Intizar is one of a number of restaurants offering traditional Uyghur food in more comfortable surroundings than you find in the streets. Much more ambitious is the Traditional Garden of the Western Regions, on the outskirts of town, which was opened in 2004 by a group of local entrepreneurs. A great complex of orchards, ponds, arbors, and pavilions, it is laid out and decorated in traditional Uyghur style. The main building has a spectacular carved-wood facade; inside, a banqueting room with walls of wedding-cake plasterwork can seat a hundred on cushions and rugs around a long table on the carpeted floor. Smaller parties can hire a pavilion, or dine on a carpeted platform under the fruit trees. There’s even an al fresco dining area before a stage set for performances of Uyghur music.
“Kashgar is an ancient city at the heart of the Silk Road, so we have many visitors from China and abroad,” says Abubakri, one of the restaurant’s owners, “but we didn’t have a single really good restaurant. That’s why we opened this place, to show the whole world the excellence of Uyghur culture and food, and the great hospitality of the Uyghur people.”
The restaurant specializes in Uyghur cooking, augmented by a certain amount of Chinese fare, and can serve a thousand people at a time in its scattered halls and gardens. We take our dinner at a table laid outside on a brick terrace, with a view of willow groves, pear trees, and vines. We begin, as always, with tea, flavored with a potpourri of spices including cardamom, pepper, cinnamon, and cloves. Our samsa are made in the traditional tandoor, but they are scattered with sesame seeds and the meat is unusually succulent. The kava manta (steamed dumplings filled with pumpkin, mutton, and onion) are sweet and juicy; and the läghmän are served in an attractive dark-glazed bowl. Lanterns and candles are lit as the sun sets, and we chat and drink tea into the night.
Beyond Kashgar, to the southwest, are nomadic lands near the borders with Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. For my last few days in the region, I head out there with a Uyghur driver, Hassan, a cassette of Uyghur dance music on the stereo, a watermelon and a few nan stowed in the back, filling the car with their seductive aromas of onion and sesame. We rattle along through the villages, stirring up a cloud of dust in our wake. To the right is a long jagged spine of mountains, their snowy peaks shining metal-white in the sun.
Soon we are driving along a riverbed where shaggy-coated camels munch on tufts of grass, and the Pamir mountains rise in pink-brown folds to their snowy summits. Shepherds tend great herds of goats, and clear lakes reflect the azure sky. Further on, there are yaks grazing on wide grasslands, where Kyrgyz herders have pitched their summer yurts. We visit friends of Hassan’s along the way: a Kyrgyz woman who invites us into her yurt for bowls of tangy yogurt, Tajik farmers who welcome us into their old courtyard house and ply us with home-baked nan and salted, milky tea.
When the sun is low in the sky we reach the last outpost of the old Chinese empire, the ancient town of Tashkurghan. We leave the car on the road and hike up to the deserted “stone fortress,” an ancient, crumbling edifice of earth overlooking a marshy plain. This was once a stopping-point for Silk Road caravans; now, traders and travelers rest here before crossing on the Karakorum Highway into Pakistan. To the east, some 2,000 miles away, lies Beijing, the Chinese capital; Baghdad is closer. I breathe in the clean mountain air and look toward the border, dreaming of tea and chopsticks, noodles and dumplings, kebabs and rice. This region is, as it has been for millennia, a melting pot of cultures, a way station between China and the West. And nowhere are the traces of those ancient paths of trade and migration more apparent than in its food.
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