This 1996 National Geographic article provides a detailed discription of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in northwestern China. By Thomas B. Allen

A chill March wind scatters the morning mist across the high plateau, revealing three camels, two riders on horseback, a dog, and a string of sheep. I hail the riders and they turn their little caravan toward me, bringing color to the drab brown land in this northwest corner of China. Lashed on the camels' backs are orange wooden stools, woolen rugs woven in mazes of red and blue, the poles and felt pieces of their tent home. On one black-maned horse sits a man in a blue cap. On the other horse is a woman in a red coat, clutching a small boy wearing a cap striped in blue and white.

For days, far off on the plateau, I had been seeing families like this one, moving to the new grass of spring and summer. Now paths had crossed. The smiling, broad-shouldered man says his name is Tarik. While his wife and their youngest child watch silently, he talks, his eyes on his sheep. Many of the 120 animals will soon drop lambs at the birthing place near here. His five other children are in school, he says, his eyes briefly turning in the direction of Altay, a city a dozen miles away. The family will be reunited in the summer pastureland.

A paved road, two jeeps, and a row of utility poles are the only visible symbols of modern life here. Tarik's family and his people live in the past. He waves good-bye and rides back into the mist, returning to a life without roads or brightly lit night, a life paced by the seasons and the needs of sheep and camels and horses.

To talk with Tarik, I first had to speak to an interpreter who translated my English into Chinese. Then a second interpreter rendered the Chinese into Tarik's language, a Turkic tongue spoken by his people, the Kazaks. Neither he, his language, his people, nor his culture is Chinese. He lives in Xinjiang, a vast province of China, where most people are Turkic-speaking Muslims. Only here and in Tibet are Chinese in a minority.

The name of the province acknowledges its double identity. Xinjiang (pronounced SHEEN-jee-ahng) is Chinese for "new frontier". China long sought this vast swath of central Asia, a corridor between East and West even before the Silk Road passed this way as early as the second century B.C. But not until the 18th century did China gain an uneasy control, and not until 1955 did the People's Republic of China establish the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, a province bigger than Alaska and home to eight million Uygurs (WEE-gurs), the most populous of Xinjiang's many ethnic groups.

Chinese leaders opened their nation to the outside world in the 1980s. But much of Xinjiang remained off-limits, primarily because the Chinese-Soviet border bristled with arms. The Soviet breakup in 1991 unlocked the border gates, travel restrictions gradually eased, and once more in its long history Xinjiang awaited discovery. Photographer Reza and I were given unprecedented access to the long-forbidden province. For months, sometimes traveling together and sometimes separately, we explored Xinjiang, from the northern mountains to the southern deserts, seeing bazaars and discos, ancient cities and new oil wells, Islamic festivals and deserted Buddhist shrines.

Beijing calls this distant western province China's California, for here is oil and here is potential wealth from industry and international trade. Xinjiang gained three new neighbors and prospective trade partners when the former Soviet republics of Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan became independent nations. Officials proudly showed off new marketing enterprises along the border and pointed to new factories built as joint ventures with several countries.

Reza and I were barred from some places, such as desolate areas where China tests nuclear weapons or runs prison camps. But we saw much of this rapidly changing frontier, meeting people who had never seen Westerners and visiting people whose way of life still resembles what Marco Polo saw in the 13th century. And we met Xinjiang's people of the future: Former nomads who would rather live in apartments than in tents. Desert workers who call themselves China's soldiers of oil. Entrepreneurs with little more than a mobile phone and a faith in venture capitalism. Uygurs hungry for a bigger stake in Xinjiang's booming economy.

Although there had been talk in the early 1900s of a Uygur-led separatist movement that would make Xinjiang an independent nation named Eastern Turkistan, republics arising in parts of Xinjiang in the 1930s and '40s were short-lived. China strengthened its control in the '50s and was rarely challenged until the '80s, when hundreds died in what China called «racial incidents» in Kashgar (Kashi in Chinese), Xinjiang's Islamic citadel, and Aksu, northeast of Kashgar. In 1990 about 50 Uygurs and Kyrgyz were killed in what China labeled a «counter-revolutionary rebellion." Bombs allegedly set by separatists exploded in Urumqi in 1992 and in Kashgar in 1993. Muslims rioted in Hotan in 1995, when Chinese authorities removed a popular Islamic imam suspected of fomenting dissent.

The Chinese in Xinjiang are known by their old name, the Han. The rest of the population consists of national minorities: the Uygurs and other Turkic-speaking Muslim groups-the nomadic Kazaks and the more settled Kyrgyz. There are Mongols, who trace their lineage to Genghis Khan; Islamic Tajiks, who speak a Persian language; and the Xibe, Manchu-speaking descendants of warriors dispatched here from northeast China 200 years ago. Even some Han Chinese, because they are Muslims, are considered a distinct nationality, the Hui.

Xinjiang's geography once was destiny. How people lived depended on where they lived-nomadic in the mountains, settled in the oases that fringed the deserts. Today change is destiny. In government-run boarding schools the children of nomads like Tarik are learning about a world beyond the old sheep paths. In one such school I talked with two 17-year-old Kazak girls. They had just passed Chinese-language examinations, a gateway to higher education. They said they wanted to become doctors and help their people. Many sons and daughters of nomads are choosing what government officials call the settled life.

After Tarik's camels plodded off toward the Altay Mountains, Abdul, the leader of a nearby small town, began educating me in the old and new ways of the Kazaks. Beijing, Abdul said, had decreed nomadic life to be inefficient and is trying to discourage it. (Beijing seems to carry about as much weight in Xinjiang as Washington does in Alaska.) Surprised at Abdul's acceptance of Han ideas and wondering about his Kazak allegiance, I sneaked a look at his watch. China has one time zone; all time is Beijing time. But Xinjiang stubbornly goes by its own time, two hours behind Beijing's. It is a subtle sign of local loyalty to live on Xinjiang time, and that was what Abdul's watch was set to.

Abandoning the road, my driver bounded over the rumpled plateau in pursuit of Abdul's jeep. Behind a rocky hill was a yurt, a circular white felt tent with a conical roof. Next to the yurt was a birthing place, a three-sided shelter and low fence, all made of flat rocks. I counted eight lambs and could hear more bleating in the shelter. Sheep wandered about, munching on scant grass as dry as straw. Tethered nearby were three of the eight horses the family owned.

A smiling man warmly greeted Abdul and motioned us inside the yurt. His wife was already heating water over a stove whose smoke rose to an open roof flap. A daughter brought in sticks to feed the small fire. In a few moments, seated on a red four-legged stool, I was drinking tea tinged with sheep milk. Around me, in low chests set on a floor of rugs, were the possessions of a mother, a father, and six children.

Like the other families drifting onto the plateau, they had come from the south, trekking 50 to 70 miles from the river valley where they had spent the winter. There, through fall into early spring, they shelter themselves and their animals in mud-brick structures. The animals find sparse grass or are given fodder. The wintering family lives on the traditional year-round Kazak diet of mutton and bread.

In spring, as the lower pastureland is turning green, the families take the sheep to the plateau. They spend the birthing time here and, when the mountain snows begin to melt, head for the high summer pastures. As the white slopes change to green, the herds climb higher. «There is a saying," Abdul relates, «that the snow leads the sheep." High in the Altay, the families gather in clans, race their horses, and mark timeless rites-wedding, circumcision, death. At the end of summer they descend in the chill air to begin the rhythm of another year.

Other Kazaks live by another rhythm. Beijing is trying to turn nomads into farmers by helping them build substantial homes wired for electricity. On another jolting trip across the plateau, I was taken to one of these houses. It belonged to Makin, a bronzed, stocky man who would stay here with his wife, Kerzira, while some of their seven children and other kinfolk took herds up to summer pastureland.

I asked them how they felt about settling down. Makin smiled. «The traveling life. Yes, most herdsmen miss that." But he lives in a house snug as a yurt, richly decorated with embroidered wall hangings and complete with television set. He and Kerzira are not housebound. They still tend flocks and walk upon the land. Makin still slaughters sheep with his own knife.

For many young Kazaks, however, the future is not on the land. They are seeking jobs in Altay, a city spread along a high river valley. Here, as in other Xinjiang cities I visited, industry is on the rise, but Han Chinese seem to have most of the jobs. At a leather factory, for instance, nearly all the workers were Han women. When I mentioned this to the Han factory manager, he pointed to one Kazak woman who was supervising Han leather cutters. The factory was producing stylish jackets for export to Sweden. They are made from sheepskins brought in by Kazak herdsmen on bicycles and donkeys. The Han women in the factory typically earn more money in two months than a herdsman can expect to make in a year.

Uygurs in Xinjiang do not talk to foreigners about Chinese policy. But Uygurs in self-exile in the U. S. say that the Chinese government is pouring migrants into the province to make Han Chinese the majority. In 1949 only 200,000 Han lived here. In 1993, by Chinese count, there were 6 million Han out of a population of 16 million. A Western scholar estimates that 250,000 to 300,000 Han enter Xinjiang each year and that in 1993 there were nearly as many Han as Uygurs in Xinjiang.

Whatever resentments Xinjiang's varied peoples may harbor, they usually get along among themselves. One day, seated at a long table in a Mongol farmhouse, I found myself facing a Kazak, a Uygur, and my Mongol host, all friends, all toasting me and one another. At this meal, as at most meals I ate in people's homes, the menu was boiled mutton and a flat, crusty bread called nan. The women and girls served the meals and did not sit with the men. Usually, though, everyone joined in post-dinner singing and solo dancing.

After the meal Kenza, my host, led Reza and me out to show us two newborn foals. Since we had arrived about the same time, he said, he decided to name the foals Reza and Tom. Suddenly, one of the guests, a husky moonfaced man named Bimbai, leaped onto his horse. He scooped up a toddler and galloped off, both he and his passenger laughing wildly and sitting ramrod straight in the saddle.

Even Mongols like Bimbai are settling down. In his Mongol ancestral region, centered on the city of Bortala, many Mongol families live year-round on widely separated farms, where they raise crops but also keep a string of horses. Others still spend part of the year in the mountains with their herds of sheep and cattle.

«The state gives herdsmen money to help make them into farmers. Now those herdsmen don't have to worry about the weather," said Ulide, a burly Mongol government official who had a swan tattooed on the back of his right hand. «And many who changed have become rich. In the past there was no industry. Now we have a textile factory and a plant for making quick food. We have many roads. Ninety-seven percent of the children go to school."

Southwest of Bortala is the Horgas Pass, a trading outpost since the days of the Silk Road. Fortified and closed against Soviet Kazakstan in 1971, the pass was reopened when relations warmed in 1983. The village at the pass, whose people had no electricity and depended on snowmelt for water, became a boomtown. Some 25,000 tons of goods crossed the border in 1984; in 1993 trade topped 422,000 tons. Joint venture deals flourish. A Hong Kong investor is building a luxurious shopping mall and hotel complex.

Small-time traders do their business at the Market for Both Sides of the Border, an arena of primitive capitalism. The market has two gates. Through one come the buyers of Kazakstan, who arrive in buses accompanied by empty trucks. Through the other gate come the sellers of Xinjiang. Each buyer pays $1.50 in U. S. currency for admission and then changes a fistful of American dollars into Chinese yuan at the day's bank rate.

The buyers run a gantlet between lines of shouting merchants offering watches, cigarettes, and currency deals. Behind the merchants, under vaulting roofs, are bazaars crammed with rows of counters where Han, Uygurs, and Kazaks sell candy, beer, clothing, toys, sewing machines, irons, hand tools, and what looks like enough shoes for every man, woman, and child in Kazakstan.

Abdu Salam, a Uygur, was selling sugar, wholesale. I asked him how much he sells a day. «One hundred fifty kilos," he said. The crowd that had gathered around me-I was the first American ever to enter the market-laughed at his fib. «He cannot be exact," my interpreter explained. «Taxes. Understand?"

The day's buyers from Kazakstan included many women weighed down with shopping bags. I spoke to one wearing an American running suit and sneakers and a Chinese leather jacket. This was her fifth trip to buy goods for her father's shop back home. Like most buyers and sellers, she was secretive about transactions.

Porters pulling and pushing carts suddenly wheeled into the loading area, banging into one another to get to a row of empty trucks. Buyers shouted orders. Security police yelled and shoved. The porters piled hundreds of bags of sugar and hundreds of cartons of vodka into the trucks. «The vodka's as good as Russian," a buyer assured me. «The Chinese did it to our taste, not theirs."

Ili, a growing city near the pass, spreads along a verdant river valley of farms and forests. Pastureland here belongs to farmers, not nomads. In one small area, known as milk country, live about 20,000 Xibe (pronounced shee-ba), descendants of an army transplanted from Manchuria in the late 1700s to help guard and colonize the western frontier. Traveling with their wives and children, the soldiers arrived with 350 babies born on the yearlong trek.

The Xibe still speak and write in their old language and keep up their prowess as archers. When a girl is born, the family hangs a red banner at the door. When a boy is born, neighbors see an archer's bow. At a sports field in Xibe country, I watched a coach scowling when arrows hit merely near the bull's-eye. He said he was working his archers-boys and girls-eight hours a day, six days a week, taking aim at the next Olympics.

In the 20th century, as in the 18th, China used the army to colonize Xinjiang. The soldiers, organized into the Production and Construction Corps in the 1950s, built an economic stronghold in Xinjiang, then largely uninhabited. The corps, through its farms, factories, and other enterprises, now runs an empire of 2.2 million people, nearly all of them Han Chinese who answer to Beijing.

I met some of the veterans at State Farm No. 128 of the No. 7 Division. The farm, about 85 miles northwest of Urumqi, lies like a green carpet on the bleak earth of the Junggar Basin. To get into the farm, I had to pass through a military-style checkpoint. Along the paved road stretched rows of cotton and groves of fruit trees, all flanked by irrigation ditches. Such rich, watered farmland is as rare as a paved road in the rugged terrain of northwestern Xinjiang.

«When I came here," Zhang Pei Ji remembered, «this was a desert. The regiment lived in holes." We talked in his home, where two or three other veterans come every day to pass the time with board games. They are in their 70s and 80s. One nodded at Zhang's recollection and said, «We came here in March, walking from Urumqi. Nine days. We shot wild pigs and wild sheep for food."

Most of the soldiers found wives among the trainloads of Han women sent here to tame the wilderness. But Zhang fell in love with Yu Sui Qi, whom he saw begging on the streets of Urumqi. They married and had eight children. A family portrait, showing some of their ten grandchildren, hangs on the wall of their home.

I asked Yu Sui Qi what she remembered. «After giving birth to my first son," she said, «I still had to keep working, making shoes for the soldiers. Twenty shoes every day for the soldiers. I kept my son in the corner and had to keep working." She turned her head away, speaking no more of those days.

The state farm is far more than a farm. It has its own foreign affairs office, television station, oil refinery, and enterprises for marketing crops and forestry products. Each of the 17,000 people who live here is assigned to a company, a word that, like «corps» and «division," comes from a military vocabulary.

Workers sign contracts, agreeing to meet quotas set by the corps. Their children are likely to get jobs in a farm enterprise. Of the 1,020 students at a middle school I visited, about 60 will go to college.

Accompanied by a large entourage of officials, I was taken to No. 17 Company. Whitewashed, single-story brick houses stood in rows along a dirt road. Awaiting me in one was a retired worker named Mau. He handed me an apple, showed off his vegetable garden, his newly planted fruit trees, and the two rooms of his immaculately clean home. He had built the house himself and had even installed radiators, which he proudly stroked.

Outside, as we all walked past a brick wall, I asked for a translation of something I had seen written in many places on the state farm: «Don't Sell. Give to the Unit." The Production and Construction Corps obviously was bracing itself against the wave of capitalism sweeping through China and, now, Xinjiang. In every other place I had been, people were trying to make money. Even in the smallest mud-brick village people squatted behind their wares-fruit, shoes, a few yards of cloth, whatever could be bought at one price and sold at a higher. And nowhere has the market mania hit harder than in Urumqi.

Seen from the air, Urumqi sprawls like a huge oasis that has flowed down from the Tian Shan. Urumqi is Mongol for «beautiful pastureland," and upon the ancient earth are etched the old roads and faint trails that once led to that precious grass. Cutting across the old is the new: the highways and railways linking Xinjiang's capital to the rest of the world. So vital has the city become to China's economy that in 1992 Urumqi was decreed a port, giving the city the same capital-luring tax incentives enjoyed by Shanghai and other seaside cities. Urumqi is an odd port; 1,400 miles from the nearest sea, it is one of the world's most landlocked cities.

On city streets clogged with wary pedestrians, cars, buses, and donkey-drawn carts, I saw dealmakers wobbling along on bicycles and shouting over the traffic into cellular phones. At a street market, amid the brisk selling of cats, kittens, birds, goldfish, and dogs, a poster urged, «Raise Dogs. Get Rich."

Well over a million of Urumqi's 1.4 million people are Han Chinese, who run the city and dispense most of the jobs. Every employee I saw in my Western-style hotel was a Han. All the police officers I saw were Han. Even unskilled laborers were Han, lured from other provinces to work on the dozens of high-rises sprouting in Urumqi.

Governor Ablat Abdulreshit had a cryptic explanation for this. «Construction has changed," he said. «We have enrolled the laborers from the inland cities of the other provinces because they have a lot of technology. And we import equipment. And so the Chinese population has increased also."

Reza and I had an audience with the governor in his spacious office near Urumqi's huge main square. By law the governor of Xinjiang must be a Uygur. Even so, Abdulreshit spoke to us in Chinese, the official language here. He presides over a bewildering structure of prefectures, towns, cities, and counties, each with sets of political and Communist Party officials. Many are from minority groups, but all are under Han superiors.

When I asked the governor what the word «autonomous» meant in Xinjiang's official name, he gave two examples. While Chinese is the national language, Uygurs and other non-Han peoples can use their own languages in newspapers and on radio and television. And, although China limits Han couples to one child, Xinjiang's non-Han couples who live in cities can have two children and those who live in the country can have three. But, because of the business boom in Xinjiang, he said, «People's personalities are changing. The family does not want more children."

While there are a few prosperous Uygurs in Urumqi-including some who are trying to increase the Uygurs' share of the city's prosperity by making loans, teaching English, and encouraging Uygurs to launch enterprises of their own-I was never able to meet them. I was, however, introduced to many new Han capitalists, such as Feng Dong Min.

Feng graduated from Xinjiang Teachers College with a degree in art and got a job on a government payroll as a designer and interior decorator. With the economic boom in 1993, he set up a joint venture company with Taiwanese investors and started a small furniture factory in Urumqi. He became rich almost immediately. He drives a Cadillac and has a thriving overseas trade. «Urumqi is like a seaside city," he said, taking me around his showrooms. All of the furniture is marked for export. About 80 percent of his tables, chairs, cabinets, and bedroom suites go to the United States. His wife runs the Los Angeles office.

As a businessman he can go to Taiwan, which most ordinary Chinese cannot do. Sitting in his office at one of his own glass-topped tables, he leaned back and talked about his plans. «I want to build an apartment house for my workers," he said, ironically preserving as a capitalist the Chinese communist notion of a single job-and-home work unit. He also expects to relocate in a new economic zone in Xinjiang, where he will pay lower taxes and be near a railroad. «I work all the time," he complained. «I do not have enough time for anything but work." As for being a capitalist in a communist nation, he shrugged and said, «I am in the confused generation."

Reza and I attended the murder trial of another member of that generation. As the story was told in an almost empty Urumqi courtroom, Sun Hong Jun was a 25-year-old Han peasant who had come to the city from a distant province to seek his fortune. He got a job as a busboy in a restaurant and a room to share in a boarding house. One night, in a drunken brawl, he fatally stabbed another roomer in the neck.

Now Sun Hong Jun stood before three judges and tried to explain that the killing was an accident. The judges wore military-style uniforms bearing the balanced-scales symbol of justice. After Sun told his story, an assistant judge held up a knife and flicked it open. It gleamed as she asked, «How did you hold it?" If he had begun the fight with an open knife, she said, the killing was no accident. If Sun was found guilty of deliberate murder, he could be executed. The judges, I later learned, were merciful, sentencing him to 15 years in prison.

During a break in the trial I glanced out a courthouse window and saw banners and balloons waving on a building across the street. It had been a theater for the military police. Now it was the Marco Polo Club, a disco that would have its grand opening that night.

The club, its dance floor and balcony jammed, opened to a blare of music and a spectacular barrage of laser beams. The club's owners cut a red ribbon on the stage, which filled with shy-looking models in skimpy bathing suits. The mayor was supposed to have cut the ribbon, but he had sent his regrets because China had just decreed a new anticorruption law prohibiting even an appearance of impropriety.

The club's principal owner, a former army truck driver, had parlayed a used-car business into a host of enterprises, the disco being the latest. Harvey Hsia, a tall, fast-talking entrepreneur from Taiwan and Los Angeles, had designed the club and brought in the Taiwanese technicians who wired it. In a central control room, flicking switches with white-gloved hands, they ran the complex system that transmitted music videos to monitors in plush private rooms. A night of fun and videos in the Marco Polo could cost a patron about what a typical worker in Urumqi earned in a month.

Over the rim of his champagne glass Harvey looked at the laser-lit bedlam and said, «A guy named Marco Polo came here and then went back to Venice and wrote a book telling all about the gold and silk around here. And everybody in Europe wanted to go to Asia. And that's what we want. So we named it after him."

Marco polo's travels took him to the sun-scorched southern half of Xinjiang, where the Silk Road, a web of caravan routes, shifted like the sands of the Taklimakan Desert. The two main routes looped around the desert, converging at Kashgar. Through Kashgar's gates passed the peoples, the riches, and the ideas of East and West. Buddhist monks took the roads eastward, carrying images that artists later painted on the walls of caves near Turpan and elsewhere. Still later, Islam traveled along with the caravans, and fervent converts defaced the Buddhist images in the caves, believing that they obeyed the will of Allah.

Reza and I often followed those old caravan routes, covered now with highways or, more often, dirt roads. This land's barriers-the mountains of eternal snows, the endless deserts-defy road builders. Even a highway is no guarantee of a smooth ride. One day, as we were driving along a cliffside highway, snowmelt cascaded from a mountain and washed out the road a few yards before us. Long lines of cars and trucks built up until the torrent eased and we could all make our way across the watery trench.

Countryside families who live close to a highway can sample modern life. Wires carry electricity, giving light and television to mud-brick houses scattered along the roadside. People can take buses to village markets, schools, jobs. But people who live deeper in the countryside live in the past. I learned this one day when we gave a lift to a Kyrgyz family-a mother and father with their nine-month-old baby boy-who had been waiting for a bus until we appeared.

About 12 miles down the highway the mother gestured for us to turn onto a dirt road that went past a school, police compound, and a few other buildings. The curving road went on for another two miles across barren, rocky ground and ended at a meadow dotted with grazing yaks. We had entered a vast valley edged by a massive mountain, more shoulder than peak, its flank half-buried in sand. The meadow had been touched by spring, and at that seam of whitish sand and faint new green was a village. The low houses, strung along the base of the mountain, looked as if they had been there since the beginning of time.

Children ran toward us, astounded at what they saw. The village elder, in a long brown coat and fur hat, gravely welcomed us, speaking Kyrgyz to our Uygur interpreter, who understood because Xinjiang's Turkic languages are so similar. Women disappeared into their homes and quickly reappeared in formal clothes, white headdresses and flowery skirts. This was Sonobashi, a village of about 40 families, some of them living several miles away on a patch of grassland.

In the gray darkness of a house, warmed by a dung fire, the elder told us about the rhythm of the year. In June the families will live in pastures farther up the valley. In September they will return to Sonobashi, and the elder hoped that there would be electricity next winter.

The trip to Sonobashi was a detour on a journey to the lofty homeland of the Tajiks, who live in high valleys of the Pamir mountains. Descendants of subjects of Alexander the Great, they speak a Persian tongue and belong to an Islamic sect led by the Aga Khan.

The Pamirs, say the Chinese, form the roof of the world, a domain where the air is lean and people rare. At Karakol Lake, a young shepherd politely asked Reza where he was from. When Reza replied Paris, the boy asked how many sheep he owned.

The highway climbed farther, then dipped. We turned off and bounced along a rock-strewn dirt track that clung to a ridge high above a swift-flowing river.

After a few miles the track pitched down to the floor of a narrow valley. A camel loped by, carrying long-grass fodder that would be bartered in one of the villages strung along the valley.

The road vanished on the rocky valley floor before reappearing to climb another ridge. Our ride abruptly ended at a half-built bridge. When we walked across it, dozens of people materialized from a village. A horseman rode off to find a donkey for our gear, and soon, with an ever growing convoy, we hiked along a canyon about 8,200 feet above sea level. The white wall of the Pamirs filled the V ahead.

Two miles down the canyon Jafargul, our Tajik host, greeted us. A tall fur hat topped his bushy red eyebrows and freckled face. Shy but warmly gracious, he led us to one of his family's houses, which spilled down a hill near a stream. They were made of the usual mud bricks, but slathered with finer mud to make smooth walls. I stepped inside the house nearest the stream. Carpets-mostly red and black in geometric designs-hung from the walls. As in Kazak, Kyrgyz, and Uygur homes I had been in, this one had a kang, a raised platform covered with rugs. This Tajik version ran around two walls. Here we would eat and, under piles of colorful quilts, sleep.

Through an archway I could see the kitchen. Jafargul's wife, daughter, and daughter-in-law worked at an adobe stove formed from corner walls. Kettles, filled with water from the stream, sat before a fire blazing at the bottom. A large pan covered the opening at the top. The women wore pillbox-shaped brocaded hats draped with white veils that framed their faces. Children, from toddlers to a teenage boy, darted in and out, sometimes helping with chores, sometimes ogling us.

Men drifted in from other farms, and we talked about life in this secluded valley, where for generations they have grown wheat, raised sheep, and ridden horses. The fathers and grandfathers around me said they knew that their children and grandchildren did not want to stay here, but stay they would. «People's life is close to the land and the animals," one of them said. «If the children go, there is no one to take care of it. If someday the social system finds a way to give security to the old, then the children will feel free to go."

On another night, at a restaurant under the trees a few miles outside of Kashgar, I talked to a group of Uygurs. There were no tables and chairs. We sat cross-legged on the board-covered springs of an old brass bedstead, an imitation of the kang. We dined on strong tea and hand-pulled noodles mixed with bits of lamb and vegetables. The talk was cautious. No one spoke of the future. No one wanted to answer my questions.

Out of the shadows came the soft, slow-paced sound of a Uygur singing and strumming his long-necked rawap. It was a love song, I was told. A Uygur interpreter tried to translate-«He is sad. He is waiting…." The interpreter shook his head. I should just listen and not worry about understanding the words.

We soon were back on the road to Kashgar. In the headlights we could see dozens of donkey carts piled high with spindly firewood for Uygur ovens.

Next morning I saw the carts again, caught in the frenzy of Kashgar's Sunday bazaar, touted as the largest market in central Asia, a square mile of tent arcades and open-air stalls. At least 100,000 people jostled with one another to buy live chickens and caged songbirds, spices and shrieking stereos, red silk dresses and jeweled knives, firewood and bleating sheep, horses and camels.

I stopped by a baker who was kneeling on a platform next to an open-topped oven. He formed dough into round shapes and sprinkled sesame seeds and water on them. Then his upper half disappeared as he dipped into the oven to slap the circles of dough onto the inside wall. In minutes he dipped into the oven again and removed … bagels! At least that was what they looked and tasted like. Uygurs call them girde nan, round bread. I bought them frequently, and each bite increased my admiration for Uygur civilization.

The Sunday bazaar, a tradition perhaps as old as the Kashgar oasis, is shrinking. Banks and office buildings are crowding out the stalls. The economic boom has not spared Kashgar. At a factory full of Uygur women sewing and embroidering tourist souvenirs, I saw a sign: TIME IS MONEY. EFFICIENCY IS LIFE. The sign jarred me because, as I walked Kashgar's alleys, I often fell under the spell of the ancient place.

The Islamic feast of Qurban was one of those times. It commemorates the story of Abraham: the divine dispatch of a celestial sheep as a substitute when Abraham was about to sacrifice his son. In every home a man killed a sheep, and the women laid out an array of special breads and sweets. It was a day of families keening at brown-earth tombs, of men and boys praying and later dancing around the great Id Kah Mosque, of people gently tugging strangers like me off the street to share festive foods in homes humble and grand.

Islam has its own style in Kashgar. I saw more veiled women on the streets than I had seen in the north. Here, though, women nonchalantly flip back their thick brown veils when they want to examine prospective purchases. Some veiled young women walk about the markets in high heels and knee-length skirts. Most of Xinjiang's Muslims are Sunni, whose religious practices differ from those of the more militant Shiite Muslims of Iraq and Iran. But there is a new militancy in the alleys of Kashgar and other Uygur cities along the fringes of the Taklimakan Desert.

Because I was always escorted by Chinese officials and could use only official translators, I could not talk to just any Uygur in Xinjiang. But, back in the U. S., Uygur exiles said that three issues had fueled desires for independence there: the massive migration of Han into Xinjiang, the use of the province for testing nuclear weapons, and the exploitation of Xinjiang oil, which local residents view as their property.

Since 1964 China has been exploding nuclear weapons in Lop Nur, a wasteland where an Indo-European civilization flourished 2,000 years ago. Chinese archaeologists who dug at Lop Nur in 1979 found the mummified corpse of a woman with dark blond hair.

Reza and I had hoped to go to Lop Nur, but Chinese officials, without mentioning the nuclear test grounds, ruled out a trip to the site, where the mysterious city of Loulan vanished more than 1,600 years ago. Although wide swaths of Xinjiang remain closed, we were allowed to visit Turpan, where the spectacular Flaming Mountains rise over the lowest place in China, and the Tarim Basin, where scorching sands enshroud ancient cities and a modern treasure: an enormous underground pool of oil.

Along the highway to Turpan the land was flat and lifeless. Seen through a scrim of shimmering heat waves, the bloodred mountains did seem afire. Nearing Turpan I asked my reluctant guide to detour through the choking dust of a rutted road. It led to a bowl of dry, cracked earth where once there had been a lake nearly 25 miles long. Here, 505 feet below sea level, is a spot where water vanishes under a relentless sun.

We made a spine-pounding return to the highway and resumed the trip to Turpan. A hazy line of green appeared in the distance, just as it must have appeared when travelers neared this junction of the silk caravans more than 2,000 years ago.

Turpan, a major center for grapes, melons, and other fruits, is greened by water from karez wells, shafts sunk along a mountain slope and connected to form a subterranean canal. The hidden water, shielded from evaporating sun for much of its journey, flows into irrigation ditches that serve Turpan's bountiful fields. Local Uygurs call the ingenious irrigation system their underground Great Wall.

South of Turpan and the Tian Shan is Xinjiang's most forbidding realm, the Tarim Basin. The heart of this vast depression is the Taklimakan Desert, a place that can kill with heat or with cold. But there are treasures here, and so the seekers come. China, thirsting for oil, is tapping the Taklimakan, which, by Chinese estimates, holds 74 billion barrels of oil-three times the proven U. S. oil reserves. Archaeologists venture into the Taklimakan in hopes of finding lost civilizations that lie beneath the sands.

To reach Tarim No. 4 Field, a major production center, we took the Oil Road, which tamed the Taklimakan. The journey began at the northern fringe, south of Korla, where desert poplars struggled out of the stony soil. The Chinese call the poplars the trees that never die, for even in death they may stand for a century. Soon the roadside thicket thinned out, giving way to clumps of spiky tamarisk and camel thorn. In pure desert now, the highway coursed straight through the sea of sand. To keep nearby dunes from burying the road, workers had planted a wide net of hardy reeds along the roadside. The net clamps down the sand when winds whip through the dunes.

We passed under an arch that said «Fighting the Sea of Death» and, 136 miles down the highway, reached Tarim No. 4 Field, site of many of the 360 successful wells thus far drilled in the great Taklimakan oil quest. Spread across hundreds of square yards of desert were trucks, oil drums, and a jumble of trailer-like boxes that house some of the 5,000 workers enlisted in this branch of China's oil army.

Xu Fu Chen, the tall, briskly confident manager of the No. 4 command post, hurried us into one of the faded green boxes and closed a hatch against the whirling sand. On the hottest day he recorded here, the temperature was 104°F; on the coldest, minus 22°F. «My men worked on both of those days," he said. «There are sandstorms. You can't see farther than a meter. Then the cars stop, and the exploration stops. But the drilling always goes on."

That night the wind came up, and for most of the next two days we ate and breathed sand. At an outlying well the men who call themselves oil soldiers worked as if the sand whipping around them was not there. They are fighting a vital battle. If the oil is as plentiful as geologists say it is, China will have enough oil to fuel its soaring economy. If not, China will continue to be an oil-importing nation.

Xu, who came out of retirement to take charge at Tarim, talked patriotically about his job. So did other workers. Unlike so many people I met in Xinjiang, they did not talk about money. Near a small greenhouse, a gardener pointed to what looked like brittle desert weeds. «I want to grow flowers," he said, looking at his patch of sand as if it were a garden in bloom.

The 324-mile Oil Road ends at the southern edge of the desert, near an old oasis that the Chinese call Minfeng and local Uygurs call New Niya. Old Niya lies under distant sands. There often are two names for places in Xinjiang, where so much history is buried. The Chinese translate Taklimakan as «go in and you won't come out." Uygurs say that it means «homeland of the past," a lament for a lost civilization whose cities included Old Niya, where Reza and I went searching the Xinjiang desert for that homeland of the past.

Source: National Geographic Magazine, March 1996.