MIR Corporation's Travel Blog:
Chinese Turkestan & Central Asia
Andrew Barron, MIR's Director of Scheduled Group Tours, visits the ancient Silk Road in Western China and the 'Stans with the Chinese Turkestan & Central Asia scheduled group tour. Read about his journey from Almaty to Urumqi, Kashgar and Bishkek. 
Day 6: Kashgar Sunday Market - The Real Thing
May 18, 2008
Today is Sunday, and that means the Kashgar Sunday Market. We started with a drive to the livestock section of the market. We arrived by bus, but it may as well have been a time machine. Despite a fair number of obvious tourists, the market is absolutely stuffed with local livestock handlers, purchasers, shoppers and, well, processors. You can literally purchase a sheep, walk down the row of stalls along the far edge of the open animal area, select a butcher, have the animal slaughtered, and take the meat back up the row to a restaurant booth. Other vendors are set up outside the livestock field, where you could buy a bridle to lead the animal to its fate, vegetables to throw in the pot with it, and a plate to eat it from. Some sellers were bringing their sheep, cows, camels etc. in by truck, but others were trailing cattle on leads or with well aimed use of a switch. No attention was paid to the travelers taking pictures except to occasionally give a warning shout when the stock was coming through. It was a noisy, odorous, and absolutely amazing place.
The livestock market no longer abuts the main Sunday Market, having been moved several years ago. So we drove back to the center of town, about 10 minutes, for a wander through the enormous market. Here the fixtures were a bit more modern, but the crowd, the variety, the mix of people and languages and the hustle and flow of the marketplace evoked a time hundreds of years ago. A few of our group members negotiated for candy, or hats, or spices, and that was just barely the tip of the iceberg. Any conceivable good, with the exception of beef on the hoof (for that you go to the livestock section from which we had just come), is available at the main part of the Sunday Market, and we could have literally spent three times longer here and still not seen everything.
We departed to Shache (Yerkent) after seeing some more of the highlights, and if Kashgar seems the middle of nowhere, we were now headed towards the edge.
Photos from this leg of the tour:
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