10.05.2011

喀什市和乌鲁木齐市

After Lake Karakul, we returned to Kashgar for two days. We returned to the same hotel, so first some brief introductions:
View of the hotel from the hallway

Our hotel was rather interestingly decorated—there were a lot of pastel colors, floral patterns and glitter… It had a strangely Russian feel, and it turns out this hotel served as the Russian Consulate in 1890. The first morning in Kashgar (before the trip to Lake Karakul) there was a Uyghur wedding being hosted at the hotel restaurant. Our tour guide for Kashgar, Mamajahn, explained to us a little about Uyghur ceremonies during our long bus ride. (Disclaimer: this is all from memory, so it is probably not 100% accurate.) Uyghur weddings typically extend for two days. The morning of the first day, all the male relatives of both the bridge and groom meet together for breakfast (this explains the long line of men sitting outside the restaurant all shaking hands); afterwards, the groom and some of his close male friends all go to pick up bride. The wedding party then gets married by an imam according to Muslim tradition. They both sign a contract agreeing that they voluntarily are getting married. Afterwards, a long reception follows with lots of dancing. The next morning, according to Muslim tradition, the bed sheets are shown to the uncles of the bride to verify that was a virgin before the marriage.

Besides learning a lot about Uyghurs and Islam, we visited the Grand Bazaar of Kashgar, which reportedly is the largest open air market in Central Asia. This bazaar was huge, though a lot of the stalls had the same wares, which made the experience more interesting but slightly harder to find special objects. Some of the vendors are very aggressive to get you to even enter their stall; also, they all seemed more comfortable speaking English with us rather than standard Mandarin. This is partially because the Uyghurs have their own language and so many of them don’t or can’t speak Mandarin and probably because we were white so English seemed more appropriate. 

Just one of the many rows of scarves for sale

The next day we started with a visit to the Old City; apparently there are three sections in Kashgar that have maintained the traditional ways of living— including building materials and style. The Old City reminded me very strongly of the fluvelas I saw in Brazil. Inside these people’s homes, however, were sometimes very nicely decorated rooms converted into stores for tourists like us.

View outside the Old City

One of the houses in the Old City has been standing for around 500 years! We had a small contest to see who could find this house again first and get someone in the house to write us a word in Uyghur (which uses the Arabic script). My group found the house first, though we struggled getting people to first understand what we wanted and then waited for a bit as they called one of the kids to come over and write for us. The asking was difficult because it seemed most of the adults didn’t know any Mandarin and the writing was difficult because many Uyghurs cannot write their own language.

Photo inside the small courtyard of the oldest house

We had lunch in a restaurant in the Old City that was rather abundant and delicious! There were a lot of bread-like foods and an assortment of dried fruits and nuts, which we don’t get often in the rest of China, so I especially savored them. Mutton is also a specialty of the Western Regions (basically everything west of Xian), as sheep are relatively easier to raise for a somewhat nomadic population and pork is traditionally forbidden because Uyghurs are Muslims. We all loved the sheep meat, especially since at one restaurant the meat came out skewered on a large metal “tree” that we aptly named “The Meat Tree.” After the lunch, we were able to see a small demonstration of Uyghur dancing. It seemed a mix of belly dancing and the harsh Russian type male-dancing, though both were less severe— the woman’s dancing was much less revealing or sexual than our standard ideas of belly dancing and the man’s dancing was ‘sharp’ though not as energetic as my notions of Russian dancing. After a few songs, they invited us to dance with them, which was very awkward but a lot of fun. They then asked us to show them an American dance. After ruling out grinding immediately and debating about how to square dance or if we knew any line dances, we decided on salsa since one of the girls is from Panama and likes to bring up salsa dancing a lot; luckily I had taken a few classes back home and also was feeling uninhibited enough to make a fool of myself so the two us improvised some salsa for them.


In addition to the Old City, we also visited the Idkha Mosque, which is apparently the largest mosque in Central Asia according to our guide. The outside didn’t seem that impressive, but the grounds of the mosque are rather large. There are various courtyards and groves of trees creating a natural fence and partial walls between the courtyards. Inside the actual prayer hall, there are rather ornate carpentry on the floor and hanging from the wall. Within the entire complex, over 5,000 Muslims can pray together at one time; at this particular mosque, only men are allowed to pray inside and women usually pray at home. Muslim customs are also very concerned with hygiene, such that both men and women must clean their bodies (typically with a shower nowadays) and put on fresh clothes before praying; men and women are also supposed to shower after sex because of beliefs of impurity about women’s bodies.

View of the Idkha Mosque from the main gate

After our tour of Kashgar, we flew back to Urumqi. Urumqi is the capital of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region and as such contains more Han Chinese people than Uyghurs or any other minority populations; Kashgar was by far more populated with Uyghurs. We only spent one day in Urumqi.

Originally, we were scheduled to visit the Institute for Ethnic Minorities and talk with some professors or students, but that was cancelled because apparently our paperwork was not filled out correctly. Our Resident Director feels that recent tensions between Uyghurs and the Han Chinese may have affected our ability to visit the school. However, instead, we ended up touring an orphanage outside the city; this orphanage receives funding from the “Half the Sky” foundation and also has some international donors, so the facilities were extremely nice and updated; they are in the process of building a facility that would imitate “normal” family like more accurately, such that there are different units (more or less apartments) with at least one adult worker who acts as a parent to the children. In most orphanages in China— this one no exception— the majority of children have some form of mental or physical disabilities, which obviously makes caring for them and getting them adopted more difficult. Beside living and school facilities, since many of the children could not keep up in the standard school system, the orphanage also does a lot of community work to outreach with families who have disabled children and informing the wider community about disabilities and working to eradicate the stigma associated with disabilities.

It was a rather bittersweet experience; it was obviously very sad and hard to see all of these orphaned children, but almost every child immediately lit up once they saw us and said hello to us. When we were in the infant/ toddler section, one of the other guys, Roy, in our trip was squirming his fingers around like a spider to play with one of the kids, who seemed to enjoy it but playfully had run away; after Roy had left to see other parts, the kid came back and one of the female workers playing with the child gave me his hand to shake. It was adorable…



The sign for the orphanage— despite the somewhat damaged sign, the orphanage itself was rather nicely furnished; we weren’t able to take pictures inside

After the orphanage, we went to the Xinjiang Museum downtown. The museum has two main exhibits and is famous mostly for its mummies. Yep, China has mummies, too. In fact, the mummies found in the Taklimakan Desert are more numerous, older, and better preserved than the mummies in Egypt. Another interesting note about the “Chinese mummies” is that these people are actually ethnically Caucasian. We’re leaning more about these people currently in our Anthropology class, but archaeological and linguistic evidence suggests that people from Eastern Europe had migrated into this desert region currently within Chinese borders. (Note: The Uyghur people are not descendants of these Caucasians; the Uyghurs actually have Turkic roots.)

View of the extremely modern looking museum in Urumqi

Besides an exhibit about the history of Xinjiang in relation to China proper (Eastern China, places that you think of as “being Chinese”) that had a lot with the Silk Road, the museum also had an exhibit on the ethnic minorities of Xinjiang.

This exhibit was somewhat unsettling for a few reasons. First of all, there were a few tremendously large tour groups of Chinese tourists who seemed somewhat overly excited about the exhibit and also made it rather impossible to walk the exhibit except at their pace. Secondly, almost every group had a life size diorama displaying their living quarters, complete with mannequin-like dolls. There was something very eerie about it, perhaps because we had met, talked, and even danced with some of these kinds of people being displayed in the museum…

Part of another exhibit, 永远和祖国在一起 Forever With the Homeland, this exhibited various ethnic children but gave off a similar eerie feeling to the other displays (and with the “It’s a Small World” ride in Disney World)

A more humorous experience while walking this exhibit was with one of the security guards. He definitely was not 100% Han Chinese (if at all), and I think he was Uyghur. He started off asking me, in English, a little about myself, where I’m from, why I’m in China, rather standard questions we’re getting used to. He than asked me some rather strange questions, such as if Uyghurs or Indian people lived in the United States. Later on, he asked me if I were scared of Osama bin Laden (by this time we were speaking Mandarin), which I was rather confused by, so figured the answer, “No, because he’s already dead” was a rather safe answer. However, if I remember correctly, he shook his head a little vigorously and after looking around a bit, said that bin Laden wasn’t actually dead and pantomimed someone jumping up and scaring people. Me and another security guard, who I think was Han Chinese, both laughed awkwardly for a bit; we talked a little more, I taught him how to say “I am twenty-six-years-old” in English, and then we left the museum. I still don’t really know what that was all about, but it was definitely memorable.

We took a train from Urumqi to Dunhuang, which we slept on overnight. However, our train was delayed a few hours. The wait inside this particular train station was also memorable. First, everyone had to queue outside the station in lines; we were given our own line and had all of the Chinese people gawk at us; inside the station, there were a lot more people than there were seats (or even space it seemed), which led to a long wait in a crowded Chinese train station with a lot of people very interested in merely looking at us. One of the girls, Karen, is half Filipino and so has some Asian features mixed with her clearly Caucasian features, which confused a lot of people into think she might be Uyghur. This slight confusion, along with her nose ring and scandalously short shorts by Muslim standards (normal to a tad short length by American standards), led to a lot of unwanted interest; one man even started talking to her in what I think was Uyghur, so I tried to explain to him that she doesn’t speak Uyghur in Chinese, which led to him trying to speak to me in Uyghur.


Photo inside the train station; it stayed this crowded for about two hours



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