Xinjiang

Goat’s Head Soup

/ Jim Sojourner / Leave a comment

August 12, 2015 — Kashgar, Xinjiang Province

As darkness fell, the night market ignited.

Backlit by the multicolored neon trim of nearby buildings, the square across from the mosque sparked into action. Grills were pulled from alleyways. Vats of entrails were put to a boil. Noodles were pulled long. Legs and livers were skewered. Potatoes were sauteed. Fruits were arranged. Breads were baked. People came.

Kashgar's Night Market

Kashgar’s night market.

We came for the goat’s head soup.

The smoke from multitude of grills choked the night as we walked out of the tunnel underneath the street separating the market from Id Kah, finally managing to dodge the Hungarian guy who’d wanted nothing more than to hang out with us and make sexist jokes.

Music bumped from the restaurants around the square as every cart vendor vied for attention and people crowded onto stools to eat. We stopped here and there for noodles, dumplings, or skewers.

Locals gather around a noodle stand.
A big pot of intestines.

Twice someone tried to pickpocket Dave. He spun on the second one, slapping his hand away. The middle aged man shouted at Dave in Uyghur, slapping the bottom of his shoe and acting offended as he blended back into the crowd. A woman grabbed Dave’s attention and made hand motions, trying to explain to him what had happened and suggest we be careful.

We all checked our pockets and shifted some stuff around. Then we found the goat heads.

Boiled goat heads. Stripped of their fur, left with just the meat clinging to the skull, the brain and eyeballs still encased. Matt had been drooling over the prospect since Beijing. He ordered one from the kid at the stall.

Goat Heads

The goat heads are ready to go into the soup.

The kid grabbed a head with a pair of tongs and dropped it into the boiling broth. After a few moments of waiting, he ladled it back out onto a plate and handed Matt at pair of chopsticks.

He dug in, yanking the sagging skin from the skull and stretching it toward his mouth. Next, he shoveled a lump of white, cottage cheese-like brain out of the anterior.

“It’s not bad, man,” he said and handed the chopsticks to me.

I dug out a pea-sized lump and placed it on my tongue.

The congealed blob split apart as I chewed. I can’t recall the taste, except that it tasted like nothing and also awful at all once. I forced myself to swallow the chewy, slimy bit, gagging all the way, and rushed for something to drink.

Matt laughed, then went for the eye. He wrenched it out of the socket, skin and nerves hanging on, and popped it into his mouth. The smirk faded with each chomp. He wretched and wretched again, forcing the whole twisted chunk down his throat.

“That was pretty bad.”

Matt digs into the goat head.
Matt thrusts the goat eyeball into his maw.

 

 

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The West

/ Jim Sojourner / Leave a comment

August 12, 2015 — Kashgar, Xinjiang Province

I kept myself from saying it: Toto, we’re not in China anymore.

Or were we?

Over some 5,000 kilometers we’d ridden the rails – and sometimes the broken roads – traversing the expanse of China, from the eastern capital to western edge.

Kashgar. The westernmost city in China.

In China? I wouldn’t have guessed.

The call to prayer drifted through the tree branches and over the minarets of the Id Kah Mosque and across the balcony of our hostel. No loudspeakers; only the voices of the faithful.

From the hostel balcony in Kashgar.
The Id Kah mosque.
It’s not uncommon to find camels and horses tied up on the sidewalks.

The warbles drifted over the mosque walls and wafted across the square, slipping past the camels, horses, and bread vendors. They danced amid the head scarfs and floral-patterned sleeves of  the Uyghur women and the black-and-green hats and drab sport coats of the Uyghur men and past their cropped and gently pointed beards.

And those eyes.

The cries slipped through the twisted desert-sand alleys where smithies and blanket makers and wood carvers and watermelon vendors scrape and grind and stuff and sort and shout. They wended around the shirtless boys who wrestled against the sandy reconstructed city walls scratched white with Uyghur script and blew through black hair of girls who threw dirt at each other and squealed underneath the painted murals and oxidizing crescent moons and the squalor of the ongoing tear-down of the old city.

Tucked in doorways, craftsmen work metal and wood outside their homes.
Blanket makers.
Xinjiang is renown for its watermelons.
Kashgar’s alleyways twist and duck through the old city.
Boys play amid Kashgar’s alleyways.
Kashgar’s old city is being torn down and being replaced with more “Tourist-friendly” construction.

On the outskirts, the notes bounced through the 2000-year-old Grand Bazaar from dog skin to wolfskin, from carpet to headscarf, from spice bin to tea bunch, from musical instrument to dope-smoking implement, off of roasting legs of lamb and then melted into the vats of iced and fermented milk at the intersections.

Kashgar’s Grand Bazaar.
Silks at the Kashgar bazaar.
That is definitely a dog pelt.
Traditional Uyghur hats

The west. We’d made it.

Under the Gun in Urumqi

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August 10, 2015 — Urumqi, Xinjiang Province

Urumqi is occupied territory.

That was clear the moment we stepped out of the train station in Xinjiang’s capital city.

Getting in or out required a turnstyle-style walk back and forth and back and forth through barricade-lined corridors. At increments, literal cages with up-swinging sides held glowering contingents of People’s Liberation Army soldiers, rifles at the ready, bayonets fixed — the only time I’ve seen it in all of China. At corners and intersections, machine gunners perched atop armored vehicles scanned the crowds shuffling along underneath their turrets.

The police were everywhere, yanking aside anyone with desert-darkened skin, black hair and especially the distinct green eyes or Muslim headscarves or four-cornered hats that really set the Uyghurs apart from Han Chinese. Which meant that what seemed like some 70 percent of everyone in the train station got pulled, bags to searched, ID to be scanned, and questions to be asked.

Ethnic relations are taut in Xinjiang.

Our train stopped in Turpan on the way to Urumqi. Xinjiang uses mostly Chinese and Uyghur script for its signs.

Our train stopped in Turpan on the way to Urumqi. Xinjiang uses mostly Chinese and Uyghur script for its signs.

At more than 1.6 million square kilometers and ringed by nigh-impassable deserts and mountains, the province is massive and isolated, which gave it the space to develop a unique culture, even though according to Wikipedia, only 4.3 percent of its land area is habitable.

Xinjiang, which means “new territory”, has a documented history that spans more than two and a half millennia, and although the Han Dynasty first pushed the Xiongnu empire out the region in 60 BC in order to secure the Silk Road, it wasn’t until the 18th century that Xinjiang was permanently — up to now, least — incorporated into China under the Qing after a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing.

In the interim, the region had traded hands between a succession of kingdoms, becoming Islamified beginning in the 9th century CE when Turkic Muslims invaded the Tarim Basin. It remains staunchly Muslim.

Today, about 45 percent of the population is Uyghur — a minority group Westerns scholars believe to be a mix of various other ethnic groups who either migrated to Xinjiang or were indigenous to it — 40 percent is Han, and the rest smaller is made up of ethnic groups. Northern Xinjiang is mostly Han, while southern Xinjiang is mostly Uyghur, and under the administration of the People’s Republic of China, development has mostly been uneven at the expense of the south. The discovery of massive oil and gas reserves has in recent years also flooded the province with Han workers, who are often better educated and better paid than their Uyghur counterparts. Economic hardships combined with fears of cultural dislocation and destruction have radicalized some Uyghur nationalists, who claim that Xinjiang is not part of China, and Xinjiang has become a frying pan of popping ethnic tensions which in recent years gone up in flames with increasing frequency.

Notably in 2008, men with purported ties to the Uyghur separatist movement attacked a group of jogging police officers in Kashgar, killing 16 of them just days before the Beijing Olympics. Then in 2009, Urumqi was the site of mass rioting by the Uyghur minority group that left some hundreds of people dead. Rumors of mass retaliation against Uyghurs followed, and the Chinese government shut off all telecommunications from the city for ten months afterward.

Ughyur separatists have also been blamed for a spate of terrorist attacks in China in the years following, including one in 2013 when members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement crashed a jeep into a crowd on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, killing five people (three of them in the car) and injuring 38 others when the vehicle burst into flames. Xinjiang militants also were blamed for a mass stabbing in Kunming in 2014 that left 29 civilians dead and 140 others injured.

Other attacks occur every few months within the province, and extremist groups have allied themselves with other terrorist organizations including al-Qaeda and ISIS.

The old adage long applied to Xinjiang that “the mountains are high and the emperor is far away” no longer seems to hold true.

That’s what we’d stepped into outside the Urumqi train station. We watched a heavyset officer, even thicker with his bulletproof vest (another novelty), scream at a crowd to move along as he jammed an old man from the sidewalk with a nearly-two-meter long heavy staff. Officers in helmets watched the crowd with stone faces behind riot shields.

The air stank of resentment, anger, and car emissions.

We got out of the station as quick as we could and went in search of something to eat. We learned quickly that even the malls of security checkpoints complete with bag scanners and metal detectors.

At last we found a mall that, empty and echoey atrium nonwithstanding, actually had some restaurants. After Matt’s recent noodle experience , we settled on pizza. The grease was so thick we could slurp it off. We barely finished a slice each.

Urumqi. It was time to get out of there.