Kashgar

1 · POSITION

Kashgar, in China’s far west, was a trading post on the Silk Road connecting the Western world with Central Asia and the Far East, and among the more powerful Turkic kingdoms into the seventeenth century. It is entered here for its markets: the Sunday livestock market, called Central Asia’s largest, and the Yekshenba Bazaar it was once part of. [1, 2]

2 · THE SUNDAY MARKET

The livestock market stands on open ground at the edge of the town and claims a history of more than two thousand years. Trucks of goats and cattle arrive early; by noon horses and donkeys fill most of the arena, with sheep, camels and yaks, and Uyghur and Kyrgyz farmers haggle over them. [1, 2]

3 · THE BAZAAR AND THE MOSQUE

The Yekshenba Bazaar sells furs, hats above all, with textiles, nuts, figs and spices. A short walk away stands the Id Kah Mosque, called China’s largest, where as many as twenty thousand people may pray on a Friday; it was a much smaller building in the fifteenth century and has been rebuilt many times. [2]

4 · THE OLD TOWN

The mud-built houses of the old town, beside the bazaar, were reported in 2014 to be crumbling and to be the focus of a modernisation programme. The register records the market as the reason the town received travellers for two thousand years; what of the old town survives is a separate question. [2]

5 · ⚑ CANDOUR

⚑ Checked on 22 October 2026. No caravanserai receiving merchants from Europe was found in the sources read. The European traveller of the nineteenth century was received at Chini Bagh, the British consul’s house, which later became a hotel; the note now names it. The two-thousand-year history is the claim of travel writing. [1–3]