Nine years ago, I took my first trip to China. I was on a tour arranged in Taipei, Taiwan, that took a handful of people via Hong Kong to Xi'an and then along the Silk Road.

It was a long, tiring journey that spanned two weeks. It would be too long for this space and tiresome to tell the story in full, but what I liked best was visiting the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

While planning the trip, I had hoped to go as far as Kashgar, near the borders of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. I had heard much of the ancient city, mostly from the first NHK series on the Silk Road, and I had just taken a college course on Islamic art and architecture. But the bus and train tour took us only as far as the regional capital, Urumqi, 1,100 km closer than Kashgar, before flying us back to Xi'an, in Shaanxi province.

Alas, the word out of Kashgar, as reported by The New York Times this July, was that many old areas of the city will be razed to, among other things, widen the streets.

When I arrived in Xi'an in August 2000, the tour guide was gushing over the wide streets: broad avenues, some tree-lined, filled with cars, motorcycles and, of course, bicycles. The streets were widened in advance of U.S. President Bill Clinton's 1998 visit to China, a proud moment for modern China, the tour guide said. The walled city of Xi'an, the ancient capital of China, was turned into a dirtier, more polluted version of any major Asian city, with cell-phone shops sharing space with luxury goods stores, and some 4.5 million people.

Right away I was prepared to be disappointed by Xinjiang, having heard that the Chinese government relocated Han Chinese there en masse to dilute the Muslim Uighur population.

After a rough road trip through the length of Gansu province, the first stop in Xinjiang was Hami, which has a population of about 388,000. Like Yubari in Hokkaido, Hami is linked to a melon (I didn't get to eat one and I don't remember why). Near the train station and hotel, the buildings looked as if they came out of Queens, New York, built after World War II but sturdy. The highlight of the trip was a visit to the Islamic King Tombs on the outskirts of town in the Taklamakan Desert. I didn't feel like I was in China.

After buying some nan and raisins at a market, we took an overnight train and arrived the next morning in Turfan. We stopped briefly in the desert community, which has about 250,000 residents, to see how grapes become raisins. In Hami, we had met Han Chinese and Uighurs, some who looked outwardly Islamic and others who you couldn't tell the difference unless you knew their name, say Amina versus Li Xin'ai. In Turfan, the Uighurs were more distinctive, but many spoke Mandarin Chinese just the same, though sometimes with an accent.

It was in Urumqi where everything was blurred and blended. The sprawling, bustling city of over 1.7 million looked like Xi'an or Taipei. We stayed at a five-star hotel in the center of the city that today costs around $65 a night. One of the porters, a female, was Uighur. There was nothing Islamic about her; she looked like a European with her blond hair and white skin. Everywhere, the city seemed integrated.

Which is why I was disheartened to read about and hear the news of the Uighur-Han violence in Urumqi recently. It was only nine years ago I was there, visiting by myself a morning market in a park, no fear of any violence.

Throughout the trip in Xinjiang, everything felt comfortable, maybe because there wasn't much of an overtly Communist China presence. But being Han Chinese, maybe the dilution of the Uighur culture had been so effective as to make life easy for people like me to adapt. Whatever the case, it is best to visit the area soon before more of its history is eroded forever.

E-mail: yung@ml.japantimes.co.jp