'Drifters' breathe life into old city

URUMQI－The ancient part of Kashgar city, Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, is home to one of the largest surviving concentration of earthen buildings in the world.

Over the past decade, a group of young newcomers has settled there and injected vitality into the roughly 400-year-old town.

Guoguo, a former soft furnishing designer from Shanghai, is one of the "drifters".

After visiting Kashgar on a sketching expedition in 2018, he fell in love with the Old Town of Kashgar and decided to stay.

Now, he and his wife run a store selling self-designed handicrafts made using traditional arts and patterns.

He sees Kashgar, which was on the ancient Silk Road, as a living museum with a heritage that draws on both East and West.

His understanding of the city is evident in his art, which includes Uygur patterns printed on canvas, drawings of traditional dwellings on paper made of mulberry bark, postcards of local musicians playing the rawap－a stringed instrument－and the tambourine, and clay figurines of middle-aged Uygur men.

In 2019, together with other artists he founded the Urban Sketchers of Kashgar, a nongovernmental organization that aims to portray the changing appearance of the Old Town. Nearly 300 people have joined the organization, of which more than 100 are based in Kashgar.

In the olden days, more than 200,000 residents were crammed into basic, disaster-prone mud-brick dwellings that covered an area of about 8 square kilometers.

The Old Town's face-lift began in 2010, when local authorities invested over 7 billion yuan ($1.1 billion) in renovating the historical district.

Within the space of five years, 49,000 dilapidated houses were fixed up while preserving their original aesthetic.

Today, local residents not only have a safer, more comfortable life, but the renovations have boosted tourism and attracted new residents, like Guoguo.

Li Jianhui, who comes from Beijing, opened a 10-room hostel in Kashgar last year. "It's rare to have such a well-preserved city that embodies the cultural elements of ethnic minority groups in China," Li said.

Yu Xiao and Wang Yunwang, from the central provinces of Hubei and Hunan, respectively, are a couple. Yu runs a photography service for tourists, while Wang is a designer making traditional gold and silver jewelry.

"We see great potential for the tourism industry in the ancient city," Yu said.

In the first 11 months of last year, Kashgar received nearly 2.3 million tourists, up 183 percent year-on-year, with tourism revenue soaring by a whopping 486 percent. Many local residents have converted their houses into bed-and-breakfasts, restaurants or handicraft shops to ride the burgeoning wave of tourism.

Xinhua