Kashgar’s Old City – The Old Becomes New
It’s no secret that the local government in Xinjiang has been systematically getting rid of Kashgar’s Old City over the past few years. Many parts are being completely demolished while others will be receiving a “face lift”.
What’s not very well known is how they plan to rebuild Kashgar’s iconic city centre.
While flying from Xinjiang to Beijing a little while back, I ran across an article in the China Southern in-flight magazine that addressed this very topic. The author obviously put a positive spin on all the changes, but what caught my attention the most were the following two photos:
This first picture was taken back in 2009, well before the majority of the demolition had occurred. Mud homes and tight alleys dominate the space with a hint of modern Chinese architecture in the background.
This second picture, however, is an interesting look into China’s view of Kashgar’s future.
What are your thoughts? Would you still be interested to travel to Kashgar if this is what awaited your arrival?
Very depressing. I know the hotel that picture was taken from. I’ve stayed in it and have almost exactly the same photo. I loved to get up early in the morning and watch the old city come to life.
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Dave says: January 21st, 2012 at 11:04 am
It’s really sad. I was there last spring and some newly-constructed apartment buildings adjacent to the old center was already peeling, and they looked really ugly and out of place there. Not sure about Kashgar but as a Beijing native I only visited the new Qianmen once since its redevelopment in 2004.
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I would answer your question this way. When I moved to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam, back in 2004, the city was just starting its development. Most of the buildings were designed and built by the French. Saigon was beautiful and green.
After Vietnam ascended into the World Trade Organization, development started to increase in Saigon. Many of the French buildings have been replaced by skyscrapers, many considered eye sores since they do not match the architecture of Old Saigon. Each month new construction starts, more historical buildings get torned down. Pollution has increased significantly.
Today I met a Vietnamese from Australia who was raised in Saigon that stated Saigon was no longer a beautiful city. I tend to agree with her. The people here are starting to miss their Old Saigon (I never used this term until reading this blog post) but now it is too late. I am considering moving to another Vietnamese city or another SE Asian country.
Regardless of what is going on with development here, tourists visits to Saigon keeps increasing each year. Nobody seems to care but the locals.
Hence if Old Kashgar is replaced, I may not visit it but tourists would still visit regardless and the Chinese authorities know it.
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*sigh* I don’t care for the “face lift”. They always seem to miss the point that it should be preservation and restoration. The second picture is pretty and all, but there’s no history behind it. It’s just sad to see the government demolish historical sites one after another and not realizing it’s current value.
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I’ve been to Kashgar many times. The old section near the Mosque has already been partially replaced. The true picture can be gathered from local residents. If they trust you, you can get a real opinion. Otherwise, they will simply say ‘it not convenient to talk’. The mud homes that are several hundred years old had withstood earthquakes and other natural disasters. If you manage to walk through the neighborhood, it’s like going back in time and able to see the simplicity of life that it once was. Very regrettable if picture number 2 becomes a reality.
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Hi, firstly, I don’t believe that the visualization will come completely true. Anyone who traveled in China must know how much they charge for entrance to whatever site, so I expect part of the old city to be preserved as some kind of museum (of course, walled with tourniquets and equipped with lots of gift shops) so some good money would be raised once the site is added onto the itinerary of chinese groups.
Second, people have right for development (although they sometimes don’t know it). And today you don’t regard Spanish less for what they did to Mayas, which is pretty much the same as is happening in xinjiang or tibet. Let’s face it, chinese are extremely competitive and innovative whereas uighurs or tibetans extremely backward. And once you are on the track, you cannot stop or go back just because you want to have some place to travel to.
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Western tourists want the Old City to remain as it is for their travelling experience. Chinese officials want to renovate the city to suit their “we-are-here-to-bring-these-backward-people-into-modernity” policy.
And just as usual, Uyghur inhabitants are pushed the decision down their throats.
A breakthrough woudl be that Uyghurs have their say on their fate someday. Noone knows better what is good for them.
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EMA says: January 22nd, 2012 at 8:52 pm
Yes, exactly. I think we miss some very significant things if we continue to mourn for Kashgar as an ancient place for Western (and other) tourists to have an “authentic” experience. Let’s be honest: that’s really what it’s about for most people. The desire for an authentic tourist experience is the source of this false mourning.
The real tragedy in all of this is that Uyghurs were forcibly removed from their homes, ripped out of the daily rhythms of likely the only life they’d ever known, and made to move into supposedly “earthquake-proof” and “climate-controlled” high-rise apartments that come nowhere near to approximating the physical space of an old home. I doubt most people care about the “authenticity” of their image in living day-to-day life–instead, they’re just trying to get by. Now imagine doing that in a home space that is physically very different than the only one you’ve known.
I lived in Kashgar in 2007, an informal language student trying to put to practice the Uyghur I’d learned in the U.S. in the previous year. All I’d ever heard about Kashgar was its “ancient”ness. I remember vividly one day walking across a foot bridge over a street near Seman Yoli. I stopped in the middle to look out over the wide, newly-paved and -painted street below: bright green taxis and modern, tiled high-rises in every direction, as far as my eyes could see. This was the ancient city of Kashgar? No and yes. No, insofar as it obviously represented a tremendous amount of demolition followed by rebuilding in a radically new style–a project that has been happening for decades now. Yes, insofar as the city is still Kashgar and still marked by things, events, and people that even we cannot see. Kashgar will continue to be Kashgar, regardless of what it looks like. Uyghurs will adapt to life in their apartments (Urumchi is a great example of how this can happen). But we should never forget that real, living, breathing people make their lives in Kashgar. If anything, the radically changing façade of the city is more reason to visit, to inquire, to seek out the relationships and the disconnects between past, present, and future.
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@Michal: I think a lot of people blame the Spanish for what they did to indigenous people of Central and South America, just as we continue to blame the current regimes there for denying their right to cultural and political self-determination. The same goes for North America. And furthermore, there’s absolutely no basis for saying that the Uyghurs or Tibetans are any more “backwards” than any other people. What exactly is the yardstick for backwardness? Is there an objective historical trajectory for civilization? These are all Marxist historiographical conventions which stem from earlier Continental European ideas about racial superiority/inferiority; both these ideological trends have been largely abandoned by most people, not simply because they were found lacking in terms of a firm basis in reality, but because they tend to enforce societal structures of oppression and intolerance. If the immediate political predecessors of the Uyghurs and Tibetans had had the international economic and political capital that the People’s Republic inherited from their Republican and previously Qing dynastic predecessors, there’s nothing to say they wouldn’t have been able to develop their urban infrastructures in ways that most societies have begun to do over the past half a century.
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I liked the old Kashgar City as it is. It is part of its long history and should remains as it is. Renovation or modernization as we called it–it is still a way to erase a civilisation and a revisionist’s view of history and what Kashgar should be. Who are we to say that the Uyghurs are “backward”. It is the same said of the Chinese in the west!
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[...] Xinjiang : Far West China - Josh bemoans the destruction of Kashgar’s Old City. [...]
[...] from Xinjiang far west China blogs about the future transformation of Kashgar city in Xinjiang. The old city's traditional mud home would be turned into modern buildings [...]
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FarWestChina is a website dedicated to opening the door to Xinjiang, China's most mysterious province.
My name is Josh Summers and I have an unexplained passion for this region. Although I now reside in the US, I spent almost 4 years living and traveling in the region and I continue to research the history and stories Xinjiang has to tell. If you're interested there's plenty to read about Xinjiang on this website, or learn about me on my about page.
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