In May 2010, a year after the Urumqi riots, Beijing decided Xinjiang's problem was poverty and that money would fix it. A central work conference approved a special economic zone at Kashgar, the country's sixth. Fifty square kilometres, ten of them out at the Irkeshtam border…
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…
Drive south from Kashgar on the Karakoram Highway and the oasis gives way to the Ghez canyon, then the high Pamir. Karakul Lake sits at about 3,600…
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…
