Uighur Luthier

Posted by Galen and Lee on 28 October 2014, 5:45 am

Galen’s father is an amateur luthier, so Galen has a natural interest in stringed instruments and the people who make them. It was not surprising that, when Galen and I split off for ten minutes in the center of Kashgar’s old city, I found him trying out instruments in a Uighur luthier’s shop.

Galen jamming on a Dutar. The Dutar is the most popular instrument among Uighur communities.

Galen bowing what I think is a Ghaykchak.

The Luthier playing one of the Dutars he made.

You may notice that the word for the Dutar sounds similar to a Guitar, and they do not look all that different. That is most likely because they share a common ancestor. The Guitar entered Europe from Spain (hence the Classical Spanish Guitar), which was, at that time, part of a Muslim empire. During the Dark Ages, ideas from all over the world, filtered through Europe via this empire. Though Spain is as far from the Silk Road as one can get in Europe, it was the main conduit for many Silk Road ideas.

More Gyachaks

Rawaps – made with snake skin, with the head bent back on itself

Ghaychak

Fried Rams

Posted by Galen and Lee on 27 October 2014, 11:35 am

This photo is widely available throughout China, largely seen in restaurants selling Uighur food. It is a ram, completely cooked and its marbled meat is browned. It sits in a position that it might use in life, legs folded underneath its torso.

The only thing I find strange about it, is that it has a red bow tied around its head. It seems cold to roast an animal and then pretty it up.

A Small Matter

Posted by Galen and Lee on 23 October 2014, 5:48 am

“During this time, I have witnessed many of the so-called great national events; but, in my heart, they left little impression…but there was one small matter which did mean something to me.”

– Lu Xun, A Call to Arms, “A Small Matter”

The mother was short, but she wore strappy, light blue wedges to give herself an extra inch. The blue wedges matched her airy blue tulle dress, which rippled against the jeans of her son as she held his hand. She carried a black purse on her left shoulder and a small shopping bag in her right hand. Her face was hidden behind a pink hijab, decorated with letters, seemingly chosen at random from the English language, an alphabet soup hijab.

Her son dressed in an outfit that one might see at a less than formal church occasion. His green shirt was collared but not tucked in, and his jeans were baggy and faded. He carried a toy .357 in his left hand, the one not held by his mother, as they walked up one of the main shopping streets in Kashgar’s old town.

I was out to meet someone. The two of them were walking ahead of me. They were boringly normal, so much so that I almost did not notice them. But as we passed a small stall along the left of the street, the boy tugged his mother towards them. She stopped but did not look at the toys, despite her son’s fervent encouragement. He poured over the contents in the small display boxes that had been set up on the street, his toy gun hanging by his side in his limp arm.

He pulled at his mom, encouraging her to at least look at the toys, but to no avail. His mother did not budge. She continued looking ahead. The shopkeeper said something to the boy, but the mother was having none of it. She pulled at him, and they were off, continuing up the street, passing a man selling shoes displayed on cardboard boxes beneath an umbrella. The boy looked back toward the toys as the mother said something soothingly to him.

I observed this small matter on an afternoon three days after Eid Al Fitr, one of the most important Muslim holidays, four days after violent riots left possibly upwards of one hundred people dead in a nearby city and two days after an ethno-religious assassination had happened approximately seven hundred feet from the spot where this photo was taken.

All of these events, I will talk about in detail in later posts. Certainly, these great national events warrant more discussion. But before that, I want to establish that the people living here are just that, people. Though I have been reporting on issues of ethnic strife and larger matters, mostly what we see is the churn of everyday life.

This episode struck me specifically because the boy reminded me so much of myself, wanting Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figures. The boy was wearing clothes that my mother might have picked out for me. Like me, he was desperate to get his mother to buy him a toy. Like my mother, his thought better of it. Watching the boy wanting yet not getting the toy, I realized that the line separating me from him was really arbitrary. I just happened to be born in the right place, and he in the wrong place.

What Remains of Kashgar

Posted by Galen and Lee on 21 October 2014, 5:31 am

Kashgar from Google Maps

The hilltop neighborhood stands like a mud lamp standing erect over Kashgar, looking out over the city. This hilltop neighborhood is the last remaining architecture preserved of this ancient city which Marco Polo once wandered through, seven centuries before.

View from above

Hilltop Neighborhood from Google Maps

Kashgar sits on a flat plane, punctuated by this small hill. The neighborhood built atop this hill was nothing special when it was built. Like everywhere else in Kashgar, it was a warren of brick-paved alleyways and mud houses, looking more like something from the Middle East than the Middle Kingdom. It is special now, only because it is the only remnant of Kashgar’s past that has been left untouched by the Chinese State.

This is all that remains of the original architecture that once filled Kashgar, one of the most important stops along the Silk Road. The seeds of the city’s architectural depredation were sown in 2009, in Urumqi, 700 miles to the east. Ethnic rioting began what has become a deadly game of cat and mouse between the Uighurs and the Han Chinese state. Authorities in Beijing feared that the impenetrable alleyways of Kashgar were breeding unhealthy Islamic ideas, allowing Uighur culture to not be alloyed with a more moderate Han Chinese culture. Thus, they issued an order to tear it down, claiming the government’s destruction was because the city would have been extremely dangerous during earthquakes.

Much of the old city of Kashgar has already been torn down and rebuilt, stucco painted to look like the original baked-clay architecture. This rebuilt section is the area that the government wants tourists to visit. It is clean and fairly wealthy, populated with Hondas, a sign of upper middle class success in China. I have read reports that, after the government tore down most of the city and rebuilt it, many of the poorer residents, those most disaffected by the Chinese state, had to relocate to the peripheries of the city, not having the money to buy into the redeveloped areas.

And that suits Chinese authorities just as well. They would prefer those Uighurs who are poorer, more religious and less willing to follow the Party line to be out of sight. Those Honda-driving merchants or bureaucrats are invested in the success of the Chinese state, so they are willing to take its orders. Those are the kinds of people authorities want the tourists to meet.

Hilltop Neighborhood from across a lake

Somehow though, this hilltop redoubt of traditional architecture has survived destruction and is filled with many of the same families who have lived there for centuries. Appearances and a source I talked with suggest that the government has declared a truce, leaving this one section of the city as it was, but it is unclear how long that truce will last.

Sad thoughts of destruction consumed me as we entered, but, as we wandered through the hilltop neighborhood, this melancholy dissipated with the treasures we found. A gang of young boys toted a large bag up the hill while old women sold corn at the entrance to the neighborhood. At each turn, we found an old neighborhood mosque with an arabesque doorway and two bulbous minarets above. The houses are built out of caked mud, with wooden logs acting as support structures. Some have rooms extended out over the alleyways, forming cavernous passageways between the homes.

We wandered through the city, hiding underneath a mosque entrance as flakes of light rain hesitated down onto us. Thinking of his camera equipment, Galen headed for shelter in the Sunday Market, but I wandered on.

Around another bend, a two year old boy wearing a striped shirt and no pants was leaning against the post of his parents’ house, brimming with cross-legged moxie. He looked at me, a little perplexed. He was hardly old enough to know why he felt I was so strange. I walked closer, and took some photos.

A woman, the boy’s mother or aunt, came out to the door post, staring at me. I showed her the picture, and she took my camera, disappearing into the house. Seconds later, a bouquet of women’s laughter issued out from one of the rooms. I could not see the boy’s female relatives laughing at the photo I had taken of their child, but, from a distance, I could share their joy.

I left with my camera, briefly heartened, before distant thoughts in my mind came closer. The boy with no pants, what would his future look like? Would his home survive? Would his culture be bulldozed? I left as sad as I had entered.

What Game Are These Guys Playing

Posted by Galen and Lee on 20 October 2014, 5:32 am

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.

Time Change Extremes

Posted by Galen and Lee on 17 October 2014, 5:12 am

Bank Hours

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 would be as far east as Washington D.C. or New York. Where we were at would be comparable to…Seattle. Despite the thousands of miles separating the two places, Xinjiang and Beijing are in the same timezone.

These problems were now a part of our lives. The first day we arrived in Kashgar, the sun rose at 7:50 and set at 10:15, Beijing time. Noon happened at 3:03 in the afternoon, Beijing time. Before, I had assumed that this timezone issue would not really be a problem, more of an annoyance. Time is just an arbitrary numerical system that we overlay onto the natural patterns of light and darkness. Being arbitrary, it should not matter whenever we say noon is. Our lives are lived by lights, not by numbers. If it occurs at the same time in terms of the sun, banks opening at ten in the morning and closing at six in the evening is no different than them opening at eight and closing at four.

I was wrong.

The timezone problem was affecting the way life was lived here. Time is a fundamental part of modern life. When it seems off-kilter, even slightly, you cannot escape the uneasiness.

In Xinjiang, there are two main time systems that are used. Uighurs tend to use the unofficial ‘Xinjiang Time,’ which is two hours behind Beijing time, but the Han Chinese are more likely to use Beijing Time.

This rule is neither hard nor fast. For example, if I am talking to a Uighur who is a Communist, they are likely to use Beijing Time. However, when we talked to these rednecky, Han Chinese truck drivers hauling freight up into the remote mountains around Kashgar, they used Xinjiang Time. This makes things very discombobulating; everyone you talk with, you have to try to calculate what timezone they are thinking in based off the color of their skin and the accent of their Mandarin.

Even more disconcerting, there seems to be a third timezone out in Kashgar. Two posts before, I mentioned how the Sunday Market was dead when we arrived at seven thirty, Xinjiang Time, few stalls were open. The market was dead, except for the men selling ice. I have never been to a market in China that was not bustling at seven thirty in the morning. But here, in one of China’s largest markets, it was dead.

Kashgar is 2,131 miles from Beijing. Noon in Kashgar happens at three o’clock Beijing time. Though people in Kashgar still use the official unofficial ‘Xinjiang Time,’ set two hours behind ‘Beijing Time,’ it appears that many of them live their lives in ‘Kashgar Time,’ three hours behind the official clocks.

We saw this anywhere in Kashgar with Uighur majorities. Kashgar’s Old Town is predominantly Uighur. The first morning we arrived, I went out to find something to eat at nine thirty, Beijing Time, yet little was open in the Old Town. I was eventually able to find some small shops run selling packaged food, but these were all run by Han Chinese. None of the stores I found at nine thirty in the morning were run by Uighurs. To the Uighurs, living on “Kashgar Time,” it was still too early to be going out for breakfast. As I walked farther, I realized that the Chinese part of town was beginning to bustle, because for them, even if it was not nine thirty, it was definitely seven thirty, not six thirty, like it was for the Uighurs.

I find the repression of the state, the center’s imposition of its own time on the periphery, troubling. But what I find most problematic is that these two groups, the Han and the Uighurs of Kashgar, seem to be living in two different times, even as they pass by each other in the street. The Han largely stay loyal to Beijing and its time, meaning they wake up earlier and go to sleep earlier. The Uighurs, more connected with this place, historically and chronologically, instead live their lives in a timezone that sets their noon as noon.

Currently, violence is roiling Xinjiang, with Uighurs unsatisfied about being ruled over by a distant Beijing and feeling their place in their own homeland threatened by Han migrants. How will these problems be solved when, every minute of the day, those Uighurs who feel wronged are reminded that even the minutes themselves betray them?

Faces of Kashgar

Posted by Galen and Lee on 15 October 2014, 5:11 am

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:

Right Here

Puzzling

Father and Son

The Gang

The Pink and the Black

The Handshake

Looking Up

The Examination

Your Eyes Only

Relief

Mother and Daughter out shopping

Intent

Over There

Hijab and Sunglasses

All White

Louis Vitton

Halfway In

Excited

Seeing You

Other Way

Examining the Wares

Madonna and Child

Working

Behind Them

Doesn’t Belong

Looking Carefully

Father and Daughter

What’s Up?

Scooting Away

Shopgirls

Putting Our Heads Together

Mounting

Cross Purposes

All Together Now

Icy

Friends

Staring

Got It

Selling

Distant

On the Move

Not Sure

Who Are You?

Earbuds

Into Hardware

Pout

Looking Things Over

Square

Waiting

Old Man

A Final Look Back

Kashgar’s Sunday Market

Posted by Galen and Lee on 10 October 2014, 12:56 pm

Chamomile Tea anyone?

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 Sunday Market was dead at that time. We walked the never-ending avenues in the center of one of the market’s buildings. The smaller lanes shooting off from the avenues were mostly lined with closed store fronts, the cold, metal shop doors and smooth, glistening concrete floors. An eerie quiet reigned with only a few shops, those selling small, everyday goods, soap and light bulbs, opened for business.

We wandered outside. This part of the market was beginning to bustle. About half the stores were open. Kashgar’s Sunday Market is only called the Sunday Market in English, because Sunday is its largest, though not its only, day.

In Chinese, the market is just called the Big Bazaar. Outside, it was easier to see that this place really was a Central Asian bazaar that had somehow ended up in China. Here, the streets were dirt or broken asphalt and the shops were merely stalls covered by hung canvas.

We walked farther up, hearing noise coming from the end of this stall-lined avenue. Here was the market we had been expecting. We were soon surrounded by sound: three-wheeled carts backing up, men yelling prices and ice being yanked off truck beds. We did not know why, but ice was the first thing that was sold in the morning.

“Bosh, bosh, bosh,” shouted a man driving his cart through the crowd towards me. “Bosh” means “out of the way” in Uighur and is an important word to know when visiting the market. The man drove past me, chilling the air for a few seconds with his cart full of ice.

A few hours later, we returned when the market was in full swing. Now, the bazaar was packed. Motorbikes filled the dust-stained lots to the side of the entrance, hardly any room available to squeeze in a bike. Stalls opened wide, disgorging their wares, and voices filled the building, amplified by the concrete floors.

In the Sunday Market, it feels like you can buy anything. Nails, fans, ice, honey, rock candy, bugles, guitars, dutars, dates, hijabs, cloth, shirts, dresses, traditional Kyrgyz hats, Russian-style caps, fur caps, knives, tires, cabbage, brooms, bicycles, power tools, horse hair brushes. Anything.

I mentioned this before, but Kashgar’s geography destined it as a market town, since it is surrounded on three sides by some of the world’s tallest mountain ranges and on the fourth side by one of the world’s largest deserts. For hundreds of miles in any direction, this is the only place where you could go to buy things. Thus, Kashgar became the Wal-Mart of the previous millennium.

Power Tools

Amongst the hardware and fruits, our strangest find was small, children’s-sized vests made out of cat fur. We picked it up. It was trimmed with cotton lining around the arm holes and had a zipper in the front. I sent pictures to my wife, and she was horrified when I suggested buying a cat-skin vest for our cats.

Cat fur vest

In the bazaar, we were able to wander for hours without feeling like we were in China. Nothing distinguishes Kashgar’s market from some of the one’s we went to later on, in Bishkek or Osh. The wares were the same, and the people manning the stalls looked similar. Chinese tourists milled about, but they looked as foreign as we did, touting large cameras and turning into each of the market’s lanes, surprised that this could still be a part of their country.

Chinese Sign

Once, however, I was reminded that, underneath the surface, even here, the Chinese state is never far away. Just above some of the shops, on an orange wall overlooking part of the outside Bazaar was a Communist style administrative board, with photos of officials. The men on the board were all Uighurs, all wearing doppa, the Uighur style hats. Seven men were Officers Controlling Governing and Administrative Style, two men were Officers Controlling Food Safety. Above the large, blockish Chinese words were smaller, Uighur words spelling out the same thing. The men looked out with the dull glazed stares that apparatchiks have in these sorts of photos throughout China.

Bugles

And then, we turned, and the sign disappeared. Immediately, we forgot that we were in China, surrounded by power tools and mustached men honking their three-wheeled carts.

Hats

Fur Caps

Horse hair dusters

Slowdown

Posted by Galen and Lee on 8 October 2014, 5:44 am

Our readers may have noticed the recent slowdown. We have not been posting everyday. Instead, we are getting to posts only once or twice a week.

Galen and I have both been slammed by some commitments that we have to take care of.

However, we are still planning on finishing the story of our trip. It may just take more time. Please keep on the look-out for more posts; the next one will be coming out soon.

Warning: Graphic Sheep Death

Posted by Galen and Lee on 3 October 2014, 12:42 am

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 the sheep, turned it over and felt it out. The sheep did not seem to like this process.

Some more things were said, but, of course, we did not know what they said as they were speaking Uighur. One of the men walked by, and, in English, told us that the sheep weighed about thirty kilos (sixty pounds).

I shrugged at Galen, not really sure what was going on. We were about to move on, but the men dragged the sheep into the middle of the road, near the sewer’s manhole cover. The two of us stopped. I still did not know what was going on, but I was aware that something was happening. We watched.

The pressed the sheep down against the stony street. A man approached with a pick ax. I thought, that’s no way to kill a sheep. Instead, the man poked the manhole cover and tried to leverage it up. After a few attempts, the cover refused to budge. The man put the pick ax away.

The real business commenced.

One man laid a small blade against sheep’s neck. She resisted, but a second man held her down. The blade crossed her neck almost in slow motion. I am sure it was much slower for the sheep. Blood flowed forth quickly, though smoothly, not at all gushing, like you see in the movies.

I showed these pictures to my wife, a veterinary pathologist. As a part of her work, she regularly cuts the head off of large animals. One thing that bothered her was how long it took to kill this sheep. The process, she said, should be quick. Slit the throat, working your way back a little with the blade, and then snap the head back and break the spine.

But this sheep was still kicking for a good three to four minutes. It was clear that these people were not very experienced butchers.

Also, an experienced butcher probably would not have dropped his money into the blood!

I will conclude with something Galen said. “I like mutton. It’s got to come from somewhere.”

For those who did not get a chance to see this before, check out our other dead sheep experience, the thirty-five frozen lamb carcasses that got placed on our bus as we entered Xinjiang.

Silk Road Hitchhikers

Hitchhiking from Xian to Kashgar and exploring the wilderness along the way