It was 9pm but the sky of Hotan town was still bright. This is one of the unique features of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region located in the northwestern side of China.
The prefecture moved its clock ahead by two hours to match the time in Beijing when the country decided to implement one time zone following the formation of a new China.
This resulted in the locals having to adjust their routine by starting work at 10am. They get a two-hour lunch and nap break and end their day at 8pm.
Xinjiang is a beautiful place of vast desert basins with stunning scenery and mountains covered in snow are visible on clear sunny days.
All the locals gathered around the oases that eventually became its towns and cities as the region developed.
I recently got on a flight from Beijing to Xinjiang and spent a week exploring Hotan town, Kashgar and the provincial capital of Urumqi.
Communication is a big problem because most of the locals could only converse in their mother tongue.
When I was travelling in a van, the sky suddenly turned yellow. It was a sandstorm albeit a small one.
“It is normal because we are surrounded by deserts, ” said the locals.
Due to the dry climate and sandy landscapes, corpses dehydrated quickly, mummified naturally and are well-preserved.
The prefecture has unearthed some 200 mummies and about a dozen are displayed at the Xinjiang Museum.
One of the mummies, “Loulan Beauty”, is the highlight of them all.
She was said to have been “sleeping” in the desert for 3,800 years before archaeologists found her in 1980.
She was believed to have been between 40 and 50 at the time of her death and stood at about 152cm.
Loulan was the capital of Kroraine, a small but prosperous ancient kingdom on the Silk Road.
As a major stop along the famous trade trail linking the West and the East, the kingdom was established on the banks of a salt lake around 176BC and flourished for about 800 years.
Researchers believe that a natural disaster, including a raging sandstorm, was one of the reasons for the vanishing of Loulan when the lake dried up and the place turned into a desert.
These mummies are a testimony to the diversity of ethnicities in the region.
Today, residents of Xinjiang comprises a majority of Uighurs (46.11%) and Han (40.16%).
The others include the Kazakh, Hui, Kyrgyz and Mongol ethnic groups.
A company has used the desert for its mushroom cultivation business as one of the poverty alleviation projects.
“We produced some 50 million bottles of mushroom sauce and 20 tonnes of organic fertilisers yearly, ” said company director Li Ruiqin.
The dry climate and long daylight hours have turned Xinjiang into the kingdom of fruits and nuts.
Grapes from Turpan, melons from Hami, fragrant pears from Korla and pomegranates from Kashgar are known as the four heavenly kings of fruits from the prefecture.
The other popular agricultural products include jujubes, figs, mangoes, raisins, walnuts and almonds.
The region is also home to a variety of flowers, which include lavender and rose.
Nuts, jujubes, raisins and pure essential oils or products are among the must-buy souvenirs for tourists.
Xinjiang has always been a place where different religions co-existed for a long time.
Buddhism was first brought into the province, followed by Islam in the late ninth century that eventually dominated the region in the early 16th century.
Protestantism, Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy made their way in around the 18th century.
According to official figures, the region has 24,400 mosques, over 250 churches and 60 temples.
During the trip, I visited four mosques but did not bump into any congregants.
“It is not prayer time. They came earlier and left, ” said mosque officials.
Separatists led by the East Turkistan Islamic Party and several other forces entered Xinjiang, spreading religious extremism.
They were blamed for the first terror attack reported on April 5,1990.
This went on until 2016 when numerous attacks were reported in Xinjiang, killing innocent civilians and hundreds of policemen, and leading to a series of clampdowns with the government imposing rigorous restrictions.
Life has gradually returned to normal.
Turqiz Osman, 33, said she had been working hard to save up some money.
“I want to spend it on a holiday to Beijing with my family, ” said the mother of three children, aged between six and 13, from Kashgar.
The farmer turned factory worker has never ventured out of the oasis.
“Now that Xinjiang is peaceful and I have a permanent job, earning around 2,000 yuan (RM1,285) per month, I’m happy, ” she added.
In the first quarter of this year, Xinjiang received 42.31 million tourists, raking in 34bil yuan (RM21.86bil).
