Bordering on Bazaar
A small herd of yaks graze on the bare plains along the Karakorum Highway. Locals live in yurts, a traditional tent-like form of housing. |
Bargaining at the Sunday market in Kashgar was never going to be easy, given the town's extensive trading experience. A major hub on the old Silk Road 1,000 years ago, the oasis was an important bartering point between the Taklimakan Desert to the east and the Pamir and Karakorum mountain ranges to the west.
Modern transport links may have nullified its role in European-Orient relations but it remains an important weekly meeting place for tens of thousands of traders from around Central Asia.
Silk rugs and saffron are still brought from Iran and Pakistani salesmen brood in the Pakistan Caf on Saturday nights like boxers in their pre-fight dressing rooms.
The animal market is now located on the outskirts of Kashgar after a decision by the local authorities led to its separation from the main bazaar.
The trade area is a large square of dusty earth enclosed by a brick wall. Metal poles form makeshift shopping aisles. The tourist's role as observer has never been so accentuated. You are not a customer unless you are planning to slaughter your own dinner.
The sale of livestock is a man's game. The few women that are present sit in the shade of their carts and wait for decisions. A group of six men, sporting four different hat styles and three goatee beards between them, discuss the hind quarters of a small herd of cows. A teenager is excluded from the close circle but strains to hear valuable tips for his future career while the cows guzzle greens as if it is their last supper.
Away from the scuffles between buyers and vendors is the test-drive track. Donkeys are ridden up and down a stony strip as drivers trial their responses to the meter-long stick.
Looking on from a concrete platform, you feel every one of the 4,000 kilometers away from Beijing. The distinctive faces all belong to the Muslim Uygurs, of which there are 8 million living in Xinjiang, and a Han Chinese tourist looks more out of place than an unshaven westerner.
In the main market area - the Yekshenba Bazaar - pomegranate juice is sold outside a steel roof covering stalls of rugs, soaps and cassette ghetto blasters. The surrounding clogged streets are much more interesting. Here a man in white gloves holds a car boot, roof and bonnet sale of unidentifiable dried objects in the name of traditional medicine. He lures customers by whispering miraculous tales into a microphone as the snake around his neck uses his shirt to hide its head from the crowd.
The city of Kashgar is sliced in two by Renmin Lu, the main road that runs from east to west. To the south lie the wide roads and gray buildings of modern development under the raised arm of one of the largest statues of Mao Zedong in the country. Behind his back, a jumble of narrow stone streets forms the old town.
Local Uygur vendors and buyers in the Sunday market in Kashgar. Photos by Chris O'Brien |
The lanes leading off from the main square and the Id Kah Mosque remain in an antiquated bubble.
Renovations on mud, dung and straw walls are carried out on wooden scaffolding and the local blacksmith pounds iron, dressed in a flat cap and suit jacket. The bakeries conduct the bulk of their business late at night to provide nang bread, the staple Uygur breakfast.
A single light bulb reveals a wooden frame, its peeling blue paint blackened by smoke. The picture is of a squatting teenager, sweat trickling from under a white prayer cap, removing flat bread after flat bread from the earthen oven with long metal tongs.
The Karakorum Highway runs southwest from Kashgar to the Pakistan border, shaving Tajikistan and coming within loudspeaker distance of Afghanistan. Having booked a minibus for three days and a driver called Lao Zun - whose parents, like so many others, moved to Kashgar from Zhejiang Province in the early 1950s - our first three hours are spent traveling through gravel plains punctuated by pensive camels and faceless mud settlements.
We enter a wider gorge of red-flecked mountains and the white crags of the Pamir Plateau barge their way into the windscreen view. As passing yaks struggle to find pasture, Lao Zun's tape player munches through Uygur pop star Kutarman's latest offering and our distorted soundtrack accompanies us to the 4,000-meter mark.
The faultless reflection of Mount Muztagata, the range's highest peak at 7,546 meters, in the cerulean waters of Karakul Lake is spectacular. A blue sign on the water's edge whose punctuation betrays its astonishment. "No pollution - drinking water!"
As at any remote beauty spot, a carpark full of tour buses blights first impressions. But a three-hour horse trek around the lake's shore, without the bind of a guide, guarantees solitude. On the southern shore, a simple village acts as an advert for renewable energy. Solar panels are fixed on flat roofs and two wind turbines create a haunting whine that mingles with the chatter of children from a classroom. The school costs just 70 yuan ($9.1) a year.
A small hamlet of five yurts 15 minutes walk from the visitors' center is a quiet place to stay. The residents are Kirgiz, nomads who settled by this spectacular water source 50 years ago. The night is cold but our new family of seven find enough blankets to cover the whole of Xinjiang - one sixth of China's total land area. Chunks of boiled lamb are followed by yak tea, inadvertent charades and bedtime. Eleven people lie in a yurt. We find it difficult to sleep. The altitude of 3,800 meters is tweaking our body clocks. Instead we lie silent; listening to a xylophone of sighs and murmurs from our hosts.
Another two hours drive south is the end of the road for travelers not crossing to Pakistan. The route that leads into the border town of Taxkorgan, still 200 kilometers north of actual frontier line, runs between life and death. On the left, green fields reflect years of hard work on the unwilling soil. On the right, sand-colored tombs are embedded in the desert.
The town is home to a predominantly Tajik population. The mud ruins of the Stone City lie at one end of the town providing views over the surrounding river plains. From here, the other parts of China seem very far away.
(China Daily 06/14/2007 page19)
