Mosques and Markets: Traditional Urban Form on China’s Northwestern Frontiers

In the late nineteenth century Chinese residents of Dihua (Urumqi), the desert capital of China’s Xinjiang Province, referred to the large, fortified gateway which separated the walled Chinese settlement from the walled Muslim settlement as the “gate which divides heaven from earth.” In so distancing themselves from their near neighbors, with whom they were inextricably linked through the economic and social life of the city, they affirmed a social hierarchy which had long been expressed in the form and function of cities across the vast expanses of China’s northwestern frontier regions. Wherever the Chinese established and developed these frontier fort-cities to control and maintain trade and trade routes they not only replicated the archetypal urban forms of the eastern core area, but also accommodated cultural diversity through the development of distinctive frontier urban forms. This article will suggest that the adaptation of both the Chinese and the frontier peoples to multicultural urban life in pre-revolutionary China was articulated in urban form in four ways. T D S R V O L U M E I X N U M B E R I I 1 9 9 8 7