Today's post wraps up the series of profiles on fieldsites I'll be working in during the next year. Xining, today's profiled city, is the westernmost city I'll be visiting.
The map below illustrates just how far away from China's bustling east coast Xining is. The city sits on the very edge of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, on the doorstep of the Tibetan world. Just to the west of the city is the legendary Qinghai Lake (sometimes referred to by its Mongolian name, "Kokonur"), one of the largest in Asia. The Hexi Corridor, a vital nexus of trade routes on the ancient Silk Road runs by the city, which served as its major commercial hub. Kumbum Monastery (also known as Ta'er Si), the birthplace of Je Tsongkhapa, one of the most famous Tibetan Buddhist monks, lies just to the South.
Unsurprisingly, the city holds a massively important place in Tibetan, Mongolian, and Chinese culture. Signs throughout the city (like the first one below that shows Xining's many ethnic groups dancing joyfully together, or the second, which emplores, '让民族团结之花竞相绽放', or 'Let the flowers of ethnic unity eagerly blossom') emphasize its multi-ethnic character (we'll dive into what these signs may or may not actually intend at a later date), and serve as reminders that Xining is home to not only Han, but also Tibetan, Tu (Mongour), Salar, Dongxiang, and other ethnic minority communities. Storefronts bear witness to this fact as well. They advertise "Dongxiang Whole Roasted Lamb", "Tu style hotpot," and Tibetan style momos (meat dumplings). Ethnic wares of all kinds are on sale throughout the city.
The city itself, however, is marked by its decidedly Hui-Islamic flavor. A contact of mine from Xining, an ethnic Hui MA student in ethnic studies, explained to me, "Qinghai province may be a Tibetan paradise, but Xining is a Hui paradise" ("青海是藏族人的天下，但是西宁就是回族人的天下"). Xining's status as a "Hui paradise" is largely due to the sizable Hui community located around the famous Dongguan Mosque near the city's center. The two maps below show the location of the neighborhood, bounded in blue. Stretching for several blocks on every side of the venerable mosque, the winding alleys of the Hui Quarter, lined with halal restaurants, tea houses, Islamic groceries, hotels, carpet shops, and large open-air markets, lend the city a uniquely Islamic character.
The community is a longstanding one. In the map below, taken from Piper Rae Gaubatz's Beyond the Great Wall, shows the city as it existed around 1900. The city's Hui Quarter is clearly seen to the east, surrounded by a series of city walls. The walls have since been razed, but the avenues which replaced them still define the boundaries of the community.
While exploring the neighborhood last July, I spoke with an elderly man outside of the Beiguan Mosque (on the neighborhood's North side) who explained to me that, in earlier eras, while the city walls still stood, a mosque stood at each directional gate. The names of the mosques in the neighborhood bear out this history. The East-Gate Mosque (东关清真寺，Dongguan Qingzhen Si) and South-gate Mosque (Nanguan Qingzhen si, 南关清真寺), pictured in the first and second images below respectively, still mark the edges of the neighborhood.
Xining's Hui community is justifyably proud of its longstanding roots. Residents are quick to connect their current mosque communities to ancient Sufi lineages that traversed the Silk Road to wind up in central China. These traders and pilgrims came from many various locations throughout Central Asia and the Middle East and established lives on the high plateau. In the middle of Nanshan Park, perched in the hills high above the city, the Fenghuang Shan Gongbei (gongbei, 拱北, being a Chinese word for a shrine built around the tomb of an Islamic saint) looks out over the city (see the picture below). Visitors come from Xining, and from places further abroad, to see the tomb (when I visited the site, a young madrassa student from Yunnan in China's southwestern corner had made a pilgrimage to see the gonbei), and also to pray and admire the views of the city that the shrine's hilltop location afford. The name of the saint buried there is long forgotten, but residents all insist that he came from the Middle East, bringing the message of the Qur'an with him. The importance of such links to saints who come from faraway places (in both space and time), whould not be underestimated, no matter how distant they may be. Xining's Hui residents always expressed a great pride in the vibrancy of the community, and the historical importance of the city, and the Dongguan Mosque in particular, as a center for Islamic culture.
The Hui account for 16% of Xining's population, according to the 2010 national census, making them the second largest population in the city, after the majority-ethnic Han. Despite such large numbers, the community feels removed from the rest of Xining. In many ways, though the surrounding walls have come down, the Hui Quarter is still marked by its separateness, its apartness from the rest of the city. My contact, the graduate student, observed that outside of the five or six blocks surrounding the Dongguan Mosque, encounters with men and women wearing the traditional white Islamic prayer hats, or headscarves (hijab) become rare. Though it is a vibrant part of the city of Xining, the Hui community, he remarked, is largely insular. But insularity is not invisibility. On Friday afternoons, when the Dongguan Mosque holds weekly Friday prayers (known as the ṣalāt al-jum'ah), nearly 40,000 people assemble. The enormous crowd spills into the courtyard in front of the mosque, and the faithful fill the sidewalks, and the eastbound two lanes of Dongguan Ave. for nearly a length of four city blocks. Loudspeakers on the telephone polls broadcast the service into the streets. It is a sight unlike anything else I've ever seen.
As one of China's western provincial capitals, Xining recieves funding from the "Great Western Development" Campaign (xibudakaifa, 西部大开发) aimed at modernizing and strengthening infrastructure on the country's periphery. Like many other cities nationwide, Xining is experiencing a construction boom. As of last summer workers plowed away to renovate the city's central rail station. New high-rises emerged near the city's central square. Like all of the places that I'm headed, Xining's transformation is ongoing, and its outcome still unseen. What's for certain is that Xining, like many other cities on the western edges of this country, continues to push ahead. Xining's story (as well Yinchuan's, and Jinan's) is story of much of contemporary China: rapid change unfolding in the face of long-standing tradition. What happens as a result of the interaction of these forces is anyone's guess. It's a story I'm truly eager to tell.