Read The Emperor Far Away for Free Online

seemed fantastic, a mix of races that belied the reality of life in Urumqi. It was as if the desert sun illuminated the true nature of the relationship between the Chinese and the Uighurs, while the night sky cloaked it, because there was a palpable tension on the streets during the day. You could see it in the eyes of the police sitting in their vans scanning passing pedestrians, and the security guards who stood outside the banks and big shops.
    Whenever there were Han and Uighurs in the same vicinity their mutual loathing was obvious. So polarised are they that they look straight through each other, as if that Uighur selling sweet apples or the Chinese newspaper vendor didn’t exist. But in the centre of Urumqi the Han and Uighurs have to walk the same streets every day, and there is always the sense that it would take very little for the barely suppressed hatred on both sides to explode.
    One afternoon, Billy took me to meet his friend Mardan. He looked like a caricature of a Uighur: big-eyed and dark-skinned with a curving nose, thick black hair and a moustache that straggled down both sides of his mouth. We met him on the edge of Saimachang, where he was waiting for us at the wheel of a Chery, a cheap Chinese car, his shiny grey shirt and trousers set off by eye-catching red fake-leather shoes.
    He was what the Chinese call a black, or unlicensed, cab driver and rented the car for 70 yuan (£7) a day. ‘I can make 1,000 yuan [£100] a week if I am lucky,’ said Mardan, whose name means ‘brave’ in Uighur. He hardly spoke Mandarin, despite his years in Urumqi. ‘I didn’t have much education. I just went to middle school, not high school. This is the best way for me to make money.’
    His job is a direct consequence of the 2009 riots, which prompted a big rise in car ownership among the local Han and created a subsequent glut of inexpensive, second-hand motors like the one Mardan drove. Fearful of what could happen if there is a repeat of the violence, the Chinese residents of Urumqi no longer want to take public transport to work, or let their children walk to school. Many of the Han victims of the riots were attacked on buses. I interviewed one young woman in hospital whose face was a swollen, purple mess of cuts and bruises. She had been dragged off a bus coming from the airport and beaten half to death.
    Mardan knew something of the rage that drives people to commit such an appalling act of violence against a defenceless woman. His cousin was one of five Uighurs who stabbed a Han man to death on Yan’an Lu during the disturbances. He had agreed to talk to me about it but was twitchy about doing so in a public place, so we drove through Saimachang until we found a quiet alley to pull into.
    Like Mardan, his cousin hadn’t graduated from high school. He was twenty-four and unemployed at the time of the riots. His only previous job had been working in the kitchen of a restaurant. As Urumqi erupted in anger, so did he. ‘He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He went out with his friends and lost control,’ said Mardan, who was clearly reluctant to describe the exact horror of what his cousin had done. ‘The whole family are heartbroken. He was a good boy, he went to the mosque. He’d never been in trouble before.’
    Embarrassed about recalling the details of his cousin’s role in the attack, Mardan was also fatalistic about it. ‘It has happened. We can’t change it.’ The only bright spot from the family’s point of view was that he had escaped being executed. At least twenty-five Uighurs were given death sentences after the riots, but Mardan’s cousin had avoided that by turning himself in to the police. He had no choice, because one of his friends was already in custody and had offered up his name.
    Now he was serving life in a prison in Aksu, nearly a thousand kilometres away. It was too far for his family to visit, even if they were allowed to. ‘We haven’t heard from him since he was