light blue wedges to …
The hilltop neighborhood stands like a mud lamp standing erect over Kashgar, looking out over the city. This hilltop neighborhood is the last remaining architecture preserved of this ancient city which Marco Polo once wandered through, seven centuries before. View from above Kashgar sits on a flat plane, punctuated by this small hill. The neighborhood …
I saw men playing this game drawn out in the dirt, but I could not tell what it was. Are they playing some version of backgammon, come to them via Persia and Central Asia? Or is this just a Uighur game? Or What? If anyone has any idea, leave your answers in the comments.
Way back when we were in Urumqi, I did a post on the awkward problem of timezones in China. Despite being the size of the U.S., including Alaska, China has only a single official timezone: Beijing Time. Beijing is in the east of the country. If you were to compare China’s geography to America’s, Beijing …
I’ve talked a lot about how different the Uighurs are from Han Chinese and how distinct Kashgar is from places farther east in China. But nothing does a better job of demonstrating that than Galen’s photography. Here are some of the portraits that Galen did while in Kashgar, mostly in the Sunday Market:
When we first arrived, Kashgar’s famed Sunday Market seemed cavernous but dead. It was nine-thirty in the morning, Beijing time, which meant that it was seven-thirty, Xinjiang time. Markets are normally bustling by seven thirty. In fact, if you get to many markets any later than that, you have missed the best time. But the …