Kashgar (Kashi) 喀什

Province: Xinjiang
Population: 210,000
Kashgar or Kashi is an oasis city with approximately 350,000 residents in the western part of the Xinjiang UyghurAutonomous Region of the People's Republic of China. Kashgar is theadministrative centre of KashgarPrefecture which has an area of 162,000 km²and a population of approximately 3.5 million.Located in the western extremity of China, the city covers an area of 15 km² at the altitude averages 1,289m/4,282 ft. above sea level.
Kashgar features a desert climate with ho tsummers and cold winters, with large temperature differences between those two seasons: The average high in January and July is 0.3 °C (32.5 °F) and 32.1°C (90 °F). Spring is long and arrives quickly, while fall is somewhat short. The mean annual temperature is 11.9 °C (53.4 °F). Kashgar is one of the driest cities on the planet, averaging only 64 millimeters (2.52 in)of precipitation per year.
Kashgar has been an important trading centre since the days of the Silk Road, and still is today. The road from Eastern andCentral China branches out to both the north and south of the Taklamakan Desert, and Kashgar is where the two branches meet again in the western part of the desert. The local population is a mixture of Uyghurs, Han Chinese, Kyrgyz,Tajiks and Uzbeks, boasting a colorful ethnic variety. The majority residents are Uyghurs in Kashgar. The Uyghurs employed an alphabet based upon the Syriacand borrowed from the Nestorian, but after converting to Islam widely used alsoan Arabic script. They spoke a dialect of Turkic claimed to be preserved in the Kudatku Bilik, a moral treatise composed in 1065.