The Emperor Far Away (9 page)

Most are relatively new arrivals in Xinjiang. Some came across the border in 1916, when Russia started calling up Muslims for army service and central Asia rose in revolt against the tsar. Others followed in the wake of the 1917 Russian Revolution. They have not strayed far from their ancestral homeland, and are mainly concentrated in this remote and stark north-western pocket of Xinjiang.

The Uighurs, though, are the most numerous ethnic group in the Kyrgyz territory and, as we dropped lower and reached the fertile plain that surrounds Kashgar, the
kalpak
hats gave way to the familiar
doppa
. The ETIM, the original Uighur separatist group, first emerged in these villages outside Kashgar, after protests over mosque closures in the nearby town of Baren turned violent in April 1990 and were put down by the PLA. That provoked the cycle of repression and resistance that has defined the last twenty-five years in Xinjiang. It was time to see how Kashgar had fared during that grim period.

5

Return to Kashgar

Revisiting the places that captured your heart when you were young is always unwise. You hope they remain trapped in time and that their magic is still potent. But invariably they have changed, just as you have, leaving you questioning your memories and wondering if they are wishful thinking or merely imagined. My return to Kashgar was a disappointment foretold. Trying to tune into the resonance of 1988 was like searching for a signal on an antique radio, and all I got was faint hisses and crackles.

I knew already Kashgar was no longer the isolated oasis it had been when I first visited. The railway arrived in 1999, there are daily flights and even the tortuous bus journey from the east of Xinjiang now takes only thirty hours and not the three days I endured. I was aware, too, that there would be far more Han Chinese than before, and that the city is undergoing the same rapid development happening all over China, which means expanding roads jammed with new cars and a rising skyline.

Yet I was still unprepared for its transformation. On my first morning, I returned to the Chini Bagh, where I had stayed in 1988. Then it had consisted of the same wooden one- and two-storey buildings in flaking green and yellow paint that housed the British consulate in Kashgar from 1890 to 1948. Now a newish hotel covered in off-white tiles stood around a car park. The gates and mudbrick walls that had surrounded the compound were gone, and security guards occupied a kiosk close to where the Pakistani traders once grilled their bowel-loosening kebabs.

Kashgar’s consulate was the most remote of Britain’s diplomatic outposts in Asia, a three-week ride on horseback from India. The people who passed through included some of the most remarkable figures from the colonial past. The half-Chinese Sir George Macartney, whose same-named ancestor was Britain’s first ambassador to China in the eighteenth century, served as consul here between 1890 and 1918. Sir Percy Sykes, who effectively ran Persia during the First World War, relieved Macartney briefly in 1915.

Great Game players, both legendary and unsung, were regular visitors. Francis Younghusband stayed a winter. He went on to lead a British invasion of Tibet in 1903–4, only to experience an epiphany on the roof of the world that transformed him from an empire-builder into a soldier-mystic. In 1918, Colonel F. M. Bailey was at the consulate en route to an extraordinary series of adventures in central Asia. They included helping to propagate the revolt among Muslims which resulted in so many Kyrgyz crossing into Xinjiang after the Russian Revolution.

Bailey was such an effective spy that he was recruited by the Cheka, the forerunner of the KGB, to hunt himself, the British agent who was stirring up the peoples of central Asia against their new communist masters. He was also a noted naturalist, just as Sykes and Eric Shipton, the last British consul in Kashgar, were part-time explorers. In the days of empire, it was possible to serve your country and collect rare butterflies on the Tibetan plateau, conquer unclimbed mountains or cross unmapped deserts.

A traveller in a more modest way, I felt a pleasing sense of solidarity with those men, simply by virtue of having stayed in the same place they had, even if Beijing, rather than London and Moscow, is now the imperial power in this part of the world. But I doubted whether Bailey, who could have stepped out of the pages of a John Buchan thriller, would have approved of how I and many of the other guests at the Chini Bagh spent our nights smoking hash on the balconies of our rooms. He would have been a whisky-and-soda man, although I suspect Younghusband in his later incarnation would not have been averse to a joint to aid his spiritual journey.

While we were sitting stoned under the stars on one of those hot summer evenings, the British among us came up with the idea of a party to celebrate the Chini Bagh’s unique history. A Union Jack was found at the bottom of a backpack and draped over the balcony rails and we held open house, drinking beer from the bottle, until there was a knock at the door and the police arrived.

They weren’t concerned about the reek of hashish in the still desert air; it was the flag that was the problem. They had heard, probably from our teetotal and less imperially minded Pakistani neighbours, that we were gathering in honour of the Chini Bagh’s past. The Union Jack was clear evidence of our separatist tendencies. It took some time to convince them it was a joke, and that we had no intention of reclaiming this little bit of Kashgar for Britain.

Eventually, they left smiling, but only after we had taken down the flag and promised not to display it again. It was an early lesson in how the Chinese authorities regard anything that could remotely be conceived as a threat to Beijing’s dominion over its furthest-flung territories as nothing less than treason. Luckily for us, we were foreign tourists and so allowed a little leeway.

If we had been Uighurs gathering to commemorate Kashgar’s past status as the de facto capital of the only truly independent state ever established in Xinjiang, then we would have been arrested and quite possibly executed for our splittist activities. That state was created in 1864 by Yakub Beg. An Oliver Cromwell-like figure, Beg took over almost all of what is now Xinjiang through a combination of military cunning and sheer ruthlessness, before imposing strict Islamic law on the region. His country, which he called Dzetyshaar, or ‘Seven Cities’, died with him in 1877, but not before the British and Russians had paid court to him as its ruler.

With no physical traces left of the Chini Bagh I had known, my uncertain recollections were all I had to remind me of 1988. But when I walked around the back of the hotel, I found that not all of the past had been obliterated. One small part of the consulate was still standing. A sign outside stated the building was a ‘Cultural Relic’, although that hadn’t stopped the hotel converting it into a restaurant. As I peered into the dining areas full of Chinese tourists whose chopsticks were whirring over their dishes, I realised that one of them was my former sleeping quarters.

Stained lino covered the old wooden floors, but the elaborate ceiling cornices were still there, as were the doors leading to a small stretch of the balcony I had spent so much time lounging on all those years before. The view from the terrace then was of the tight little alleys of the old town. I looked out now on to salmon-pink apartment complexes and a bright-red office block with Chinese characters atop its roof. But I was happy just to be standing there, transported back to being twenty-one and footloose.

Discovering that my former digs had survived the wrecking ball infused my return to Kashgar with some much-needed meaning, because almost everything else I remembered had disappeared or was in the process of going. In 1988, the old town covered most of the city centre, an intricate mesh of winding, cobblestoned lanes, some no more than lines of simple mudbrick homes. But other alleys housed elaborate, three-storey structures with terraces and window frames decorated with brightly coloured arabesque patterns, accessed by wooden doors that opened to reveal small courtyards.

Plunging into the old town was both disorientating and invigorating. Barbers and dentists, their profession indicated by signs displaying rows of teeth,
naan
bakeries, blacksmiths, knife makers and carpet weavers, silk shops, restaurants and small mosques were scattered throughout. Donkey carts clattered down the alleys, where the smell of spices mingled with the smoke billowing off the grills outside the restaurants as skewers of lamb were barbecued in their dozens. Mobile butchers wielding wicked-looking knives hacked up the carcasses of sheep to provide the raw material for the kebab men.

Now those shops and houses are vanishing fast and whole streets are like the film-set version of a town – a single row of buildings with vacant land behind them where the alleys have already been levelled. ‘I think in three years there’ll be nothing left of the old town. It won’t exist,’ a Uighur who was still clinging on to his small general store told me. ‘No one is happy about it but it is the government, so what can you do?’

Its demise began in the wake of the devastating Sichuan earthquake of 2008, an event that allowed the city authorities to claim that Kashgar’s oldest buildings were no longer safe to live in. Yet the old town had already survived two millennia, while the schools and apartment blocks thrown up as cheaply as possible in Sichuan Province by corrupt contractors crumbled to the ground when the 2008 quake struck, leaving almost 70,000 people dead.

Most locals believe tearing down the old town is less about making Kashgar safe for its residents and more about wiping out the past – an effective means of emphasising Han control over the Uighurs’ spiritual and cultural capital. It is no coincidence perhaps that the 220,000 residents of the old town are being moved to hutch-like flats on Kashgar’s outskirts, where it will be much easier to monitor their activities.

Only the great Id Kah Mosque, the largest in all China, is certain to survive the destruction. In every sense it is the heart of Kashgar, the one building that can’t be demolished unless the Chinese want to incite a Xinjiang-wide uprising. From first light on, as darkness gives way to an orange-streaked dawn sky, the square in front of it starts to fill up. Old men fingering prayer beads and women covered from head to toe join vendors selling ice cream and prayer mats, kids running around and tourists snapping pictures. People pray at all times, while families promenade before heading to the nearby restaurants for dinner.

During major Muslim festivals, 50,000 people or more pack into the Id Kah and the square. There are so many worshippers that the surrounding roads are blocked when they fall to their knees as the loudspeakers boom out the prayers. It is a peaceful demonstration of how Kashgar remains a Uighur city, even as much of it is being systematically obliterated, a once great Silk Road city being reduced to rubble to fit the CCP’s narrative.

Mosques in China are often hybrids of traditional Islamic and Chinese architecture, a concession to the long-held Han distrust of religions from far-off countries. Many appear to be Buddhist temples, until you notice the silver or golden crescents perched on the pagoda roofs. But there is no mistaking the Id Kah’s denomination. Sand-coloured, it is partially hidden by trees which make it appear smaller than it is until you venture inside and realise how far back it extends. There is a classic simplicity to its lines, with perfectly proportioned minarets at the corners flanking the arched entrance and walls neither too high nor too low.

The Id Kah dates back to the mid-fifteenth century, although other mosques occupied the same site for hundreds of years before. Having survived numerous conflicts over the last five centuries, it stands now in defiance of the changes around it, like one of those forts in an old western movie surrounded by hostile Indians. The latest challenge is a row of recently built, Chinese-owned department stores across the road. They incorporate a faux-Islamic styling, yet they stand taller than the minarets of the Id Kah.

Their presence allows for a symbolic stand-off – grandiose new shrines to the Han religion of commerce opposite the Uighurs’ ancient place of worship. I was confident the Id Kah would still be there the next time I came to Kashgar, while the department stores would go the way of most modern Chinese architecture and age rapidly and disastrously, before being pulled down and replaced.

So much of old Kashgar has gone that I was at a loss to know what to do with myself. But I hung around anyway, reluctant to move on after investing so much in my return. I spent a lot of time with Lin Lin, a thirtysomething woman from Beijing who was staying at my hotel while scouting locations for a TV show. Rather more sensitive to Uighur culture than most Chinese, she took care to wear a headscarf and it was only when you saw her delicate features and pale skin close up, or heard her melodious Mandarin, that you realised she was Han.

Lin Lin liked to cultivate an air of mystery. She had an enticing, cat-like, self-contained nature. A keen shopper, she dragged me to the various markets around Kashgar in search of pashminas, silk and jewellery. The only place she didn’t buy anything was the Sunday market. In 1988, it had been a frantic clash of peoples and tongues. Now Uighurs and ethnic Kyrgyz and Tajiks still bargain over camels and sheep and goats tied tightly together, but they do so confined inside a much smaller, rigidly demarcated area. I preferred the chaos of before.

At night, we ate in the Uighur places near the Id Kah, leisurely meals of lamb skewers,
naan
,
laghman
noodles and the black Xinjiang beer. She would appear uninterested when we returned to the hotel, saying ‘Good night’ and disappearing to her room, only to call later and ask me to come over. I didn’t mind being summoned. Lin Lin was travelling on TV company money and her room was much more comfortable than mine. It had two double beds and after we’d slept together, I was always sent to the spare one with a warning not to make any noise. Cats are light sleepers.