Spatiocide as Spectacle, Part 3: Imperialist Fantasy-Making and the Symbolic Death of Old Kashgar
This is the final article in a three-part series. Follow the links to read part 1 and part 2. NB: some links in this article may not work due to PRC firewalls designed to keep non-Chinese IP addresses off Chinese government websites.
This three-part series traces the planning and urban design practices of the Chinese party-state as it “reconstructed” the Uyghur city of Kashgar over the last twenty years. Initial efforts centered on physical interventions that made the city more legible to the state. Subsequent projects worked on the symbolic level to estrange Kashgar from its residents and would-be Uyghur nationalists for whom the city was a touchstone. In this final article, I document the spatial transformation since 2014 of “Old Kashgar” (喀什老城) into “Ancient Kashgar” (喀什古城): a highly stylized city-scale historical reenactment set in the late nineteenth century.
This second transformation of the urban core in less than a decade has received far less attention than the more terrifying aspects of China’s ethnic-cleansing project in Kashgar, including the dense network of CCTV cameras that make use of facial recognition and pre-crime detection algorithms, ethnically segregated physical checkpoints on city streets, the omnipresence of Chinese flags in public space and on all religious buildings, and even the chains that keep food preparers’ knives secured to the wall. These dystopian innovations, however, are inseparable from the project of remaking Kashgar into a destination for patriotic middle-class Han tourists and the occasional McKinsey corporate retreat (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Typical security checkpoint on a street in Old Kashgar. Courtesy Gene Bunin, 2017.
In the context of China's new-build network of “re-education” camps, prisons, and factories of coerced labor, Kashgar’s city-scale panopticon, whose creation I described in part two, forestalled the sort of violence against the state that might resist cultural erasure. The drag performance of local Imperial history discussed here, though, aims to go further: to extinguish Kashgar’s authentic, modern culture so totally that the city can no longer serve as the cosmopolitan metropole at the heart of the Uyghur homeland. The former effort (2009-14) impeded resistance; the latter, if successful, moots its very premise.
There is an obvious logic to China’s invocation of the late Qing era. As James A. Millward lays out, the period following the reconquest of Xinjiang was the high-water mark of Imperial power in the newly created province of Xinjiang. The view from Beijing around 1870 was that decades of underinvestment and laissez-faire governance had created the conditions for a foreign warlord to successfully challenge the Qing and unite a vast territory under strict Islamic rule. That Yaqub Beg repelled Manchu forces northward from his base in Kashgar made the late-1870s reconquest of the city particularly symbolic. To avoid repeating its past mistakes, Qing enlarged its bureaucratic footprint and re-Sinicized Xinjiang’s built form through massive infrastructure projects. Put another way, the 1880s saw Imperial space and subjecthood reconstituted in tandem (Figure 2).
Figure 2. 1908 British intelligence map of Imperial-era Kashgar. Courtesy Duke University Libraries.
To twenty-first-century party elite, that era makes fertile symbolic ground on which to build a fascist imaginary. It also offers an irresistible justification for daily pageantry of costumed dancing minorities—a treat that was previously reserved for the lunar new year.
On Walls and Gates
Reconstruction work in and around the previously preserved neighborhood at the northeastern limits of the walled city (see Part 2) began almost immediately after Xi Jinping visited the region in May 2014 to personally re-shape local governance. By July 2015, when the newly designated “Ancient City Scenic Spot” earned the top designation in the national rating system for domestic tourist sites, the eastern limits of Old Kashgar had been entirely reimagined (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Kashgar with city wall in the foreground in 1915. Photograph by Percy Sykes. Courtesy Duke University Libraries.
The first phase of this round of redevelopment re-created the East Gate and the eastern and northeastern portions of the Imperial city walls, which had been demolished in the early 1950s for their connection to the twin evils of “Imperialism” and “Han chauvinism.” Ample visual evidence guided reconstruction: photographs by Carl Mannerheim from 1907 and Percy Sykes from 1915 offer panoramic views of Kashgar that include its late-Qing walls and the East Gate. In these photographs, the walls appear as massive mud-brick structures with parapets and embrasures at regular intervals. Unlike those in the walled capital city of Urumqi (then Dihua) in northern Xinjiang, the watchtowers had no grand pagodas to Sinicize the aesthetic. The reconstructed wall and East Gate are largely faithful to the original design (Figure 4).
Figure 4. East Gate of the reconstructed Imperial-era city wall, 2015. The flags represent the eight banners of the Qing military. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
If the walls and gate remake Imperial space, a new daily gate-opening ceremony rehearses Imperial subject-making. There are eight parapets in the rampart above the East Gate: one for each representative of the eight banners of the Qing military. On the tower below them, trilingual (English, Chinese, and Uyghur) signage welcomes visitors to the “Ancient City of Kashgar.” Although the procession varies, stills released by a local government website are telling. In this typical ceremony, Uyghur women appear first. The more modest ones, whose hands are positioned as they would be in a muqam, escort a sedan chair of some Qing bureaucrat. Then comes a second all-female group in low-cut and improbably bedazzled gowns doing what might only be described as a Uyghur can-can. When men finally appear, they are infantilized, flanking a cartoonish parade float depicting the very scene in which they are participating.
The “Chinese Temple” Between Symbolism and Spectacle
Figure 5. 1915 photo of Geng Gong Temple as viewed from the floodplain below. Photograph by Percy Sykes. Courtesy Duke University Libraries.
Reconstructing Imperial walls and gates inadvertently highlights the slippery relationship between “Chinese” as an imagined community and as a political category. The Qing, after all, were Manchu. In the present age of an increasingly strident Han ethnonationalism, patriotic tourism in Kashgar requires a narrative of political supremacy that is not just “Imperial,” but also explicitly Han (Figure 5).
Enter Geng Gong temple. The original structure, a simple, two-story wooden ancestral hall north of East Gate with a curved roof and broad eaves, was built in the 1880s. It commemorated what China (then and now) asserts as the origin story of unified Chinese control of Xinjiang: the defeat of nomadic tribes in the Tarim basin during the Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 CE). The symbolism was unambiguous: like the Han before them, the Qing’s military would fight to save Kashgar from nefarious forces beyond the gate, while its bureaucracy would engage in a civilizing mission to save the population from itself.
Labelled “the Chinese Temple” in a 1907 British spy map, the original Geng Gong temple was surrounded by mud walls and looked out onto the floodplain of the Tuman River. Built directly atop a cliff face, it had a scenic view of poplars and, to the immediate north, natural springs. Photos taken by a People’s Liberation Army photographer in 1950 show the site in disrepair but otherwise unchanged since its construction. It was demolished soon after (Figure 6).
Figure 6. Reconstructed Geng Gong Temple with expanded water feature, 2015. A viewing pavilion extends into the water in the style of a Song-era water garden. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
The twenty-first-century version nods to the original design. The ceramic barrel-tiled roof, for example, features faithful reproductions of decorative elements on its upward-curving corners. To its immediate north, however, is a five-story pagoda with no historical precedent. It mimics the design of the temple but is twice as tall, making its roof the highest point in the old city. Meanwhile, unlike other new sites, which variously advertise themselves with some combination of Chinese, English, and Uyghur, the signage here is only in Chinese. The temple itself features numerous couplets written by a decorated local calligrapher.
The temple complex is utterly and ostentatiously unlike anything else in Ancient Kashgar. Its high-gloss red paint invokes lacquer in the desert sun, and the form, decorative elements, and calligraphy make a stark and literal visual statement about the towering importance of a distinctly Han cultural legacy in Kashgar.
“The drag performance of local Imperial history . . . aims to . . . extinguish Kashgar’s authentic, modern culture so totally that the city can no longer serve as the cosmopolitan metropole at the heart of the Uyghur homeland.”
Decentering Uyghur Identity in the Festival Marketplace
Even the most dutiful patriotic tourists need a place to let their hair down after a day of monument hopping. Toward that end, a new shopping and entertainment district at the eastern limits of Ancient Kashgar was built in the shadow of the Geng Gong temple complex, alongside a massively expanded water feature named for the area’s natural springs, Jiulongquan (九龙泉) in Chinese and Brak Bekxi in Uyghur (literally “Nine springs”). Its landscape design is an homage to the Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE). This choice, too, is symbolically loaded: the Song is as known for its strong centralized bureaucracy as for its scientific advancements and quintessentially “Chinese” cultural legacy.
The revamped Jiulongquan is the brainchild of designers based in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou who were apparently charmed by the contemplative power of Song-era water gardens but dismayed by their lack of laser shows. During the day, the space invokes the famed gardens in Suzhou. A pavilion extending into the water and foot bridges offer viewing angles characteristic of, for example, the Master of Nets Garden. Similar, too, is the picturesque reflection of architectural features and garden scenery in the water. Here, in Ancient Kashgar, the water reflects Geng Gong Temple and its Sinicized surroundings, but, owing to a trick of angles, not the Uyghur city behind them. At night, however, the subtlety gives way to a futuristic light show that bathes the floodplain and nearby bars and restaurants in a rainbow of saturated colors. It is this space that the local government uses for catering large events such as a banquet for McKinsey executives in 2018, though more regularly it is simply used for al fresco nightlife.
Here and on nearby Impression Street (Yinxiang Jie 印象街), in-your-face nationalistic symbolism gives way to a very different form of cultural erasure. Uyghur culture becomes a bit of flair for a style of consumption and a use of public space that are profoundly and publicly in violation of Quranic practice. If there’s any sort of bright side, it’s that few Uyghurs are subject to direct participation in Ancient Kashgar’s haram leisure activities. Most of the bars and restaurants—like the equally new spate of “homestays” and B&Bs— are (no surprise) owned and operated by Han.
Thinking about these and other changes made since 2014, big questions remain. First and foremost: is this the end game for the state or will land-use strategies change yet again in response to some new external development? All evidence indicates that the few remaining authentic spaces will, sooner rather than later, be reconstructed to fit the broader political narrative and the demands of domestic tourists—or simply be erased.
One such site is Koziqiyar Beshi (Gaotai Jumin 高台居民), which has been essentially cut off from visitors and tourism development in recent years. Now, however, another Han firm from eastern China is planning to rebuild it, complete with homestays and dancing natives. Outside the city proper, it’s more of the same. The Apak Khoja mausoleum, a sacred, multi-layered, and profoundly important site in Uyghur history has recently been re-interpreted as nothing more than a shrine to the Fragrant Concubine: a Uyghur woman enslaved by the Qianlong Emperor of the Qing Dynasty as a spoil of conquest. Finally, satellite imagery now indicates that Kashgar’s Sunday bazaar, a critical market for a vast rural territory, is being demolished.
Whatever the future holds, it’s impossible to imagine the present regime pursuing anything that would dilute the narrative of Han cultural supremacy taming the frontier and its “exotic” population. This is especially true given that, if official data is to be believed, domestic tourism has attracted Han bodies and capital to the city to a degree that manufacturing—a previous strategy—has not.
Beyond all that lies the question of to what degree this decade-long project of spatiocide has diminished Kashgar’s symbolic significance as the urban heart of a vast Uyghur homeland. The only answer I can offer here is: let’s wait and see. Despite ample reason for pessimism—not least the million or more Uyghurs imprisoned for invented crimes—the persistent power of place and concerted international pressure that will hit the regime where it hurts offer some small ray of hope. Perhaps one day this question can be considered freely not only by Kashgaris in the Uyghur diaspora, but by those who remain in China.
Banner image: At Donghu Park, just opposite the southeast corner of Old Kashgar, flying pigs flank a statue of the Chinese character for “spring” (chun春). The installation celebrated the early-February arrival year of the pig in the Chinese lunar calendar, although satellite imagery shows that it remained in place through at least August. Courtesy Shutterstock, 2019.
Citation
Lauren Restrepo, “Spatiocide as Spectacle, Part 3: Imperialist Fantasy-making and the Symbolic Death of Old Kashgar,” PLATFORM, November 7, 2022
