The Emperor Far Away Read Online Free PDF

farmers elsewhere in China and moving to the cities in search of better-paid work.
    Lacking both education and fluency in Mandarin, most of them fail to find jobs. Many of the 2009 rioters were newcomers from rural areas. Saimachang was where I had come two days after the violence, to find that almost all the men under fifty had been taken away by the police. Now, its residents are subdued to the point of hopelessness. Hanging grimly on at the very edge of Urumqi, Saimachang is an outpost in enemy territory – the site of the Uighurs’ last stand in a city where they have been all but vanquished by the Han.

2
    The New Silk Road
    Billy drank alcohol only on special occasions, so most evenings in Urumqi I went alone to the one western-style bar in the city. It was owned by Hiro, a stocky, long-haired Japanese guy with a goatee, and Manus, a laidback Irishman who was tall and thin with a shaved head. Both were eight-year veterans of Urumqi who had first arrived as language teachers.
    Their bar functioned as a gathering place for the city’s tiny foreign community, who were mostly students or taught English, and passing travellers. But, uniquely for Urumqi, it was a place where Uighurs and Chinese drank side by side. The bar attracted a crowd who could be described as Urumqi’s bohemians, people whose work brought them into contact with westerners or those who had rejected the local entertainment options.
    Uighurs patronise dance clubs no Chinese will step into for fear of being stabbed, and which are dangerous too for foreigners who try it on with the Uighur women. Han head to the karaoke joints or the Chinese bars, where whisky is bought by the bottle and mixed with green tea and endless games of liar’s dice are played, with the losers downing their drinks in one as punishment. One of my Han friends in Beijing used to tell me that the Chinese don’t really like western alcohol and only drink it as a sign of status. He thought the dice games were a way of forcing each other to consume it.
    At Hiro and Manus’s bar, though, everyone was thrown together. Chinese customers had no choice but to play Uighurs at pool if their names came up on the blackboard. Americans and Europeans, as well as a few Africans, drank foreign beers, talked endlessly of their China experiences and chased the local women regardless of whether they were Han, Uighur, Mongolian, Kazakh or Uzbek. It was integration on a tiny scale, but so divided is Urumqi it seemed startling.
    That alone ensured the bar aroused suspicion among the authorities. ‘The cops don’t like us and would rather we shut down. They don’t like the idea of foreigners gathering in one place and they don’t like the fact that a lot of Uighurs drink here,’ said Hiro. Smart, fast-talking and more than a little burned out by his eight years in Xinjiang, Hiro was one of the rare foreigners who can speak fluent Uighur. He needed to, just to mediate the disputes that erupted almost nightly between the bar staff.
    ‘I’d prefer to employ Han waiters, to be honest. The Uighurs don’t work as hard and they’re always arguing with each other. If they can’t agree among themselves, how can they expect to get anywhere? Uighur means “union”, but they never have been united. It was the Chinese who created Xinjiang. Before 1949, it was just a series of city states,’ said Hiro. It was true. Only in the 1930s did the natives of Xinjiang begin using the term ‘Uighur’. Until then, they identified themselves by their home region. They were ‘Urumqilik’, which in Uighur means someone from Urumqi, ‘Kashgarlik’ or ‘Hotanlik’.
    Hiro had no time for the wide-eyed solidarity expressed by the few foreigners who embrace the Uighur cause. Nor was he impressed by my efforts to pass as a local. ‘You look too clean. You look like a westerner with a moustache. If you really want to look like a Uighur, you need to stop washing your hair,’ he told me. It was harsh, but he was