Sightseeing around big mosque in Kashagr

It felt strange to continue with the same tourism as before, but actually there was not much else to do for us. Right from our hotel a street lead towards the mosque. Like in Xian it is a place of pleasant calm, but its style is distinctly Central Asian, not Chinese: the wall and the gate towards a larger city square are covered with yellow tiles, inside the walls there is a park with dry basins and a little grove of trees. Across from the entrance the prayer hall opens towards the yard. Its roof is supported by slender colorful carved pillars. Its back wall oriented towards Mekka is clogged in somber light against the yard's daylight. On the whole the mosque appeared a bit neglected and dilapidate, especially when comparing with its counterpart in Xian.

In the streets around the mosque a great lot of shops offer a large variety of goods, close to the mosque's gate mostly souvenirs for tourists, metalwork, knives, animal skins, but only a little further one finds ordinary household goods, meats, groceries, and a great lot of food stalls. Across the square in front of the mosque the permanent city bazaar starts, where in a maze of streets a rich choice of textiles, spices, blacksmiths can be found, with shops on several floor of modern buildings. Late that day we took a walk through this central part of old Kashgar, admiring the representative buildings with their verandas, whose colors shone in the sinking sun. At night we walked back through the poorly lit streets into the newly built town. Everywhere now small food stalls are set up, where with minimal equipment shashlik is grilled, or Chinese boiled dumplings (Jiao Zi) are prepared.

resource of this article

http://eos.photonik.tuwien.ac.at/china/xinjiang/node41.html