The horses were ridden by young men who took pride in their churning of dust and wild yelps as they flailed their whips. The smells of the bazaar, dust, dung, and humanity, hung in the air. Older men cleared a path for the riders who dashed up and back to show off the horseflesh being sold. Young boys scurried along the perimeter, occasionally daring to dash across the path of the oncoming horses. On this side of the Sunday Market, it was 95% men, only a few of whom were buying and selling. The rest were there for the show. I wandered over to a section where there were camels. “About two dozen altogether, a few big fuzzy ones, a couple of suckling babies, a herd that turned to stare at us.”
No traveler comes to Kashgar and misses the Sunday Market. I had walked in the Forum and the Colosseum in Rome, gingerly negotiated the smooth stones in the Khan el Khalili Market in Cairo, traversed the Cardo of Jerusalem, now under the street level, and had marveled at the tiny shops in the Covered Market in Istanbul. But this market had not yet met the twentieth century. The men wore clothes similar to the ones their fathers and grandfathers had worn, they flocked to the horse show and the camel market as their forebears had done. They listened to the shouts of the sellers in the same language that had been used for centuries. I had wandered into a time warp and I knew it. There was a thrill to the whole day, to the entire place. Tens of thousands of people gathered as they had for centuries. This was not a place for tourists from New York or London or Paris, but a living market where peasants from the countryside came to trade their goods.
I first went to the Sunday Market in November 1987. It had started as a cool day and I had worn many clothes. At noon I was down to the last layer, a black, long-sleeved turtleneck and I longed to take it off. The sun was bright and I wondered at the clothes worn by the locals. All of them, except for the young men, wore many layers of traditional clothes. I ran into a few foreigners, including a couple from our hotel, but the thousands of people were here on business, or maybe to have a break. Nick Danzinger, who was the “first outsider to enter China over the Karakoram in thirty-five years” in 1984, described the approach to the market. “One could hardly move for the traffic, and there must have been thousands and thousands of people milling and shoving while avoiding the flow of carts. Drivers stood up and constantly shouted: ‘Posh! Posh! – get out of the way!’ as they nudged their carts forward to the river bank where the ‘car park’ was – hundreds of carts in ordered rows, their shafts all pointing heavenwards like the barrels of field guns.” He continues on at length to describe baking bread, what people wore, and the organization of the market. He described the section where cloth was sold, where clothes were sold, and hats from various ethnic groups were displayed. There was a section for produce, fruits, vegetables, bundled and loose. An entire street was lined with kitchens making fried, boiled and baked snacks and were fronted with tiny stools and benches for customers to sit. Also, the fact that as far as he knew, he was the only foreigner In Kashgar, besides a Chinese-American tourist on an escorted visit.
Kashgar has been a crossroads for over two thousand years and as such, has always had a market. Emperor Wu sent an envoy, Zhang Qian, who commented on the prosperous market. Kashgar was a mainstay on the ‘Silk Road’ and so most travelers passed through. More likely, they came to sell their goods, both from the east and from the west, as almost no one was a through traveler. Marco Polo was an exception, although he never made it to Kashgar, as he took a more northerly route. No one has been sure exactly where the market was, but by the late twentieth century, the site of the Sunday Market was east of the Tumen River at a place called Aizilaitie Lu. It was a vast area, and each kind of product had its own section. We in the twentieth century think that Costco or Target offers variety, but because most products are hand-made or home grown, there is an incredible variety and each hat maker, gardener or raiser of sheep can show his own handiwork.
Although the market’s history has been lost in time, by 1993, it had become an every day market. The livestock had been moved to a different location, to keep the smells and dust away. Early travelers, those in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, did not mention this vast and exciting place, but it would have been ‘as expected.’ Markets in Asia and the Middle East would have been similar and so, this place would not be an attraction. And of course, the population would have been much less. Estimates in the late twentieth century vary from 100,000 to 150,000 on a Sunday. Presumably, having an every day market would have taken the pressure off the crowding. At some point, the Chinese built fences, gates and a large administration building with a monumental gate.
Every time I visited Kashgar, I made sure to be there on a Sunday and took in the market. The last time I was there, in 2018, my companions were less than enthusiastic and only wanted to see and get out as soon as possible. The smell of the animals was disgusting, the cooked meals unappetizing and unhygienic, rows and rows of stalls with cheap cotton cloth uninteresting. But I craved the experience. I bought a number of ‘doppas’, traditional embroidered Uyhgur hats and at the animal market, a whip made from leather and bone, probably a sheep leg bone.
Since that last visit, I have found out that the building has been torn down, and the rows of rickety shops cleared away for new clean stalls and shops. A twenty-first century market will emerge. Tourists will presumably enjoy this market more, not having to push their way through the 100,000 other patrons, not negotiate the pushing donkey carts, not hear the raucous cries of ‘Posh, posh.’ And these new visitors will have no need to watch where feet step and can go to the market every day of the week. But I will remember when…
Bonavia, Judy, 1999. The Silk Road: Xi’an to Kashgar. Odyssey.
Danzinger, Nick, 1987. Danzinger’s Travels, Beyond Forbidden Frontiers. Flamingo.
Tredinick, Jeremy, 2012. Xinjiang, China’s Central Asia. Odyssey.
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