Always wanted to visit Kashgar as well as the rest of the Tarim Basin, but sad I'll never get the chance.

There are multiple Uyghur Sarais littered across the high Himalayas from an era when commerce still passed on the back of a Yak

Highways like the G219, G314, the Leh-Manali, etc are all based on older trade routes from a bygone era, and now increasingly carry troops instead of tourists or commerce.

My friend did the KKH from Islamabad to Kashgar (at the very least Havelian to Tashkurgan) about 15-20 years ago. He may have some digitized photos.

Oh whoa! That's pretty dope!

Yeah his mom is from Swat and his dad was from Hasanabdal so it makes sense they started at Havelian lol

There is a fascinating 2019 photo essay of Kashgar that I link to in my post remembering my trip in 2004, when Kashgar looked a lot different from now (I include a few pics)

https://chadkohalyk.com/2019/04/07/kashgar-15-years-later/

Death to the dream of the American lawn!

Kashgar is significant in Turkic culture. The oldest comprehensive dictionary for Turkic languages was written by Mahmud Al-Kashgari in 11th century.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmud_al-Kashgari

Here are some photos I took in Kashgar in 2008: https://www.flickr.com/search/?q=kashgar&w=36101702059%40N01

And some stories from my visit: https://theporouscity.com/show.pl/1980?id=1980

Wonderful place. Unspeakable what's been done to the people there.

I was travelling through Xinjiang in 2007 and it was an amazing place to visit, although I didn't manage to travel down to Kashgar. I was in Turpan and noticed some signs on doors of Uighur houses and managed to find a foreigner who could read Chinese and translate for me. He explained it basically says "A good/loyal Uighur family lives here". Quite disturbing. Since I've been there several of the mosques have been torn down, built over, or shut down.

A recent Drum Tower episode (paywall) visited Xinjiang and talked about this:

https://shows.acast.com/drumtower/episodes/drum-tower-ramada...