Kashgar Travel Guide

There is no crowded and noisy place in Kashgar, Xinjiang of northwestern China, where the local people say that if you haven't been to Kashgar, you haven't been to the Xinjiang region. The old city of Kashgar is a pure Uyghur town, and you can always hear the prayer of Almighty Allah from the mosque tower when you're standing on the top of one of the yellow earth buildings in town. Uygur merchants are unlike the ordinary businessmen. They are so quiet and they don't shout loudly to sell their merchandises on the streets, because people are very familiar with all the things that they are selling.

Well, the city is very colorful also. It is because the pretty Uyghur girls are wearing vivid-colored clothes and hair decorations. Their colorful fashions contrasted the silence and religious atmosphere in Kashgar. If you are standing at the crossroad, the very tranquil mood might make you lost yourself in this exotic area!

Geography

The Kashgar area is located at the southwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the western frontier in China, with the majestic and scenic Tianshan Mountain in the north, lying on the Pamirs Plateau in the west, neighboring the Kunlun Range in the south and bordering the dangerous and famous Taklamakan Desert in the east. The total area of Kashgar takes up about 162,000 sq. km in which the oasis zone occupies around 27,400 sq. km. The administrative area of Kashgar consists of one municipal city and eleven counties.

Kashgar has been one of the oldest and most fertile oasises in the western part of the Tarim Basin since ancient times. With rich of natural resources such as abundant sunlight, underground water and arable land, so the area is so good for cultivating crops and plants like wheat, maize, cotton, barley, highland barley, rape, sesame, peanuts, flax and fruits; as well as many kinds of mineral and having great reserves of natural gas resources.

The geographical sceneries in Kashgar are very eye-catching like deserts, oasises, snowy mountains (Mount Kongur is the most notable), glaciers, rivers (Yarhant and Kashgar Rivers) and virgin forest fields.

Climate

At the heart of the Eurasian landmass, the four seasons are very distinctive in Kashgar, but the extreme weathers are quite seldom. It mainly belongs to the continental temperate climate zone, and greatly varied with topography as plain, desert and mountain climates. Kashgar's mean annual temperature about 11.7 degrees Celsius, and the lowest recorded temperature is -24.4 while the highest is 40.1 degrees Celsius; having abundant sunshine and around 224 day-length of frost-free period with annual rainfall about 150 mm.

Population

Having a total population of 3.5 million, the Uyghur nationality takes up 90 per cent while the Han Chinese 8 per cent and other thirty ethnic minorities account just 2 per cent of the whole population in Kashgar. Among the total population, 80 per cent are living in the rural areas. With such a special population structure, Kashgar is having very different look and feeling from other places in China.