{"id":178,"date":"2013-05-15T19:26:02","date_gmt":"2013-05-15T19:26:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/?p=178"},"modified":"2017-07-25T22:09:51","modified_gmt":"2017-07-25T22:09:51","slug":"demolishing-kashgars-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/?p=178","title":{"rendered":"Demolishing Kashgar’s History"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Joshua Hammer<\/p>\n

The second-story rooms of the centuries-old mud-brick houses were cantilevered atop log beams and nearly touched each other across an alleyway paved with hexagonal stones. Women wearing dark veils leaned out of tiny windows. Poplar doors, painted bright blue or green and adorned with brass floral petals, stood half open\u2014a subtle signal that the master of the house was inside. The aromas of freshly baked bread and ripe peaches wafted up from vendors\u2019 wooden carts.<\/p>\n

It was early morning and I was exploring the back streets of Kashgar, a fabled city on the western edge of China, with a Chinese journalist from Beijing, whom I\u2019ll identify only as Ling, and a young handicraft salesman from Kashgar, whom I\u2019ll call Mahmati. Mahmati is a Uighur (WEE-goor), a member of the ethnic minority that makes up 77 percent of the Kashgar population. He had traveled to Beijing before the 2008 Olympics to take advantage of the tourist influx and had stayed on. I\u2019d invited him to accompany me to Kashgar to act as my guide to one of the best-preserved\u2014and most endangered\u2014Islamic cities in Central Asia.<\/p>\n

The three of us followed narrow passageways bathed in sunlight or obscured by shadows. We encountered faces that testified to Kashgar\u2019s role as a crossroads of Central Asia on the route linking China, India and the Mediterranean. Narrow-eyed, white-bearded elders wearing embroidered skullcaps chatted in front of a 500-year-old mosque. We passed pale-complexioned men in black felt hats; broad-faced, olive-skinned men who could have passed for Bengalis; green-eyed women draped in head scarfs and chadors; and the occasional burqa-clad figure who might have come straight from Afghanistan. It was a scene witnessed in the early 1900s by Catherine Theodora Macartney, wife of the British consul in Kashgar when it was a listening post in the Great Game, the strategic Russia-Britain conflict for control of Central Asia. \u201cOne could hardly say what the real Kashgar type was,\u201d she wrote in a 1931 memoir,\u00a0An English Lady in Chinese Turkestan<\/em>, \u201cfor it has become so mixed by the invasion of other people in the past.\u201d<\/p>\n

We rounded a corner and stared into a void: a vacant lot the size of four football fields. Mounds of earth, piles of mud bricks and a few jagged foundations were all that remained of a once-lively neighborhood. \u201cMy God, they are moving so fast,\u201d Mahmati said. A passerby pointed to a row of houses at the lot\u2019s edge. \u201cThis is going next,\u201d he told us. Nearby, a construction team had already laid out the steel and concrete foundations of a high-rise and was dismantling the surrounding buildings with mallets and chisels. The men stood on ladders, filling the air with dust. A red banner announced the quarter would be rebuilt with \u201ctrue care from the [Communist] Party and the government.\u201d<\/p>\n

For more than a thousand years, Kashgar\u2014where the bone-dry Taklamakan Desert meets the Tian Shan Mountains\u2014was a key city along the Silk Road, the 7,000-mile trade route that connected China\u2019s Yellow River Valley with India and the Mediterranean. In the ninth century, Uighur forebears, traders traveling from Mongolia in camel caravans, settled in oasis towns around the desert. Originally Buddhists, they began converting to Islam about 300 years later. For the past 1,000 years, Kashgar has thrived, languished\u2014and been ruthlessly suppressed by occupiers. The Italian adventurer Marco Polo reported passing through around 1273, about 70 years after it was seized by Genghis Khan. He called it \u201cthe largest and most important\u201d city in \u201ca province of many towns and castles.\u201d Tamerlane the Great, the despot from what is now Uzbekistan, sacked the city in 1390. Three imperial Chinese dynasties conquered and reconquered Kashgar and its environs.<\/p>\n

Still, its mosques and madrassahs drew scholars from all over Central Asia. Its caravansaries, or inns, provided refuge to traders bearing glass, gold, silver, spices and gems from the West and silks and porcelain from the East. Its labyrinthine alleys teemed with blacksmiths, cotton-spinners, book-binders and other craftsmen. Clarmont Skrine, a British envoy writing in 1926, described looking out on \u201cthe vast horizon of oasis and desert, of plains and snowy ranges….How remote and isolated was the ancient land to which we had come!\u201d In 2007, Hollywood director Marc Forster used the city as the stand-in for 1970s Kabul in his film of Khaled Hosseini\u2019s best-selling novel about Afghanistan,\u00a0The Kite Runner<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Uighurs have experienced tastes of independence. In 1933, they declared the East Turkestan Republic, from the Tian Shan Mountains south to the Kunlun Mountains, which lasted until a Chinese warlord came to power the next year. Then, in 1944, as the nationalist Chinese government neared collapse during World War II, the Uighurs established the Second East Turkestan Republic, which ended in 1949, after Mao Zedong took over China. Six years after Mao\u2019s victory, China created the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, similar to a province but with greater local control; the Uighur Muslims are its largest ethnic group.<\/p>\n

In the 1990s, the Chinese government built a railway to Kashgar and made cheap land available to Han Chinese, the nation\u2019s majority. Between one million and two million Han settled in Xinjiang during the past two decades, though Kashgar and other towns on the southern edge of the Taklamakan Desert are still predominately Uighur. \u201cXinjiang has always been a source of anxiety for the central power in Beijing, as is Tibet and Taiwan,\u201d Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based Uighur expert at Human Rights Watch told me. \u201cHistorically the response to that is to assimilate the territory, particularly through the immigration of Han Chinese.\u201d The Han influx stirs resentment. \u201cAll construction and factory jobs around Kashgar have been taken by Han Chinese,\u201d says British journalist Christian Tyler, author of\u00a0Wild West China: The Taming of Xinjiang<\/a><\/em>. \u201cThe people in charge are Han, and they recruit Han. Natural resources\u2014oil and gas, precious metals\u2014are being siphoned off for benefit of the Han.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now the Chinese government is doing to Kashgar\u2019s Old City what a succession of conquerors failed to accomplish: leveling it. Early in 2009 the Chinese government announced a $500 million \u201cKashgar Dangerous House Reform\u201d program: over the next several years, China plans to knock down mosques, markets and centuries-old houses\u201485 percent of the Old City. Residents will be compensated, then moved\u2014some temporarily, others permanently\u2014to new cookie-cutter, concrete-block buildings now rising elsewhere in the city. In place of the ancient mud-brick houses will come modern apartment blocks and office complexes, some adorned with Islamic-style domes, arches and other flourishes meant to conjure up Kashgar\u2019s glory days. The government plans to keep a small section of the Old City intact, to preserve \u201ca museumized version of a living culture,\u201d says Dru Gladney, director of the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College and one of the world\u2019s foremost scholars of Xinjiang and the Uighurs.<\/p>\n

The destruction, some say, is business-as-usual for a government that values development over preservation of traditional architecture and culture. In 2005, new construction in Beijing equaled the total in all of Europe, according to the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center (BCHPC), a privately funded advocacy group. In the Chinese capital, one hutong (traditional alley) after another has been demolished in the name of progress. \u201cThe destruction of [Kashgar\u2019s] Old City is a bureaucratic reflex, a philistine approach,\u201d says Tyler. \u201cIt\u2019s devastating for the history and the culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

Others believe the plan reflects a governmental bias against ethnic minorities. \u201cThe state does not really see anything of real value in indigenous culture,\u201d says Bequelin. \u201c[The thinking is] it\u2019s good for tourism, but basically [indigenous people] cannot contribute to the modernity of society.\u201d Greed may also be a factor: because most residents of the Old City lack property rights, they can be pushed aside, Bequelin adds, giving developers unbridled opportunity for self-enrichment.<\/p>\n

The Chinese government says the demolition is needed to fortify the Old City against earthquakes, the most recent of which struck the region in February 2003, killing 263 people and destroying thousands of buildings. \u201cThe entire Kashgar area is in a special area in danger of earthquakes,\u201d Xu Jianrong, Kashgar\u2019s deputy mayor, said recently. \u201cI ask you: What country\u2019s government would not protect its citizens from the dangers of natural disaster?\u201d<\/p>\n

But many in Kashgar don\u2019t buy the government\u2019s explanation. They say officials carried out no inspection of the Old City\u2019s houses before condemning them and that most of those that collapsed in recent earthquakes were newly constructed concrete dwellings, not traditional Uighur homes. \u201cThese buildings were designed to withstand earthquakes, and used for many centuries,\u201d Hu Xinyu of the BCHPC said of the traditional architecture. He suspects the widespread demolition has a more sinister motive: to deprive the Uighurs of their main symbol of cultural identity. Others view the destruction as punishment for Uighur militancy. The flood of Han Chinese into Xinjiang energized a small Uighur secessionist movement; Uighur attacks against Chinese soldiers and police have occurred sporadically in recent years. The government may well see the Old City as a breeding ground for both Uighur nationalism and violent insurrection. \u201cIn their minds, these mazelike alleyways could become a hotbed for terrorist activities,\u201d says Hu.<\/p>\n

To halt the destruction, the BCHPC recently petitioned Unesco to add Kashgar to a list of Silk Road landmarks being considered for United Nations World Heritage status, which obliges governments to protect them. China conspicuously left Kashgar off the list of Silk Road sites the government submitted to Unesco. \u201cIf nothing is done today,\u201d says Hu, \u201cnext year this city will be gone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ling, Mahmati and I had flown southwest to Kashgar from Urumqi, an industrial city of 2.1 million now 80 percent Han Chinese. The China Southern Airways jet had ascended over a sea of cotton and wheat fields at the edge of Urumqi, crossed a rugged zone of crenelated canyons and translucent blue lakes, then soared over the Tian Shan Mountains\u2014a vast, forbidding domain of black basalt peaks, many covered in snow and ice, rising to 20,000 feet\u2014before setting down in Kashgar.<\/p>\n

The three of us climbed nervously into a taxi in front of the tiny airport. A government notice posted in the taxi warned passengers to be vigilant against Uighur terrorists. \u201cWe should clear our eyes to distinguish between right and wrong,\u201d it advised in both Chinese and the Arabic script of the Uighur language (related to Turkish).<\/p>\n

Two months earlier, on July 5, Uighur anger had erupted lethally in Urumqi, when Uighur youths went on a rampage, reportedly stabbing and beating to death 197 people and injuring more than 1,000. (The rioting began as a protest against the killings of two Uighur laborers by fellow Han workers in a southern China toy factory.) Rioting also broke out in Kashgar but was quickly put down. The government blamed the violence on Uighur secessionists and virtually cut off western Xinjiang from the outside world: it shut down the Internet, banned text messages and blocked outgoing international telephone calls.<\/p>\n

Just outside the airport, we hit a massive traffic jam: the police had set up a roadblock and were checking identifications and searching every car headed into Kashgar. The tension was even more pronounced as we reached the city center. Truckloads of People\u2019s Liberation Army soldiers rumbled down wide boulevards, past an unsightly m\u00e9lange of billboards, glass-and-steel banks, the high-rise headquarters of China Telecom and a concrete tower called the Barony Tarim Petroleum Hotel. More troops stood vigilant on sidewalks or ate their lunches in small clusters in People\u2019s Square, a huge plaza dominated by a 50-foot-high statue of Chairman Mao, one of the largest still standing in China.<\/p>\n

We pulled into the Hotel Seman, an 1890 relic. Pink-and-green molded ceilings, Ottoman-style arched wall niches and dusty Afghan carpets lining dimly lit hallways evoked a distant era. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Russian consulate was located here, lorded over by diplomat Nicholas Petrovsky, who kept 49 Cossack bodyguards. As Russia tried to extend its influence over the region, Petrovsky and his British counterpart, Consul George Macartney, spent decades spying on each other. When the Chinese revolution that put an end to imperial rule and brought Sun Yat-sen to power reached Kashgar in 1912, violence broke out in the streets. \u201cMy one thought was that the children and I must be in clean clothes if we were to be murdered,\u201d Macartney\u2019s wife, Lady Catherine, wrote in her diary. \u201cWe all appeared at 4:30 a.m. as though we were going to a garden party, in spotless white!\u201d (The family returned safely to England after departing China in 1918.)<\/p>\n

The hotel\u2019s glory days were well behind it. In the dusty and empty lobby, a Uighur clerk in traditional brocade dress and head scarf handed us a blank hotel register\u2014foreign visitors had nearly disappeared since the July violence in Urumqi. At a deserted Internet caf\u00e9, the proprietor reassured us that we were not totally incommunicado. \u201cI have a nephew in Xian,\u201d he said. \u201cI can fax him your message, and then he will send it over the Internet to where you want it to go.\u201d<\/p>\n

To tour the back streets of the Old City, Mahmati, Ling and I took a taxi to the Kashgar River, the murky waterway that divides Kashgar, and climbed to a hive of mud-brick buildings hugging a hillside. As the din of the modern city dropped away, we turned a corner and entered a world of monochromatic browns and beiges, gloom and dust, mosques on nearly every corner (162 at last count) and the occasional motor scooter putt-putting though the alleys. A team of Chinese officials carrying briefcases and notepads squeezed past us in one lane. \u201cAre you going out on a tourist excursion?\u201d one of them, a middle-aged woman, asked, and Mahmati and Ling nodded nervously; both surmised the officials were taking a door-to-door survey of the neighborhood\u2019s families in anticipation of evicting them.<\/p>\n

In an alley bathed in the perpetual shadow of vaulted archways, we fell into conversation with a man whom I\u2019ll call Abdullah. A handsome figure with an embroidered cap, gray mustache and piercing green eyes, he was standing outside the bright green door to his home, chatting with two neighbors. Abdullah sells mattresses and clothing near the Id -Kah Mosque, the city\u2019s grandest. During the past few years, he told us, he had watched the Chinese government chip away at the Old City\u2014knocking down the ancient 35-foot-high earthen berm that surrounded it, creating wide boulevards through dense warrens of homes, putting up an asphalt plaza in place of a colorful bazaar in front of the mosque. Abdullah\u2019s neighborhood was next. Two months before, officials told residents that they would be relocated in March or April. \u201cThe government says the walls are weak, it will not survive an earthquake, but it is absolutely strong enough,\u201d Abdullah told us. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to leave, it is history\u2014ancient tradition. But we can\u2019t stop it.\u201d<\/p>\n

He led us through the courtyard of his home, filled with drying laundry and potted roses, and up a rickety flight of stairs to a balustraded second-floor landing. I could reach out and practically touch the mottled tan house across the alley. I stood on the wooden balcony and took in the scene: head-scarfed women in a lushly carpeted salon on the ground floor; a group of men huddled behind a half-closed curtain just across the balcony. The men were Abdullah\u2019s neighbors who had gathered to discuss the eviction. \u201cWe don\u2019t know where we\u2019re going to be moved to, we have no idea,\u201d one of them told me. \u201cNobody here wants to move.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another man weighed in: \u201cThey say they are going to rebuild the place better. Who designs it? Nothing is clear.\u201d<\/p>\n

Abdullah said he was told that homeowners would be able to redesign their own dwellings and the government would pay 40 percent. But one of his neighbors shook his head. \u201cIt has never happened before in China,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

One evening, Mahmati took me to a popular Uighur restaurant in Kashgar. Behind closed doors in a private room, he introduced me to several of his friends\u2014Uighur men in their mid-20s. As a group they were angry about tight surveillance by Chinese security forces and inequalities in education, jobs and land distribution. \u201cWe have no power. We have no rights,\u201d a man I\u2019ll call Obul told me over a dinner of lamb kebabs and cabbage dumplings.<\/p>\n

In 1997, Chinese troops in the Xinjiang town of Ghulja fired on protesting Uighur students waving the flags of East Turkestan, killing an unknown number. Then, following the 9\/11 attacks, the Chinese persuaded the United States to list a secessionist group calling itself the East Turkestan Islamic Movement as a terrorist organization, claiming it had ties to Al Qaeda.<\/p>\n

During the American-led offensive against the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, Pakistani bounty hunters captured 22 Uighurs on the Afghan-Pakistan border. The prisoners were turned over to the U.S. military, which incarcerated them at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Bush administration eventually released five to Albania and four to Bermuda. Six were granted asylum on the South Pacific island of Palau this past October. Seven Uighurs remain at Guantanamo, with ongoing litigation about whether they can be released in this country. (The federal government has determined that they pose no threat to the United States.) The Supreme Court has agreed to take up the case.<\/p>\n

Just before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the Chinese government claims, two Uighurs driving a truck deliberately slammed into a column of Chinese paramilitary police jogging through the streets of Kashgar, killing 16 of them. (Eyewitness accounts from foreign tourists cast doubt on whether this was intentional.) In the following days, a few explosives went off 460 miles south of Urumqi, in the city of Kuqa, presumably the work of Uighur nationalists. But, says Bequelin of Human Rights Watch, \u201cthese are small groups with no coordination, no international support. They have no access to weapons, no training.\u201d The Chinese cracked down on all Uighurs, shuttering Islamic schools and tightening security.<\/p>\n

One of the men at dinner that night told me that after he went to Mecca for the hajj, the annual holy pilgrimage, in 2006, he was interrogated by Chinese intelligence agents and ordered to surrender his passport. \u201cIf you are a Uighur and you need a passport for business purposes, you must pay 50,000 yuan (about $7,500),\u201d another dinner guest told me. Ling suggested that the Uighurs were partly to blame for their problems, saying they didn\u2019t value education and their children had suffered for it. Obul acknowledged the point, but said it was too late for reconciliation with the Han majority and the Chinese government. \u201cFor us,\u201d he said, \u201cthe most important word is \u2018independence.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t take long before I\u2014as one of the few foreigners then visiting Kashgar\u2014came to the attention of Chinese authorities. At about 9 p.m. on my second night in Kashgar, there was a knock on my hotel room door. I opened it to confront two uniformed Han police officers, accompanied by the hotel manager. \u201cLet me see your passport,\u201d one officer said in English. He rifled through the pages.<\/p>\n

\u201cYour camera,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

I retrieved it from my knapsack and displayed the digital photographs one by one\u2014scenes from the Sunday animal market, where Uighurs from rural Xinjiang meet to buy and sell donkeys, sheep, camels and goats; shots taken in the alleys of the Old City. Then I came to a picture of a half-collapsed house, mud walls sagging, tile roof disintegrating\u2014belying the image of burgeoning prosperity that China projects to the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cRemove the picture,\u201d a police officer commanded.<\/p>\n

\u201cExcuse me?\u201d<\/p>\n

He tapped his finger on the screen.<\/p>\n

\u201cRemove it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shrugging, I deleted the photo.<\/p>\n

Mahmati, meanwhile, had been taken to the first floor of the hotel for interrogation. At midnight, he called me on his cellphone to say, in a quavering voice, that he was being taken to Kashgar\u2019s security headquarters.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s because he is a Uighur,\u201d Ling said bitterly. \u201cThe Chinese single them out for special treatment.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was long past midnight when Mahmati returned. The police had questioned him for two hours about his relationship with Ling and me and had asked him to account for all the time we had spent together. Then they made Mahmati provide names, addresses and phone numbers for every member of his family in Kashgar, and warned him not to enter the \u201cforbidden area\u201d again\u2014apparently the part of the Old City not designated a tourist zone. \u201cThey demanded to know the real reason for our journey. But I didn\u2019t tell them anything,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

On one of our last days in Kashgar, Mahmati, Ling and I took a government-licensed tour through a tiny section of the Old City\u2014about 10 percent of it\u2014for 30 yuan (about $4.40). Here was a glimpse of the sanitized future that the Chinese government apparently envisions: a Uighur woman clad in a green vest and long blue skirt led us past re\u00adconstructed houses adorned with clean ceramic tiles, handicraft shops and caf\u00e9s offering Western-style food\u2014a tidy, highly commercialized version of the Old City. She kept up a cheerful patter about the \u201cwarm relations\u201d among \u201call of China\u2019s peoples.\u201d<\/p>\n

But under Mahmati\u2019s gentle questioning, our guide began to express less charitable feelings toward the Chinese government. It had refused to allow her to wear a head covering on the job, she said, and had denied her permission to take breaks for prayer. I asked her whether the area we were walking through would be spared the wrecking ball. She looked at me and paused before answering. \u201cIf the customer asks, we are supposed to say it will not be destroyed,\u201d she finally answered, \u201cbut they will destroy it with everything else.\u201d For a moment she let her anger show. Then she composed herself and said goodbye. We left her standing on the street, below a banner that declared, in English: \u201cAncient residence, a slice of the real Kashgar.\u201d<\/p>\n

Writer\u00a0Joshua Hammer<\/strong>\u00a0lives in Berlin.\u00a0Michael Christopher Brown<\/strong>\u00a0travels the world on assignment.<\/p>\n

Read more:\u00a0http:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com\/history-archaeology\/Demolishing-Kashgars-History.html?c=y&page=1<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joshua Hammer The second-story rooms of the centuries-old mud-brick houses were cantilevered atop log beams and nearly touched each other across an alleyway paved with hexagonal stones. Women wearing dark veils leaned out of tiny windows. Poplar doors, painted bright blue or green and adorned with brass floral petals, stood half open\u2014a subtle signal that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chinas-uyghur-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=178"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":278,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178\/revisions\/278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}