A decade ago, much of the mud-brick old city was leveled and rebuilt. Authorities said it was to guard against earthquakes. Roads and alleyways were widened, making patrolling easier. The rebuilding continues today. At one of the only remaining original spurs of the old town, residents had been moved out and earthmovers chipped away at historic houses. This last island of old Kashgar will soon disappear.

On the neighborhood’s edge, I ran into a woman who appeared to be squatting in an abandoned structure. Her bereft expression said about everything there was to say about the tragedy of Xinjiang. Just after I took her picture, two Chinese tourists shouted at her in Mandarin, an attempt to get her to look at their cameras. When she turned her head away and hid it in her hands, they laughed.

Eventually, my colleague Chris Buckley joined me. We hired a car and tried to explore the surrounding area. By early morning, a trip to a nearby village was stalled by a staged car accident.

Three cars, all facing the same direction, their undamaged bumpers barely touching, blocked the road. The drivers stood around, mute — until we remarked that they didn’t seem to be upset. Suddenly tempers flared. They raised their arms, pointing at each other and shouting. We were advised that it would be a while and that we should turn around. In minutes, the road cleared.

Another time, a police officer stopped us close to our hotel. Inspecting Chris’s photos, he deleted a shot of a camel. When Chris asked why that photo was deleted, the man turned to Chris and said, “In China, there are no whys.”

It was good advice. As we pulled down another road in search of a re-education camp, a car sped in front of us, cut us off, and stopped. Men jumped out unfurling a spike strip directly in front of our car.

“Road’s closed,” we were told. We didn’t ask why.

Each evening as we returned to our hotel, we would pass a boarding school surrounded by tall fences topped with barbed wire. Socializing in clusters in the twilight, the adolescent students looked very much like prisoners.