Kashgar (Kashi in Mandarin) was another hour and a half flight west from Urumqi. If by going to Kanasi we had travelled about as far north as we could get in China, certainly in the left half of the country anyway, then this was about the furthest west we could go. Inevitably we were met by another tour guide, this time named Hassan, who was Uighur and so looked about as Chinese as I did. As we wandered around the town on the first afternoon, though, this became less and less of a surprise. Hassan told us that 90 per cent of the townspeople were Uighur; there were hardly any Chinese people there at all. The spoken language was Uighur, and I wondered if I had finally found a town in China where I spoke Mandarin better than the locals did. Maybe I could give lessons.

              Most of the local industry involved farming, and it was not just in distance that we were so far away from Shanghai. The glitz and power of the skyscrapers in Pudong were in every sense a world away from the Central Asian-looking farmers living by dusty streets that I saw here as we explored.