Tashkurgan and the Karakoram Highway, China's Tajik Frontier Under Watch

Drive south from Kashgar on the Karakoram Highway and the oasis gives way to the Ghez canyon, then the high Pamir. Karakul Lake sits at about 3,600 metres under Muztagh Ata, a 7,500-metre dome of ice. Another few hours on, at 3,090 metres, comes Tashkurgan, the last town before Pakistan.

Tashkurgan is the seat of a county the size of a small European country, about 25,000 square km, that borders Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan all at once. About 40,000 people live in it. In 2018 around 82 per cent were Tajik. That word misleads. China's Tajiks aren't the Persian-speaking Tajiks of Tajikistan. Most are Pamiris who speak Sarikoli, with a Wakhi minority, and they're Ismaili Shia Muslims.

Photo: Drgkl, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Stone City and a borrowed past

The postcard sight is Stone City, a ruined fortress on a hill above the Golden Grass wetlands. The site goes back to the kingdoms that guarded this stretch of the Silk Road, and the monk Xuanzang passed through in the 7th century on his way home from India. The walls you see today are much later. Together with the wetland and a Tajik "folk village", it makes up the Pamir Tourism Area, rated 5A.

In 2025 the regional government named that tourism area a model site for ethnic "exchanges, interactions and integration". That's party language for absorbing minorities into a single Chinese nation. The fortress, the grassland and the Tajik village are props in that project now.

A frontier people turned into border guards

Tashkurgan's Tajiks didn't escape the crackdown that swept Xinjiang from 2017. The state appoints their Ismaili clerics, foreign Ismaili preachers are kept out, and under Xinjiang-wide rules nobody under 18 may take part in religious activity. Reports say only one mosque is allowed to operate in the whole county. That claim is hard to check from outside, which says something on its own.

Herders have been moved down from the high valleys into new housing near the county seat, under poverty-relief and post-earthquake programmes. State media show the before and after photos. Nobody independent has been allowed to count how many families went, or ask them whether they wanted to.

Those who stay on the pastures get a different job. Beijing has turned Tajik herders into a frontier militia of "border-protection" volunteers, celebrated on state TV as three generations of one family guarding the line. On a border with Afghanistan, that's the point.

The highway and the pass

The Karakoram Highway was finished in 1979 and opened to outsiders in 1986. It runs about 1,300 km, some 413 of them in China, where it's the G314. Pakistan counts about 810 of its own workers killed building it, and about 200 Chinese died too.

At the top, the Khunjerab Pass sits at 4,693 metres, the highest paved border crossing in the world. The passenger crossing runs from April to the end of November, on weekdays, and there's no visa on arrival. You can't drive yourself on the Chinese side. Customs and immigration are down in Tashkurgan, where officers search bags, laptops and phones. Islamabad and Beijing keep promising a crossing that stays open all year.

Since December 2022 Tashkurgan has had its own airport, at 3,200 metres, with flights to Kashgar and Urumqi. You'll still need the border permit, issued free at Kashgar airport, and you'll still be stopped at checkpoints on the way up.

Who the mountains are for

Tashkurgan gets sold as the most beautiful corner of Xinjiang, and it is. It's also a militarised border zone where a small Ismaili minority is watched, resettled and enlisted, and where the scenery is packaged as proof of ethnic unity.

The lake is real. The harmony is staged.