Amir&Jeff’s Excellent China Adventure Series. 2026: Xinjiang Province Red Tour. Photos and commentary. The REAL Chinese people you do not know!
Amir&Jeff’s Excellent China Adventure Series. 2025: Hunan, Jiangxi, Fujian and Shaanxi Provinces’ Red Tour. Short videos with transcripts, captioned photos, articles and commentary. The REAL Chinese people you don’t know!
https://radiosinoland.com/2025/07/27/amirjeffs-excellent-china-adventure-series-2025-hunan-jiangxi-fujian-and-shaanxi-provinces-red-tour-short-videos-captioned-photos-articles-and-commentary-the-real-chinese-people-you-don/
Short intro to Xinjiang by Jeff
Xinjiang is huge, 17% of the country’s landmass, 1.66 million square kilometers (China’s total land area = 9.6 million), which is three times the size of France, or bigger than Alaska in North America. It is mostly desert, mountains, basins and high plateaus, with beautiful lakes. Weather is harsh here. When we arrived on 5 August, the temperature was 41 degrees. In the winter, it can drop to minus twenty.
For our one-month Red Tour adventure in Xinjiang, we will get a far west as Aksu and as far south as Korla. It is already starting out as an amazing lunar cycle.
The Uyghur people in China are members of the Turkic language group, of which there are many derivatives, starting in Turkey, of course, and there’s a swath going from there to the east through South Central Asia. They are, at varying degrees, mutually understood, from 0 to maybe 75%, depending on the dialect. For example, Turkish and Uyghur are 30% mutually comprehensible.
So Uyghurs are, in fact, Turkic people.
Xinjiang’s population is 26 million, 58% Muslim. The capital is Urumuqi. It has four million residents. Hami has 670,000 citizens. Shihezi, Karamay, Korla, Yining and Aksu are other cities we are visiting each have about 500,000 souls.
West to east, Xinjiang has common international borders with Pakistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia and Mongolia. Internally, it borders the provinces of Gansu, Qinghai and Tibet, north to south. It is now a hugely important nexus in Asia’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), connecting the rest of China with the rest of Mackinder’s Heartland. On that note,
Jeff J. Brown comments on Sputnik News- Putin: China’s Belt and Road Initiative ‘in Sync With Russia’s Ideas on Large Eurasian Space’. China Rising Radio Sinoland 231027
Not only industry and commerce, Xinjiang is a massive producer of high value crops, including a huge variety of fruits, vegetables and cotton. We see lush, green fields and orchards stretching kilometer after kilometer, thanks to one of the biggest water canal and irrigation systems in the world, starting in the Altai Mountains, over 400km away. The BRI has made it possible to ship large quantities of this produce all over Asia.
Amir’s comments and photos at the end
How the rich and famous will live after Judeo-triggered Armageddon, just on a much more grandiose scale than us!
Living in a Box
For those on a budget, Xinjiang offers a wide variety of low-cost options, especially if you don’t mind living in a box.
Hotels that seem too good to be true (at a fraction of the cost you would pay in other Chinese cities) often sport no windows. Jeff and I were caught staying in boxed rooms with no natural light on more than one occasion due to my hasty picks.
But we move around so often that I have now levelled up on the learning curve. One piece of advice to anyone thinking of travelling around this wonderful autonomous region is to look closely at any hotel reservation. Do not take windows for granted!
All things considered (amenities, location, breakfast, price), sometimes the tradeoff is worth it. For instance, a hasty pick on my part had us book the Hanxuan Hot Spring Hotel in Korla, which featured excellent facilities, including a large, indoor, heated swimming pool, hot tubs, Jacuzzi beds, sauna and steam rooms, all at no extra charge!
I booked excitedly in hopes of assuaging sore muscles, for both me and Jeff. Long travels, followed by daily step counts exceeding 10k while lugging heavy rollers to and from hotel destinations takes its toll. Safe to say that in this case, both Jeff and I were willing to trade windows for therapeutics.
The creepiest thing about staying in boxes, however, is the disruption of circadian rhythms. Falling asleep and waking up to the same dimmed artificial room lighting risks taking the mind and imagination to some very dark places. I’m not sure if anyone else’s mind goes there, but mine does; I could not help but feel that I was living in some dystopian enclave, tucked away underground to live out the remainder of my days bumping shoulders with neighbors who were fortunate enough to retreat to some luxurious bomb-shelter long after nuclear fallout had poisoned the aboveground atmosphere.
No doubt Zuckerberg and the rest of the billionaire class have built comparable fallout shelters of exceedingly robust luxury and amenities. If you’ve ever seen The Shawshank Redemption, you might reasonably ask yourself how long you could survive in prison. If you’ve ever seen The Wandering Earth, or stayed in a boxed hotel room, you might reasonably ask yourself how long you could survive in a post-apocalyptic subterranean luxury resort.
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