Uyghur Muqam and Meshrep in Kashgar, UNESCO Heritage on Stage While the Musicians Go to Prison

Twice a day at the East Gate of Kashgar's Old City, actors in costume stage an opening ceremony. There's narration about the Silk Road, a Han envoy and a jolly Uyghur uncle. Then the performers pull tourists into the circle to dance. The dance is the meshrep, and for the visitor it costs nothing.

For some Uyghurs in Kashgar, holding a meshrep of their own cost years of their lives.

That contrast is the whole story of Uyghur culture under Beijing. The state keeps the costumes, the steps and the songs, and puts them on a stage. It takes away the people who made them mean something.

Heritage China put on UNESCO's list

The Uyghur muqam is the great classical music of Central Asia, suites of songs and instrumental pieces. The Twelve Muqam alone has more than 300 pieces and runs to over 20 hours. China put it forward to UNESCO, which proclaimed it in 2005 and inscribed it on its heritage list in 2008. In 2010 China nominated the meshrep too, the Uyghur gathering where music, dance, food, poetry and moral instruction come together, and UNESCO put it on its list of heritage in urgent need of safeguarding.

UNESCO's own notes named the dangers: young people losing interest, pieces no longer played, gatherings held less often, and what it called "theatrification". In 2021 its committee asked China for a new plan to deal with the continuing risks, with real participation from the community and its free, prior and informed consent. China's previous report had been three years late.

A gathering on the list, a gathering in court

The state has always split the meshrep in two. There's the healthy, traditional kind it can show off, and the illicit kind where Uyghurs organise themselves. It banned meshreps across Xinjiang in 1995, after young men in Ghulja used them to campaign against drinking and drugs. The arrests of meshrep leaders there helped spark the Ghulja protests of 1997.

Kashgar has a recent case. Abliz Tohtaji had been head of the Kashgar Prefecture Transport Department, a senior official by any measure. He was detained in May 2017 for "illegal gathering and organizing" over meshreps his circle held in 2014 and earlier, apparently because members chipped in money. He got seven years and was held in a prison in Yarkand. A source said up to 14 of the group's 16 members were jailed.

The same government that asked UNESCO to save the meshrep put a group of middle-aged men in prison for holding one.

The musician from Kashgar and the 25-second video

Abdurehim Heyit was born in Kashgar in 1962, studied at the city's art school and became the best-known player of the dutar, the long-necked Uyghur lute. He was detained in 2017, reportedly over a song called "Fathers". In February 2019 Turkey's foreign ministry said he had died in custody and condemned China's camps.

The next day Chinese state radio released a 25-second clip. In it Heyit says he is being investigated for allegedly breaking national laws and that he is in good health and hasn't been abused. Beijing said he was held for harming national security. The video set off a campaign by Uyghurs abroad posting pictures of their own missing relatives and asking China to show those alive too. Later reports said Heyit was under house arrest, the last of them in 2021. There's been no public word since.

He isn't alone. Rahile Dawut, the folklorist who spent her career documenting Uyghur shrines and songs, was sentenced in secret to life in prison for "splittism". The sentence was confirmed in 2023. The pop singer Ablajan Ayup was reported in 2022 to have been given 11 years. A 2021 count by a rights group put the number of Uyghur cultural and intellectual figures detained, jailed or missing at more than 300.

Dance on demand

In February 2024 the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, the most watched TV show in China, broadcast a segment live from Kashgar for the first time: six minutes of Xinjiang dance with Mandarin lyrics and a famous Uyghur actress in the lead. The previous year a "Xinjiang dance" craze had taken off on Chinese social media. The musicologist Rachel Harris has tied it to the state's tourism and heritage drive, a way to answer reports of camps and erasure with smiling faces, and called the endless smiling a form of forced labour.

Beijing says it protects Uyghur music better than anyone, with training centres, state ensembles and UNESCO certificates to prove it. The certificates are real. So are the prison sentences.

The music plays on at the East Gate, twice a day.