page_title: Kashgar
section_title: People's Republic of China
hierarchical_section_title: Kashgar / History / People's Republic of China
caption_attribution_description: English: NJ 43 Su-fu [U.S.S.R., China, Afghanistan, Pakistan, State of Jammu and Kashmir] Series 1301, Edition 5-AMS, Map from the International Map of the World 1:1,000,000
context_page_description: Kashgar, also Kashi, is an oasis city in Xinjiang. It is one of the westernmost cities of China, near the border with Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Pakistan. With a population of over 500,000, Kashgar has served as a trading post and strategically important city on the Silk Road between China, the Middle East and Europe for over 2,000 years.
  At the convergence point of widely varying cultures and empires, Kashgar has been under the rule of the Chinese, Turkic, Mongol and Tibetan empires. The city has also been the site of a number of battles between various groups of people on the steppes.
  Now administered as a county-level unit, Kashgar is the administrative centre of Kashgar Prefecture, which has an area of 162,000 square kilometres and a population of approximately 4 million as of 2010. The city itself has a population of 506,640, and its urban area covers 15 km², though its administrative area extends over 555 km². The city was made into a Special Economic Zone in 2010, the only city in western China with this distinction.
context_section_description: Kashgar was incorporated into the People's Republic of China in 1949. During the Cultural Revolution, one of the largest statues of Mao in China was built in Kashgar, near People's Square.
  On October 31, 1981, an incident occurred in the city due to a dispute between Uyghurs and Han Chinese in which three were killed. The incident was quelled by an army unit.
  In 1986, the Chinese government designated Kashgar a "city of historical and cultural significance". Kashgar and surrounding regions have been the site of Uyghur unrest since the 1990s. In 2008, two Uyghur men carried out a vehicular, IED and knife attack against police officers. In 2009, development of Kashgar's old town accelerated after the revelations of the deadly role of faulty architecture during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Many of the old houses in the old town were built without regulation, and as a result, officials found them to be overcrowded and non-compliant with fire and earthquake codes. Additionally, the newer buildings may also have been built with increased ease of surveillance in mind.
  When the plan started, 42% of the city's residents lived in the old town. As the plan was undertaken, residents have been removed from their homes in order to demolish large sections of the old city and replace these areas with new developments. The European Parliament issued a resolution in 2011 calling for "culture-sensitive methods of renovation."  The International Scientific Committee on Earthen Architectural Heritage (ISCEAH) has expressed concern over the demolition and reconstruction of historic buildings.  ISCEAH has, additionally, urged the implementation of techniques utilized elsewhere in the world to address earthquake vulnerability.
  Following the July 2009 Ürümqi riots, the government focused on local economic development in an attempt to ameliorate ethnic tensions in the greater Xinjiang region. Kashgar was made into a Special Economic Zone in 2010, the first such zone in China's far west. In 2011, a spate of violence over two days killed dozens of people. By May 2012, two-thirds of the old city had been demolished, fulfilling "political as well as economic goals." Critics have called the destruction of the old city part of a campaign of cultural genocide. In July 2014, the Imam of the Id Kah Mosque, Juma Tayir, was assassinated in Kashgar.
  On October 21, 2014, Aqqash Township (Akekashi) was transferred from Konaxahar (Shufu) County to Kashgar city.
caption: Map of Kashgar (labeled as SU-FU (KASHGAR)) and surrounding region from the International Map of the World (1966)[a]
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