I received an email from a lady a while back whose kids were going to travel through Kashgar. She had been there as a student back in the late 1970′s and later worked there in the 1980′s. She shared with me these pictures she took in Kashgar that I thought were absolutely fascinating.

Urumqi train station has played a key role in Xinjiang’s development. It still does as a matter of fact…for every 100 people that enter Xinjiang through the airport, there are 400 more that enter through the train station.

It’s always amusing when city locations are named after landmarks that no longer exist.  For many years Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang, used to be a walled city, but this didn’t last too long after the regime change in 1949.
Like most cities in China now, the walls have been torn down and replaced with wide roads to facilitate the country’s growing urban population.  The only part of the wall to remain is the name of its gates, most notably the north and south gates (北门 bĕimén and 南门 nánmén).

In the middle of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, a hill sticks out of the ground that seems out of place. Legend says that both this hill and the nearby Yamalik Hill were two dragons that kept watch over the city. Even now it serves as a symbol of a city that doesn’t have much else to offer…

The Id Kah mosque is one of the oldest and largest in all of China, dating all the way back to 1442. It was severely damaged during China’s Cultural Revolution but purportedly restored multiple times by the local government and declared a protected monument. The pictures below were taken almost two decades before the CCP came to power and created the Xinjiang Autonomous Region.