My travel diaries
Thursday 23 August, 2007 - Kashgar, Xinjiang, China
The Great Game
In the morning we transfer from the Seman Hotel to the Qini Bagh Hotel. Both of these hotels have interesting histories. The Seman Hotel is located on the site of the former Russian Consulate, while the Qini Bagh Hotel is on the site of the former British Consulate. Kashgar itself was a central focus of the political intrigues of the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries between Britain and Russia known as the Great Game: two great empires tormenting themselves about each other's penetration into Central Asia.
David's irritation with the lethargic Ali is turning the pair of them into an entertaining comedy double act. Today we have a bus tour of Kashgar with Ali as our guide. Although he has been to Kashgar many times before, David decides to come along to keep an eye on him.
Uighur city
There's not much left of historic Kashgar. When Shipton came here as British Consul-General in 1940, he described the city as being surrounded by massive fifty foot high walls, but now the old ramparts can be seen in very few places where a small section of wall has been preserved. He noted that the narrow streets were lined with people on donkeys, but these have now been replaced by wide boulevards lined with cars and buses. The local Uighur population are Muslims who have more in common with Tadjik and Kirghiz peasant folk across the border than the Han Chinese who govern them. Although nominally part of the Xinjiang "Autonomous" Region, in reality the area is governed from Beijing, and many of the old Uighur buildings have been knocked down to make way for the wide streets of the modern Chinese city. We are dropped off somewhere in the centre of modern Kashgar, cross a busy road by a brand new footbridge, turn off a side street and find ourselves walking through an old Uighur market street, full of grocery and souvenir shops located within old three storey buildings with colourful carved balconies. We reach the large and open brick-tiled Id Kah Square and look around the Id Kah Mosque where modern signs in pigeon English eulogise about the Chinese Communist government's sensitivity to Islamic culture.
Then Ali takes us to a carpet shop. Most of us have been to carpet shops before and have no wish to spend very long in there. They exist in great profusion from North Africa to East Asia, and it's very difficult to go on a commercial tour of any city in Asia without being taken to one. David is also trying to usher us through as quickly as possibly, all the while making disparaging comments in Ali's hearing.
"There are better things to do in Kashgar than visit a bloody carpet shop," he says.
On the other hand, I wager to myself that at least one of us will end up buying a carpet, and sure enough, Luigi obliges.
Meanwhile, Geoff has walked straight through and is sitting outside on a step, talking to Ali.
"I don't have a house. Can I still buy a carpet?"
"Yes, of course," says Ali.
"But where can I put it after I've bought it?"
"On the floor," Ali replies. He isn't the brightest tour guide in Kashgar, but at least Luigi has earned him his commission.
After lunch in the Chinese restaurant attached to the Qini Bagh, we go to the Abakh Hoja mausoleum complex on the outskirts of the city, built for the descendants of Abakh Hoja, who ruled Xinjiang in the 17 th century. Behind the mausoleum is a vast graveyard with hundreds of tombstones which demonstrate, if nothing else, that Abakh Hoja must have been tremendously virile. The mausoleum looks rather like a mosque, with a large tiled dome and minarets in each of its four corners. We see a small child having a shit in the grounds.
Old Kashgar
We drive back to Kashgar and go for a walk through the old alleyways. Many of the old buildings have literally been sliced in half to put the modern Chinese roads through. After another aborted visit to a carpet shop, David is now determined to get his money's worth out of Ali, asking him all sorts of questions about the signs on the doorways. This is the street name and number, this is the certificate for water inspection, this means the man is being paid social security, and this means "Beware of the dog." We don't really need to know all this, but it's curiously engaging watching Ali's brain work in slow motion as he reacts to David's questions. As we walk slowly through the streets, we stay well fed by Orna, who keeps appearing from behind us with another delicacy she has bought from a street vendor, first a meat pasty, now a fig which she's taken a bite out of to check that it's ripe. I wish we'd employed her as our chef from the very start.
After a walk around the old covered market, we finish our tour at the giant Mao statue. He stands 18 metres high and appears to have disproportionately large hands.
Shipton's old house
In the evening we have dinner at the Uighur restaurant housed in the old white and brown castellated British consulate building at the back of the Qini Bagh Hotel compound. We are taken to a private room with an old colonial feel to it, and there is much talk of Eric Shipton, who lived here in the 1940s, when these buildings comprised the Consul-General's apartments. He described a reception room opening through French windows onto a terraced garden shaded by plane trees, and with views north to a line of buff-coloured loess cliffs topped by flat-roofed mud houses, and when the air was clear, the distant Tien Shan mountains. In Shipton's day there was often a dust haze from the outlying desert clouding his view, but these days this has been amplified tenfold by pollution from vehicles.
The sherpas join us for dinner having bought lots of clothing and gadgetry to take back with them to Kathmandu. Leela is wearing a brand new Adidas top, and there is much mirth and embarrassment when I explain to him that Adidas stands for, "All Day I Dream About Sex."
The Qini Bagh has its own John's Café in another canopied outdoor area, where Toby tries to get us involved in a physical drinking game requiring you to walk on your hands using glass bottles. We're all useless at it, but fortunately have the good sense to stop before anyone severs an important artery.
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