The Opposite End of China || Xinjiang & Northwest China Blog (中国的另一端 ||...
News, information, and hearsay about northwest China from a blogger who lived for 3 years inside the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Now written from Beijing.



Me & Ehud (Apr 7)




An Interesting Article (Mar 30)
...can be found here (and here).


Random Xinjiang Image (Nov 25)



Happy Halloween! (Oct 31)



Who is my carpet? (Mar 4)
I picked up this carpet (rug?) at a second-hand shop in Beijing yesterday. Can you tell that I'm an impulse buyer? I have no idea who this is supposed to be. My only guess from browsing through Wikipedia is Mikhail Kasyanov, the former Russian Prime Minister who was pushed out of power by Putin in 2004. Of course, Russia is just a guess... and this guy could be a Serbian or a Turkmen or whatever. Any good guesses out there? Or better yet, does anyone know who this is? Feel free to pass this photo on to anyone who might be well-informed on the sorts of people whose faces turn up on used carpets. Comments are working again! Send in your answers below.


I found Osama bin Laden. (Jan 28)
And in Beijing, no less... I shot this at the Ditan Park Temple Fair yesterday, where I found Osama selling rubber masks and Ox-themed headgear to the masses. The fair was a total zoo, but as this is my first Lunar New Year in Beijing, I had to check it out. If you look closely, you'll also see a forlorn-looking George W. Bush mask, and a huge inflatable pile of poop... something to do with good luck and this year's zodiac animal.


I'm Alive. Happy Niu Year. (Jan 26)
Another year, another animal crossed-off the Chinese zodiac, as I slowly but surely move towards completing the whole twelve-year cycle. I shot the above video last night in the square between the Drum Tower and the Bell Tower here in Beijing. It's more than a bit of a cliché to try and wow people not living in China by describing the ferocity of the Lunar New Year fireworks... and I don't really have a good excuse, except that I'd like to add my own personal video to the genre. The first 20 seconds show what the square looked like when I arrived at about 11:30 pm. The video then cuts to about 2 minutes before midnight, as all hell begins breaking loose. As if bringing in the Year of the Ox in the perfect Beijing setting wasn't enough, I was also lucky enough to meet Da Shan yesterday... the most famous foreigner ever, period. Now, I can truly say that life is complete. I'd post the photo, but something's wrong with my blog interface and it's not allowing me to upload. I'll post ...


More LIFE (Dec 17)



Luvchina's One-Man Nationalist Fatwa (Dec 12)
Somebody really, really cares about me! And he's been nice enough to write a rambling, semi-psychotic diatribe all about me. Think I'm joking? Well, he cares thiiiiiiiis much:
I'll let you check out the post for yourselves. Needless to say it's not a development I can really welcome... but I suppose it's a badge of honor, of sorts. I've almost certainly dealt with this person before as a commenter. He's likely a Chinese person living in the United States. The dork uses various names on this site, including "tctdh", "sogdia", and "oldwiseman". His blog on sina.com mostly focuses on pictures of his sister (a flight attendant on Air New Zealand) with Chinese celebrities, rants against France, and... a vaguely homoerotic display of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao photos. Hundreds of them. Really, you should check it out, if only to peer into the mind of a Chinese ultra-nationalist for just a moment. (And yes, that background in the screen grab above is for real.) Oh yeah... vote for me...


Pakistan Nukes China. Et la France? (Dec 9)
A stumper for your next quiz night: Name all of the countries that have exploded atomic weapons in Xinjiang. The answer: China and... Pakistan? Crazy stuff in today's New York Times nuclear book review smorgasbord. The book in question is "The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and Its Proliferation" due out in January. The authors drop more than one bombshell recovered from the dustbin of atomic history: Secret cooperation extended to the secluded sites where nations tested their handiwork in thundering blasts. The book says, for instance, that China opened its sprawling desert test site to Pakistan, letting its client test a first bomb there on May 26, 1990.

That alone rewrites atomic history. It casts new light on the reign of Benazir Bhutto as prime minister of Pakistan and helps explain how the country was able to respond so quickly in May 1998 when India conducted five nuclear tests.

“It took only two weeks and three days for the Pakistanis to field and fir...