On the night of 31 August 2022, minutes before Michelle Bachelet's term as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights ran out, her office published its assessment of human rights in Xinjiang. It had been delayed for close to a year. Beijing lobbied hard to stop it. When it finally…
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…
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…
Since 2016, more than a million Chinese officials have been assigned a Uyghur family each. They're called relatives. They arrive with gifts, stay for…
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…
Beijing's word for them was "vocational skills education and training centres". The people inside were students, the official line went. They studied…
Kashgar's farmland is cotton country. Xinjiang grows more than a fifth of the world's cotton, and the southern oases around Kashgar, Aksu and Hotan…
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…
In 2018 a walk across central Kashgar meant a police post every hundred metres or so. They were called convenience police stations, and Xinjiang…
Here are two numbers from China's own censuses. Kashgar prefecture had 4,499,158 people in 2015. In 2020 it had 4,496,377. In five years, in one of…
Kashgar sits in an oasis at the western edge of the Taklimakan desert, closer to Kabul than to Beijing. For two thousand years it was a market town…
In December 2019 Xinjiang's regional chairman told a press conference in Beijing that everyone in the camps had graduated. Some of them had. Many…
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…
Mahmud al-Kashgari, born near Kashgar in the 11th century, wrote the first great dictionary of the Turkic languages and drew the first known map of…
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…
