The Chinese Empire

After a brief and uneventful stay in the metropolis of Urumqi, I drove out to the airport to join the masses of Chinese tourists boarding one of the dozen daily flights connecting the provincial capital to its primary tourist destination: Kashgar, where I met Jon and Robert and have spent the last day. Today we drove down the Karakoram highway to the foothills of the Karakoram mountains, just miles from the border with Pakistan. Along the way we passed quaint mud-hutted villages with mosques and ruddy, broad faced peasants -- a reminder that we are closer to Mecca than to Beijing.

A bit of context: Both Urumqi and Kashgar are cities in the "Xinjian Autonomous Region" of China. The region is populated mostly by muslims from the Uigher ethnic group.

Uighers are a turkic people, very closely related to the people of central asia. They speak a turkic language, and have features much closer to mine than to that of their Chinese masters.This vast, arid area has been ruled by China since the middle ages, and today has many Chinese living here, partly because of government policies encouraging migration of majority Han chinese to the hinterlands.

The Uigher, many of whom speak no Chinese, have very much found themselves in the midst of the vast Chinese empire. Despite the government's efforts to preserve their cultural identity, they are very much second-class citizens in their own homes. All jobs that require even the most minimal skills go to Chinese immigrants (even that of hotel maid) -- leaving the Uighers to their traditional crafts of farming and simple craftwork. From all appearances, if they want to participate in the economic miracle of modern china, they must do so as streetsweepers.