At 10:30 every morning, except Mondays, a crowd packs the square outside the east gate of what the signs now call the Kashgar Ancient City. Drums start. The gate swings open. Dancers in Uyghur costume perform to welcome actors playing Zhang Qian and Ban Chao, the Han dynasty…
About five kilometres north-east of central Kashgar, in the village of Haohan, stands the finest Islamic building in Xinjiang. A green-and-blue tiled…
Id Kah is the mosque on every Kashgar postcard. Yellow brick, a tiled gateway, two slim minarets about 18 metres high, and a courtyard of poplars…
In 2009 Kashgar's Old City was still a working town. Mud-brick houses stacked two and three storeys high over lanes too narrow for a car, with…
For as long as Kashgar has been a city, it has been a market. Traders came from Samarkand, Kabul, Lahore and Xi'an, and Marco Polo passed through in…
Ordam Padishah sat out in the sand dunes of Yengisar, south of Kashgar. It was the tomb of Ali Arslan Khan, a Kara-Khanid ruler killed in 998…
Twice a day at the East Gate of Kashgar's Old City, actors in costume stage an opening ceremony. There's narration about the Silk Road, a Han envoy…
