新疆 Day 4 - Miscellaneous

We had breakfast at our “5-star” hotel, and I was ridiculously happy to taste familiar things like steamed egg, fried dumplings and noodles in soup. I’m not usually picky about what I eat, but it was a welcome change from the strongly flavoured local food we had been eating thus far. After leaving the hotel, we drove out through Xin Jiang’s oil fields. The road was dusty and bumpy, and the view was simply a wasteland dotted with slowly moving oil pumps. After passing through that region, we turned onto small country roads and drove between endless fields of what the guide told us was cotton. Occasionally, there would be one or two fields of sunflowers, all the little yellow faces turned away from the road as though trying to avoid the dust.

We stopped in a small town to go to a fruit stall, where we bought a locally grown melon—similar to a cantaloupe but more elongated in shape—and the man selling it cut it in slices for us on the spot. While we were standing around eating, an extremely old man tottered up to look at us curiously, and the shopkeeper handed him a slice of melon for free. The old man smiled a little bit, ate it, and then settled down on his haunches by the side of the road for a cigarette.

The guide told us that most of the villages in Xin Jiang were settlements that the Chinese government created deliberately in a previously largely unoccupied desert region. At the time, most of the locals were of ethnic minorities, and the government did not have enough control over the area. They sent in people of the Han ethnicity—what many Chinese consider to be pure— in large numbers, divided them up like army platoons, and settled them into government-owned lands to farm and develop the province as a service to the country.