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 …
I have mentioned that Kashgar is a Muslim city that is known for trading. I wanted to detail this encounter we had. Walking down a lane in Kashgar’s old city, Galen and I came upon a handful of men with a sheep on a rope leash. We watched as one of the men picked up …
Galen put together a great two minute video of our time around the Sunday market in Kashgar:
Kashgar. Something about that name rings of the end of the earth. Like Kathmandu or Patagonia, the city’s name is redolent of a wild and ancient greatness that leaves me wondering why it has not yet been appropriated as the name of a clothing company, as the other two names have. Kashgar is the epitome …
Time shifts all things, leaving no stone unturned. In an earlier post, I documented how the Uighurs, though now persecuted by central authorities in Beijing, were once the allies of Beijing, assisting them in the genocide of millions of Dzungarian Mongols, nearly wiping out the entirety of the people. But after the genocide, there still …
We were leaving Turpan on a sleeper bus, the bad road bumping along. The landscape was that of a brush desert, low, green-gray bushes the only plants that could hang on to life in this environment of extremes. The wind had picked up that day, rocking our bus from side to side and tossing tumbleweed …
Our bus was late. We waited in the bus station. Trying to stay cool, I walked back towards some large fans while nervously glancing from our bags to the man who was supposed to tell us when our bus finally showed up. Suddently, I heard the sound of a pop off somewhere by the ticket …