Next in the field-site profile series, is the city of Yinchuan, provincial capital of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, and its suburb of Najiahu.
The map below shows Yinchuan's location within the region. Perched near the Yellow River on the southern edge of the Mongolian steppe, and just to the west of the Chinese heartland, Yinchuan has always been a city on the fringes of traiditional China. During the Tang Dynasty (considered by many to be the height of China's cultural power between about 700-900) Yinchuan was a stronghold of the Western Xia, a people about whom precious little is still known (this is largely due to the fact that Ghenghis Khan and his armies subjugated the Western Xia and had the city of Yinchuan sacked in the early 1200s and then ordered most traces of the Western Xia to be utterly destroyed). Due to this location on the steppe, and in between the nomadic people who lived on the steppe and the comparatively settled Han in eastern China, the region has been a place of great cultural fusion and exchange. Islam took root here after the Mongol conquest, as interaction with Central Asia brought culture and trade into the area. Gradually, the Ningxia region became a stronghold of Chinese-Islamic (Hui) culture. When the new government of the PRC decided to give the Hui an autonomous region to govern in Ningxia in the 1950s, Yinchuan became the capital.
Ancient Yinchuan can still be seen in traces when examining the city's design. Like many Chinese cities, Yinchuan's urban grid overlays the fomer series of city walls that encircled the city (Incidentally, Piper Rae Gaubatz wrote an amazing book entitled, Beyond the Great Wall on how the cities of western China took their shape. It's worth looking for if you're into urban planning). The core of the old wall city is gone, but many of the landmark buildings remain, or have been reconstructed. In the center of town, visitors can still see the ancient bell and drum towers that once kept the city's time. More impressive still are the twin pagodas, 13 storeys tall, that still probably stand as some of the loftiest buildings in a city which really doesn't have too many towers. These buildings hint at Yinchuan's former character, but they also provide a strong contrast to its impending future.
The future for Yinchuan is in the a construction boom. Largely, the boom is taking place in a "new city" to the west of the former walled city of Yinchuan. To the west of town the streets are wider, straighter (and emptier), and the buildings are a little newer. Though they are linked by a strip of highway, the two parts of the city seem almost completely disconnected. In some senses this kind of division makes Yinchuan a difficult place to nail down. In effect, this city is a provincial capital. The new shopping malls with IMAX theatres, impressive provincial government headquarters, spiffy new train station, and other buildings that have been constructed in the last decade attest to Yinchuan's rise in profile in the era of Reform and Opening. However, Yinchuan feels like the county seat that was yoked with the title of provincial capital about five decades ago, and has been trying to adjust ever since. It's a city that still feels like it's growing into its own role.
What the city does offer is a visible Hui culture. The city's many green domed mosques are noticable on the city skyline, and Islamic businesses and eateries are ubiquitous.
Perhaps nothing can attest to Yinchuan's recent growth more than its rapid expansion south that surrounds the former village, now suburb, of Najiahu (shown at the red marker on the map below):
Among scholars of the ethnic minority studies community in China, the village of Najiahu is widely known. In the 1980s, the community was the site of scholar Dru C. Gladney's field research on Hui culture (later published as his book, Muslim Chinese), and served as his example of a rural Hui community. Gladney's Najiahu was a tiny farm village, far removed from Yinchuan. Life centered around the famous Great Mosque of Najiahu, and tending the field. When I first visited Yinchuan last year, and started to describe my project to a contact (a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies who hailed from the area), she immediately suggested I go to Najiahu. "I know about that place," I told her. "From Gladney's book. But I'm not interested in the countryside." Quickly, she corrected me. Gladney's Najiahu from the '80s was now only a memory. If I went to Najiahu, I would see.
She was, of course, correct. The village has since been incorporated into larger, metropolitan Yinchuan. It's accessible by the no. 1 bus from the city's South gate, and can be reached in about an hour. Largely this is due to the creation of the "Hui Culture Garden," a combination of a garish Chinese Islamic Disneyland-style theme park, and culture musuem complete with a mock-up prayer hall, and a front entrance gate which is a replica of the Taj Mahal (pictured below. This place, intended as tourist bait, deserves (and will get) its own separate entry).
The highway down to the Hui Culture Garden is an unbroken line of urban development. The city of Yinchuan never truly stops, and thus the village of Najiahu now more closely resembles a suburb. The map of Najiahu reveals a bit about how the community has developed. The Culture Garden serves as the major draw to the community, while the old Grand Mosque (pictured below) still stands as the heart of the community. :
The mosque at Najiahu is a beautiful building constructed in the style of traditional Chinese temples. Below is an image of the minarets which stand at the front gate of the mosque complex, from which the call to prayer is announced. The mosque has been visited by former Presidents of China, dignitaries from throughout the Islamic world, and important Hui theologians. It still remains as an important site for pilgrimage and prayer for the Hui, especially those living in Ningxia.
What's changed in Najiahu, though, are the surrounding houses. In Gladney's time Najiahu was a community of farmers living in single story mud-brick houses. Today, many of those houses look like this:
As the houses are cleared away, the land they stood on now is developed into smart-looking grey stone buildings, built to resemble medeival Chinese buildings. It's a tactic that can been seen in Shanghai's trendy XinTianDi neighborhood, Datong's new shopping areas adjacent to the former Red Flag Square, and a host of other Chinese cities. The buildings make up a fascimile of a community that never really was. The alleways are paved with cobblestones, and lined with trellaces, and the scene is tidy and pleasant (if generic). However, it is a far cry from the former community which Gladney wrote about.
When I first visited, many of these storefronts remained empty, and only a few scattered visitors wandered about in the cobblestone alleys. The story of Najiahu's development is one I'm eager to unravel. Understanding the plan for these storefronts, and finding out just how this center of Hui culture is to be marketed seems like a fascinating challenge to me. It is this tale that I hope that, in the end, I'll be able to tell.