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Feb. 12, 2005 The full name of Sinkiang is Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, and it is one of 7 autonomous regions, 3 municipalities and 21 provinces (22 if you count Taiwan) that make up the People's Republic of China. Actually, 'Xinjiang' is the official Communist transcription into English letters, of the Chinese characters that form the name of the region, while 'Sinkiang' is the older transcription of the same characters, which mean 'New Frontier'. I use 'Sinkiang' only because it is more familiar. The word 'Uygur' is the name of a Turkic people who have lived in Sinkiang for 1500 years or more. In fact, Sinkiang and adjacent areas are the original homeland of the Turks. The Uygurs, who compose up to 45% of today's 19,000,000 Sinkiangese, ruled a vast empire in the region, 1000 years ago, before the rise of the Mongols. The area of Sinkiang is 618,000 square miles, about 4 times as large as California. The capital is Ürümqi, or Wulumuqi in Chinese, today a modern city of over 1,000,000, in the past famous as the remotest of exotic caravansaries. A railroad traverses the vast region, which is bounded by Mongolia, Russia, Central Asian Republics, Pakistan, Tibet and Chinese provinces, and there are 'roads'. I passed through Sinkiang 3 times in 1997-1998, and spent several days in Ürümqi. Ürümqi itself is not bad at all. In fact the hilly modern downtown district near Hong Shan Amusement Park is a little reminiscent of the area around 9th and Washington in San Diego's Hillside District. Believe it or not, there's a Holiday Inn in Ürümqi, and there are a couple of large, fashionable department stores. On the street level, the central part of the city fairly teems with people on a warm summer day, and one can hardly make his way through the throngs without pushing and shoving, and making numerous detours. The outlying districts of the city are full of high-rise apartment buildings, mostly grim, stark, utilitarian structures devoid of cheer or luster. One wonders how demanding the local building codes are, and how well they're enforced. However, I could probably adjust easily enough to Ürümqi's pace, except for the Arctic winters, with temperatures probably falling to 30 or 35 below zero. Rural Sinkiang is an entirely different matter however. Dreadful poverty afflicts the countryside, much of which I saw with my own eyes. Let me describe one of the hundreds or thousands of typical houses visible from a train window: Such a house measures perhaps 15 by 20 feet and is built of unplastered pumice blocks. I assume they must be mortared somehow, but the walls are seldom erect, bulging or leaning one way or other. The roof is generally a gable of rusty corrugated sheeting on which piles of stone have been heaped at the corners of the house to keep the sheets from blowing away. Nonetheless, the edges of the sheets are often bent upward where a stiff wind must have pried them a little. The ridge of the roof usually runs right-left instead of forward-backward, and the corrugated sheets in front cantilever over the front wall five or six feet to afford an awning or dirt-floor porch in front, which is usually supported by little gnarled tree trunks or 4-by-4 wooden stanchions, often leaning. Windows may be covered with glass or with pieces of metallic sheeting, plywood, cardboard or cloth. The appearance is very trashy. Still, in a warmer climate, say Africa or Latin America, such conditions would be tolerable. In Sinkiang's bitter cold, I don't see how people with families manage in such conditions, given an average income of $100 a month or less, which hardly enables them to purchase adequate food and fuel. Another kind of dwelling you see in Sinkiang is cave houses. In the region, the Tian Shan mountains are full of vertical cliffs, something like parts of Arizona, and people have built residences in caves. Generally the mouth of a such a cave may be more or less circular, with a diameter of 10 or 15 feet. Into this cavity, a wall of pumice blocks has been fitted. It is mortared, as is evident from the fact that they're usually quite plumb, unlike the walls of the freestanding houses I described. Usually, the front wall has a door and a window or two. I did not enter any such houses, but I imagine the interiors are amorphous, in view of the great amount of labor that would be required to square and fair them. I saw several hundred such cave houses. There are also some villages consisting of adobe houses on dirt streets, perhaps preferable to the other kinds of housing, but I tried to imagine those streets under a foot of snow or six inches of slush. Most of the land through which the trains and bus that I rode passed are potentially arable, as can be seen by the small farm districts along the few rivers that vein the countryside, but there are immense, unirrigated wastelands betwwen such little 'oases'. Irrigation remains prohibitively expensive. Much or most of the farming is done by ox-drawn ploughs, as you can see on any day in the summer. This contrasts with Eastern China, where the fields are farmed mechanically. I noticed that numerous mountains were terraced to provide additional farmland. I shudder to think of the amount of labor that went into this kind of earthwork, considering that it was done probably by human and animal labor. Basically, eight times as many Chinese must eat off an acre of land as Americans, since China with 4 times the population of the US, has only half as much arable land. In some small towns where I stopped, the only ready-to-eat food being offered for sale was brown hard-boiled eggs, often with broken shells, slices of warm honeydew melon, and bottles of lukewarm water or soda. Toilets, where they existed at all, were generally horrid. To wash up a little, one has to scoop water from an irrigation ditch. A 28-hour bus ride from western Gansu province to Ürümqi involved about 24 hours of dirt road. Often, creeks were not bridged and the bus just flopped through. From Ürümqi to Khorgos, Huoergusi in Chinese, on the Kazakh border, it's a 15-hour ride on a fairly decent two-lane road. I recall that at about midnight, a volley of cheers went up inside the bus I was on. We had reached the only spot along the road where cold soda could be bought. A little Chinese lady had a refrigerator in a tent of bleached canvas with a dim electrical light hanging in the center. Khorgos was fairly decent. A town of 2000, it featured stuccoed pumice block shops with rolling garage doors, with erect walls and paved walks. Comparing these scenes with those one might see along the I-80 in Wyoming, with five-and-six room houses with cars in the drive, modern filling stations and supermarkets, it was hard for me to imagine that China is on the threshold of taking over as Number One, but who am I? I'm not an economist, just a witness. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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