Oh, Xinjiang
Cultural Impressions from the Heart of Eurasia
But China is not monolithic. For sure, Xinjiang is in China, but it is a different region to the one you’ll experience in Beijing, or in Hong Kong. The Han-dominated homogeneity of the country’s eastern regions is fused away here. The result is China’s Central Asia: a heady concoction of color, religion and language.
Ethnic diversity is actually a hallmark of many regions in China. Officially, 56 ethnic groups call the country home. The 55 minority groups constitute almost 10 percent of China’s 1.3 billion people. The remaining 90-odd percent are Han, and when citizens of other countries imagine a “typical” Chinese, it’s inevitably a set of Han facial features that springs to mind.
China officially recognizes 13 peoples indigenous to Xinjiang: Uygur, Han, Kazakh, Hui, Kyrgyz, Mongolian, Tajik, Xibo, Manchu, Uzbek, Russian, Daur and Tatar. Han make up 40 percent of the population. “Minorities,” as their colloquially known, are in the majority here.
Xinjiang’s ethnic heterogeneity is a product of thousands of years of intermingling Persian, Turkic, Mongol and Han peoples. Migrating populations originally came for the grasslands, and then for the trade. All branches of the ancient “Silk Road,” the interconnecting network of trade routes that connected East China to far-flung Africa and Europe, passed through modern-day Xinjiang, earning it the timeworn epithet, “the Heart of Eurasia.”
The Uygur are by far the largest “minority” in Xinjiang. Region-wide, they number slightly more than Han, and this breakdown is represented in microcosm at Urumqi’s grand bazaar, where I met Abdulrahman.
“I mainly sell nuts. To my right is a Han seller who specializes in fruit, and to my left is a Uygur friend who makes trinkets,” he says. “We’re all here together, chatting and joking, all day every day.”
Abdulrahman knows a few English phrases, which he’s picked up from the odd foreign tourist who finds his or her way to the bazaar. Where do the foreign tourists come from? “A few from Japan, the occasional American; quite a few Germans,” he estimates.
Looking in
Cognizance of Xinjiang as an “exotic” tourist destination has been on the rise in recent years. In the West, this is in large part due to a string of novels and travel narratives that explore the glory of the Silk Road of yore.
A slapdash survey of a dozen Western acquaintances who have traveled in Xinjiang reveals that all but one had read Foreign Devils on the Silk Road: The Search for the Lost Cities and Treasures of Chinese Central Asia. Published in 1980 by journalist Peter Hopkirk, the book is one in a series of six in which the author recounts the (mis)adventures of European explorers in the Central Asian region in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Nowadays, those in the West who strive for a deeper understanding of Xinjiang can study the region as part of Chinese or Central Asian studies degree programs in many countries around the world. In the U.S., four universities – The University of Kansas, Washington University, the University of Indiana at Bloomington and Harvard University – even offer instruction in the Uygur language, a Turkic tongue closely related to Uzbek, Kazakh and Turkish.
Understandably, Chinese attraction to the “exotic appeal” of this part of their country stretches back further than recent Western interest. One of the most widely quoted historical references to Xinjiang in China today is the 16th century novel Journey to the West. Written by Wu Cheng’en, the story is loosely based on the 6th century adventures of monk Xuanzang as he traveled through Xinjiang on his way to India to seek out sacred Buddhist texts.
Scenes from Journey to the West, recounted ad nauseum in countless Chinese melodramas based on the book, remain vividly alive in popular Chinese imagination.
