By noon the field seethed with people and livestock, heat and dust. Buyers squeezed the flesh of sheep, haggled over cows, donkeys and goats. Alongside, the snack stalls were doing a roaring trade. A baker with an ear-splitting yell invited customers to taste his piping hot samsa, small pastry parcels of lamb and onion that he plucked from the domed walls of his tandoor oven. Young men lolled on ironwork benches under a canvas shelter, eating ice cream with a spoon as they watched noisy Kung Fu films on a propped-up television. Everywhere, people were slurping fruit juice or cool jellies in spicy dressings. The crowds milled around, talking and shouting in a melodic, guttural tongue that sounded like Turkish. The air was filled with the punchy scent of cumin from sizzling kebabs.
到了中午，田野里到处都是人和牲畜，热浪和尘土。买主们挤羊肉，为牛、驴和山羊讨价还价。旁边的小吃摊生意兴隆。一位面包师以震耳欲聋的叫声邀请顾客品尝他滚烫的萨姆萨，他从他那台烤箱的圆顶墙壁上摘下的小包羊肉和洋葱糕点。年轻人懒洋洋地躺在帆布帐篷下的铁艺长凳上，用勺子吃着冰淇淋，一边在支撑着的电视上看吵闹的功夫片。到处都有人在用辛辣的调味料啜饮果汁或凉果冻。人群在周围转来转去，用一种听起来像土耳其语的有旋律的喉音说话和喊叫。空气中弥漫着烤羊肉串里的孜然香味。
At seven o’clock on Sunday morning, the market was already coming to life. Bakers were hooking the first batches of nan bread out of tandoor ovens. Snack-sellers were lighting fires under their stoves, setting up cauldrons of soup to boil, and chopping piles of vegetables and hunks of mutton. The rising sun spilled through the poplar trees bordering the field, marking out long fingers of light on the ground. And already the first market-traders were arriving, steering donkey carts laden with produce, or driving flocks of bleeting sheep into the great livestock enclosure. Hungry after an early start, I bought a nan from one of the bakers. The golden, onion-speckled crust yielded to fluffy white dough: it was magnificently tasty.
星期天早上七点，市场已经活跃起来了。面包师把第一批南面包从烤箱里拿出来。小吃小贩们在炉子下点起了火，烧开了一大锅汤，切碎了成堆的蔬菜和大块的羊肉。冉冉升起的太阳透过田野边的白杨树，在地上划出长长的光指。已经有第一批市场商人来了，他们开着装满农产品的驴车，或是把成群的羊赶到大牲畜圈里。我很早就开始饿了，我从一个面包师那里买了一个南面包。金黄的洋葱皮做成了蓬松的白色面团，非常美味。
I had wanted to go to Xinjiang for some time. Although I hadn’t completed my research project on China’s ethnic minorities, I’d always been attracted by the diverse cultures of the western regions, and their grasslands and deserts — wide open spaces that offered respite from the crowded intensity of China proper. As a student I had hitchhiked around the Tibetan provinces of Amdo and Kham, but I’d never made it as far as Kashgar. Years later, it wasn’t just the thirst for adventure that drew me to Xinjiang. As a food writer, I had a particular desire to explore a region that lay at the culinary crossroads of Asia.
我本来想去新疆一段时间。虽然我还没有完成关于中国少数民族的研究项目，但我一直被西部地区的多元文化以及他们的草原和沙漠所吸引，这些广阔的开放空间为缓解中国人的拥挤程度提供了喘息的机会。作为一名学生，我曾搭便车游览过西藏的安多省和汗省，但我从未到过喀什。多年后，吸引我来到新疆的不仅仅是对冒险的渴望。作为一名美食作家，我特别想探索一个位于亚洲烹饪十字路口的地区。
I found it hard to believe that I was still in China. The only reminder was the occasional street or shop sign, with Chinese characters alongside the local, Arabic-based script. Kashgar, the Silk Road town where this famous Sunday market draws trade from far and wide, lies in the desert province of Xinjiang, at the westernmost tip of the country. This vast region occupies a sixth of China’s territory, and is home to myriad ethnic groups, including the Turkic Uyghur people, the largest minority, Tajiks, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Russians and, increasingly, Han Chinese.
我发现很难相信我还在中国。唯一能让人想起的是偶尔出现的街道或商店招牌，上面有中文和当地的阿拉伯文字。喀什，丝绸之路小镇，这个著名的周日集市吸引着来自四面八方的贸易，位于中国最西端的沙漠省份新疆。这个辽阔的地区占中国领土的六分之一，是无数民族的家园，其中包括突厥维吾尔族、最大的少数民族、塔吉克人、哈萨克人、吉尔吉斯人、俄罗斯人以及越来越多的汉族人。
In Xinjiang one still senses this ancient connection between the Chinese and Eurasian worlds. At the market that day, I wandered among the farmers’ stalls, where fruits and vegetables were laid out on the ground. The produce itself was a living record of the region’s multicultural history. When the Han Dynasty Chinese envoy Zhang Qian passed through this area in the second century BC on his missions from Chang’an to the kingdoms of Central Asia, legend says he returned with new foodstuffs that were to have a lasting impact on Chinese cuisine: grapes, alfalfa, coriander and sesame, all of which are still of vital importance in the Uyghur diet. Still, you see carts of alfalfa and dried grapes in the markets, and the scent of sesame hangs over freshly baked bread.
在新疆，人们仍然能感觉到中国和欧亚大陆之间的这种古老联系。那天在集市上，我在农民的摊位间闲逛，那里的水果和蔬菜摆在地上。这件作品本身就是该地区多元文化历史的生动记录。公元前2世纪，汉朝的中国特使张谦从长安到中亚诸国执行任务时经过此地，传说他带着对中国烹饪产生持久影响的新食品回来了：葡萄、苜蓿、香菜和芝麻，所有这些在维吾尔族饮食中仍然是至关重要的。不过，你仍然可以在市场上看到一车车的苜蓿和干葡萄，新鲜出炉的面包上弥漫着芝麻的香味。
More than 2000 years ago, trade began along the perilous overland routes between China and the West that later became known as the Silk Road. Camel caravans carried silk and other luxuries out of China, bringing back spices, precious stones and the sacred texts of Buddhism. Kashgar was one of a string of thriving oasis towns that lay on the route from Central Asia to the glittering Tang Dynasty capital Chang’an (at the site of modern Xi’an). It was only after the opening of the sea routes in the late fifteenth century that the region lost its vitality, and many of the towns were reclaimed by the desert sands.
2000多年前，中国和西方之间的危险陆路贸易开始于此，后来被称为丝绸之路。骆驼车队将丝绸和其他奢侈品运出中国，带回香料、宝石和佛教的神圣文献。喀什是一系列欣欣向荣的绿洲城镇之一，这些城镇位于从中亚到光彩夺目的唐代都城长安（现代西安所在地）的路线上。直到15世纪末海路开通后，这一地区才失去了活力，许多城镇被沙漠中的沙子填海造地。
Other foods such as carrots, cucumber and onions also found their way into Xinjiang, and then China, along the desert roads. The names of fruits and vegetables in the Uyghur tongue carry echoes of languages from all over Asia: the Turkic piaz for onions and uzum for grapes, Chinese words for garlic stems and Chinese cabbage, turup like the Persian torobcheh for scarlet radishes. And, alongside the crops that entered this region along the ancient land routes are sold the New World tomatoes, potatoes and chillies that revolutionised the diet here as in so many other countries.
胡萝卜、黄瓜和洋葱等其他食物也沿着沙漠道路进入新疆，然后进入中国。维吾尔语中的水果和蔬菜的名称与亚洲各地的语言相呼应：突厥语中的piaz表示洋葱，uzum表示葡萄，汉语中的单词表示大蒜茎和大白菜，肿胀得像波斯的torobcheh表示猩红色的萝卜。而且，除了沿着古老的陆地路线进入这个地区的农作物之外，新大陆的西红柿、土豆和辣椒也在销售，这些食物和其他许多国家一样，在这里彻底改变了人们的饮食习惯。
As usual, I was hovering around the food stalls that day, watching the cooks at work and pestering them with questions. The ice-cream vendor presided over a juddering machine that whipped up ice-cream in a copper cauldron surrounded by ice. At the back of the stall, enormous blocks of ice lay out on a table, melting slowly. ‘How do you make ice on that scale, in September?’ I asked him. ‘We cut it from the frozen lakes in winter, and haul it back to Kashgar on a donkey cart,’ came the unlikely reply. But it was true, the ice was mud-streaked and threaded with reeds to prove it. ‘We can keep it all summer,’ he told me, ‘wrapped up and stored in underground pits.’
像往常一样，那天我在食品摊周围徘徊，看着厨师们在工作，用问题纠缠着他们。卖冰淇淋的小贩主持了一台摇摇晃晃的机器，它在一个被冰包围的铜锅里搅拌冰淇淋。在摊位后面，巨大的冰块摊在桌子上，慢慢融化。九月份，你怎么用这种比例制冰？我问他。“我们在冬天从冰冻的湖里把它切下来，然后用驴车把它运回喀什，”这个不太可能的回答说。但这是真的，冰上有泥痕，上面有芦苇证明了这一点。他告诉我，我们可以把它整个夏天保存起来，包起来存放在地下坑里。
For me, all this was fascinating. In my early twenties, during that long, hot summer when I stayed with a Turkish family in Anatolia, learning a little Turkish and Turkish cookery, I had stood on the brink of Europe, looking east; and here I was, a decade later, on the edge of China, looking back in the direction of Istanbul.
对我来说，这一切都很迷人。二十出头的那个漫长而炎热的夏天，我和安纳托利亚的一个土耳其人家庭住在一起，学了一点土耳其语和土耳其语的烹饪，我站在欧洲的边缘，向东看；十年后，我站在中国的边缘，向伊斯坦布尔的方向看去。
I chose to eat a bowlful of their noodles rather than mine, sitting at a table in the sun with a motley assortment of Uyghur sheep-traders. The boiled pasta was topped with a colourful stew of mutton and vegetables: red and green peppers, garlic stems, onion, tomato and cabbage. I plunged in with my chopsticks. The noodles were fresh and springy in my mouth, utterly delicious.
我选择吃一碗他们的面条，而不是我的，坐在阳光下的桌子旁，桌上摆着各式各样的维吾尔族羊贩。煮熟的意大利面上放着五颜六色的炖羊肉和蔬菜：红椒和青椒、蒜茎、洋葱、西红柿和卷心菜。我用筷子插进去。面条在我嘴里又新鲜又有弹性，非常美味。
At another stall, young men in embroidered caps pulled noodle dough into lengths that they swung and looped in the air, stretching it into strands as fine and even as spaghetti. I persuaded them to let me try. It was an impossible task. In my hands, the dough stretched unevenly, the noodles snapped and shrivelled. Again and again I tried. Occasionally I found my rhythm, and the noodles spun out evenly for a moment, but then they disintegrated, collapsing into a jumble on the wooden board. The boys laughed at me.
在另一个摊位上，戴着绣花帽的年轻人把面团拉长，在空中盘旋，伸展成细细的甚至像意大利面一样的细丝。我说服他们让我试试。这是一项不可能完成的任务。在我的手里，面团伸得不均匀，面条啪啪地一声就干瘪了。我一次又一次地尝试。偶尔我发现我的节奏，面条均匀地旋转了一会儿，但随后它们就解体了，在木板上崩塌成一团。孩子们嘲笑我。
The cooking of the Uyghur people, too, has echoes of both east and west. Their noodles and dumplings link with the band of pasta-eaters who live across northern China as far as Beijing, and they eat them with chopsticks in the Chinese style. The Kashgar spice stalls sell the familiar aromatics of Chinese cookery — Sichuan pepper, star anise, Chinese cardamom and fennel — but they also dispense herbs and flavourings redolent of Persia and Central Asia: saffron, green cardamom, safflower and rose petals. And while the Uyghur drink tea, constantly, like the Chinese, they show their nomadic heritage in their liking for yoghurt and other dairy foods.
维吾尔族的烹饪，也有东西方的回声。他们的面条和饺子与生活在中国北方，远至北京的一群吃面食的人联系在一起，他们用中国式的筷子吃。喀什的香料摊位出售中国烹饪中常见的香料——四川胡椒、八角茴香、中国豆蔻和茴香，但他们也出售有波斯和中亚香味的草药和香料：藏红花、绿色豆蔻、红花和玫瑰花瓣。维吾尔族人和中国人一样，经常喝茶，但他们喜欢酸奶和其他奶制品，这显示了他们的游牧传统。
The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region remains an anomaly in the Chinese empire. The Uyghur people have even less in common with the Han Chinese than do the Tibetans: they are Central Asians in almost every sense, part of the great family of Turks that extends from Xinjiang through Uzbekistan and across central Asia, as far as modern Turkey itself. They speak a variant of Turkish and eat kebabs, and their faith is Islam.
新疆维吾尔自治区仍然是中华帝国的一个异常。维吾尔族人与汉族人的共同点甚至比藏族人还要少：他们几乎在任何意义上都是中亚人，是从新疆延伸到乌兹别克斯坦和中亚，直至现代土耳其本身的土耳其人大家庭的一部分。他们说土耳其语的变体，吃烤肉串，他们的信仰是伊斯兰教。
For the Chinese, of course, this was always a barbarian land. In the past, they thought civilisation itself ended more than 1000 miles east of Kashgar, at the Jiayuguan fort in Gansu Province, where the last garrison of the Great Wall marked the boundary of the Chinese empire. From the eighteenth century onwards, however, the Manchu Qing state consolidated its grip on this outlying desert region, and a Muslim rebellion against Chinese rule in the 1870s was brutally crushed. In the 1930s, as China fell apart under the stress of warlordism, revolution and foreign invasion, the local people seized their moment and proclaimed a republic, East Turkestan. But it was short-lived. And then in 1949, Mao’s victorious communists swept in with their peculiar brand of ‘liberation’, which actually meant, as it did in Tibet, de facto colonisation.
当然，对中国人来说，这里一直都是蛮荒之地。过去，他们认为文明本身结束于喀什以东1000多英里的甘肃省嘉峪关堡，在那里，长城的最后一个驻军标志着中华帝国的边界。然而，从18世纪开始，满清政府巩固了对这个边远沙漠地区的控制，19世纪70年代穆斯林反抗中国统治的叛乱被残酷镇压。20世纪30年代，中国在军阀主义、革命和外国侵略的压力下解体，当地人民抓住时机，宣布成立东突厥斯坦共和国。但这是短暂的。然后在1949年，毛的胜利的共产党人以他们独特的“解放”的品牌席卷进来，这实际上意味着，就像在西藏一样，事实上的殖民。
Coppersmiths beat their gleaming metal into the curves of cooking pots and kettles, while knife merchants lurked amid rows of bejewelled daggers. Shopkeepers sat cross-legged in the doors of dim Aladdin’s caves hung with carpets or old porcelain and trinkets. Dark alleys shimmered with multi-coloured Atlas silks. The men wore Muslim skullcaps or fur hats, the women mixed workaday clothes with peacock finery. Some shimmered through the crowded bazaars in glittering ankle-length skirts, their sparkling slippers kicking up dust as they walked.
铜匠把闪闪发光的金属敲打成锅和水壶的曲线，而刀商则潜伏在一排镶有珠宝的匕首中间。店主盘腿坐在昏暗的阿拉丁洞穴的门口，洞穴里挂着地毯、旧瓷器和小饰品。黑暗的小巷闪烁着多色的阿特拉斯丝绸。男人们戴着穆斯林的骷髅帽或皮帽，女人们把工作服和孔雀的服饰混为一谈。一些穿着齐踝长裙的人在拥挤的集市上闪闪发光，他们穿着闪闪发光的拖鞋走路时扬起了灰尘。
In recent years, the Chinese state has pursued an aggressive campaign to develop its impoverished western regions. Han Chinese settlers have poured into Xinjiang, lured by economic opportunity, and Chinese white-tiled buildings have sprung up in every county town. The new part of Kashgar looks, by now, like anywhere else in China, with its dull apartment blocks and shopping malls, its karaoke bars and mobile-phone stores. But when I visited, you could still escape into the narrow streets and bazaars of the old Muslim town, and feel that you were in another world.
近年来，中国政府积极开展西部开发活动。在经济机遇的诱惑下，汉族移民涌入新疆，每个县城都涌现出中国白瓦房。到目前为止，喀什的新城区看起来和中国其他地方一样，有着沉闷的公寓楼和购物中心、卡拉OK酒吧和手机商店。但当我访问时，你仍然可以逃到穆斯林老城狭窄的街道和集市上，感觉自己身处另一个世界。
There was an almost Mediterranean warmth about the Uyghur. The men clasped hands when they greeted each other; people laughed freely and moved sinuously. All this was delightful to me, and such a contrast to the emotionally reserved Chinese. Even better, Xinjiang was the one place in China where a Western woman, tall, with brown hair and green eyes, could disappear into the crowd if she chose to, and walk through a market without attracting attention. Most of the Uyghur had Caucasian features; some of the local people were fair-haired and green eyed. After the relentless scrunity to which I had become accustomed in China, it was a sweet relief to be so inconspicuous.
维吾尔人身上有一股地中海般的温暖。人们互相打招呼时紧握双手；人们尽情地笑着，罪恶地移动着。这一切都让我很高兴，这与中国人沉默寡言形成了鲜明的对比。更妙的是，新疆是中国的一个地方，一个高个子、棕色头发、绿色眼睛的西方女人，如果她愿意，可以消失在人群中，穿过一个市场而不引起注意。大多数维吾尔族人都有白种人的特征；一些当地人是金发碧眼的。在中国，我已经习惯了这种无休止的顾忌之后，如此不引人注目，真是一种甜蜜的解脱。
On many afternoons in Kashgar, I sat on the verandah of a teahouse somewhere behind the Idkah mosque, watching the donkey carts mingle with shoppers in the marketplace below. Ensconced on one of the carpeted platforms, birdcages hanging above me, I ate nan bread and sipped my black tea. Sometimes, one of the old Uyghur men would take a newspaper wrap from his jacket pocket, and offer to tip some of its contents, black pepper, safflowers or mysterious herbs, into my teapot.
在喀什的许多下午，我坐在伊德卡清真寺后面的一个茶馆的走廊上，看着驴车和下面的市场里的购物者混在一起。我躺在铺着地毯的平台上，头顶挂着鸟笼，一边吃着南面包，一边喝着红茶。有时候，一个维吾尔族老人会从夹克口袋里拿出一个报纸包装纸，主动把里面的一些东西，黑胡椒、红花或神秘的草药，倒进我的茶壶里。
As students in the nineties, intent on venturing into forbidden parts of China, my classmates and I had found the mere existence of Xinjiang fantastically useful. Most of us had never been there, but we had all run into Uyghurs in other parts of China, and been told by Chinese people how much we looked like them. We were well aware that in the backwoods of places like Tibet and Gansu, no one would expect in their wildest dreams to run into an actual Westerner. If we concealed our cameras, fancy sunglasses and conspicuously Western clothing, we could easily pass for ‘Xinjiang people’, with our big noses and strangely accented Chinese.
作为90年代的学生，他们打算冒险进入中国的禁区，我和我的同学发现新疆的存在非常有用。我们大多数人从来没有去过那里，但是我们都在中国的其他地方遇到过维吾尔人，中国人告诉我们有多像他们。我们很清楚，在西藏和甘肃这样的边远地区，没有人会在他们最疯狂的梦想中遇到一个真正的西方人。如果我们把相机、花哨的太阳镜和显眼的西服藏起来，我们就可以轻易地把大鼻子和奇怪口音的中国人当成“新疆人”。
One day, out in the Xinjiang countryside, somewhere near the Pakistan border, I left the car I had hired and climbed up a hillside in search of a discreet place to pee. I had been in the region for a week or two, and was dressed modestly in cotton clothes. I had a few scarves wrapped loosely around my head and shoulders, to fend off the ferocious late-summer sun. On my way back down the hill, I was surprised to run into a middle-aged Han Chinese tourist with a long-lensed camera. He gave me a kindly and patronising smile. ‘Hello, young lady,’ he said, ‘So what national minority are you?’ He clearly thought he’d discovered a member of a semi-forgotten tribe of nomads, and I didn’t like to disappoint him. (Perhaps even now I appear in his photo album as a specimen.)
一天，在新疆农村，巴基斯坦边境附近的某个地方，我离开了我租的车，爬上山坡，寻找一个隐蔽的地方小便。我在这一带呆了一两个星期，穿着棉质的衣服。我头上和肩膀上松松地裹着几条围巾，以抵挡夏末凶猛的太阳。在下山的路上，我惊讶地遇到一个中年的汉族游客，他带着一个长镜头的照相机。他给了我一个和蔼可亲的微笑。“你好，小姐，”他说，“那你是什么少数民族？”他显然认为他发现了一个半被遗忘的游牧部落的成员，我不想让他失望。（也许现在我还是以标本的身份出现在他的相册里。）
I did, of course, look bizarre by anyone’s standards. Not only did I stand out like a sore thumb on that bus full of Chinese peasants, I looked like no one you would ever run into in Xinjiang or anywhere else in China. Nonetheless, as I knew perfectly well, everyone on the bus would dimly remember some middle-school textbook that rambled on about the colourful, singing-and-dancing ethnic minorities of China, with their outlandish styles of dress and quaint social customs. Some of them might even have seen a few of the colourful minorities on TV. And sure enough, as I listened to the muttered conversations around me, I heard the word ‘Xinjiang’ crop up a few times. No one had the remotest suspicion that I might be an actual foreigner.
当然，以任何人的标准来看，我看起来都很奇怪。在那辆满载中国农民的公共汽车上，我不仅显得特别显眼，而且在新疆和中国的任何地方，你都不会碰到我。尽管如此，我清楚地知道，车上的每个人都会隐约记得一些中学课本，里面漫无目的地讲述着中国色彩斑斓、歌舞升平的少数民族，他们怪异的衣着风格和古雅的社会习俗。他们中的一些人甚至可能在电视上看到过一些色彩鲜艳的少数民族。果然，当我听到周围喃喃自语的对话时，我听到“新疆”这个词出现了好几次。没有人怀疑我可能是个真正的外国人。
I remember once sitting on a shaky old bus somewhere in the bleak Gansu countryside. I knew that the area I was in was closed to foreigners, so I had tucked my hair into a pair of black knickers and swathed my head in a great black scarf, which I imagined gave me a slightly Arabic air. My eyes were concealed behind a pair of crude, wonky Chinese-peasant sunglasses, my backpack was hidden in the kind of white plastic sack that people used for carrying grain, and I was dressed in jeans, a padded jacket and some Chinese army boots. After buying my ticket from the driver, I sat silently at the back of the bus, trying to avoid conversation with my fellow passengers and to be as unobstrusive as possible.
我记得有一次我坐在一辆摇摇晃晃的老爷车上，在荒凉的甘肃农村。我知道我所在的地区对外国人不开放，所以我把头发塞进一条黑色的内裤里，用一条黑色的大围巾裹着头，我想这条围巾给了我一点阿拉伯的气息。我的眼睛藏在一副粗糙、古怪的中国农民太阳镜后面，我的背包藏在人们用来装粮食的那种白色塑料袋里，我穿着牛仔裤、棉袄和一些中国军靴。从司机那里买好车票后，我静静地坐在车尾，尽量避免和其他乘客交谈，尽量不引起别人的注意。
The people of Xinjiang were also useful to the foreign students of Chengdu in other ways. All over China, Uyghur migrants, most of them young men, set up portable grills on busy streetcorners, and offered lamb kebabs, scattered with chilli and cumin, to passers-by. So strong was the association between these people and the scent of kebabs that you had only to catch a whiff of cumin on the air to know there was a Uyghur nearby. But when I lived in Chengdu, a number of these kebab-sellers had a second line of trade, in cannabis resin, so the smell of kebabs became a kind of sensory analogy for the smell of smouldering hash.
新疆人民在其他方面对成都的留学生也很有用。在中国各地，维吾尔族移民，其中大多数是年轻人，在繁忙的街角设置便携式烤架，向路人提供散放辣椒和孜然的羊肉串。这些人和烤肉串的气味之间的联系是如此强烈，以至于你只需在空气中闻到一股孜然的味道就知道附近有一个维吾尔族人。但是当我住在成都的时候，很多卖烤肉串的人都有第二种贸易方式，大麻树脂，所以烤肉串的味道就成了一种类似于燃烧的杂碎味道的感官。
Because of the link between the kebab sellers and the hash trade, you could always tell when a police crackdown on drugs was in progress. Suddenly, with no warning, the aroma of sizzling lamb and cumin vanished from the streets, and you couldn’t find a kebab anywhere, however hard you looked. But then, slowly, the Uyghurs would re-emerge from the shadows, the good folk of Chengdu would start eating kebabs again, and the foreign students would resume their habit of getting stoned on Saturday nights.
由于烤肉串销售商和杂烩贸易之间的联系，你总能知道警方何时在打击毒品。突然，毫无征兆，街上扑鼻的羊肉和孜然的香味消失了，无论你看起来多么难看，你在任何地方都找不到烤羊肉串。但是，慢慢地，维吾尔族人又会从阴影中走出来，成都的好人又会开始吃烤羊肉串，外国学生也会恢复周六晚上被石头砸死的习惯。
In a Kashgar backstreet, I watched Ähmät and his family at work in their bakery. People said their nan bread was the best in the district, and in ceaseless demand. Ähmät tended the fire, raking the fierce embers in his tandoor oven, which was set into a platform outside a tiny workshop. Inside, his wife and sister rolled the dough into large rounds, and pricked a pattern into it with a gadget made from chicken’s quills. They smeared each round with mashed onion and oil, and flipped it, upside-down, on to a padded cushion. Ähmät then thrust the cushion into the oven, and pressed the dough on to its heated wall. Ten minutes later, when he hooked it out, the bread was a ravishing golden brown, patterned elaborately with quill-pricks and morsels of roasted onion.
在喀什的后街，我看到了主题和他的家人在他们的面包店工作。人们说他们的南面包是这个地区最好的，而且需求不断。他照管着炉火，耙着放在一个小车间外面的平台上的烤箱里的熊熊余烬。在里面，他的妻子和姐姐把面团擀成大圆，用鸡毛做成的小玩意在里面扎上一个图案。他们在每一个圆上涂上洋葱泥和油，然后把它翻过来，放在一个垫子上。然后把垫子放进烤箱里，把面团压在加热的墙上。十分钟后，当他把它钩出来时，面包是一个迷人的金棕色，用鹅毛刺和一些烤洋葱精心制作的图案。
The nan is the staff of life for Uyghur people; it has an almost sacred significance. It is used in wedding ceremonies, where the imam invites the bride and groom to share a piece of nan dipped in salted water as a sign of their intended fidelity. It is also part of the visible landscape of the region. As you drive through the countryside, through irrigated fields lined with trees, and villages of adobe homes, there are bread-stalls at every turn. Sometimes a sleepy vendor sits behind a stack of half a dozen small nan; sometimes a stall is laden with dozens of flatbreads of different shapes and sizes. There are large nan the size of dinner plates; small nan like bagels with the hole filled in; shiny glazed nan; nan scattered with sesame seeds or onion; greenish nan made from dough mixed with chopped Chinese chives; sweet nan sprinkled with sugar and chopped nuts or seeds. The nan is a bread with many uses. It can serve as an edible platter for kebabs or juicy steamed dumplings; or be used to wrap food for a takeaway. It is eminently portable — perfect for a long, gruelling trip across the desert.
南朝是维吾尔族人民的生命之杖，具有近乎神圣的意义。在婚礼上，伊玛目邀请新娘和新郎分享浸泡在盐水中的一片楠木，以此表示他们的忠诚。它也是该地区可见景观的一部分。当你开车穿过乡间，穿过绿树成荫的灌溉田，穿过土坯房的村庄时，每一个路口都有面包摊。有时候，一个昏昏欲睡的小贩坐在一堆半打小楠后面；有时候，一个摊位上摆满了几十个不同形状和大小的扁豆。有餐盘大小的大楠；小楠状的百吉饼，馅有洞；发亮的釉面楠；撒有芝麻或洋葱的楠；用切碎的韭菜和面团做成的绿色楠；撒有糖和切碎的坚果或种子的甜楠。楠是一种用途广泛的面包。它可以作为烤肉串或多汁蒸饺的可食用盘；也可以用来包装外卖食品。它非常轻便，非常适合穿越沙漠的长途旅行。
The Uyghur share their nan-baking technology with the Persians (who probably invented it), Afghans, Uzbeks, northern Indians and Turks, among others, and it has ancient roots in the region. The museum in the regional capital, Ürümchi, displays fragments of an actual nan from the eighth century, which looks very like those baked in Kashgar today. The Uyghur still treat their everyday bread with reverence. They never throw it away: even stale bread can be resurrected by a dipping in tea. One afternoon, as I walked through an avenue of poplars on the outskirts of Kashgar, a very old lady came up to me and clasped my hands in greeting. Then she rummaged in her pockets until she found a small piece of nan, which she pressed on me as a gift. I still have it in my flat in London.
维吾尔族人与波斯人（可能是波斯人）、阿富汗人、乌兹别克人、北印度群岛人和土耳其人等分享他们的烤楠技术，维吾尔族在该地区有着古老的渊源。位于该地区首府_rümchi的博物馆展示了八世纪的一个真正的南部，看起来非常像今天在喀什烤的那些。维吾尔族人仍然以崇敬的态度对待他们每天的面包。他们从不扔掉它：即使是不新鲜的面包也可以通过蘸茶复活。一天下午，当我走过喀什郊外的一条杨树林荫道时，一位老太太走到我跟前，握着我的手向我问好。然后她在口袋里翻了翻，找到了一小块楠木，她把它压在我身上当作礼物。我还在伦敦的公寓里。
Soon after my arrival in Xinjiang, I followed my usual practice and went to a bookshop, where I searched for material about the local cuisine. There were the recipe books I’d expected, and one or two volumes about food tradition, but it was a grainy colour photograph in a book on local customs that really caught my eye. It depicted a group of local dignitaries in traditional Uyghur costume standing around an entire roasted camel! On my way to Kashgar, in the nightmarket of the regional capital, Ürümchi, I had seen whole roasted sheep with curly horns, fresh from the tandoor oven, ready to be carved. But a camel? It was enormous! Had they built a special oven?
刚到新疆不久，我就按照惯例去了一家书店，在那里寻找当地美食的资料。有我期待的食谱书，也有一两卷关于食物传统的书，但真正吸引我眼球的是一本关于当地习俗的书中的一张彩色颗粒照片。它描绘了一群身着维吾尔族传统服饰的当地政要站在一整只烤骆驼周围！在去喀什的路上，在当地首府_rümchi的夜市里，我看到了整只刚从坦铎烤箱里烤出来的卷角烤羊，随时可以雕刻。但是骆驼？太大了！他们建了一个特别的烤箱吗？
Of course I spent the rest of the trip asking everyone I met if they knew where I could find a roasted camel. Most of them looked at me as if I was mad. No one had ever heard of such a thing. Although you see camels grazing in the foothills of the Pamirs, to the south of Kashgar, the ubiquitous meat of Xinjiang is the fat-tailed sheep, also prized by the Iranians and other Central Asians. Outside every kebab shop and butcher’s stall in the region, sheep carcasses hang, their football-sized lumps of tail-fat obscenely exposed. The fat itself is a delicacy, marvellously aromatic, which is why it is always threaded on to kebab skewers alongside the chunks of lean meat. Whole sheep are slaughtered and cooked for the major Muslim festivals.
当然，剩下的时间我都在问我遇到的每个人，他们是否知道我在哪里可以找到烤骆驼。他们大多数人看着我，好像我疯了似的。从来没有人听说过这样的事。尽管你看到骆驼在喀什以南的帕米尔山麓吃草，但新疆随处可见的肉是肥尾羊，伊朗人和其他中亚人也很珍视它。在该地区的每一家烤肉店和肉铺外，都悬挂着羊的尸体，它们足球大小的尾部脂肪块被猥亵地暴露在外。脂肪本身是一种美味，非常芳香，这就是为什么它总是和大块瘦肉串在一起。在穆斯林的主要节日里，整只羊被宰杀和烹调。
I never did find a roasted camel. But one day when I was wandering through the Sunday market in southern Khotan, I almost tripped up on a camel’s head, lying in the dust beneath a butcher’s stall. Its feet were standing up nearby, like a pair of riding boots in an English country house. Above, amid the bulbous chunks of sheep’s tail-fat and the strips of fatty mutton, hung tranches of a darker meat. The butcher told me it was indeed the flesh of the camel, so I bought some, and took it to a nearby kebab stall to be cooked. I retired to a teahouse nearby, and a few minutes later a Uyghur boy made his way through the crowd, bearing my steaming camel kebabs on a nan bread platter. It was good meat, rich and flavourful, and more tender than I had expected.
我从没找到烤骆驼。但有一天，当我在呼和浩特南部的周日集市上闲逛时，我差点被一头骆驼的头绊倒，躺在屠宰场下面的尘土里。它的脚站在附近，就像英国乡村别墅里的一双马靴。上图，在一块块的羊尾脂肪和一条条的肥肉中间，挂着一块黑色的肉。屠夫告诉我这确实是骆驼肉，所以我买了一些，带到附近的烤肉串摊上煮。我回到附近的一家茶馆，几分钟后，一个维吾尔族男孩穿过人群，拿着我的热腾腾的骆驼肉串在南部的面包盘上。这是很好的肉，味道丰富，比我预想的还要嫩。
We hurried past this sad sight and dived into what was left of the Uyghur citadel. It was more like Marrakech than Beijing, with its a maze of blank, adobe-walled alleys, their wooden doorways opening into cool courtyards alive with vines and fruit trees. The scents of rice and mutton mingled around the entrance to the bridegroom’s house, where a few men were preparing food in an ad hoc kitchen. A vast wok was filled with the essential wedding food, polo, a rich pilaf made with pearly rice, chunks of mutton and strips of yellow carrot; in another wok simmered a hot-and-sour vegetable stew.
我们匆匆走过这一悲惨景象，跳进了维吾尔大本营剩下的地方。它更像马拉喀什，而不是北京，有一个迷宫般的空白，土坯墙小巷，他们的木制大门打开进入凉爽的庭院充满了葡萄树和果树。在新郎家门口，米饭和羊肉的香味交织在一起，几个男人正在一个特别的厨房里准备食物。一个大铁锅里盛满了必不可少的婚宴食品，马球，一根用珍珠米饭、大块羊肉和黄色胡萝卜条做成的浓密的肉饭；另一个铁锅里炖着一道酸辣的蔬菜炖菜。
We met at the teahouse the following day, and soon he was leading me towards the old city. We passed the great square outside the Idkah Mosque where the Han Chinese were wreaking their usual architectural carnage. The lovely old Uyghur houses at the side of the square had recently been demolished, and those behind them hung in ruins, their courtyard gardens and wedding-cake plasterwork rudely exposed. The square itself was now fronted by tiled, concrete buildings, Chinese monstrosities covered in a thin veneer of Islamoiserie.
第二天我们在茶馆见面，不久他就带我去了老城区。我们经过伊德卡清真寺外的大广场，在那里汉族人正在进行他们通常的建筑大屠杀。广场边上可爱的维吾尔族老房子最近被拆了，后面的房子成了一片废墟，院子里的花园和结婚蛋糕的灰泥被粗暴地暴露出来。广场的正面是铺着瓷砖的混凝土建筑，中式建筑覆盖着伊斯兰主义的薄薄表面。
There were other fortuitous encounters on that trip. Sitting in a Kashgar teahouse one day, eating fresh figs, I fell into conversation with Memet Imin, a lively man in his fifties with a charming manner and sparkling eyes. He told me he played in a troupe of musicians who performed at Uyghur weddings. ‘There’s one tomorrow, come with me,’ he said. So I did.
在那次旅行中还有其他的意外遭遇。有一天，我坐在喀什的一家茶馆里，吃着新鲜的无花果，和一个50多岁、神采奕奕、眼睛炯炯有神的活泼男子梅米特·伊敏聊了起来。他告诉我，他在一个在维吾尔族婚礼上表演的音乐家剧团里演出。“明天有一个，跟我来，”他说。所以我做了。
As the musicians played on in the bridegroom’s house, a young girl led me through the lanes to the home of the bride. Surrounded by her girlfriends, she was posing for photographs in a white, Western-style wedding dress, her hands patterned in henna, her hair glittered. In the next room, the older women of the family sat around a tablecloth on the floor, feasting. They helped themselves to deep-fried pastries served with sweetened qaymak cream; almonds, sultanas and dried apricots; samsa parcels of mutton, sponge cakes and dough twists; watermelon slices; and some of the literally hundreds of nan breads that were piled up in towers all over the cloth.
当乐师们在新郎家里演奏时，一个小女孩领着我穿过小巷来到新娘家。在女朋友的簇拥下，她穿着白色西式婚纱摆姿势拍照，双手用指甲花图案，头发闪闪发光。在隔壁房间里，家里年长的妇女围坐在地板上的桌布旁，大吃大喝。他们自己动手做了油炸糕点，里面有加糖的Qaymak奶油；杏仁、苏丹娜和杏干；Samsa包的羊肉、海绵蛋糕和面团；西瓜片；还有成百上千的南面包，堆在布上的塔楼里。
On an upstairs verandah, Memet Imin and his band set up their instruments and began to sing and play, filling the air with rousing, passionate music. Little children ran up and down the stairs, and soon a girl brought me a bowl of polo, to eat with my fingers in the traditional way. ‘It’s very heavy and rich,’ warned Memet Imin as he sipped his tea between songs, ‘so you should never eat it in the evening, or you won’t sleep soundly.’
在楼上的一个阳台上，梅米特·伊敏和他的乐队竖起乐器，开始唱歌和演奏，空气中充满了激动人心的激情音乐。孩子们在楼梯上跑来跑去，很快一个女孩给我拿来一碗马球，用我的手指按传统的方式吃。“它又重又丰富，”梅梅内特伊明一边喝着茶一边警告说，“所以你不应该在晚上吃它，否则你睡不好。”
Amid the merriment of the wedding, I couldn’t help thinking of those ruined houses by the Idkah square. Would there be anything left of the old Uyghur town the next time I visited, I wondered? There were no Chinese guests at the wedding, of course: there is little social intercourse between the Uyghur and the Han. Many Chinese people dismiss the Uyghur as luo hou, ‘backward’, that most damning of Chinese adjectives. ‘Filthy as hell,’ said one Chinese man who gave me a lift in his car, of the Uyghur, ‘They don’t know anything about hygiene.’ Like most Han Chinese, he saw his people as a force for civilisation, bringing modernity to the benighted natives of the western regions.
在婚礼的欢乐气氛中，我不禁想起了伊德卡广场旁那些被毁坏的房子。下一次我去维吾尔古镇的时候，会不会有什么遗物呢？当然，婚礼上没有中国客人：维吾尔族和汉族之间几乎没有社交活动。许多中国人认为维吾尔语是“落后的”，是中国形容词中最糟糕的一个。一个中国人在车里载了我一程，他对维吾尔族说，他们对卫生一无所知。和大多数汉族人一样，他把自己的人民视为文明的力量，为西部地区愚昧的土著人带来了现代感。
As a ‘barbarian’ visitor to China proper, I am occasionally affected by these echoes of the age-old Chinese racial superiority complex, for example in the hints that Westerners are sexually decadent and somehow unclean. Yet this is so often mixed with such toadying because of the relative wealth of my home nation that it’s never a disadvantage. But in Xinjiang, I saw what it was like to be a poor ‘barbarian’, without the weird kudos of an early industrial revolution and the victorious opium wars, without the glamour-by-association of the American Dream. In Xinjiang and Tibet, I witnessed the spectacle of ‘Great Han Chauvanism’, unleashed on people for whom I felt an instinctive sympathy.
作为一个到中国的“野蛮人”，我偶尔会受到这些古老的中国种族优越情结的影响，例如西方人在性方面堕落和不洁的暗示。然而，由于我的祖国相对富裕，这常常与这种奉承混在一起，因此从来就不是劣势。但在新疆，我看到了当一个贫穷的“野蛮人”的感觉，没有早期工业革命和鸦片战争胜利带来的怪异荣誉，没有美国梦带来的魅力。在新疆和西藏，我亲眼目睹了“大汉族主义”的壮观景象，对那些我感到本能同情的人释放了出来。
It’s strange for me to hear myself saying such things. I’ve devoted years of my life to China, and I love the country in so many ways. For more than a decade I’ve been arguing its case. Yet give me a week or more in Xinjiang or Tibet and I see its uglier side. Unlike many of my compatriots, I’ve never thought of Chinese popular attitudes to Xinjiang and Tibet as malicious. Most Chinese people, after all, have little access to objective information about either place, and have had no social contact with either Uyghurs or Tibetans. Even Chinese policy-makers, I suspect, consider the demolition of old Kashgar to be an improvement, and wonder why anybody minds. I doubt that Chinese chauvanism in Xinjiang is any worse than racism in Europe or the colonialism of my own ancestors. But it’s painful to see.
我很奇怪听到自己说这样的话。我把我的一生献给了中国，我爱这个国家有很多方面。十多年来，我一直在为它辩护。然而，给我一个星期或更长时间在新疆或西藏，我看到它更丑陋的一面。与我的许多同胞不同，我从未想过中国民众对新疆和西藏的态度是恶意的。毕竟，大多数中国人对这两个地方的客观信息了解甚少，与维吾尔族和藏族也没有任何社会接触。我怀疑，即使是中国的决策者，也认为拆除老喀什是一种进步，并想知道为什么有人会介意。我怀疑新疆的中国沙文主义比欧洲的种族主义和我祖先的殖民主义还要糟糕。但很痛苦。
It wouldn’t be so bad if this was Tang Dynasty China, a shot-silk, jewelled, perfumed, star-spangled civilisation, the world’s legend. But this is early twenty-first-century China, and the ‘civilisation’ it bestows on its colonies is often a tacky, off-the-peg outfit of wide roads, sterile concrete high-rises, karaoke bars and brothels. Chinese modernity is bad enough in a Chinese city like Chengdu. In Kashgar it is an outrage.
如果这是唐朝的中国，一个闪亮的丝绸、宝石、香水、星光灿烂的文明，世界的传奇，也不会那么糟糕。但这是21世纪初的中国，它赋予殖民地的“文明”往往是一套俗气的、现成的设施，包括宽阔的道路、贫瘠的混凝土高楼、卡拉OK酒吧和妓院。在成都这样的中国城市，中国的现代性已经够糟糕的了。在喀什，这是一种愤怒。
‘Yes, yes,’ I said, trying to quiet him, knowing that this kind of talk could lead him into serious trouble, but he wouldn’t stop. I left the shop.
“是的，是的，”我说，试图让他安静下来，因为我知道这样的谈话可能会给他带来严重的麻烦，但他不会停下来。我离开了商店。
‘Blah blah blah East Turkestan,’ (he mimed a razor blade, slitting his throat), ‘Blah blah blah blah East Turkestan’ (slash). The door of the shop was open and he was almost shouting.
“东突厥斯坦”，他用剃须刀割开喉咙，模仿“东突厥斯坦”。商店的门开着，他几乎要大叫了。
In the nineties, anti-Chinese sentiment in Xinjiang erupted into riots, bombings, and the assassination of Chinese officials. Many Han Chinese people were afraid to travel to the region. But the flood of Han immigrants that has come in the wake of the economic reforms and a brutal crackdown on dissent have stifled most resistance. People are afraid, on the whole, to talk of political matters.
上世纪90年代，新疆的反华情绪爆发骚乱、爆炸和中国官员遇刺事件。许多汉族人不敢到这个地区旅行。但随着经济改革和对异见人士的残酷镇压而来的大量汉族移民扼杀了大多数人的抵抗。总的来说，人们害怕谈论政治问题。
The Uyghur, of course, burn with resentment against the Chinese. It’s dangerous for them to express this openly, but in every private situation, the anger and bitterness flood out. Once I was exploring a biscuit shop, marvelling at the similiarities between the chrysanthemum-shaped pastries within its glass cabinets and the well-preserved eighth-century pastries on display in the Ürümchi museum, when the owner started jabbering at me in Uyghur. I could understand only the two forbidden English words that he said, again and again, referring to the fragile independence movement and the failed Uyghur republic of 1933.
当然，维吾尔族人对中国人充满了怨恨。他们公开表达这一点是危险的，但在每一个私人场合，愤怒和痛苦都会涌出。有一次，我在一家饼干店探险，惊奇地发现玻璃柜里的菊花形糕点和在_rümchi博物馆展出的保存完好的8世纪糕点之间的相似之处，当时店主开始用维吾尔语对我叽叽喳喳。我只能听懂他一次又一次提到脆弱的独立运动和1933年失败的维吾尔共和国时所说的两个被禁止的英语单词。
One afternoon a young middle-school teacher, Ali, and his wife invited me for tea at his parents’ house. We knelt around a large, low table covered in the nibbles and sweetmeats known as gezäklär. There was nan bread, with sugary preserves made from local apricots and shredded carrot; deep-fried dough twists dredged in sugar; crisp, flaky pancakes the texture of pappadoms; all kinds of sweet biscuits cut into ornamental shapes; and a silver tray of dishes filled with tiny almonds, dried jujubes, sultanas and paper-wrapped sweets. We chatted happily about the life and customs of the Uyghur and the British. But then I asked an innocent question about family size, a sensitive issue in China’s minority regions, and Ali thought I was straying into political matters. He froze instantly, and the atmosphere did not recover.
一天下午，一位年轻的中学老师阿里和他的妻子邀请我去他父母家喝茶。我们跪在一张低矮的大桌子旁，桌上摆满了被称为“Gez_kl_r”的小吃和甜食。有南面包，里面有用当地杏子和切碎的胡萝卜做成的含糖蜜饯；用糖调成的油炸面团；松脆的、片状的薄煎饼，有纸垫的质地；各种切成装饰性形状的甜饼干；还有一个银托盘盛有小杏仁、干枣、苏丹娜和纸包糖果的菜肴。我们愉快地聊着维吾尔族和英国人的生活和习俗。但后来我问了一个关于家庭规模的无辜问题，这是中国少数民族地区的一个敏感问题，阿里认为我在政治问题上误入歧途。他立刻冻僵了，气氛没有恢复。
Later that evening, as I wandered with my camera among the pool tables and snack stalls of the Kashgar nightmarket, I was shadowed by a secret policeman, who spoke both Uyghur and English. ‘Hello, pleased to meet you,’ he said with feigned warmth (his eyes hard, unsmiling), before interrogating me about my travel plans. ‘Where have you come from, where are you staying, where are you going, are you working for a newspaper…?’ I was deliberately vague in all my replies.
那天晚上晚些时候，当我拿着相机在喀什夜市的台球桌和小吃摊间闲逛时，我被一个会说维吾尔语和英语的秘密警察跟踪了。“你好，很高兴见到你，”他假装很热情地说（眼睛紧盯着，不带笑容），然后问我旅行计划。你从哪儿来，住哪儿，去哪儿，在报社工作吗？我所有的回答都故意含糊其辞。
He trailed me for an hour. Infuriated, I took my revenge by using him as a free translator whenever a stall-holder did not speak Chinese. ‘Please can you ask this man what exactly is in his dumplings?’ I asked him. ‘Is it sesame seeds or peanuts?’ The spook was irritated, but as he was pretending to be my best friend he had little alternative but to oblige. ‘How many spices are in this pigeon stew? And what kind of flour does she use in these fritters?’ I went on and on and on, giving him none of the information that he wanted but filling my notebook with recipes. It was deeply satisfying. Eventually he gave up, and melted back into the crowd.
他拖了我一个小时。我很生气，每当摊主不说中文的时候，我就用他做免费翻译，以此报复。请问这个人的饺子里到底是什么？我问他。是芝麻还是花生？那鬼很恼火，但他假装是我最好的朋友，只好答应了。这炖鸽子要多少香料？她在这些煎饼里用的是什么面粉？我不停地给他提供他想要的任何信息，只是在我的笔记本上写满了菜谱。非常令人满意。最后他放弃了，又融入了人群。
I wasn’t followed by the police again, but I did become more sensitive to signs of ethnic tension. And I began to notice how often the Uyghurs’ loathing of the Han Chinese coalesced around the matter of pork.
我没有再被警察跟踪，但我确实对种族紧张的迹象变得更加敏感。我开始注意到维族人对汉族人的憎恶是如何围绕着猪肉问题融合在一起的。
For the Chinese, of course, pork is the staple meat. They eat it on its own or stir-fried with vegetables, they wrap it into dumplings, they use its bones for stock and its fat to flavour almost everything they eat. When the Chinese say ‘meat’, they mean ‘pork’ unless otherwise specified. To the Uyghur, as Muslims, the mere idea of eating pork is abhorrent. One taxi driver, cocooned with me in the privacy of his cab, assured me that ‘if a true Muslim eats pork, his skin will erupt into blood-spouting boils that can be fatal’. Others spat out that old adage about the Chinese ‘eating everything’ with expressions of visceral disgust.
对中国人来说，猪肉当然是主食。他们自己吃或者用蔬菜炒，把它包成饺子，用它的骨头做汤，用它的脂肪给几乎所有的食物调味。当中国人说“肉”时，除非另有说明，他们的意思是“猪肉”。对维吾尔人来说，作为穆斯林，仅仅吃猪肉的想法是令人憎恶的。一个出租车司机，在他的驾驶室里与我相依为命，他向我保证：“如果一个真正的穆斯林吃猪肉，他的皮肤会喷出血来喷射，这可能是致命的。”另一些人则用发自内心的厌恶表达了中国人“什么都吃”的古老格言。
Although the Chinese authorities in no way condone such crass behaviour, many Uyghurs feel the government does not try hard enough to protect their feelings. ‘In the eighties, there were more sensitive policies on ethnic minorities,’ a teacher told me, ‘and Han Chinese had to be discreet about their consumption of pork. It was actually illegal to display it in shops or markets, and anyway they would not have dared to flaunt it, because they knew they would be beaten up or knifed immediately. But now the Chinese have tightened their control of the region, and they are no longer afraid of us. They don’t care anymore what we think.’
尽管中国当局绝不容忍这种粗鲁的行为，但许多维吾尔族人认为政府没有尽力保护他们的感情。一位老师告诉我，在80年代，对少数民族的政策比较敏感，汉族人在食用猪肉时必须谨慎。在商店或市场上展示它实际上是违法的，不管怎样，他们都不敢炫耀，因为他们知道他们会立即被殴打或被刀砍。但现在中国已经加强了对该地区的控制，他们不再害怕我们。他们不再在乎我们怎么想了。
Han Chinese have occasionally used the pork taboo in ways designed to inflame Muslim sensibilities. During the Cultural Revolution, Chinese Muslims were reportedly forced to eat pork and to drink water from wells contaminated by pigs. More recently, in the early nineties, a spate of offensive publications showing Muslims with pigs or pork triggered street protests in four Chinese provinces. Violent clashes between Muslims and Han Chinese in 2000 were sparked off by the hanging of a pig’s head outside a mosque.
汉族人偶尔会用猪肉禁忌来煽动穆斯林的情感。据报道，文化大革命期间，中国穆斯林被迫吃猪肉，喝被猪污染的水井里的水。最近，在90年代初，一系列关于穆斯林带猪或猪肉的攻击性出版物在中国四个省引发了街头抗议。2000年穆斯林和汉族之间的暴力冲突是由在清真寺外悬挂猪头引发的。
The Muslim taboo on pork reinforces strong social divisions between Uyghur and Han. Most Uyghurs won’t patronise Chinese restaurants, even those that claim to serve food prepared in accordance with Muslim dietary laws. ‘You can’t trust the Chinese not to use any pork products, whatever they say,’ a Uyghur shopkeeper told me. As for the Han Chinese, they tend to see Uyghur restaurants as dirty. And so the two ethnic groups dine separately, and don’t talk to each other.
穆斯林对猪肉的禁忌加剧了维吾尔族和汉族之间强烈的社会分歧。大多数维吾尔族人不会光顾中国餐馆，即使是那些声称提供按照穆斯林饮食法准备的食物的餐馆。一位维吾尔族店主告诉我，不管中国人说什么，你都不能相信他们不使用任何猪肉制品。至于汉族人，他们往往认为维吾尔族餐馆很肮脏。所以这两个民族分开吃饭，不说话。
Revulsion at the pork-eating of the Han Chinese is the focus for general anxieties about cultural assimilation and contamination. A few years ago, a rumour that pigs had trampled all over Chinese black tealeaves earmarked for sale in Xinjiang spread like wildfire. It was widely believed that this had been done as a deliberate affront to Uyghur sensibilities, and moreover that the Uyghur chairman of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region had published a notice in a newspaper warning Muslims not to drink Chinese tea. ‘So everyone stopped buying tea produced in inland China,’ one young Uyghur told me, ‘and now we buy Indian tea instead.’
对汉人吃猪肉的反感，是人们对文化同化和污染的普遍焦虑的焦点。几年前，一个关于猪践踏了中国在新疆销售的黑茶叶的谣言像野火一样蔓延开来。人们普遍认为，这样做是故意冒犯维吾尔人的感情，而且新疆维吾尔自治区主席在一家报纸上发表了一则通知，警告穆斯林不要喝中国茶。一位维吾尔族年轻人告诉我，所以每个人都不再购买中国内地生产的茶叶，现在我们转而购买印度茶。
As the days drifted by, I found myself developing an unexpected aversion to pork. Perhaps it was all those taxi-drivers, ranting about the omnivorous Chinese, filling my head with visions of pustules and sickness, but I couldn’t bring myself to go into Han Chinese restaurants. They started to acquire the dangerous aura of the early English Chinatowns: dark, mysterious, risky places, where you might end up drugged or abducted. Chinese butchers’ shops reeked of rapacious carnivorousness, perhaps even cannibalism (those Chinese eat anything). If I ate pork myself, would the Uyghur be able to sense it, just as the Chinese say they can sniff out a dairy-eater in a crowd, from the smell of her sweat?
日子一天天过去，我发现自己对猪肉产生了意想不到的反感。也许是那些出租车司机，对杂食性的中国人咆哮，脑海中充斥着脓疱和疾病的幻象，但我无法进入汉中餐馆。他们开始获得早期英国唐人街的危险光环：黑暗、神秘、危险的地方，在那里你可能会被下药或绑架。中国的肉店里到处都是贪婪的肉食者，甚至可能是食人族（那些中国人什么都吃）。如果我自己吃猪肉，维族人能感觉到吗，就像中国人说的，他们能从她汗水的气味中嗅出人群中一个吃奶的人？
So I stopped eating pork. Except for once, in Khotan, on the Southern Silk Road. Magnificent though the Uyghur traditional foods were — those delightful noodles, rich polos, crisp nans and spicy kebabs — after a few weeks they were becoming a little repetitive for a European barbarian nurtured on the ‘hundred dishes, hundred flavours’ variety of Sichuanese cuisine. Like most travellers to Xinjiang and Tibet, I had found myself starting to dislike the Chinese, but I was still fantasising about their food. So one night I stole into an upmarket Chinese restaurant in the new part of Khotan. The food was stupendously good: the roast pork, the stir-fried duck, the sizzling chives… It was clearly a place for serious Chinese gourmets, aimed at wealthy jade dealers and local officials. Guiltily, I had to admit that it was the finest meal of the trip. But it left a bad taste in my conscience, a kind of rancid, oily shame.
所以我不再吃猪肉了。除了一次，在和田，在南丝绸之路。尽管维吾尔族传统食物——那些美味的面条、丰富的马球、酥脆的南面和辛辣的烤羊肉串——在几周后，它们变得有些重复，因为一个欧洲野蛮人在“百菜百味”的川菜品种的滋养下。像大多数去新疆和西藏的旅行者一样，我发现自己开始讨厌中国人，但我仍然幻想着他们的食物。一天晚上，我偷偷溜进了和田新城区的一家高档中餐馆。这里的食物非常好：烤猪肉、炒鸭、炙热的韭菜……这显然是一个适合中国美食爱好者的地方，目标是富有的玉石商人和当地官员。内疚的是，我不得不承认这是旅行中最好的一餐。但它给我的良心留下了一种不好的味道，一种腐臭、油腻的耻辱。
While I watched, Qurban filled the bags with a pale starchy liquid. As the liquid sloshed through the windpipes, the lungs themselves hissed gently and began to expand. They blew up extravagantly as Qurban filled them with almost unbelievable amounts of liquid. After the lungs had quadrupled in size and looked fit to burst, he bound the windpipes tightly with pieces of cloth. Then, one at a time, he lifted the immense, bulging sacs, hauled them across the yard, staggering under their weight, and hurled them into a vast wokful of simmering water on a brick stove by the gateway.
我看的时候，库尔班往袋子里装了一种淡淀粉状的液体。当液体从气管里流出来时，肺本身发出轻微的嘶嘶声，开始膨胀。当库尔班往他们身上灌满了几乎难以置信的液体时，他们大发雷霆。在肺部体积扩大了四倍，看起来适合破裂后，他用几块布把气管紧紧地捆起来。然后，他一个接一个地举起那些巨大的、鼓鼓囊囊，拖着它们穿过院子，在它们的重压下蹒跚而行，把它们扔进门口一个砖炉子上的一大锅沸腾的水里。
The Uyghur may not be as omnivorous as the Han Chinese, but some of their traditional foodstuffs are just as imaginative. In a courtyard in one of Kashgar’s Uyghur districts, a street vendor named Qurban and his wife laboured over a favourite local street snack: sheep’s lung, and sheep-intestine sausages. The scene in their outhouse on the morning I visited resembled a surrealist installation. Two pairs of sheep’s lungs, gleaming in the bright sunlight which shone in from the courtyard outside, lay on the ground, their obscene, glistening windpipes attached to the wooden nozzles of dangling cloth bags.
维吾尔族人可能不像汉族人那样杂食，但他们的一些传统食品同样富有想象力。在喀什维吾尔族自治区的一个院子里，一个叫库尔班的小贩和他的妻子在当地街头苦读当地最喜欢的小吃：羊肺和羊肠香肠。我早上在他们的外屋看到的场景就像一个超现实主义的装置。两对羊的肺，在外面院子里照进来的明亮阳光下闪闪发光，躺在地上，它们的脏兮兮的、闪闪发光的气管连在悬挂的布袋的木制喷嘴上。
The texture of this delicacy is hard to describe. The pale lungs are smooth as custard, floury as a white sauce, chubby as a cheesecake. In fact, with a little added sugar you might imagine you were eating an English pudding, if it wasn’t for the odd tube poking out…
这种美味的质地难以形容。苍白的肺像奶油冻一样光滑，面粉像白沙司，胖乎乎的像芝士蛋糕。事实上，加一点糖，你可能会想象你在吃英国布丁，如果不是因为奇怪的管子伸出来…
Later, down by the market in a Kashgar backstreet, I tasted the strange fruits of Qurban’s labours. On his stall, the great ivory lobes of boiled lung were steaming away, topped with the rice-stuffed intestines made by his wife the same afternoon. He lopped off a few chunks of lung and a few slices of sausage and piled them up in a china bowl, drizzling over a good ladleful of stock. A gaggle of hungry customers were seated at benches around his stall, tucking in.
后来，在喀什后街的市场边，我尝到了库尔班劳动的奇异果实。在他的摊位上，煮好的肺的大象牙瓣冒着热气，上面放着他妻子当天下午做的米馅肠子。他切下几块肺和几片香肠，把它们堆在一个瓷碗里，淋在一瓢好汤上。一群饥肠辘辘的顾客坐在他摊位周围的长椅旁，狼吞虎咽地吃着东西。
In late summer and autumn, the bazaars of Kashgar are piled high with fruit. Men crouch over baskets of ripe, juicy green figs cradled in their fragrant leaves, or pull barrows filled with watermelons, pears, or mottled brown-and-green jujubes. There are dried fruits too, as there are all year round: dark, treacly apricots from the Kashgar area, green sultanas from the vines of Turpan, and melons from Qumul in the northeast. But while the region is famous for its fruit in general, it is the pomegranate that has the strongest resonance in Kashgar. In the shady carpet shops around the Idkah mosque, it appears as a motif, woven into the intricate patterning of the local rugs. And in the orchards, large, exotically beautiful pomegranates hang amid dark leaves, their skins glowing yellow, orange and ruby-red.
夏末秋时节，喀什的集市上堆满了水果。人们蹲在一篮篮篮成熟多汁的绿色无花果上，这些无花果放在芳香的叶子里，或者拉着装满西瓜、梨子或斑驳的棕色和绿色枣子的手推车。这里也有全年都有的干果：来自喀什地区的黑而甜的杏子，来自吐鲁番葡萄园的绿色苏丹娜，以及来自东北部库木尔的瓜。但是，尽管该地区以其果实闻名于世，但石榴在喀什的共鸣最强烈。在伊德卡清真寺周围阴暗的地毯店，它看起来像是一个图案，编织成当地地毯的复杂图案。在果园里，巨大的，异国情调的美丽石榴挂在黑暗的树叶中，它们的皮肤泛着黄，橙和红宝石的光泽。
Both of them, they told me, were traders, running companies that were flourishing with the resurgence of economic ties between China and Central Asia. One of the men, Ismail, was keen to inform me about the nutritional benefits of the Uyghur diet. ‘The onions we grow here are very pungent,’ he said, ‘so they counteract the fattiness of the mutton, and keep the blood pressure low.’ The other, Husseyn, explained how the climate of the Kashgar oasis, with its cold nights and scorching days, brought forth the sweetest fruits. We broke open the pomegranates and devoured their sweet, dark juices, warmed by the late summer sun.
他们告诉我，他们都是商人，经营着随着中国和中亚经济关系的复苏而蓬勃发展的公司。其中一位名叫伊斯梅尔（ismail）的男子非常想告诉我维吾尔族饮食的营养价值。他说，我们这里种的洋葱很刺鼻，所以可以抵消羊肉的肥肉，降低血压；另一种是侯赛因，他解释了喀什绿洲寒冷的夜晚和炎热的白天，是如何产生最甜的水果的。我们把石榴掰开，吃掉了它们的甜的、暗的汁液，被夏末的阳光温暖着。
It was late afternoon, and two Uyghur businessmen had invited me to join them on their carpeted platform under the pear trees. The teahouse garden was dappled with sun. They sat on either side of a low table, propped up by cushions covered in brightly coloured, shot-gold brocade. There were teabowls on the white tablecloth, and a waitress brought platters of grilled lamb chops, sliced melon and pomegranates. The men were in an easy, expansive mood.
下午晚些时候，两个维吾尔族商人邀请我和他们一起在梨树下铺着地毯的平台上。茶馆的花园里阳光灿烂。他们坐在一张矮桌子的两边，靠着铺着鲜艳的金色织锦的垫子支撑着。白色桌布上摆着茶碗，一位女服务员端来了一盘烤羊排、瓜片和石榴。这些人心情轻松、开朗。
After a while, to my surprise, their conversation drifted into sensitive political matters. ‘We Uyghurs are basically the same as the Uzbeks and Turks,’ said Ismail. ‘We were a great people once, under the Ottoman Empire, but it all ended with the First World War. The problem with the Uyghur is that they are too simple and pure, too trusting. They are easily abused, and now they are angry.’ He went on in the same vein.
过了一段时间，令我惊讶的是，他们的谈话变成了敏感的政治问题。伊斯梅尔说：“我们维吾尔人和乌兹别克人和土耳其人基本上是一样的。”我们曾经是一个伟大的民族，在奥斯曼帝国统治下，但都以第一次世界大战结束。维吾尔族的问题是他们太单纯，太信任人。他们很容易被虐待，现在他们很生气。”他继续说。
A slight breeze stirred in the trees; birds twittered in their branches. No one could hear us, but I still felt uneasy on their behalf. Perhaps they felt protected by their wealth and powerful connections, yet I couldn’t help thinking of Rebiya Kadeer, the prominent female Uyghur entrepreneur and philanthropist, who was once held up by the Chinese authorities as a role model for the country’s Muslims. In 1999, the political winds changed and she was detained for ‘endangering state security’ because she had sent some newspaper clippings to her husband abroad. She was imprisoned for six years before she was allowed to go into exile in the United States.
微风在树上吹动；鸟儿在树枝上叽叽喳喳。没有人能听到我们的声音，但我仍然为他们感到不安。也许他们觉得自己受到了财富和强大人脉的保护，但我不禁想到著名的维吾尔族女企业家、慈善家热比娅·卡迪尔，她曾被中国当局视为中国穆斯林的榜样。1999年，政治风向发生了变化，她因“危害国家安全”而被拘留，因为她给国外丈夫发了一些剪报。在被允许流亡美国之前，她被关押了六年。
But Ismail was still speaking freely. ‘The Han Chinese, they are a greedy race. Look at them, with their Kitchen God, and their shrines to the God of Wealth. They are a greedy race. I ask you, what kind of people worship food and money?’
但伊斯梅尔仍然畅所欲言。汉族人，他们是贪婪的种族。看看他们，和他们的灶神，还有他们的财神殿。他们是贪婪的种族。我问你，什么样的人崇拜食物和金钱？
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