It is now nine years since I, together with my superb photographer colleague Richard Jones (since banned from China) , and by a brilliant translator and fixer whom I shall not name here, travelled to the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar, and the troubled metropolis of Urumchi in China's far west. But recent news from this area - of re-education camps, round-ups of dissenters, railway closures and the most elaborate surveillance state yet to operate anywhere in the world, have prompted me to republish what still seems to me to be a highly relevant article. It is, incidentally, one of the articles now incorporated in my e-book 'Short Breaks in Mordor' which has recently been thoroughly revised and expanded and will very soon be published as a proper three-dimensional printed book.

The streets of Old Kashgar were running with blood on the day I arrived, with slaughter on every street corner. I am relieved to say that on this occasion the blood was from the throats of hundreds of sheep being ritually slaughtered — the highlight of the Muslim festival of Eid-ul-Adha as celebrated in this lovely old oasis on the Silk Road, which was already ancient when Marco Polo passed this way in the 13th century.

But in this tense, racially divided and unhappy part of Peking’s hard-faced and increasingly muscular empire, human blood sometimes flows on these streets as well. And it may do so again, Heaven forbid. We do not really know how much killing there has been. Modern China has liberated money and trade, but not information. Locals talk in low voices about anything remotely political.

This, however, is certain: last year, just before the Olympics, two Kashgar Muslims drove a truck into a group of jogging Chinese paramilitary troops, then attacked them with knives and home-made grenades, killing 17. The two were caught and later executed — probably shot in the head, still a common method of capital punishment in the People’s Republic.

The anger follows aggressive colonisation. Ethnic Chinese people have come West in their millions in the past 30 years, encouraged by the state to settle and make the region their own. The locals fear their homeland is being snatched away from them before their eyes, by strangers who wish to change the place to suit them, rather than adapt to the customs of the country.

What seem to have been race riots broke out in Sinkiang’s provincial capital Urumchi last July, with an official death count of 156, plus 800 injured, many, it is said, in horrific slashing attacks by inflamed Muslim mobs. Women were not spared.

Ethnic Chinese retaliated soon afterwards, taking to the streets with iron bars and axes and looking for suitable candidates for gory vengeance. Rumours suggest that the real butcher’s bill was much higher than the published figure, around 2,000. Who can say?

A few weeks ago, the authorities announced the executions of 12 more men for their part in the carnage — ten Muslims and two ethnic Chinese, to prove they are not wholly one-sided. Actually, the proportions may be more or less just.

Any sane person must be appalled by such outbreaks of ancient bloodlust, and — as in Tibet last year — the cause of the local people is severely set back in the West by being linked to such cruel horrors. China’s response is understandable, if overdone.

It is physically impossible to telephone abroad, or use the internet, throughout Sinkiang, China’s vast, western-most province, thanks to the official and unlikely Chinese belief that the trouble was fanned by exiles in the United States.

In Kashgar and Urumchi, which are both in Sinkiang but 700 miles apart, squads of paramilitary riot police patrol or set up sudden road blocks — in many cases they are in full battle kit, and some wear uniforms of Cold War-era dark green.

They are supposed to reassure, but mainly they remind people of recent trouble. I watched one group file silently down Urumchi’s Happiness Street, passing a desolate, darkened Muslim restaurant put out of business by fear.

Even middle-class Muslims and ethnic Chinese are nowadays nervous of mixing with each other in public. One Muslim who tried to carry on seeing Chinese friends described to me how she was then shunned by her Muslim neighbours.

A sort of apartheid, voluntary but bitter, is springing up in the enormous city. “When people who have lived alongside you for years suddenly turn on you, you cannot feel safe near them ever again,” said one Chinese resident.

Both Urumchi and Kashgar are full of banners urging ethnic unity for the sake of the motherland. Military trucks are adorned with banners pledging troops will treat the people as if they were their parents, rather unconvincingly, given that they are armed with pump-action shotguns and long rubber clubs.

In Kashgar’s main square, across the road from a colossal statue of Mao Tse-Tung, the riot squad exercise their tactics and manoeuvres, a sort of ballet of brutality, as people of both ethnic groups hurry by trying not to catch the eye of authority.

Did I say main square? Not exactly. Kashgar is, in fact, two cities, the ethnic Chinese one, with its mobile phone stores, beer shops and Cantonese restaurants, and the Muslim one, inhabited by the Turkic Uighur people (pronounced ‘Wee-gur’), where men in fierce moustaches and fur hats consume quantities of mutton and tea, and you can buy your own sacrificial sheep for perhaps £50 (though a top-grade ram in good condition costs four times as much).

It has two main squares. While the huge stone Mao waves jauntily on one, the other is dominated by the ancient Id Kah Mosque, done out in garish yellow but profoundly serious and sombre in the freezing early dawn of this most holy day.

The riot squad are there too, tactfully to one side but bitterly out-of-place as the all-male worshippers, dark-clad and quiet, stream into the square, filling it and the neighbouring streets until the mosque and all the surrounding space are covered with men and boys kneeling on their individual prayer rugs. It is impossible to be unmoved as they make the solemn gestures of devotion that have been repeated here for more than 1,000 years. It is also hard not to wonder if this is not also a demonstration.

The same feeling — will this explode? — springs urgently to mind later when, with the sun up and the air warming, a band climbs to the roof of the mosque and — matched by another perched above a nearby porch — begins to play the ancient dance music of the Uighurs. On the mosque steps are groups of beggars, dirty and squalid, displaying stumps. They are waiting for their grisly share — mandated under Islamic law — of the slaughtered sheep that are being butchered all around.

Some are women, grotesquely veiled in the local style, even more restrictive than the Afghan burka. Their entire heads and faces are covered by a sort of brown wool shroud, through which they can presumably see where they are going, though they look horribly like walking corpses as they go about the streets.

Some are old, some are young. But it is not universal. Modern China has had an impact. Many of the Uighur women wear headscarves in the carefree Iranian style, and strut about in high heels. It is startling enough to see a band on the roof of a mosque, as incongruous as a clown at a funeral. The music they make is even more strange and oddly disturbing. It is relentless, insistent and unsettling.

One man blows a sort of trumpet, a mixture of tooting and buzzing that sounds a little like the old comb-and-lavatory-paper combination familiar to generations of British schoolboys before the days of Andrex. He is accompanied by two others wielding long, curved sticks to pound a relentless beat on two drums, one fast and one slow.

Suddenly one of the fur-hatted men shouts something up to the band. The rhythm changes to a more urgent, yet more haunting tune and within 30 seconds half the men on the square are dancing. It is an old and seemingly simple dance, plainly learned in early childhood, and it feels both sad and angry.

One group abruptly begins circling behind me and one of the dancers, in a kind of trance and indifferent to who or what is in his way, barges into me quite hard. It is nothing personal (I think) but this sight is definitely not intended to be picturesque or twee. I consider joining in for all of five seconds, and then decide that it would probably get me beaten up for disrespect.

The dancers are mostly pretty unlovely, scruffily dressed and unsentimental. They do not smile. One has a mobile phone clamped to his ear as he moves. It is an affirmation of an ancient and warlike tradition.

Later I learn that, 20 years ago or earlier, the whole square would have been dancing, that this culture is dying, or rather that it is being killed.

For we are at the scene of a tragedy nearly as wretched as the similar destruction of Tibet’s even more ancient culture. In a few years, if the authorities 2,000 miles away in Peking have their way, Old Kashgar will have ceased to exist.

I got there just in time. Great tracts of the city have already vanished under the bulldozer and the wrecking ball. Broken houses stand open to the sky, and there are large melancholy stretches of bulldozed mud, the size of football pitches.

The loss is unbearable. This is a place so old that it has been invaded by both Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, where many of the tiny houses, built of mud bricks, have secret tunnels beneath them, designed for the inhabitants to hide from murder, rape and plunder as various invaders passed through.

It has in its time been Buddhist, Christian and is now Muslim. It stands in the midst of a great desert, ringed with vineyards and orchards planted before the birth of Christ. Yet it is about to vanish for ever.

Guided by a helpful inhabitant, I penetrated into the heart of the maze of streets, whose claustrophobic chaos probably annoys the Chinese authorities as much as anything else. You could never get a tank down these narrow ways, nor even an armoured car, and a foot patrol would need to be very careful if it came this way in troubled times.

After rounding five corners, I found myself in a narrow alley, partly roofed over. Three men have hold of a quivering black sheep. Another similar beast stands tethered close by, watching and smelling the fate it too will undergo in a few minutes.

They turn its head towards Mecca and hold it down, its throat over a metal pan, as one produces a newly sharpened knife and hacks its throat open. Its head is almost completely off before it finally stops kicking and convulsing. A young boy watching the butchery ends up with streaks of gore on his cheeks.

The sheep, steaming in the freezing air, is then expertly and neatly butchered, a process I will not describe in detail (especially the removal of the skin) but which ends with some rather skilful, intricate business with the entrails.

“Every Uighur man knows how to do this,” a neighbour assures me. Several contradictory thoughts crowd into my mind. The first is a sort of envy at the honesty of all this. These are real men, who are prepared to kill the flesh they eat and to be splattered and smeared with blood as they do it. Whereas we prefer our meat neatly packaged in the supermarket chiller, barely recognisable as the animal it has come from, and think sentimentally about little lambs.

The second is a Christian unease at what is obviously a sort of sacrifice, something which is supposed to have ended at the Crucifixion. The local name of the festival is ‘Corban’, from the Arabic word for sacrifice.

It commemorates the Muslim belief that Ibrahim — the biblical Abraham — was preparing to sacrifice his son (they say it was Ishmael, the Bible says it was Isaac) when he found a ram trapped in a thicket and sacrificed that instead. Christians and Jews see the story as an instruction to end human sacrifice. Muslims seem to view it as permission to continue animal sacrifices.

I must admit I have certainly been desensitised to brutality by what I have seen. Would it be easier, if I had slain a sheep in this way, for me to do the same to a human being? I am sure it would be.

How many sheep had the fanatical killers of Ken Bigley or Daniel Pearl slaughtered and beheaded before they turned their knives on their fellow creatures?

This thought seems most unfair to the smiling, proud, friendly Uighurs who have shown me such hospitality, invited me into their tiny one-room homes and spoken with sad regret of the imminent destruction of a way of life that has lasted for 2,000 years. “We don't want to go and live in blocks of flats,” one explained to me in poignant terms that many British city-dwellers would completely understand.

“Here we are all together, we see and talk to our neighbours all the time in courtyards and lanes. We do not close our front doors, nor do we need to. But once we are in flats we will cease to be proper people. Once you live behind a locked door, much of your life has gone.” It is they who are being sacrificed to China’s unrelenting drive for modernity, and to the fervent, rather arrogant Chinese nationalism that has taken over from Maoist communism as the binding dogma of the state.

Every city in the country seems destined to turn into a sort of Oriental Las Vegas, with monster six-lane streets lined with showy pillared hotels and fake marble shopping malls devoted to the worship of global brands, all surrounded by mile on mile of grubby, stained concrete blocks of flats. Much of Kashgar already looks like this. Despite loud protests from Chinese scholars and outsiders, the plan seems to be to destroy almost all of the ancient city, and to rebuild the houses with modern methods, a sort of Disney version of the real thing.

Big signs everywhere in the old city refer to ‘dangerous’ buildings. This is because the pretext for this official vandalism is ‘protection against earthquakes’, though up-to-date Chinese buildings (especially schools) failed badly to stand up to earthquakes in Sichuan and Yunnan provinces in 2008 and 2009.

In one outlying portion of the city, you can see the sanitised, tourist version of it that Peking is planning — a ridiculous mini-Kashgar that you must pay to enter, its lanes neatly tiled, its houses labelled in English, its streets tidily signposted to avoid the enjoyable confusion of an unplanned town. No pools of sheep’s blood are to be found on its street corners.

How sad it will be when this is all that is left. For this small ancient place is an extraordinarily valuable part of our planet, and of some importance even to us in Britain. Right up until 1949, we and the Soviet Union both maintained busy consulates here as we continued the Great Game, the old struggle by which Britain sought to keep Moscow’s prying hands away from our Indian Empire.

Thanks to the completely artificial frontier between ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’ we often forget that one unbroken landmass stretches from Calais to Shanghai — a landmass we are much closer to than we used to be, whether we like it or not. If there is a border between Europe and Asia it is really here, not on the Urals. The word ‘Sinkiang’ means ‘New Frontier’, and China only recently established absolute power in this territory of desert, mountain and oil. That power is pretty much colonial.

In Kashgar, the local language is closer by far to Turkish than to Chinese. The Afghan border is a day’s drive away, as are Pakistan and both halves of Kashmir. Iran is surprisingly close, along with the great bubble of oil and gas around the Caspian Basin. Not much more distant is the back door to Tibet, and a mysterious chunk of territory still angrily disputed between India and China. In Urumchi, you see Russian, Arabic and Chinese script jostling for supremacy on the shop signs.

And here the astonishing jigsaw of ‘stans’ — Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tadzhikistan — fits untidily together at the landlocked heart of the Eurasian landmass, each of them wooed for its oil or strategic position by both Moscow and Washington.

China is keenly aware that until 1991, these were all subject provinces of an apparently mighty Kremlin in Moscow. Now they are all independent states, until Moscow regains its strength — or Peking gobbles them up. Peking cannot, will not contemplate such independence for Sinkiang, its Western outpost and also full of oil and gas.

The mightiest symbol of this newly vigorous empire is the almost unbelievable 700-mile railway between Urumchi and Kashgar, completed ten years ago, most of it driven through desert as barren as the surface of Mars, or climbing laboriously through mountains, fenced against the camels that can be seen roaming untethered by the tracks. Even here, way beyond the back of beyond, the remotest place on Earth is bound tightly to the motherland with links of concrete and steel.

The railway’s centralising, imperial purpose is clear above all from its suspicious attitude to the natives. Travellers from Kashgar are searched for knives and subjected to identity checks before they can board the train, a reflection of the Chinese prejudice against supposedly knife-wielding Uighur Muslims.

Nobody but China builds railways like this anymore. As the world’s other empires evaporated, collapsed, died or weakened, China slowly woke to the realisation of its giant, almost limitless potential.

So far we have tended to view this rebirth with wonder and a certain amount of admiration. As we learn more of its ruthlessness, its touchy sensitivity to criticism, its unashamed imperial purpose and its newly passionate national fervour, we might also begin to feel a little apprehension as well.

China once bestrode Asia but turned its face away from the rest of the world. Soon it hopes to land its first man on the Moon and to sit as of right at every top table of power and diplomacy. It is immensely rich, in fact its growth outstrips anything we can imagine, yet it is not free, nor is it likely to be. The world has not seen such a power before.

The Mail on Sunday, 6th December 2009



