Yesterday I did a post on our visit to the Afaq Khoja Mausoleum.

A few months ago, the New York Times did a story on the same Mausoleum.

Their story did not completely jive with what we saw, though, I would still recommend reading it there.

The author of the Times story suggested that bus loads of tourist were tromping into the Mausoleum. For us, that simply was not the case. In the hour we spent there, we may have seen twenty to thirty tourists, including ourselves. Several of them were Uighur tourists, exploring their own historical sites. We saw no tour buses.

Two factors might explain the discrepancy between our experience and that of the Gray Lady. First, we got to the mausoleum as soon as it opened, 10 a.m. Beijing Time, 8 a.m. Xinjiang Time. It is likely that the number of Han Chinese tourists, particularly those on tour buses, picked up after we left.

Second, the Times story appears to have been written much earlier than it was published. We were at the mausoleum a few weeks before the story was published, but the Times story has a photo showing scaffolding around the mausoleum. We saw no evidence of construction or maintenance.

Time is important. Even a few months earlier, things might have been different. But in just in the past few months, Xinjiang has become increasingly violent. As we mentioned in our post on the Mummy exhibit in Turpan’s museum, this violence has deeply cut into the numbers of Chinese tourists willing to come out to Xinjiang. Perhaps, buses were unloading when the Gray Lady was here.