Nice review of a beautiful looking book: The Uyghurs: Kashgar before the Catastrophe

Photos are from 1998. Compare with the NYT photo essay from 2019 I linked in a post with some of my photos from 2004. What a place. 😔

chadkohalyk.com/2019/04/0…

@chadkoh Thank you for sharing these stories of Kashgar. How very sad how much it has changed and the way that it has changed. I feel for those people.

I visited Kashgar in 1989 while traveling the Karakoram Highway from Pakistan to China. I’ve recently started going through my slides, which are in a mess, but will search deeper for slides of time in Kashgar. A group of us did get arrested for staying with some local people in the mountains outside of Ürümqi, though things felt relatively tame back then and none of us, our hosts or us, got into much trouble.

@crossingthethreshold That sounds amazing. There is probably a historical project out there that we could submit our photos and slides to in order to preserve the past. If you find one please let me know!

@chadkoh Ditto if you come across somewhere. Seeing your post has made me see my photos in a different light, or should I say the possibility of some of them. I was just a young person backpacking and exploring the world back in 1989. Now it looks as though something that I took photos of has potentially become a record of something that sadly no longer exists.

I think as well of other travelers that I crossed paths with. What did they record?

@crossingthethreshold I think of the guides I had... and what their life might be like now. They were really honest with us once we were out in the desert, away from prying eyes.

@chadkoh Those are awesome pictures, thank you for sharing. The plight of ethnic minorities in China is awful, especially for Uyghurs