Xinjiang: Urumqi and Korla

I am now in Korla, which is actually the biggest city in Xinjiang (or at least the richest and most modern): they found oil and China Petroleum has a large complex here. We were in Urumqi yesterday, where we went to the Xinjiang Provincial Museum (very nicely done and had a fabulous collection). Then we went to the Uighur market, which was also very interesting and colorful. But I got my camera stolen out of my bag, so I felt very sad and stupid. :( :( :( I liked the camera and now it is gone forever, and it's the first thing I have had stolen in China. I feel really bad about it still.

We took the train last night from Urumqi (an overnight train). Originally we had planned to take the soft sleeper class, but missed our 8:15 pm train by 5 minutes. The next train was at 11:00 (good) but had only hard seat tickets available (bad, especially since it was an 11 hour trip). But otherwise we would have had to stay another day in Urumqi, and then would not have been able to leave until 12 the next day, arriving at 1 am in Korla, so we bought the tickets. The hard seats were very hard, and the train did not have any air conditioning.

Interestingly, they put us in a relatively uncrowded car, which was fairly clean: we thought that things weren't too bad until I happened to see the other hard seat cars, which were all full of Uighurs (our car had mostly Han, many of them college students): they were horrible, dirty, packed to the gills, full of smoke. When the passengers tried to open the windows, the train conductors came over and yelled at them, and then closed the window and locked it. They also continually gave directions via megaphone (they didn't do this in our car). Of course all the train conductors were Han. They treated the Uighurs like cattle, which I found really shocking.

This was not limited to the train, of course: there is a lot of tension here. The Uighurs have all the bad jobs (like street sweeping) and are obviously poorer: the Han officials often hassle them. They do not interact at all, and there are certain sections to each city for each group: for instance, there were no Han at all in the Uighur market in Urumqi. Yiyi talked to a Xinjiang-born Han on the train and he said that he had never talked to a Uighur until he went to college.

I managed (after standing in a sweaty huddle for 45 minutes in the train passageway) to upgrade our tickets to hard sleeper. This meant we got beds and were relatively comfortable, which was very fortunate indeed. So we weren't in a bad state this morning, and after checking into our hotel, hired a taxi out to the sand dunes at the beginning of the Karakorum desert. There is an oasis there, and it was really incredible to see the division between decididous green poplar trees and sand dunes. I had never seen a sand dune (besides at the ocean) before. They are very beautiful. Tomorrow we will go to a nearby lake, and then take an overnight train from Korla to Kashgar, so as to be there on Sunday and see the famous market.