The Emperor Far Away Read Online Free PDF Page A

acknowledge that as many as 60,000 Uighurs died during the 1950s, both resisting Beijing’s rule and in what Mao called the ‘stamping out of superstition’.
    Over sixty years later and Urumqi is still full of soldiers. Slow-moving convoys of the Wu Jing, the People’s Armed Police, an offshoot of the PLA, rumbled down the roads at all hours. They were not as visible as they had been in July 2009, when I watched them marching ten abreast through the deserted streets chanting ‘Protect the country, protect the people, preserve stability.’ But they still guarded significant intersections in steel helmets with their AK47s to hand.
    There were newly formed police SWAT teams too, tucked down side-streets in vans waiting to move if there was trouble. My hotel overlooked one of their barracks. In the morning, I’d lean out of the window and watch them doing press-ups or practising unarmed combat in their all-black uniforms. They were mostly Han, with a smattering of Uighurs, including a lone young woman with a ponytail.
    After lunch, Billy and I walked along Yan’an Lu, heading deeper into Uighur Urumqi. North, west and east of People’s Square, Urumqi looks much like any Chinese city. There are only a few Uighur pockets near the former main bazaar, now a market for tourists, where the minarets of mosques poke into the sky alongside the apartment blocks. But the further south you go in Urumqi, heading towards the desert that surrounds it, the more Uighur it becomes.
    By the time we reached a district called Saimachang, we could have been in any one of the small oasis towns that run along the fringes of the Taklamakan Desert in the far south of Xinjiang. On the main street, sheep were being butchered and the meat sold, alongside piles of watermelons and tomatoes. Billy pointed to them proudly. ‘Han people think Xinjiang is just a desert and that we ride camels. They don’t know we grow so much fruit and vegetables. It’s because they only show Xinjiang on TV when something bad happens.’
    Food is almost as important to Uighur identity as Islam. Streetside bakeries making naan dominate any Uighur neighbourhood. The bakers knead the dough and sprinkle it with water, before sticking it on the sides of the tonur , the bread oven. When ready, it is removed with two skewers with their ends bent into the approximation of a fish hook. In Urumqi, naan comes in every conceivable variety: plain or with elaborate patterns imprinted on the bread, sprinkled with sesame seeds or rice, and sometimes with lamb embedded in it.
    No one was going hungry in Saimachang. Instead, it is jobs and money that are in short supply. Kids with bright eyes shining out of dirty brown faces offered to clean shoes, while groups of young men lounged around in ill-fitting camouflage uniforms. Ostensibly security guards, they are hired by the local government in an effort to reduce the absurdly high Uighur unemployment statistics. Billy told me they were paid 1,000 yuan (£100) a month.
    Old men with white beards sat stoically on the steps of the tenement buildings that line the narrow alleys off the main street. The women were dressed much more conservatively here than elsewhere in Urumqi. All but the very young wore headscarves and long dresses that covered every inch of their bodies bar their hands. But even if just their large eyes were visible, no one was in the dreary all-black worn in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Uighur women love bright colours, and their dresses and hijabs were a kaleidoscope of patterns in lilac, turquoise, pink, red and yellow.
    ‘They’re not from Urumqi. Most of the people here are from the country, from the south,’ said Billy as we walked the alleys. Southern Xinjiang is the Uighur heartland where agriculture is the main industry. But much of the south is made up of the Taklamakan Desert and is far from suitable for cultivating anything. So more and more Uighurs are choosing to follow the example of Han