Almost eponymous with Kashgar is its famous Sunday Market, which for centuries has played center stage to the art of buying and selling since the days of the ancient Silk Road.
Though perhaps no longer a stopover for travel weary merchants, Kashgar, and particularly it’s Sunday Market, still attracts thousands of farmers from surrounding villages who come the city to sell their produce and animals.
It is said that Kashgar’s population increases by 100,000 every Sunday for the market, which perhaps is true in the summer months when the warmer weather is more inviting and the day has an earlier start.
In the heart of winter, however, things don’t get started until well after midday Beijing time (about 10 am local time) when the sun is finally high enough in the sky to provide both warmth and light. At least two or three time zones to the west of Beijing, Kashgar runs on a local time more attuned to the city and the rising and setting of the sun despite the official decree of Beijing clocks being the official time for all of China.
However, regardless of the cold and delayed start, thousands of men and women (though perhaps not 100,000) make their way to the market to eat, socialize, haggle, shop, or get a shave.
Here, garlic sellers draped with ropes of garlic walk throughout the market, eager to make a sale. On a street corner, men discuss the quality and price of shoes.
Amidst the call of the vendors, women in all variety of scarves and dress come to inspect the goods and buy the necessities of the week to come.
Richly covered fabrics hang from stalls and against the mud-brick walls surrounding the market.
At the height of the day, the streets are so crowded with people that it’s easy to get swept away by the current of moving bodies as they steadily stream by the stalls.
With so many people walking through the market, its essential that the vendors help each other in keeping an eye out for thieves.
Locals will tell you that the market is not as traditional as it once was, and it’s easy to see why as whole sections of the market are devoted to refrigerators and other major household appliances.
Neighbor to stalls selling spices and nuts are stalls specializing in cheap plastic tack from, no doubt, the larger metropolises of the east.
It reminds one more of a cheap dollar store than an old, exotic market seemingly at the world’s end.
Nevertheless, the market, as with all of Kashgar, is still an excellent place to experience a culture more akin to Central Asia and the Middle East than China proper and where the art of buying, selling and haggling is as old as the city itself.
by FFrame
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