KASHGAR, China - The first thing you see upon arriving on the edge of the old city in this Silk Road oasis town are clouds of white smoke from wood-burning fires and steam from soup pans, the smoke rising like a curtain over one of Asia's last great open-air markets.

As you approach the entrance, a man approaches in a charcoal-gray cap, pushing a wooden cart piled high with ripe apricots.

"Get out of the way!" he says in Uigher, the Turkic-Altaic language that dominates Kashgar, a desert outpost at China's far Western frontier. "Hello," the fruit vendor adds with a grin after recognizing your foreign face. Had you been Chinese, he would not have been so friendly, but more on that later.

Inside the market, a landscape of fur and fleece unfolds over several acres ringed by brick walls and poplars. A farmyard babble of bleating sheep, braying donkeys, whinnying horses and mooing cows fills the air. Contributing to the cacophony are jangling bells from creaking carts, fires hissing inside concrete ovens, the chugga-chugga of diesel tractors and the snip-snip of shears as farmers groom their goats for sale.

Manure, tufts of white and black wool, and bits of hay carpet the ground. A woman in a raspberry-colored vest and flowered scarf scours the dirt for stray clippings, which she drops into a woven plastic sack by the handful.

Kashgar's market attracts more than 50,000 people each Sunday. Some travel as much as five hours by horse cart to stand in the hot summer sun, checking each animal's coat and teeth while bickering over prices.

A small but growing number of tourists snap pictures or record video, trying to capture this vibrant hub of Central Asian commerce before it is drowned in a sea of white bathroom tile, the ubiquitous covering for modern Chinese buildings.

In a nation fast losing its mystique, the name Kashgar still conjures up images of caravans laden with silk, incense, gems and spices journeying along the Silk Road, the ancient trade route between East and West. The Silk Road opened in the second century B.C. and stretched from China's former capital of Chang 'An (now Xian) to the shores of the Mediterranean.

From the West, traders arrived in Kashgar by yak and pack horse, descending from the icy Pamir and Karakoram Mountains along the borders of what are now Tajikistan and Pakistan.

From the east, they came by camel after braving sandstorms and blistering heat along the edges of one of the world's deadliest deserts, the Taklamakan, which in Turki means "go in and you will not come out."

In the 13th century, Marco Polo described Kashgar, then a kingdom, as the "starting point from which many merchants set out to market their wares all over the world."

You can buy practically anything in Kashgar's market: hand-stitched skullcaps covered with green, purple and gold sequins, crystallized pillars of rock candy, mirrored vests and jeweled daggers. The most interesting transactions, though, involve animals.

Near the gate, three men argue over the price of rams, which can go for as much as $7,200 each, a fortune in a part of China where the average per capita income is less than $650 a year.

Farmers pool money to buy a ram so they can enter him in butting contests in which people bet on the outcome. The first ram to fall loses.

At the other end of the market, Mijit, a 65-year-old farmer, sits on a red rug in his wooden cart watching young boys ride horses bareback in the equine equivalent of a beauty pageant. Dressed in caps with their shirttails hanging out, the boys guide stallions across the dusty earth, lightly kicking their gaunt ribs.

Mijit's father, Muhammad, a 90-year-old with a flowing white beard, tests a cart and horse draped in bells. He approves, and Mijit buys the rig and horse for $320.

Mijit, a stocky man with 22 grandchildren, wears a gray suit coat, a white skullcap, navy blue slacks, black dress shoes, powder-blue socks and a couple of days' growth of beard. When a foreign woman sits next to him, he immediately begins chatting in his native tongue, Uigher (pronounced wee-gur).

Without warning, he squeezes her left thigh and then her biceps. When the woman explains that she is eight months' pregnant, he grabs her belly with both hands, not an uncommon reaction in crowded China, where the concept of personal space seems nonexistent at times.

Afterward, the woman says Mijit's touch did not seem sexual. Instead, it was as if he had been sizing her up as he might a horse.

"When he found out I was pregnant, I felt like a much more valuable mare," she said.

Like most people in Kashgar, Mijit is a member of the Uighers, descendants of nomadic Turkic tribes and the largest minority in Xinjiang, China's far Western province. Situated at the crossroads between Central and East Asia, Xinjiang comprises one-sixth of China's land mass and is a potential fault line in the continent's geopolitical struggles.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, British and Russian spies maneuvered about the region to gain control of Central Asia in what was known as "The Great Game." The British established a critical listening post at their consulate in Kashgar while the Russians ran spies from theirs.

Visiting in 1936, English journalist Peter Fleming captured Kashgar's air of intrigue in his best-selling travelogue News from Tartary.

"The city is, not without reason, very prone to spy-fever, and the night we arrived the bazaar rumor ran that a British agent had ridden in from Khotan(another oasis town), accompanied by a White Russian disguised as a woman," wrote Fleming, the brother of novelist and James Bond creator Ian Fleming. "The whole city was in effect run by the secret police, the Russian advisers, and the Soviet Consulate, and most of the high officials were only figureheads."

Three years before Fleming's arrival, Uigher rebels declared an Independent Muslim Republic of East Turkestan in Kashgar before Chinese and Soviet troops crushed the rebellion.

The struggle to overthrow Chinese rule in the province continues. In the past decade, Muslim separatists have bombed buses in Beijing and Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital. Police arrested 25 alleged separatists in Kashgar in April on charges of buying nine pistols and a hunting rifle, according to Xinjiang Daily.

Most Westerners have never heard of the Uighers. They have neither a charismatic leader such as the Dalai Lama nor the mystical allure and colorful culture of the Tibetans, the nation's other restive minority.

In many respects, Kashgar, a city of more than 200,000, does not feel like the rest of China. The country is officially atheistic; Kashgar has about 300 mosques.