Travel Journal: Hotan (和田)
Hotan, given its location, looked surprisingly Han Chinese upon arrival. The large town was dominated by two-floor white-tile buildings and adorned with ugly billboards advertising such exotic wares as China Telecom. Noodle shops and Sichuan eateries lined the streets, and there was even one or two of the famed “wood panel tropical motif” bars spotted. It was uninspired, dusty and overwhelmingly ugly; it could have been any poor city in China (except for the huge number of Uygur residents).
Our hotel was in the western part of town, just down the street from a statue commemorating Chairman Mao shaking a Uygur elder’s hand (or something like that). This monument was at the southern end of a big public square imported directly from Eastern China, complete with gaudy lighting and an obsession with concrete. It was, however, a great place to people watch; hundreds of families were out for a walk and some ice cream, and there were even some small carnival rides for the kids. We sat around here for a few hours on two different evenings watching all the fun, including a musical performance taking place right under the watchful eye of the Great Helmsman.
Mao and friends
The most unforgettable experience from Hotan (and the whole trip, perhaps) was our visit to the Sunday Bazaar. I find it hard, now, to describe what it felt like to wander into that sea of bargaining humanity. It was like no crowd I had ever experienced in China.
With only some loose directions from a book to guide us, we set off in search of this weekly event. Finding it was much easier than anticipated; we only had to follow what seemed like half of Xinjiang’s population as it made its way, by foot and donkey cart, east towards the bazaar area. Along the sidewalks were rows of little shops, stalls and restaurants, hawking everything from delicious bread to butcher knifes.
I don’t think we ever figured out where the bazaar began or ended; every intersection was a traffic jam of bodies and commerce, continuing down every avenue in every direction. Whole blocks were devoted solely to the buying and selling of sheep, while others were the domain of donkeys, bikes and any and every trinket you could possibly desire.
What became immediately noticeable was the lack of any tourists besides Justin and I. The vendors never even looked our way; they were too engaged in heated bargaining over the price of wool.
Not one “hallo!” was heard the whole time. It was like we weren’t even there. This was pretty representative of my experiences in Xinjiang as a whole: foreigners just aren’t an oddity there, given the area’s role as a cultural crossroads of sorts. In Urumqi, one women even asked us if we were foreigners (imagine our shock!). Several people just assumed Justin was from Pakistan.
Although I felt completely out of place, I got none of the staring and mock hellos that are pretty standard back East, even in cosmopolitan cities like Hangzhou. Uygurs in general seemed much more relaxed and matter-of-fact in dealing with us, and didn’t treat us like we had arrived from outer space. Heck, I even looked like some of them.
Anyways, back to the bazaar…This place borderlined on sensory overload, pure and simple. The crowds, the wares, the hawking, the colours, the sheer life; it was almost too much to handle. Every face, every stall, every strolling family was worth a picture. With nary a Han Chinese person in sight, I felt culture shock sneaking up on me again: how had I ended up in Afghanistan? Thankfully, I got a mental grip on myself and managed to snap some pictures, knowing full well that, without them, it would be almost impossible for others to visualize what we were experiencing.
The outskirts of the bazaar
One of the few quiet streets
One of the many not-so-quiet streets
A pedestrian-only section leading into the Uygur city
The neighbourhood barbers
It was on the trip to this bazaar that I realized Hotan was, in effect, split into two different cities. We were staying in the Han part of town, with its cookie-cutter buildings and uselessly wide boulevards, good restaurant stalls and “waste-the-day-away” sidewalk beer gardens. The bazaar was at the heart of the other, Uygur city, with its mudbrick homes, great bread, narrow lanes, mosques and Muslim architecture. In this section, Beijing couldn’t have felt further away.
That is one cheery building
A quiet side street
A mosque door
It was a bit sad to see that, beyond the necessary mingling at the street traffic level, the two ethnic communities were pretty segregated. Whole streets (not to mention whole parts of town) were either Han or Uygur, with a scant few being a mixture of both. Han people shopped at Han stores, and Uygurs shopped at Uygurs stores. I was absolutely amazed at seeing only a few Han faces at the great bazaar, given the great love for shopping and bargaining in China. The different ethnic groups lived side-by-side, but I never got the sense that they truly lived together in a multicultural environment. It was like they were guests in each other’s worlds, neighbours by necessity.
Hotan was an amazing introduction to Uygur Xinjiang, and also in some ways a glimpse into the future of the area. Han Hotan is likely to swallow the rest of the city in the next decade or so, with “modernity” replacing difference and bulldozing any ideas of cultural accommodation. An underground shopping mall had already turned the centre of town into a giant construction pit. The Uygur city is pushed steadily to the fringe, its colour and vibrancy under threat from the white tile. I have absolutely nothing against modernity and rising living standards, but, I suspect, these are not the driving forces behind the re-modelling of this region and its march towards the national ideal of conformity. One gets the feeling there is something slightly more sinister going on.
