There’s no sense that etches stronger into the human memory than the sense of smell. As we were walking the streets of Kashgar, the Chinese signs looked familiar, and so did the endless streams of scooters, the people’s faces and their language; it were the smells, though, which really took me back right away to my previous visit in this country four years ago. The dust, the people, the spices in the food — they all combine to create a unique smell fingerprint which stays imprinted in your mind.

In fact Kashgar, at the far west of China, is not even a Chinese city — it is the home of the Uyghur, a Turkic Central-Asian people which is distinct from the Han Chinese ethnically, linguistically and religiously. Under Beijing’s auspices the Hans settled here in large numbers, but the Uyghur still retain the majority and give this city a distinct face. Kashgar was a key oasis on the Silk Road, and in many ways it still is — at the crossroads of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and China, this area forever remains a fountain of commerce. Beijing has moved in in brute force and Kashgar’s old city is currently being “renovated”, that is, razed to the ground and replaced by standard-issue Chinese residential blocks. The markets, however, are in the people’s blood and every street, old and new, functions as a bazaar from dawn till dusk.

Curiously, as we crossed southwards from Kyrgyzstan, we had to move our clock forward by two hours, even though we didn’t move even one meter eastwards. All of China officially operates on Beijing time; the Xinjiang region has an unofficial Xinjiang timezone, two hours back from Beijing, and each person decides by which clock their life will tick. The consensus seems to be that the day starts by Xinjiang time and ends by Beijing time, thus prolonging the night by two hours. We readily adopted this scheme and found it to be very beneficial for the human body and soul.

The Uyghur is a rather religious nation, more so than other Central Asian peoples, and the Chinese suppression of religion has not hit them as hard as the Soviet system had hit the rest of Central Asia. Or perhaps they are simply not as partial to vodka and thus accept Islam more readily. In Kashgar we saw for the first time a real flesh-and-blood muezzin — since the Chinese forbade the “adhan” (call to prayer) from being loudly broadcast with loudspeakers, the imam has to climb the stairs and do the job himself, just as in times past. We visited Kashgar during the Ramadan, so most Uyghur restaurants were closed during the day; in the evening, after the sun had set, the old city exploded in a colorful and bustling food festival, as people gathered from all corners of the city to break their fast.

We left Kashgar after a few days towards Urumqi, the capital city of Xinjiang, along the northern branch of the Silk Road, rounding the mighty and deadly Taklamakan desert. It’s next to impossible to get any train tickets in China at the moment because it’s the students’ migration season. We had to cover the distance of 1600 kilometers in one long bus ride, 25 hours long to be exact, in a sleeper bus: instead of seats, rows of narrow bunks line the bus, arranged around two aisles, and on two levels one above the other. It is in fact a quite clever concept and the ride was not at all uncomfortable. A pair of earplugs solved the problem of Uyghur-dubbed action movies and bored conversation-hungry Chinese. Food was a bigger problem, since the shops at which we stopped on the way only offered cookies and snacks such as preserved chicken feet, but after the sun had set we finally stopped at a restaurant and had a hearty plate of plov. At noon the next day the bus rolled into Urumqi.

August 13, 2011