Ordam Mazar and the Kargilik Grand Mosque, the Shrines Kashgar Prefecture Lost
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 fighting the Buddhist kingdom of Khotan. Uyghurs remembered him as a saint martyred in the wars that brought Islam to the region. Every year tens of thousands of pilgrims walked into the desert for a three-day festival at his shrine, a cluster of flags, poles and tombs that had stood for close to a thousand years.
The historian Rian Thum compared what Ordam meant to Uyghurs with what Notre Dame means to the French.
China banned the festival in 1997, one of the first shrine gatherings to go. Around 2018 bulldozers were hauled 14 km across the dunes to flatten what was left. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute says it was completely destroyed by 2019. Nobody lived there. Nobody needed the land. As Thum put it, destroying it seems to have been the point.
A mosque in Kargilik's old town, 2012. Photo: Eric Feng, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
A mosque from 1543, gone in a month
The Grand Mosque of Kargilik, Yecheng in Chinese, was the other great loss in Kashgar prefecture. Construction was approved in 1543. It covered about 4,762 square metres, held around 10,000 worshippers, and had been expanded in 1883 and 1936. Satellite images show it standing on 1 September 2018. Between late November and late December that year, the open-source investigators at Bellingcat found, a large part of the complex disappeared, including its great gatehouse. The mosque's preacher had been detained in 2017 and later died in custody.
Beijing says none of this happened the way it looks. A regional spokesman said the gatehouse had been found unsafe in September 2018, repaired, and that the mosque reopened after renovation in March 2019. China's ambassador in London called the demolition reports a lie. Nobody independent has been allowed to check whether what stands there now is the old gate or a copy of it.
Protected sites, unprotected
Kashgar city's own losses started earlier. On 15 June 2009 the Hanliq Madrassa was knocked down during the Old City "renewal", though it was a protected site at the regional level. Tradition says Mahmud al-Kashgari studied there, and in 1883 it housed the first school in Xinjiang to teach science alongside religion. It stood in a primary school's yard. Protection on paper meant nothing.
In 2016 the head of Kashgar's ethnic and religious affairs office told Radio Free Asia that nearly 70 per cent of the city's mosques had been removed in a "rectification" campaign, because there were more than enough. That's not an exile estimate. It's the local government's own number.
Across Xinjiang, ASPI's satellite survey in 2020 estimated that about 16,000 mosques, some 65 per cent, had been destroyed or damaged, mostly since 2017, and that about 8,500 were demolished outright, with most of the land left empty. It found 30 per cent of important shrines, cemeteries and pilgrimage sites demolished and another 28 per cent damaged. Many were legally protected.
Ban, then museum, then bulldozer
Thum describes a sequence that fits Kashgar prefecture well. First ban the festival. Then turn the shrine into a museum, or leave it to decay without its pilgrims. Then knock it down. Ordam went the whole way. The Afaq Khoja tomb stopped at the museum stage, because it sells tickets. Kargilik's gatehouse went in a month.
China's foreign ministry answers every report the same way. Xinjiang has more than 24,000 mosques, it says, more than ten times as many per person as the United States. Ask the official in Kashgar how many his city lost.
He already said. Seventy per cent.