A car pulls up outside an apartment building in Ürümqi. An elderly woman, in her eighties and frail, emerges and is helped into the vehicle. She is driven to a prison on the outskirts of the western Chinese city. She is taken inside a room where she is shown, via a screen, her 57-year-old daughter, the Uyghur anthropologist Rahile Dawut. Days later the old woman relays the encounter to her granddaughter, Akeda Paluti. “Your mother is doing well,” she says. “Try not to worry.”
Rahile’s life was devoted to the preservation of cultural diversity across the vast Xinjiang region, nearly three times the size of France and covering about one-sixth of modern China. For centuries, ancient Silk Roads wove past its mountain ranges, lakes, deserts and valleys. Today, officially called the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, it shares borders with Russia and Mongolia; Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan; and Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.
Rahile insisted on conducting gruelling fieldwork. She regularly travelled hundreds of kilometres from the capital Ürümqi to isolated villages to research the local Mazar — the shrines and tombs, sometimes attached to mosques, where saints have been buried or where miracles happened — as well as the farmers and craftsmen to understand the traditions etched into their daily lives. She recorded the oral histories that local leaders had for centuries offered to pilgrims; their poetry, music, folkways and other traditions.