Word: kashgar
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...medieval scholar named Mahmud Kashgari - from, as his name suggests, the Silk Road outpost of Kashgar - presented a landmark text to the Caliph of Baghdad. It was the first ever compendium of the Turkish language, the babble of tongues spoken by nomadic tribes who roamed between the shores of the Caspian Sea and the wastes of Siberia. Despite the scope of his work, Kashgari was proudest of his hometown, boasting that the Turkic dialect there was the "purest" and "most elegant" of them...
...Nearly a millennium later, that language still lingers, spoken by ethnic Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim minority who make up the majority population in the Chinese frontier region of Xinjiang. Kashgar, a city of 3.4 million surrounded by mountains and desert, is at Xinjiang's westernmost tip, closer to Baghdad than to Beijing. And while its history is rich - most agree at least 2,000 years old - many Uighurs in Kashgar see their culture and heritage as under attack by the Chinese government. In the latest move, authorities have started to demolish Kashgar's old town - an atmospheric, mud-brick maze...
...decision to raze Old Kashgar was made before anti-Chinese riots in Xinjiang's capital of Urumqi broke out earlier this month. That violence, in which at least 197 people died, was largely perpetrated by Uighurs against local Han Chinese, according to Beijing. Uighur-rights groups say that the Uighur death toll after a police crackdown and Chinese counterattacks has gone unreported and that the riots were an outgrowth of long-standing frustrations with Beijing's policies, which, they say, discriminate against Uighurs, depriving them of jobs in their own land while curbing the teaching of the Uighurs' language...
...According to observers, the bulldozing of Old Kashgar has only accelerated in the riots' aftermath. The old town's warrens and alleyways are home to a tightly knit Uighur community and present, in Beijing's eyes, a potential haven for antistate activities. "Uighurs may see the area as a space of refuge," says Szadziewski. "Moving them out makes the situation much easier for China to control." As many as 220,000 residents (almost half the urban center's population) will be relocated to "modern" housing estates almost 8 km from their original homes, which have been passed down within families...
...their culture has been threatened by a steady influx of Han Chinese. The result: resentment and unrest. The past decade has seen bombings by suspected Uighur separatists and crackdowns by the Chinese authorities. At the time of last year's Beijing Olympics, an attack in the Xinjiang town of Kashgar killed 17 Chinese police officers. But the region's most serious outbreak of violence took place in its capital, Urumqi, over three days beginning July 5, when rioting left at least 156 people dead and more than 1,000 wounded...