Great laghman (لەغمەن) is well worth obsessing over. Hand-pulled and perfectly chewy wheat noodles are boiled, drained, and then topped with a hot stir fry of fatty mutton, garlic, tomato, and peppers with any seasonal vegetables. Check out my 2015 post on the topic if you want to learn more, or even make these at home. The noodles pictured above were perfect–it looked like a large plate of noodles, but I devoured them in an instant. They were so good. While laghman is one of the most delicious and ubiquitous foods of Uyghur Xinjiang, I was actually on a self-imposed mission to explore the foods that I knew much less about. Because of that goal, this was one of my only laghman experiences during my whole trip earlier this year in March. That said, my subsequent meals and snacks were no less intriguing.

Regular readers of this blog will be at least somewhat aware that the foods of Xinjiang (and adjacent Muslim regions just to the east) represent a fascinating mix of cultures. Turkic and Persian Central Asia, China, Russia, Tibet, and Mongolia all meet and mingle in this vast region famous for its own legendary agricultural products to forge a delectable culinary landscape.

Much to my dismay, my long-anticipated food trip return to Kashgar’s Old City was met with many closed restaurants, empty food stalls, and boarded-up storefronts. It seemed like half of the bustling businesses in the Old City were now closed or shuttered. The streets were unusually devoid of activity, aside from the parts that were adjacent to the streets with roving police vans with their blaring sirens and soldiers conducting military drills. Ever since the neighborhood’s streets were closed to car traffic a year or so ago as police checkpoints were installed on every block, far fewer people are out selling things and far fewer people are out buying things too.

Bughra Uyghur foods. Closed and derelict.

Qoy koshi ugre foods (mutton noodle soup), closed.

Adilbek’s “western fast food” restaurant. Looks like it might still be operating, but was padlocked while I was there

Among the small handful of open restaurants that I found upon my arrival, one small restaurant seemed to be doing a brisk business. I went up to the locked doors and pressed the doorbell to be let in. Inside customers were quietly eating, keeping largely to themselves with few rare conversations. The waiter directed me to an empty chair at a shared table with an elderly woman and her son and brought me a teapot and bowl. “Nime yeysiz?” he asked. I responded with a dish that I had been dreaming about for a long time, which was also happened to be one of the restaurant’s specialties. “Öy leghmini yeymen–I’ll have the home-style laghman.”

“Teweruk ta’amliri”, a welcome sight and one of a handful of small restaurants operating in March on Nobishi road. Note: this image is from the morning after, the boy is preparing steamed breads outside for morning/lunch service while watering the street (a neighborhood initiative to fight dusty streets)

I was first introduced to the wonders of Uyghur food with travels to Xinjiang in the late 1990s, a time that followed a period of great economic and political opening that nurtured a flourishing intellectual and artistic curiosity throughout the PRC. Printing houses even in rural provinces were publishing new books like crazy, and you could find very interesting scholarly and layman works focused on all sorts of topics, including Uyghur culture and history, both in Chinese and in Uyghur. It was a thrilling time to be there—a time when anything seemed possible. Socially outgoing Uyghurs would often initiate conversation with a cheery “hello!” in English. I found that if I engaged in conversation, that undoubtedly would lead to the famous Uyghur hospitality: invitations to meals, drinks, and even home stay situations. Those extremely positive memories are part of what drove me to do Central Asian Studies in graduate school.

I knew that this trip would be different. The social and political climate in southern Xinjiang has been deeply affected by the “Strike Hard”-related police/military surveillance, as well as by the detainment and forced migrations of a substantial portion of the population. What I didn’t know was how widespread these effects would be, and how much they would influence daily life for Uyghur locals, and even their interactions with tourists like myself.

Kashgar’s night market, summer 2010

After I finished my plate of noodles, I took a long walk and ended up at Kashgar’s famous night market. The last time I visited in 2010, the market was alongside Liberation Road (Jiefang Lu), and it was thrilling—I was excited to return. Now the market has been relocated to a courtyard further down Orda Ishik Road (欧尔达西克路). It was clearly moved and modified to fit the “tourist village” redesign that the Old City has been undergoing for the past decade or so. The vendor stalls were built with identical styles, and they were placed together in a small labyrinth meant for tourists to explore. There were very few locals eating out at this market (unlike my trip in 2010), but there was a small handful of Chinese tourists as customers.

Sadly, only about half the stalls were occupied with vendors, and some of my favorite night market foods weren’t even there. I enjoyed what was there in any case, the offerings of opke-hesip ئۆپكە – ھېسىپ (boiled and chopped stuffed lungs and sausages) and hoshang خوشاڭ (pan fried meat pies), as well as freshly squeezed pomegranate juice:

I noticed something curious with the opke-hesip vendor. The butcher knife he used to cut up the offal pieces was locked with a chain to the bench. I noticed other vendors had the same setup. This, it turned out, was a new policy for food vendors (as well as butchers) as knives are under strict control throughout the province and are treated as weapons.

I didn’t capture an image of the empty stalls, but someone who came back to Kashgar just after I left, Gene Bunin, commented on that, and the lack of that most famous Uyghur dish polo in a Facebook post (see here for my 2014 post on that dish, with a recipe):