Postcard from Xinjiang

Only a postcard, and not a letter, as I’m a bit pressed for time. But who writes letters anymore?

Here’s the front of my postcard, a quick snap I took surreptitiously out the window of my cab. (The characters on the truck - more likely PAP than PLA? - read “The happiness of the ethnic people is our desire”.)

The stamp mark in dated Kashgar, 25th June. Not bad for the mail to arrive only a few days later, right?

And on the back I scribble in a spidery, cramped scrawl:

That truck is part of China’s crackdown in advance of the one year anniversary of Xinjiang’s July 5th riots*. The nerviness this kind of police presence creates reminds me strongly of Tongren, the Tibetan town with it’s own history of unrest, where I’ve just come from. But don’t think too much of it: for most of the population, life goes on just as it did before and will after. It’s a beautiful corner of the world, where the sun sets at 10pm (I should be two or three timezones before Beijing) and the old town feels more like my imagination of Persia than my experience of China. Maybe that’s why the truck is there. Wish you were here.

Now think of the act of blogging as me leaving the address space blank, and instead glueing my postcard outside a bus-stop somewhere, with a ‘p.s.’ inviting those who like it to make photocopies and glue them up at other stops.

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* This is point where I would despair at pen and paper, and wish I could link to the Himalayan Times story on this, giving the China Daily link too, for an alternative spin. Who knows, maybe in twenty years I can.