Afaq Khoja Mausoleum in Kashgar, How a Sufi Shrine Became the Fragrant Concubine Theme Park
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 tomb with a 17-metre dome and four corner minarets, built around 1640 for Muhammad Yusuf, a master of the Naqshbandi Sufi order. His son Afaq Khoja was buried there in 1694, and up to five generations of the family lie under the dome.
For three centuries Uyghurs came here as pilgrims. They prayed, left offerings, stayed overnight at festivals and buried their dead in the mud-brick cemetery around the shrine. Many still call it the holiest Muslim site in Xinjiang.
Photo: Radosław Botev, CC BY 3.0 pl, via Wikimedia Commons
Chinese tourists know it by another name. On signs, tickets and in the guides' patter it's the Tomb of the Fragrant Concubine.
A love story written over a shrine
The Fragrant Concubine, Xiangfei in Chinese and Iparhan to Uyghurs, is a legend about a Kashgar woman taken to the court of the Qianlong emperor after the Qing conquered the region in the 1750s. In the version told at the shrine today, she's a granddaughter of Afaq Khoja who bathes in camel's milk, wins the emperor's love, and is carried home to Kashgar after her death by 120 bearers on a three-year journey. The emperor builds her a mosque and a little oasis in Beijing. It's a story of a Uyghur bride and a Manchu emperor who end up loving each other. Party-backed historians have shaped it into a parable of ethnic unity.
There's a problem. The real woman behind the legend, the imperial consort Rong, died in 1788 and is buried at the Eastern Qing Tombs outside Beijing. She isn't in Kashgar at all. The legend only attached itself to this tomb in the late 19th century. A local Uyghur man told the New York Times in 2014 that the truth is she isn't even buried here. The tourist crypt carries her label anyway.
Uyghurs have long told the story differently. In their version she carried daggers in her sleeves, refused the emperor, and was killed for it on the orders of his mother. She's a captive who resisted, a symbol of a people conquered by force. The state took that symbol and turned it into a romance. Today the name Xiangfei sells TV dramas, perfume, raisins and roast chicken.
Priced out, then policed out
After the 1980s the shrine was run as a tourist site with a ticket price few rural pilgrims could pay. The religious staff were removed, offerings stopped, festival gatherings and overnight stays were banned. The historian Rian Thum, who has written the best work on the site, describes this as museumification: keep the building, remove the worship. In 2015 officials opened a Fragrant Concubine Garden next to the mausoleum. Ticket sites list it as a 4A scenic area from 40 yuan, with camel rides on offer.
The cemetery is still there, for now. Across Xinjiang it's a different picture. AFP and Earthrise Alliance found at least 45 Uyghur cemeteries dug up and flattened between 2014 and 2019, and CNN counted more than 100 by early 2020, including a thousand-year-old graveyard in Hotan. In Aksu a cemetery holding a famous poet's grave became a "Happiness Park". Officials called it standardisation and civilised burial.
Afaq Khoja was no hero, and that's the point
Here's the awkward part for everyone. Afaq Khoja himself was a divisive figure. Driven out of Kashgar in 1669, he went to the Dzungar Mongols with a letter from the Dalai Lama and came back as their puppet ruler, agreeing to pay them 100,000 coins a year. Some Uyghur nationalists call him a traitor. Others revere him as a saint.
That's what real history looks like: argued over, layered, owned by the people who tell it. Uyghurs spent three centuries arguing about Afaq Khoja at his own tomb. Officials once burned a Uyghur novel about him. The state's answer was to replace the argument with a tidier story about a fragrant bride, and to sell tickets to it.
The tomb is beautiful. Go and see it. Just remember who's telling you the story at the door.