An ancient city, a flat skull and a disappearing way of life

Once the most populous oasis cities in the Uyghur Kingdom, Kucha (sometimes also known as Qiuzi or Qiuci), is home to a ruined city (Subash or Subashi - why do they have so many alternative spellings?), an old mosque and a distinctively Uyghur culture - for now.

Built in the shadow of the great Tianshan mountain range, the ancient capital of the Kingdom of Qiuci is split east and west by the Kucha River, but only the western portion incorporating the 5th century Zaoguli Buddhist temple is open to visitors. My guide book says that a recently excavated tomb revealed a corpse with a square skull, indicating the practice of flattening a child's skull with wooden boards - to what end, one may well wonder?

Back in the city of Kucha, all 22 of us in the group were seated around the most massive table I have ever seen and we were regaled with a seemingly endless procession of dishes, including snow peas, celery, beans, daikon, chicken, tofu, a delicious pastry bread, dumplings, french fries (!!), steamed fish, deep fried spring rolls, and rice. Accompanying the meal were pots of lightly fragrant chrysanthemum tea sweetened with rock sugar, and we finished off with slices of the delicious and ubiquitous honeydew melon.

Suitably fed and watered we ventured out into the old town to visit the mosque - a beautiful recent facade, though inside the prayer hall has seen better days. The paint is peeling off the doors and windows, the carpets look worn and frayed and the courtyard is cluttered, dusty and neglected. The deputy imam, a round bespectacled man with a ready smile explains the history and takes us into the adjoining court house. Up until the 1940's when state laws replaced the local shariah laws, this was where cases were heard. On display were the instruments for administering the punishments for various offences, the broadest of which was a leather sand-filled whip for the most serious crimes. Adulterers were buried up to their shoulders in sand and stoned by the aggrieved parties and others, presumably. Thieves had their hands chopped off, murderers had their throats cut and unmarried lovers had 80 lashes of the larger whip. If they survived that they were free to marry. Gulp!

 

After that rather horrendous show-and-tell, I left the others to look around the dusty exhibits and followed the sounds of mewing to a small courtyard to find a tiny kitten curled up on a rug next to a very large pumpkin!

Outside the gates a vigorous pumpkin trade was going on between several be-whiskered old gentlemen. The woman driving the vehicle wisely kept out of it and two brothers watched the proceedings with great interest. 

 

Despite the complimentary description of the different indigenous peoples mentioned in the plaque, there are signs of the progressive sinicization of Xinjiang.  It is a shame that the Uyghur way of life is slowly being eroded. From a balcony outside the courthouse we could see various traditional Uyghur homes in partial states of destruction. There is underway a deliberate re-housing policy and this explains the abundance of high-rise housing evident in the city surrounds. In a country with so much space, there seems little justification for destroying natural community housing in favour of ugly, nondescript apartment towers.

Still, on our way back from visiting Subash, we saw many traditional dwellings - homes with gated courtyards in which we could see glimpses of the enterprises carried out by the households. We saw a man leading his sheep into one, another had corn cobs stacked up ready to lay out into the open to dry and outside the gates were pyramids of watermelons, rows of walnuts, and giant wheels of flat breads laid out on tables.