About

Kashgar is two thousand years old. For most of that time it was a crossroads, a market town where caravans from China, Persia and India met and traded. Today it's something else. It's the place where the Chinese state tried out its most complete system of control over a people, and where it is now building the roads and railways it wants to run through Central Asia.

This site covers both. The detention camps and the prisons that replaced them. The checkpoints, the cameras and the apps on every phone. The Old City that was bulldozed and rebuilt as a ticketed theme park. The mosques that were closed or knocked down. The cotton and the factories. And the corridors: the highway to Pakistan, the new railway to Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, the border with Afghanistan.

We take a side. We think what Beijing has done to the Uyghurs and the other peoples of Kashgar is a crime, and we say so. We also think a side is only worth taking on the evidence, so we work from documents: the Chinese government's own statistics, notices and tenders, leaked police files, satellite imagery, court records and the reporting of journalists who got in. Where Beijing has an answer, we give it and test it.

Kashgar.org is independent. It has no connection to any government, party or exile organisation.