Kashgar Old City, How Beijing Bulldozed a Living Uyghur Town and Sold Tickets to the Copy

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 families who had lived in the same courtyard for generations. Architectural historian George Michell called it the best-preserved traditional Islamic city anywhere in Central Asia.

That year the government started knocking it down.

Kashgar's Old City in August 2017, original houses being cleared. Photo: Radosław Botev, CC BY 3.0 pl, via Wikimedia Commons

The official reason was earthquakes, and it wasn't made up. Kashgar sits in a seismic zone. A 1902 quake killed hundreds in the city, and the 2003 Bachu quake flattened thousands of buildings in the region. Officials pointed to earth-and-timber houses with extra floors added over the decades, lanes under a metre and a half wide where no fire engine could pass, and tunnels dug beneath homes. The plan was finalised at the end of 2008. The money, by the government's own figures, came to 7.049 billion yuan, two billion of it from the central budget. It covered 49,083 households and about 220,000 people.

Safety was the pitch, demolition was the plan

Follow the numbers the city gave out at the time. In 2009 officials told the New York Times they would demolish at least 85 per cent of the Old City. Kashgar's vice mayor said the work would preserve Uyghur culture. By late 2011 one researcher counted about two thirds of it gone. Global Heritage Network estimated 90 per cent.

The official account says more than 7,000 traditional houses were repaired and reinforced. That's the figure Beijing quotes. It's a fraction of a district that held tens of thousands of homes, and it leaves out what went with the buildings: the lanes, the neighbours, the guilds and the mosques. The Old City had about 112 of them.

Thousands of families were moved out to apartment blocks on the edge of town. Official reports list relocation estates by name, with 2,868 households sent to one and 2,132 to another. Those who wanted to return to a rebuilt house in the core were expected to pay for it.

If earthquake safety was the goal, there were other ways to get it. Engineers who work with earthen architecture have shown for decades that mud-brick houses can be braced and kept. The International Scientific Committee on Earthen Architectural Heritage said Kashgar's Old City had unquestionable universal value. The European Parliament asked China in 2011 to use culture-sensitive methods. Beijing chose the bulldozer.

What stands there now is a theme park

The rebuilt Old City opened as a scenic area. It passed its 5A review, China's highest tourism grade, in late 2014 and was formally rated in July 2015. It was Xinjiang's first 5A historic-cultural site. A Beijing company, Zhongkun Investment Group, took a lease to market it as a living Uyghur folk museum.

Every morning there's an opening ceremony at the gate, a staged show of narration, dance and acrobatics. The façades are new, the patterns are Islamic in a general way, and the shops sell the same souvenirs. Former mosques have become bars and tea rooms for tourists. A rule passed in 2024 sets visitor caps, and a government management committee runs the site.

It works as a business. State media reported 16.7 million visits and 7.47 billion yuan in revenue for the Old City in the first seven months of 2025 alone. Spring Festival visits that year more than doubled.

About 40,000 people still live in the core zone. They live inside a set. Their streets are policed by the "convenience police stations" that cover the city in a grid, each responsible for a few hundred residents, and they're part of the exhibit.

The test is simple

Ask who the Old City was rebuilt for. The families moved to the outskirts were told to pay if they wanted to come back. The worshippers lost their mosques to tea rooms. The people the new town serves are visitors, overwhelmingly domestic tourists, who want to see Uyghur culture on a short trip and then go home.

That's what Beijing means by preservation in Kashgar.

A culture kept behind a ticket booth.