Day one in Xinjiang: Urumqi

By Dominic Swire

17 August 2009

Three things struck me as I walked out of Urumqi airport after a four-hour flight from Beijing. The first was the bilingual posters and signs dotted around the airport. Most of these are written in both Chinese and Uygur language, the latter looking almost identical to Arabic to the untrained eye as it is written in the same script. The second was the snowcapped mountains I glimpsed through the windows of a minibus as we as we zoomed down the highway into the centre of the city. The peaks of some are so high they can be mistaken for clouds. The third was a disproportionately high number of billboards and posters featuring Yao Ming. The Chinese basketball star's popularity really does seem to spread across all corners of this vast country.

Urumqi, capital of China's Xinjiang  autonomous region, wakes up to the morning  sun on Monday August 17, 2009. [Photo: CRIENGLISH.com/Dominic Swire]

Although a mere village by Chinese standards, Urumqi's population of 2.5 million is bigger than many world capitals. The city is the capital of Xinjiang autonomous region, the largest political subdivision in China, making up approximately one sixth of the country's territory. It has a population of around 20 million, almost the same as Australia, and a GDP of 27.4 billion dollars, roughly equivalent to the Middle Eastern state of Yemen.

Xinjiang is home to 47 officially recognized ethnic groups, the widest diversity of any single province in China.