Kashgar Streets
Kashgar’s offerings to the street photographer are rich. The diversity of its architecture, colors, activity and faces make it an ideal location to capture the spirit of a city.
So, what is the spirit of Kashgar? In a word: tradition.
The way things are done in the Uyghur community within the Old City walls are the way things have been done there, more or less, for hundreds of years.
People make or harvest goods that they sell at the market or in the bazaar, sheep are a valued form of currency and donkeys are still, for some, the preferred method of transport.
People’s lives are dictated by this sense of tradition from the clothes they wear and the jobs they hold, which are often passed down from one generation to the next, to the way in which they worship or spend their hours of leisure.
Also embedded in this tradition is, in some regards, a truer version of capitalism. In the streets of the bazaar or the famed Sunday market, a consumer has the choice of countless stalls from where to buy their goods. And, their choice doesn’t end there. To a certain degree, consumers choose the cost of these goods as they haggle for a mutually agreed upon price with the vendors.
This way of life has little room in the new world order dominated by name brands and mass-produced goods, where style, price and choice are predetermined.
The threat to the Uyghur’s Kashgar is not so much the Han Chinese sent to settle in the area, tempted by cheap housing and subsidies, or the government per say but the multinational corporations that stamp out any other way of life that does not prescribe to it or feed into its machine.
In the case of Kashgar, tradition does not sync with “progress”, and though I would like to think we could come back in ten or even five years time and find the Old City untouched and people going about their way of life undisturbed, sadly I find it doubtful as much of the Old City has already been reduced to rubble with more of it set to follow suit.
Now mixed in with the sense of tradition that permeates the streets of Kashgar, like the smell of wood burning in the stoves of the stalls, is a sense of fear of what’s to come.
Kashgar teeters on the edge of a precipice. What the other side holds is its preservation or demise.
