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Twenty-something years ago, I took my first trip to the Xinjiang region of China.
One day, I wandered up a dry gorge in the Flaming Mountains outside the city of Turpan to visit caves carved into a cliff face centuries ago and decorated inside with colorful Buddhist murals. I was the only tourist there, and as I walked alone along the pathway from cave to cave, everything was perfectly silent – apart from one thing.
An old Uyghur man was playing a dutar, a traditional two-stringed instrument with a long neck, a kind of lute at the heart of Uyghur musical culture. He sat on a stool, plucking away, sending notes ricocheting against the rock and out into the narrow valley below. It was haunting and timeless, connected to a tradition that stretched back ages.
It was made poignant by everything else I’d seen in Xinjiang on that trip and a subsequent one a couple years later: the local culture was fast disappearing.
The cities of Urumqi and Kashgar, for example, were being rapidly reshaped. Block-by-city-block, traditional buildings in their mud-brick tans, so indicative of central Asian architecture, were being torn down and replaced by modern low-rises of metal and glass.
A few traditional buildings would be allowed to remain, it seemed back then – a madrassa and a mosque, perhaps – just enough to have an iconic local image for postcards, but nothing else.
The trend of cultural erasure intensified years later with the Chinese government’s “Strike Hard” campaign that aimed to “break their lineage, break their roots.”
The result has been crimes against humanity, including mass detention, forced labor, and cultural persecution against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang, a region which some Turkic Muslims refer to as “East Turkestan.”
In some parts of the province, entire Turkic families have been forcibly disappeared or torn apart, with the adults detained and the children held in state-run “orphanages” that aim to stamp out their culture and identity.
Another part of the Chinese government’s efforts to erase Uyghur culture in Xinjiang has been the changing of hundreds of village names that have religious, historical, or cultural meaning for Uyghurs. Authorities impose new village names reflecting crude, even offensive, propaganda – “Happiness” or “Harmony,” for example – or straight-up Communist Party ideology.
One place in the long list of village name changes stands out for me. There’s a village that was relabeled “Red Flag” in 2022. It used to be called “Dutar” – after the musical instrument.
