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!

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Short intro to Xinjiang by Jeff

Xinjiang is huge, 1.66 million square kilometers, 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 a few beautiful lakes. In fact, Hami is over 900 meters above sea level. 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 Turkey 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.

Comment by Jeff

Uyghur cuisine is popular all over China.

It is kind of like Italian restaurants and Chinese restaurants in North America and Europe. They’re just everywhere, even in small towns. And that is true for Uyghur food all across China. People love it.

They are famous for their hand pulled noodles. A lot of their sauces are based on tomatoes, which are a huge crop out here. And it’s all very fresh. Of course, the big draw is the barbecued meat or smoked meat.
And of course it’s going to either be lamb, beef or chicken. Uyghurs, of course, are not going to be serving pork because they’re Muslim. If you want the world’s best pork, there are plenty of Chinese restaurants.

Other popular names of “Muslim” cuisine are Lanzhou and Ningxia, which are other Muslim minority regions towards the east and Hui, which is the second largest Muslim group in China, after the Uyghurs. Some slight differences, but pretty much the same fare.

Uyghurs have no qualms about serving alcohol, because they would not do the business volume that they want, if they didn’t do so. There are some who do not do it, some of the smaller, family-owned ones. But for the most part here in Xinjiang, they serve alcohol in their restaurants, at least beer.

There’s an excellent Muslim restaurant that we go to in Kunming, and they will not serve alcohol, so you have to go have your beer afterwards. Nor can you bring your own. Some don’t serve alcohol, but will let you bring your own.

Uyghurs have all kinds of fresh fruit and vegetables. Fruit is huge here, because plums, apples, pomegranates, hawthorns, watermelon, cantaloupe, grapes, along with cucumbers, other melons and tomotoes are all huge, irrigated crops here in Xinjiang, shipped across the country and around the world.

So fresh fruit is standard for desserts. Little, sweet egg custard pies are also quite popular and very similar to the French variety.