Arriving at the far side of China

We're gonna miss you China!

China: between X'ian and Urumqi

We're in Urumqi!

We’re in Urumqi. The capital city of Xinjiang Province, the most western province in China, and also the city furthest from the sea of any in the world.  We’re currently taking a compulsory week off the bikes while we wait for our Kazak visas and are staying with a Chinese family that we found on Airbnb.  There are three people in the family, the parents and their adult daughter.  The also have a kitten, called Chitah.  The apartment is big, spacious & modern and the family live in much the same way that we, or any other western people, do.  When we say that we are staying with a Chinese family I can only imagine the images that people will conjure up in their minds – eating meals on the floor, wearing conical straw hats, living in dimly lit, squalid rooms, bathrooms with poor sanitation etc etc etc – but none of these images hold, at least not for this family. They are part of the ever-growing Chinese middle class and with that comes a certain striping of culture, a leveling of the playing field so to speak.

Urumqi, and Xinjiang Province in general, is very different from the other areas of China we’ve been in.  The people fall mostly into two ethnic groups, Han Chinese and Uyghur.   Both Mandarin and Uyghur are official languages here and as a result English has been replaced by Arabic on the road signs, leaving us in a bit of a pickle!  The Uyghur people are a predominately Muslim people who look much more Central Asian/ Middle Eastern than they do Chinese, giving the place a much more diverse feel to it than other areas.  However, there appears to be considerable tension between the two groups of people, and as a result there is a scarily heavy police and military presence on the streets at all times.   Not so long ago, the two groups coexisted quite peacefully but now everyday life is pretty segregated with kids attending different schools and the people living in separate neighborhoods.  It’s an odd situation and one that we’d like to know more about but the lack of English spoken locally and our obvious failings in Uyghur and Mandarin make asking questions pretty difficult.  If you were to believe everything you read in the media then the Uyghur people are a bunch of violent, bomb detonating lunatics but we’ve been here long enough now to know that the truth, and what the Chinese media would have you believe is the truth, aren’t exactly well aligned.  From what we can see, the Uyghur people, who it would seem have been in this region a lot longer than Han people, are being persecuted.  They seem to be discriminated against much like ethnic minorities in many countries or regions worldwide, only they aren’t a minority and they were very much the majority until the government started to relocate Han people to this region not too long ago.  They seem to occupy the lower echelons in society, living in poorer neighbourhoods and working at the more menial jobs.  Anyway, like I said, it’s an interesting place, and one that we’d really like to understand a bit better.  I suppose we have a week now to try and delve a little deeper!

Tanks, Guns, Bayonets...