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Aslan resented Chinese rule. Ten years earlier, he said, the authorities had shut down a religious school in the mosque. A young architect wearing rimless glasses and cargo-pocketed shorts inspected a new brick terrace. Blank-eyed workers slaked their thirst with beer and plucked with chopsticks at their dumplings. The skimpy shirts and trousers, the alcohol, the forbidden pork meat in the mosque precinct would have horrified a devout Muslim of the Middle East. Their behavior did not faze Aslan, however, who quite liked the neat lines of the park. What bothered him was that there was not one Uygur among them.

Aslan invited me home. Once I picked up speed on my rented bicycle, he jumped up onto the rear carrier frame. In the old Uygur quarter, the centuries had worn smooth the remaining beaten-earth streets. Across a wide new boulevard we walked through a rough, narrow passage between brick walls that led to a gate in his garden wall. His family came out to greet us in a dirt courtyard. Aslan cut open a melon. A conversation of sorts got cautiously under way with his father Mohammed.

Officials ban dozens of religious practices, foreign missionaries in China's Xinjiang

On one level, the common language and gestures made me feel as though the Uygurs were close to other Turkic nations. On another, they seemed to know remarkably little of the world outside their almost medieval domain, or of the broad Turkic resurgence of the past decade. Uygurs who heard me speaking an approximation of their language assumed it was because there were Uygurs where I lived. Eighty years out of date, many thought Istanbul was still the capital of Turkey. My courage faltered in this increasingly political terrain. They ruled a wide empire for a century before themselves being forced to move southeast to the area now known as Xinjiang.

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New leaders arose in Kashgar in the mid-tenth century, known as the Karakhanids. Around the same time, Yusuf Hass Hajib of Kashgar wrote his Kutadgu Bilig, a book of advice for princes, whose 6, couplets are the first work of Turkic literature. Two centuries later, when the Mongol leader Genghis Khan conquered most of Asia, the educated, literate Uygur elite supplied the bureaucracy of his empire. Later, I would meet educated Uygurs who noted with satisfaction that the Mongol, or Yuan dynasty actually ruled the whole of China for nearly a century from But the dynasty fell in , and thereafter the Uygurs and Chinese began to compete for territory and trade.

The name Uygur fell into disuse for centuries and was only revived by Soviet ethnic planners in That question was answered with a heartfelt sigh.

No one spoke. I had touched on a subject that perplexes Turkic peoples everywhere: their weakness, disunity and failures in the past century.

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The Uygurs have a better excuse than most: their lands were a battlefield between the far greater powers of the Soviet Union and China for the first half of the 20th century. After being cast away by Moscow in the late s, Xinjiang was subjugated by China for the second half of the century. I tried to compliment him on his bright and hardworking son, Aslan. But Aslan complained that he could not speak or write proper Chinese, which blocked his access to good work.

TVs, watches, radios too. The high-wheeled Turkic arba carts cut wider ruts into roadways than did the trucks belonging to the Chinese. Bread appeared in roadside stalls, and rice became rare. The sing-song staccato of colloquial Chinese would switch to the more guttural sounds of Turkic. Today, many of these signs have vanished; the physical geography has been blurred as the Chinese expand their settlement around roads and towns and push the Uygurs to the margins.

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Although the main body of China is hundreds of miles to the east of Turfan, it is largely the Chinese who benefit from new highway connections like the one I followed westward to Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. Uygurs are condemned to a parallel economic, social and political system, their villages bypassed by the new main roads. China clearly hopes such policies will lead their culture to dry up in a desert dead-end. For the Chinese, travel is far easier now.

The driver of the bus careered around brand-new, still-empty toll booths.

The highway was even and smooth—and, I learned later, partly financed by the World Bank. Gas stations built to resemble great pyramids and cartoon fantasies whizzed past, as if in defiance to the harsh desert haze that hung over us. After an hour, the rocky east-west range of hills that divides Xinjiang into two vast, shallow bowls loomed ahead. The bus climbed out of the Tarim basin and up the rocky river gorge that leads to the northern plateau.

A howling wind lashed the river beside the highway into galloping waves, whipping spray off the crests in long sheets that hung in the air over the water for dozens of yards. With memories of the Uygurs in their shady, timeless Turfan oasis villages still fresh in my mind, I was amazed to encounter among the barren hills the swooping propellers of a vast complex of Chinese windmills, purposefully feeding electricity into a network of high-tension powerlines.

With a new railway line shooting straight into the heart of distant Kashgar, and new highways all over the territory, there is no doubting Chinese determination to impose control. Reasons are not hard to find.

Gold, uranium, iron and coal are also abundant. Showing a rare willingness to integrate, the Uygur bus conductress wore an immaculate uniform and had adopted a no-nonsense, egalitarian style. But a tacit apartheid otherwise divided our motley caravan. While a cheerful group of young Chinese workers noisily joked and ate at the front, Uygur families sat impassively toward the back.

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One couple jointly studied a text on how to be good Muslims, and another man cradled a cage with two canaries. The Chinese buys at Chinese stalls, the Turki shops among his own people and the food vendors serve men of their own race. The mentality and outlook of each nation are profoundly different and neither trusts the other. Still, on street level, I was constantly reminded of the sharp divisions between Chinese and Uygurs.

My first stop was to change money at the regional headquarters of the Bank of China, set in the shiny new city center. I pushed up the steps to the entrance. I had not expected a crowd of Uygur wheeler-dealers to accompany me, each of them waving a wad of currency. I asked them to let me through. The clerk typed out the numbers My Uygur companion coolly picked up the calculator and typed the figure I expected a quick-stepping troupe of Chinese police to come and drag us both away at any moment.

I looked at the young clerk, who watched me impassively.

I began to bargain. He laughed.

But we should step outside. The Chinese teller betrayed no sign of interest. Outside, the moneychanger produced a fat bunch of notes and began to count them into my hand.

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My trust broadened. It seemed just a small step from this pavement in China to my home street in Turkey.

Turks feel honor-bound to act as though the actual transfer of money to complete a deal is a matter of supreme indifference to them. This habit can infuriate foreign business partners. But it is a boon when I step out to the shops in Istanbul and find I have forgotten my wallet.

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