ABSTRACT
A few days before returning to England I went to see Bahargül.1 Her husband Dilshat, a social scientist himself, was also there. He had just returned from two months’ fieldwork in the Tarim basin and his advice for my research was: ‘If you want to know traditional Uyghur food, you should go to Southern Xinjiang. In fact, even Uyghurs themselves don’t know what their traditional food is. For instance, män pär, the dough in suyuq ash, comes from the Chinese mian pian. But you can’t say that to a Uyghur [ … ]’. ‘And what about sangza? They are originally Hui’ added Bahargül. ‘Han’, corrected her husband. ‘No, they’re Hui’ insisted Bahargül. ‘After all it’s the same’, said Dilshat, ‘how many years of history have the Han? More than 5000. And how many have the Hui? Only a few hundred’, implying that, for many Uyghurs, there is not such a big difference between the Han Chinese and the Hui (Chinese Muslims).2
