The Emperor Far Away Read Online Free PDF Page B

right. Personal hygiene isn’t always a priority for Uighurs, and the closest I had come to being taken for a native was when taxi drivers asked me if I was from Kazakhstan.
    But there were other people who drank in the bar who also looked nothing like the Uighurs, and they had been born and bred in Xinjiang. I was most intrigued by six-foot-tall Fei Fei, whose extraordinary high-angled cheekbones and slanted eyes marked her out as pure Manchu, and Kamil, a Chinese Tatar. With his blond mullet haircut, pot belly and taste for loud shirts, he looked like he should be propping up a bar in Vladivostok.
    So Russian did Kamil appear it was only when he opened his mouth and Mandarin came out that I remembered he was a Chinese citizen. Hearing him speak was disconcerting. It reminded me of how foreigners are sometimes wheeled out on Chinese TV shows to perform in perfect Mandarin, while the live audiences stare at them as if they are chimpanzees holding a tea party. Certainly, I used to gaze at Kamil and Fei Fei like they were rare animals in a zoo. Tatars and Manchu have intermarried so much there are very few left who look as they did, and Xinjiang is the only place they can be found.
    Descendants of their Russian cousins who wandered across the border centuries before, the Tatars are now one of China’s smallest minorities. Fewer than 5,000 of them are left, living mostly around Yining in the Ili Valley near the frontier with Kazakhstan. Also resident in the Ili Valley are the 200,000 Xibe. Closely related to the Manchu, and like them originally from north-east China, the Xibe are the ancestors of soldiers sent to garrison Xinjiang in the eighteenth century.
    Unlike the Manchu, who assimilated with the Han they had conquered to the point that their tongue is now virtually extinct, the Xibe have retained their version of Manchu. Xinjiang is now the sole place where you can hear an approximation of the language of the Qing dynasty emperors, a geographical irony given that it is thousands of kilometres away from the Manchu homeland.
    Kamil seemed to spend most of his time drinking or destroying all-comers on the bar’s over-subscribed pool table, but he somehow managed to run a successful import and export company. China’s Tatars are known for being bright. Ninety-five per cent of them go on to higher education, the highest proportion of any ethnic group in China, and Kamil had spent four years at Moscow University.
    In contrast, Fei Fei was the outdoor type. A star basketball player for Xinjiang in her youth, she took Han tourists on adventure tours to the Altai Mountains and spent her free time scaling peaks in Tibet. So rare is it to encounter full-blooded Manchu people that many of her clients mistook her for a Mongolian, even though she had the pale skin and oval face desired by all Chinese women. I told her jokingly she would have been a princess in the Qing dynasty. Fei Fei answered seriously that her family were once very rich and powerful and had owned a huge estate in the north-east.
    Spending a night at the bar was to rewind back through the centuries to when Urumqi was a crucible of races and religions. It was a modern-day version of the caravanserai, the inns along the Silk Road where merchants and travellers from the Middle East, central Asia, India and China had spent their nights telling tales around open fires. Indeed, some of the bar’s customers were the same traders from central Asia and Russia Kamil did business with.
    Lured to Urumqi not by the promise of rare spices and exotic inventions but by the low cost of more prosaic items like furniture and household appliances, their increasing presence in Xinjiang is a sign a new Silk Road is emerging. It is one where the cheap clothes and goods churned out by the factories in the south and east of China head west via Urumqi, while the natural resources of central Asia travel in the opposite direction.
    Come dawn, though, and the bar’s cosmopolitan atmosphere