By Alison Bate

When I visited Kashgar just over three years ago, I was disappointed at first.

The road in from the airport passed concrete roundabouts and boring buildings typical of the modern Han Chinese city. There was even a giant Mao statue close to the bus station.

Kashgar's Id Kah Mosque in winter

While Kashgar – or Kashi as the Han Chinese call it – is inside China, people don’t visit the city to see its Chinese culture.

Like me, they come to see the ancient Silk Road city famous for its Uyghur market, rabbit-warren streets, donkey carts and the largest mosque in China.

The Uyghurs are Muslims speaking a language similar to Turkish, and their way of living is totally different from the Han Chinese. They eat nan bread rather than rice, don’t drink (or aren’t supposed to) and in their traditional homes, sleep and entertain on raised areas covered in carpets. And the city, close to the border with Kyrgystan and Kazakhstan, is surrounded by barren mountains that have more in common with central Asia and Mongolia than anywhere else.

Three years ago, even though some of Kashgar’s charm was already being whittled away, there was still a solid core of traditional streets, mosques and artisan shops.

But now the whole ancient core is being bulldozed, according to a New York Times report last week. Authorities say that demolition is needed because an earthquake could strike at any time, collapsing centuries-old buildings and killing thousands.

The irony of destroying a historic city to make it safer is not lost on the New York Times, which headlines the story: “To Protect an Ancient City, China Moves to Raze It”.

Having travelled around a lot of western China as well as Tibet, it’s easy to see that the Chinese authorities have a standard blueprint of what to do with a old city. They clear out any traditional ethnic buildings in the city centre, and replace them with a People’s Square, police station and boring apartment buildings.

What’s happening in Kashgar follows a well-established Chinese pattern, and to be fair, the Chinese authorities apply it to cities with a Han Chinese majority as well.

Whether the decision to raze Kashgar is political or simply the Chinese passion for replacing the old with the new, the end result is nothing less than tragic.

Tea kettles in Lhundrub

By Alison Bate

Watching Brad Pitt in “Seven Years in Tibet” the other week, I idly wondered how any movie about Tibet could be so boring.

Tibet’s so striking, and there are so many surprises around every corner, that making a boring movie about the country should be impossible. But it did trigger a couple of my favorite memories while biking with my sister around Tibet in 2006.

Early one morning, we were in the small town of Lhundrub (Chinese name: Linzhou), east of Lhasa. We watched in bafflement as a local Tibetan woman carefully placed large kettles of water on what looked like makeshift satellite dishes.

A few minutes later, it all became clear. The kettles began puffing away merrily, and we realized she was using solar panels to heat the water.

We were travelling in October, and it was sunny every day for three weeks except the last one – when it snowed. I found out later that Lhasa, the capital, has more than 3,000 hours of sunshine every year.

Tibetan women working on the land

Later in the day, we ran into another use for the popular kettles. As we biked up a wide valley northwest of Lhundrub, we met these Tibetan women, who were relaxing after a hard day’s work moving muck around. They waved us over to join the party and poured us a potent brew called chang from the big kettle. We drank it down . . .before wobbling away merrily on our bikes again.

By Alison Bate

It’s winter in Urumqi and everyone is out in the streets chipping away at the snow and ice. A huge human effort. Even the local doctor is out in the alley in her white coat and mask, attacking the ice with a spade.

The local government has closed all the major roads downtown until noon, and told the residents to clear the streets. No snowplows here or salting and gritting of roads. Just hordes of people attacking the ice. It’s dirty and grimy, full of soot.

After a token effort, the stall-keepers huddle round tiny coal-fire tin cans, the men wearing Chinese army overcoats and Snoopy sheepskin hats with long earflaps. Only the Uyghurs selling kebabs look warm, with large old-style barbeques for cooking the mutton.

Kebab seller in Urumqi. Jackie Logan photo.

The Uyghurs (pronounced Wee-gur in English) are Chinese Muslims, speaking a Turkish kind of language, writing in Arabic script, praying to Allah, and wearing traditional skull caps and shawls.

Urumqi is the capital of Xinjiang province, in China’s remote northwest, and is surrounded by desert and barren mountains. It has more in common with the neighboring states of Mongolia, Russia, and Kazakhstan than Beijing – more than 3,200 kilometers away.

It’s a small city by Chinese standards, a mere two or three million people, but growing fast and furiously, with skyscrapers and modern office blocks downtown, and a booming oil industry in the surrounding countryside. A world without trees, stark and barren, with low wattage lights, concrete overpasses and thick smog.

When I arrive in October, I start coughing immediately. A hacking dry cough that seems endemic at first, but after about three weeks my body adapts to the pollution. I can almost smell the acid in the air, though: sulfur dioxide from factories and chemicals and dust from farms outside the city.

Mountains outside Turpan, three hours' drive from Urumqi, in temperatures of minus 35C

Urumqi is surrounded on three sides by the magnificent Tian Shan mountains, reaching up to 5,000 metres. But the constant haze means we very rarely see them. It’s only when we go on trips outside the city that we escape the blanket of smog, see blue sky and realize: “Oh my God, it’s a sunny day.”

The temperatures drop quickly in late October and we shiver in our concrete apartments, north of downtown. An important person in local government decides what day to turn the heating on the whole city, and that day hasn’t arrived.

Then suddenly the heating is on, the coal-fired power plants crank into high gear just outside Urumqi, and warm air and coal dust pour through the heating vents. Now it’s so hot that even when it’s minus 15 or 20 C, the windows need to be open all the time in my apartment. Fine coal dust settles everywhere, making me grumpy as I wash the floor yet again. I blow my nose: black snot oozes out. My white pants? A big mistake bringing those for work. They have to be washed after just one outing.

I’m teaching at a language school downtown and as we dig in for winter, most of us acquire really bad colds or flu that lingers longer than usual thanks to the pollution. Those with bronchitis are put “on the drip” to receive their antibiotics from Chinese doctors.

I also visit the local doctor with a fiery throat and receive an impressive array of medicine: a mixture of western-style throat pills and Chinese herbal remedies packaged in cute little brown bottles that look very Dickensian. I down them all, and they seem to do the trick.

But now it’s time for work. I buy some nan bread and slither down the hill, muffled up to the hilt, heading past an ugly roundabout and across to People’s Square.

Watching World Cup Soccer in Urumqi

On weekends – work days for us – it’s full of women swaying as they do morning keep-fit, middle-aged couples playing badminton in their street clothes, a brass band in another corner, and others watching a giant TV screen. Impressive ice sculptures occupy another part of the Square.

By April, Urumqi is emerging from its winter cocoon. The snow has melted, we can stride out at normal speed without fear of slipping on the ice, and no longer need thermal underwear and gloves. Old people in wheelchairs are wheeled out into the sun, and the outdoor night markets grow bigger daily.

A couple of months later, it’s 30 to 35C in the city and we buy ice-creams before class, beg for fans for our apartments, and go drinking after work at Wuyi night market. All kinds of nuts are being roasted outside, watermelons are laid out in tempting wedges and more and more people sit outside to eat kebabs.

I foolishly leave Urumqi by train, heading to Chengdu on a 54-hour trip by hard sleeper, packed to the gills. However, it does give me time to reflect on life in Urumqi. Leaving Urumqi is somewhat like leaving the army, I imagine. We can’t wait to escape the busy teaching workload, but miss the camaraderie and claustrophobic coziness afterward. However frustrating the work, however incestuous the gossip, however polluted the city, it was never boring.

Link to part of scientific report concluding that Urumqi is the world’s most polluted city. PDF file

Camel driver in Mygoma, a suburb of Khartoum

My story about teaching in Khartoum, Sudan in 2007 is now on the Transitions Abroad website. It begins this way:

By Alison Bate
Shortly after I arrived in Sudan, one of my favorite male students quietly passed me a handwritten note, whispering that I should read it later.

After class, I read a charming explanation that because he was Muslim and I was a woman, he could not shake hands when we met.

“OK?” he asked, embarrassed, the next time we ran across each other.

“OK,” I confirmed, smiling, keeping my hands firmly behind my back and mortified that he felt the need to explain his actions.

In Sudan, such mistakes are easy to make. Whenever men meet, they shake hands with everyone in the room. Whenever, I walked into a room, they nearly all shook hands with me too. It is a charming custom, and you soon get in the habit of doing the same. But Khartoum is home to students from all over the Arab world, and those from Saudi Arabia, in particular, have been raised in a strict Muslim culture that believes men should not touch women, especially those outside the family.

Most Sudanese Arabs — in Khartoum anyway — come across as moderate Muslims, and are usually curious about the West and surprisingly comfortable when discussing politics. They are also very hospitable and friendly to foreigners, so it is easy to forget that the government or fundamentalist Muslims may not share the same relaxed attitude.

Continued

How we were turfed out of a village in remote China

after a friendly soccer game

It was late January, the start of Chinese New Year, when Chris and I decided to escape the coal pollution, dirty snow and concrete overpasses of Urumqi.

We were teaching English in the capital city of China’s remote northwestern province of Xinjiang. Tired of the daily grind of teaching, drinking Wusu beer and watching DVDs, we caught a flight to Kashgar, close to the Chinese border with various -stans: Pakistan, Tajikistan, Kyrghyzstan, and even Afghanistan.

It really felt like frontier country as we headed up the Karakoram pass for eight hours on a rickety local bus. Stark snow-capped mountains reached 7,500 metres high, and we passed loaded camel trains, and scattered villages with small herds of yaks, sheep and goats. It was a chilly minus 25C, and the villagers wore a fascinating array of fur hats: Snoopy hats with long ear flaps, upsidedown flowerpot hats and flat fur hats with woolly bits on the outside. While we were busy staring at them, the locals were equally busy staring at us.

“It’s because you wear such bright colors all the time,” Chris insisted, glancing at my bright blue jacket.

“Maybe it’s because you’re a 6′5″ American,” I retorted.

But never did they stare at us as much as near the hilltop village of Bulungkol, where we stayed for two nights on the way back to Kashgar. As we hiked up a side valley, men, women and children literally ran out of their houses to look at us.
A family of Kyrgyrs, one of the semi-nomadic ethnic groups in the region, invited us to stay in their simple home, for a fee, of course. So that night we settled in comfortably while they watched local XJTV2, Chris read Herman Hesse’s “Siddartha” (in true backpacker style), and I updated my diary. Come nighttime, the family pulled colorful eiderdowns out from behind a curtain and we all lay down to sleep on the carpeted floor, packed together like sardines.

After a breakfast of yak milk tea and nan bread the next day, we went walking again, but Chris was itching to play soccer. We’d seen a wonderful soccer pitch carefully cleared of stones, and headed there again.

“Any of you guys play soccer?” he asked the villagers, miming in true ESL teacher-style. An impromptu game began, with more boys and men joining in all the time, while the women gathered around me. After several minutes of action, though, the ball was suddenly kicked away and everyone disappeared mysteriously.

A little uneasy, Chris and I carried on walking across the ice-filled river valley. I started a rambling story about my scary experiences in Kashmir, and how I’d run into a risky situation after being out after curfew. Perfect timing, as just then a police jeep came bumping along a dirt road toward us.

“Hope that’s not for us,” I said half-joking.

Unfortunately, it was. Four uniformed officers got out, along with one of the villagers who’d been watching the soccer game. He gave us a long, long stare before slipping away.

“Where are you staying?” asked one of the officers politely, after they’d checked passports and herded us into their vehicle. He was a good-looking Han Chinese guy in his mid-20s, with pretty good English. Foreigners were not allowed to stay in this border village, he told us. As they grilled our hosts, and we worried they would get into trouble, he played the good cop, while a veteran Kyrgyz officer played bad cop, exchanging harsh words with the feisty lady of the house. After long discussions in the local language, which we couldn’t understand, the tension eased, there were smiles all round, and we were told to be ready to leave in the morning.

They came for us the next day, the same young Han Chinese officer and a different colleague, and for the next 90 minutes, we sat chatting in the back of the police car.

The officer talked about growing up in China, studying English at university, and how he wished he’d been posted to a city where he could meet foreigners. We were the first foreigners to stay there for two years, he added. I practised my shaky Mandarin, and he was thoroughly charming.

Every now and then, he remembered he was a police officer, and became more menacing. He checked the digital photos we’d taken, and there was an awkward moment when he saw that my “Lonely Planet” guidebook marked Taiwan in a different colour from the rest of China.

“Taiwan is in China. Why is it a different colour?” he asked, suddenly angry. We could see he was caught in a dilemma: very proud of his country, but also wanting westerners to enjoy themselves in China.

Finally, a private vehicle came down the lonely mountain road, and the men inside were ordered to take us to Kashgar. As we said goodbye to the young officer, his last words were: “When I’m in Urumqi, I hope we can meet up again.”

Sadly, he never did call to meet for a drink. It would have been neat — to visit with the guy who kicked us out of town.