Threatening the Uighur culture, destroying the ancient city of Kashgar

Showdown at the crossroads of the world

The city of Kashgar is a melting pot of nationalities where East and West meet. But its rich heritage is being crushed by Beijing’s brutal attempt to impose Chinese culture on an unruly imperial outpost.

By Clifford Coonan

 Saturday, 6 June 2009

EPA

Uighur men at a Sunday livestock market in Kashgar

Dust billows on to the medieval streets of Kashgar, clouding the view of the cutlers and wood-carvers across the road, as the last wall of an ancient house in this city on the Silk Road is destroyed. Even before the dust has settled, workers wearing Chinese People’s Liberation Army uniforms start pulling down the blue hoarding around the site.

The Chinese government believes this ancient latticework of narrow streets, with its courtyard homes, mosques and open-fronted shops, is dangerous. Beijing believes the city is in need of modernisation if it is to take part in China’s economic miracle.

But fears about earthquakes and the compulsion to modernise are only part of the story. The Chinese are trying to contain what they say is a separatist movement in the Xinjiang region, and this week claimed to have unmasked eight terror cells.

Kashgar has not experienced the sort of dramatic demographic changes seen elsewhere in Xinjiang: in Urumqi, for example, the capital, two hours by plane from Kashgar, the Uighur population has plummeted from 60 to 30 per cent of the total. In Kashgar, by contrast, the Han population is largely confined to police and other officials. But knocking down the ancient fabric of the city and replacing it with bland concrete blocks and towers is part of the same sinicisation process that has been applied in Tibet: another way Beijing strives to bind up the nation’s fraying fringes.

Nothing is simple in Kashgar, the original capital of globalisation and a real melting pot. Kashgar’s street signs are written in Arabic lettering as well as Chinese and people on the streets are a mixture of Uighur and Han, with a fair smattering of Kazakhs, Pakistanis, Russians and Uzbeks. The city’s bazaars and mosques, Uighur language and clothes, Caucasian features and the Turkish food mark China’s westernmost city out as Central, not East, Asia. Here you are closer to the Mediterranean than to Beijing.

Many local Uighurs, a Turkic ethnic group who share linguistic and cultural bonds with central Asia and who make up the majority of the population in the province of Xinjiang, fear their culture is being crushed to rubble along with the ancient masonry of Kashgar.

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