Kashgar under Beijing: the camps, the cameras, the bulldozed Old City and the corridors China is building through it
About five kilometres north-east of central Kashgar, in the village of Haohan, stands the finest Islamic building in Xinjiang. A green-and-blue tiled tomb with a 17-metre dome and four corner minarets, built around 1640 for Muhammad Yusuf, a master of the Naqshbandi Sufi order…
Since 2016, more than a million Chinese officials have been assigned a Uyghur family each. They're called relatives. They arrive with gifts, stay for…
For almost thirty years a railway from Kashgar into the Fergana Valley was a drawing that never got built. Kyrgyzstan worried about debt. Russia…
When Xi Jinping went to Islamabad in April 2015, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor was sold as a road from Kashgar to the Arabian Sea. Chinese…
Kashgar wants visitors. Xinjiang counted 323 million tourist visits in 2025, a record, and Kashgar prefecture alone logged 50.1 million, up from a…
Id Kah is the mosque on every Kashgar postcard. Yellow brick, a tiled gateway, two slim minarets about 18 metres high, and a courtyard of poplars…
South-west of Kashgar, past Tashkurgan, China touches Afghanistan. The border is only about 76 km long, high in the Pamirs at the end of the Wakhan…
Beijing's word for them was "vocational skills education and training centres". The people inside were students, the official line went. They studied…
Kashgar's farmland is cotton country. Xinjiang grows more than a fifth of the world's cotton, and the southern oases around Kashgar, Aksu and Hotan…
In 2009 Kashgar's Old City was still a working town. Mud-brick houses stacked two and three storeys high over lanes too narrow for a car, with…