Month: September 2013

Adil, “Prince of the Sky,” Uyghur Diplomat

Published by Darren Byler

Last month Adil Hushor (Ch: Adili Wuxor) pulled off his latest feat– walking over the Pearl River on a wire suspended 116 meters in the air. Over the past decades he has walked between skyscrapers, over China’s most iconic valleys, canyons, stadiums, lakes and rivers. He’s broken multiple world records by doing it faster andlonger, higher and weirder. As a nineteen year-old he broke 12 bones when a rotten rope broke in Shanghai and he fell 15 meters. But the everyday trauma of risking his life has not stopped him from tackling bigger and more dangerous feats. Above is Adil’s biography as shown on CCTV 9: Adil brings the Uyghur tradition of dawaz-style tightrope walking forward into global spotlight of Asian cities. According to the Uyghur oral tradition, dawaz or darwazliq (Edit: see comments below) – a kind of dashing, court-performance, dance-style of tightrope walking – has played a role in Uyghur society for 2000 years. It was first noted as a Uyghur cultural feature in Mahmud Kashgari’s authoritative dictionary of Turkic languages in Kashgar in …

Bringing “Blood-sweating” Horses Back to Xinjiang: Chen Zhifeng and his Million-Dollar Horses

Published by Darren Byler

Behind Chen Zhifeng’s hotel and gallery in northern Ürümchi are giant Jurassic Park-style gates often guarded by a huge hound (which I’m told is Chen’s personal pet). Inside the gates is something Chen refers to as an “Ancient Ecology” park: a collection of rare Xinjiang artifacts. There is a forest of petrified wood, a collection of meteorites, sand-polished boulders, mysterious stone balls, and a collection of ancient Turk ancestor stelae known as balbals. It is here, among propped-up 3,000-year-old desert poplars (the iconic symbol of Xinjiang), that Chen meets visiting heads of state and domestic dignitaries for business negotiations and history lessons in Xinjiang style. In the northeast corner of the park Chen has a motley crew of camels, eagles, peacocks, deer, and cows – but most impressively, a small herd of 38 wild horses from which his brand gets its name. These horses, known as the horse “discovered” by the famous Russian explorer Nikolay Przhevalsky, or as the horse of the Jungar Mongols, are native to the steppes of Northern Xinjiang. Przhevalsky and the Jungars did not …

Chen Zhifeng, Xinjiang Billionaire, Patron of the Arts

Published by Darren Byler

Untitled #1 Chen Zhifeng is a “self-made” billionaire, founder of the Western Regions Photography Society, and a major force in Xinjiang’s art scene. He is part of a newly minted cohort of Xinjiang capitalists: the Xinjiang 8 (or 9) nouveau riche, who have taken advantage of Chinese-Central Asian market development and the post-Reform oil and gas economy. His Wild Horses Corporation brings in an annual income of $700 million selling Chinese-made women’s underwear and TVs in Russia and Kazakhstan. Yet, unlike some other Xinjiang elites, Chen has reinvested his wealth in Xinjiang. As a trained artist himself, he is renowned for his support of a multiethnic crew of young Xinjiang artists. With his prominently displayed black Hummer standing sentinel in front of his Wild Horse Hotel compound on Kunming Road just down the street from the Kazakhstan Visa Office/Embassy, Chen has become a Xinjianger’s Xinjianger. Although he was born in Hubei and came to Xinjiang as the result of a military assignment in 1981, Chen has taken on the cultural genealogy of Xinjiang history with a fierce amount bravado and …

Gendered Futures, “Mother Tongue,” and Berna the Uyghur city girl

Published by Darren Byler

(Part 2 of 2) I have written previously about the way endearing child stars such as the seven-year old Berna are being mobilized as a method of securing the future of Uyghur ways of knowing and speaking. Yet Uyghur “mother tongue fever” has a long legacy. The famous Uyghur poem Ana Til or “Mother Tongue” was composed by the poet Haji Qutluq Shewqi in the mid-nineteenth century when a love of Uyghur was directed in opposition to the dominance of Persian and Arabic in Uyghur education. While the vectors of linguistic force have found new centers of gravity in the past few decades, the sentiment carried forward by that old poem resonates more strongly than ever in Uyghur popular culture. Yet as I will explain below despite the continuity of these feelings, there are also some important differences from these desires of the past. Despite, and because of, their almost bizarre appeal, young performers like Berna and her promoters are challenging staid masculine notions of what it means to be Uyghur and what the …