Couple of Kashgar mysteries

Lady Macartney made descriptions of the limited European presence in Kashgar at the time.

From Chini Bagh “below us ran a road… Beyond the road were fields of melon, rice, cotton and clover… In the midst of the fields was a sad little triangular bit of ground enclosed by a mud wall, and in it were a few mounds of earth, and Russian crosses. It was the Russian cemetery. Beyond it I could see the Kashgar river…”

This was where all Europeans who died in Kashgar were buried including missionaries, such as the Dutch Catholic Father Hendricks, who was George Macartney’s flatmate pre-marriage, and later source of information in relation to goins-on in and around the old town.

It presumably also included officers, diplomats, merchants and families and others who had the misfortune to die in what was then perhaps one of the world’s least visited locations.

The consulate still looks towards the river but the fields are now apartment blocks and houses and sadly asking a number of guides did not reveal anyone who knew anything about a European or Russian cemetery. Destruction of cemeteries was one aspect of the cultural revolution but it could quite easily have just been overtaken by growth and a pragmatic attitude to a series of alien monuments.

One way to find it might be to go back to old maps of Kashgar, pinpoint the exact position in relation to Chini Bagh and then retrace steps to it. Sadly old anything in Kashgar is difficult to find and the only bookshops are the small handful near the Id Kah mosque. So this will take more work.

More satisfactory was a walk from the old British to the old Russian consulate. It sits on a big intersection, across the road one way is a school and across another way is a restaurant named Sultana. On the walk from the China Bagh to the Russians you can see the remains of the city walls (a small section, by the PLA compound and hence awkward to photograph). Further along, just before the main intersection with the Russian consulate there is a small alleyway about a car wide. Modern buildings on the main street block it from view but you can just see a white pedimented building down this alleyway. It turns out to be very substantial.

All one storey classically laid out, colonnaded on the two long sides and with pediments on the shorter sides. It turns out to be Kashgar’s first “privately founded public kindergarten” and the entrance portico’s pillars have been brightly painted as a result. A teacher spoken to says it has been a kindergarten for around 12 years and thinks the building may have been connected “to the Soviets” before then. It certainly sits close enough to the old Russian (later Soviet) consulate to have perhaps been some sort of ancillary building – the consular residence perhaps, or barracks?

Lady Macartney said that in her time there were only four European buildings outside the old city walls – the two consulates, the Swedish mission and the Russo-Asiatic bank. The latter would presumably have been close to the Russian consulate. It was liquidated in 1925 or 26 but the building could conceivably date from before this time. There is a Soviet star above the main entrance but this could have been a later addition and while the building is large it does not seem to be quite as monolithic as the classic Stalinesque structure. Again, a map of Kashgar from the 1920s or so, if such a thing exists, would help to clear this up. This is an exercise that might take some time.