Tomb of Mahmud Kashgari

Mahmud Kashgari was an 11th-century Islamic scholar and a cunning linguist who wrote a dictionary of the Turkish language in Arabic, in addition to recording loads of historical and cultural arcana. 

Kashgari's tomb is located a few kilometers from downtown, but still well inside the city limits of Kashgar. 

One thing that leaped out at us here, as it did at other historical sites and in the city as a whole, was the comparative disrepair of the place. Whatever funds were tapped to create the gleaming museums and spotless cultural attractions of Shanghai, Beijing and Xi'an have clearly not made their way to Kashgar. Here, the stairs were crumbling, the wall tiles and flooring was cracked, and dust balls skittered around the courtyard. 

The tomb itself held several of Kashgari's works -- sadly, the Chinese government doesn't allow Muslims to have these books in their homes, so his teachings are here, literally locked away from the people. 

Visiting sites like this reinforces just how far we are from the Pacific and all things I think of as "Chinese". It looks and feels like a different country. Evidence of this friction is everywhere.