David Frodsham

Located on the Silk Road – which stretches from the Gulf to the Yangtze – Urumqi (pronounced Oo-Roo-Um-Chee) is a melting pot of cultures and peoples. One of the local dialects is Uyghur and is written in Arabic. Another is Russian. So the signs are not just in the usual Chinese & English, but often in Arabic and Cyrillic too. Historically this is a Muslim city, but the influx of Han (ethnically pure) Chinese in recent years has, as in Tibet, put the locals in a minority.

The food is Chinese, but reflects the ethnic mix and Muslim culture. Bacon for breakfast is made of beef for example rather than pork; many of the main dishes are made of lamb; there’s Russian Borscht on offer; Nan bread as found in Indian restaurants is made on every street corner; alcohol is available but not pushed and the locally grown fruit is served at every meal. I mentioned before that this should really be two or three timezones further west than it is, as China has a single timezone. So dawn is at 08:00 for example. The locals get round this in a very pragmatic way – they just shift everything by two hours. So people work from 10:00 to 19:00 for example, lunch is at 14:00 and the night market, which is the best place to go for dinner, opens at 21:00.

I am staying at a 5 Star Hotel called the Silver Star at a cost of RMB600 per night, which is not that cheap considering similar quality can be found in for example Germany at that price. It has 25 floors and is quite well equipped, with a bank, shops, swimming pool as well as conference centre. The room is a touch dingy, with inadequate lighting, smelly drains and connecting walls to the rooms on either side that have the acoustic dampening quality of Bible paper. There’s broadband, but it is so slow that it had to left on all night to download a 2MB email. The laundry service is of the usual high quality; each item comes back beautifully and individually wrapped in tissue-paper, held together by a sticker, with the hotel’s seal. The slight resistance to alcohol extends to the mini-bar, which has no beer or alcohol of any sort, but does have condoms, with the great strapline: “Be Love, Do Love”. The loo-paper holder brand is also noteworthy; it’s “Bum Han”. Han of course means Pure Chinese, so perhaps it could be literally translated as “Pure Chinese Bum”. On that limitless subject of Chinglish, I saw a couple of signs at a picturesque lake (more about the lake later), both promoting a boat ride to the other side. “Take the seat yacht and go from this” is perhaps clearer (although not a great ad for the lake) than the more confusing “The pleasure-boat rides the seat place”. Poor translation is not a function of development; after all in Nagasaki last weekend the warning label on my hairdryer said “Please do not use for the other purpose”. The mind boggles. Anyway, I digress; back to Urumqi.

Urumqi is in the Guinness Book of Records as the city in the world furthest away from any sea – about 2,500km. It’s the capital of China’s largest province, Xinjiang, which is mostly desert. There are mountains to the north near Russia, and a river running across the state, going nowhere. In its recent history, the province was the first conquered by Mao, who persuaded the local warlord to join the fledgling Red Army in about 1945. It became a regional military stronghold, and there was an influx of Chinese to build the Red Army, and who then settled.

Apart from its military and trading roots, Xinjiang’s economy is mostly agriculture focusing on fruit – especially grapes – and cotton. The conference is being held there because my Chinese host spent 5 years in the province in his youth, and developed an affection for it. On the first night we are taken to an enormous restaurant with stage show, including dancers, tightrope walkers, and singing. The stage backdrops show different mountain and river scenes. The dancing reflects the cultural soup: there are stretchy men doing Cossack-style Russian dancing; long-haired Kazak girls dancing with four bowls perched on their heads, the top one with water in it; and some Uyghur songs that many sang along to. I am told that the Han Chinese are shy people, so they like to have “ethnic minorities” to liven the party up. I’ve never been called an ethnic minority before, but it’s probably good for me! So an American and I are picked to go up on stage and help with the dancing. It’s bait and switch, though, as the luscious girl who persuades me to join her on stage passes me over to a rather muscular Russian man, who makes me copy his every dance-move. And move he certainly can. I’m still stiff from the experience, writing this two days later.

There is an outing to Tianchi (Heavenly) Lake, so called because it’s where the gods are supposed to come for their holidays… It’s at 2,000m altitude, and the locals live in round brightly coloured huts called yurts. Around the lake there are racks of local traditional costumes, which you can put on and be photographed with the lake as a backdrop. I think we should try that in Annecy: berets and striped crew-necked shirts all round.

After Tianchi we drive another few hours to the local development zone, where we look around an extraordinarily large cotton mill and spinning factory, all automated; a water conservation project; local military history museum (perhaps best described as “somewhat biased”, I can’t quite bring myself to describe the victory of the Communists in 1949 as “liberation”), culminating in a lecture from the local development chief (lots of graphs pointing upwards, not sure whether these measure sales, profits or pollution) and a lunch, complete with Karaoke. Fortunately the resident ethnic minority (me) managed to wriggle out of providing that entertainment. It’s all reminiscent of communist-era propaganda, but I suspect here there is real substance behind the claims. But why anyone would want to locate their business in this particular business zone, 2 hours from the local airport and 4 days by train from Shanghai is beyond me.

It’s been a great experience, but now for the longest part of my journey: Urumqi -> Beijing -> Hong Kong -> Johannesburg -> Cape Town -> Hermanus.