Kashgar

Where the two roads around the Taklamakan meet again

Kashgar lies in a fertile oasis on the western edge of the Taklamakan desert and north of the Pamirs, in the Tarim Basin of southern Xinjiang, close to China's borders with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. For over 2,000 years it has been a strategic stop on the Silk Road, the junction where traffic turned west to Central Asia and Europe, east to China and south to the subcontinent, and it is among the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world.

Chinese, Turkic, Mongol and Tibetan empires have all ruled it. The Han dynasty took Shule, as Chinese records called it, in 76 BC, and the Book of Han counted 18,647 people there. Its people followed Zoroastrianism and Buddhism before Islam, which took hold under the Kara-Khanid Khanate in the 10th century. The Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang passed through in 644 on his way home from India and called it Kasha. Marco Polo came about 1273-4 and found numerous Nestorian Christians with churches of their own. The British Empire kept a consulate here from 1890 to 1948.

For the Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim people who have long given the city its character, the mud-brick old city with its narrow lanes, coppersmiths and minarets is one of the cradles of their culture. Its Sunday Market, the largest in Central Asia, can draw a hundred thousand people at its peak, farmers arriving by donkey cart, ranchers parading livestock and offering horses for test rides, artisans selling knives, teapots and carpets, and saffron from Iran.

From 2009 the old city was largely torn down and rebuilt. The authorities, pointing to the deadly collapses in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, said its houses were overcrowded and extremely vulnerable to earthquakes and fire; a three-billion yuan plan moved residents out to new housing, installed water and electricity and widened the alleys, and by May 2012 much of the old city had been rebuilt. An official at the Id Kah mosque argued that without redevelopment people would lose more. The city's own cultural relics office said preserving the district was beyond it, and Uyghur advocates, earthen-architecture specialists and the European Parliament objected to the loss of a rare earthen city and the crafts and households bound up in it.

Kashgar became a Special Economic Zone in 2010, the first in China's far west, and it is the Chinese end of the Karakoram Highway, which climbs over the Khunjerab Pass to Islamabad.