ABSTRACT
In the summer of 2016, during a two-week visit to Xinjiang, I travelled up the Karakoram Highway from Kashgar to Tashkurgan in the company of two colleagues. Not long after the Gez canyon checkpoint, upon reaching the high plateau that would lead us to Karakul Lake, we made a short detour to visit a new village to which a few hundred Kyrgyz have been recently resettled. The outline of the village followed a familiar pattern, with concrete houses built in orderly fashion along straight roads, each separated by a concrete wall enclosing a small garden. To the southernmost edge of the village a few buildings were meant for livestock, which families were prohibited from keeping in their own yard for “hygienic” reasons. Not unlike the new villages in the Dulong Valley described in Chapter 3, the Kyrgyz village in Xinjiang also featured Party offices, a building for communal activities with a basketball court, and a school. At the time of our visit the village was mostly unoccupied. Young men and women, as well as the livestock, were camped at higher altitudes, in the summer pastures, and would not come back until the change of the season. Driving through the village’s empty street we could not help but feel a distinct sense of desolation.
