Changed lives

The renovation project has changed the lives of Mardan and his wife. In 2017, while strolling with his wife, who had a dream of opening a coffee shop in Kashgar, Mardan noticed that a recently renovated two-story building at a crossroads in the Old Town was being offered for rent.

The couple immediately fell in love with the dusty building, believing it to be the ideal location for their coffee shop.

Having rented the building they started to fill it with old furniture and decorations they had collected from flea markets, such as a sign from a 1980's tailor's shop, and they used old doors as tables and hung pictures of Kashgar in old window frames.

"I just want the coffee shop to be a place to showcase Kashgar as it was in the old days. It's my responsibility to preserve our culture and present it in a modern way," Mardan said. At the time, many observers doubted that the tea-loving Uygurs would accept coffee and even the young couple wondered if people would come to the Old Town to try it.

Despite their concerns, Kashgar Corner opened for business in 2018, just as the city's tourism boom began. Last year, Kashgar hosted more than 8.8 million tourist visits, a rise of 59 percent year-on-year.

Back in 2018, Xinjiang's social situation gradually stabilized after a number of anti-extremist and anti-terrorism measures were put in place. For a period, terrorist attacks happened frequently in Kashgar prefecture, which made people afraid to travel there.

At first, the coffee shop's customers were mainly tourists, who often packed the premises at peak times. Gradually, local residents of the Old Town also developed the habit of drinking coffee, just as they have become accustomed to hearing a young musician playing the popular Western song Despacito on the rawap (a traditional five-stringed Uygur instrument) at a famous centuries-old teahouse in the Old Town.