Decoding Kashgar: China’s Westernmost City on the Historical Silk Road

This photobook portrays Kashgar, the westernmost city in China and once considered one of the best preserved examples of a traditional Islamic city in Central Asia. With a renewal project, nearly 80 percent of the old houses have been replaced with new ones that just look sufficiently old to make a visitor feel in a fictional world of Kashgar’s maze-like urban pattern with narrow alleyways and tunnels. “The fictional is authentic; the authentic is fictional.” Celebrating this dualism between fiction and authenticity, this book is an attempt for a visual integration between them with 13 sections, each with their own stories and themes based on content ranging from historical architecture to people of Kashgar and from black-and white urban scenes to digital reconstructions.