When going west from inland China, one first encounters the entrance oasis town to the immense Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Hami. The name of the city is said to have derived from an ancient Uyghur word, hami, which meant a ‘great gate’. Although this Xinjiang region is vast -- it embraces the huge Taklimakan Desert in the center, the Kumtag Desert in the east, and the Kunlun Mountains in the south near the Tibetan Autonomous Region -- more than half is unsuitable to live in; Uyghur cities therefore lie like a chain from the north to west.
As along the erstwhile Silk Route, from far east Hami to far west Kashi, there now runs a well maintained rail road and highways as well as air routes, the current circumstances of transport are no longer bad in this region.

Hami is the central city in the Hami Basin that appears when crossing the Beishan Mountains from Dunhuang, famous for its cave temples, in Gangsu Province. It was an important trading city between the east and west since before the Common Era, referred to as Kunmo and Yiwu in ancient times, and nowadays it is a middle class city with a population of about a half million.
It was at the end of the 17th century that Hami became a territory of the Qing Dynasty, after which the cultures of Central Asia and China have intermingled in this area. In spite of submitting to the Qing, the Islamic political power, the Monarchy of Hami, ruled here for 233 years, from the 36th year of the Kangxi age (1697) until the 19th year of the Republic of China (1930).

While the palace area, 2km southwest of Hami, is now being restored, consisting entirely of Chinese style wooden buildings, the neighboring area for the Hui Wangling (Monarch Mausoleum) and mosque is far more in the Central Asian style with brick arches or domes and tile-finishing.
This area was the cemetery for the royal family since the burial of the first monarch of Hami, erecting the tombs of successive kings. However, there remain nowadays only one brick mausoleum and two of mixed structure, wood and brick, as well as a wooden mosque. The mausoleums, called ‘Gongbei’s in Chinese, embrace not only monarch’s tombs but also those of queens and their family members.

The largest Gongbei was constructed in 1868 for the seventh monarch, Baixier (Boxier), and also includs the tombs of the eighth, and forty members of both families. It is made of brick in the style of Persia and Central Asia, on a rectangular plan of 15m wide and 20m deep. All outer walls are covered with ceramic tiles, and its façade forms an Iwan with a minaret on both sides, each with a spiral stairway in which one can go up to the roof of the mausoleum.
Most remarkable is that the shape of this Iwan is not round but triangular like a gable, and further ornamental patterns on the surrounding walls, niches on interior walls, and even the squinches supporting the dome, are all triangular arches. Despite that, its ceiling (roof) is not a cone but a dome with a diameter of 9m. It is mysterious why triangles were adhered to in the lower part of the building. Such triangular shapes have often been used in the province of Xinjiang, especially seen in the mosques of Tulufan, Kuche, and Korla.
Although, in addition to the outer walls, the inside walls, and even the dome, are all finished with square ceramic tiles, the tile design in this province of Xinjiang, not limited to Hami, did not reach the highly subtle level as in Persia or Central Asia. Another characteristic of Xinjiang architecture is that it never uses of Muqarnas decoration.

 

In the south side of this building were once erected five Gongbeis, but only two are extant now. In the foreground is the mausoleum for the ninth, and last, monarch, and his wife and children, while in the background is another for the other successive kings.
These are also made in a strange way: both have a twofold roof and the walls of each upper story are trellises, being see-through. However, when entering them, we are surprised to see that one has a flat ceiling and the other has a dome, so the upper stories do not function as lighting spaces for the lower stories. Since there are no stairs to the upper stories, they do not even function as rooms; I wonder if the upper stories are nothing but decorations.

Moreover, in the foreground Gongbei there is a diagonal thick two-fold pile beam at each corner, a post on which, four in total, supports a flat ceiling in a floating state, from each peripheral side of which comes down a slant ceiling at the perimeter of the room and over the outer gallery continuously; what an extremely complicated structural system it is !
And in the background tomb, regardless of the semicircular arches of the outer windows, the squinches under the dome are triangular arches. Both Gongbeis are not covered with tiles but finished with mud or wallpaper. Why were the design and structure of these buildings so different from the north Gongbei of the seventh monarch?

 

In front of these mausoleums is a large mosque erected by the fourth monarch, Yusuf, in the 18th century, 36m in width and 60m in depth. Its name ‘Attika’ Great Mosque, also called ‘Aidika’er’ like that of Kashi, is a transliteration of a Persian ‘Idgah’, which is usually an open-air extensive mosque where, in principlem the entire citizenry of a city can come together for the congregational worship in the Muslim festive days of Eid. The Great Mosque of Hami is said to be able to accommodate 1,800 worshippers at the same time.

The worship hall with 108 regular wooden columns forms a Central Asian taste hypostyle mosque, that is, a continuously spreading universal space under a flat roof, instead of a magnificent structural frame to make a hipped or gambrel roof in the Chinese style. Though the roof should be slanted in pluvial inland China, in the dry Xinjiang region with almost no precipitation it is just enough to tread down earth on a flat roof.

While in inland Chinese mosques it is rare to give a special design to the top of a column, in Central Asian mosques the capital of a column usually has an ornamental design like a bunch of grapes, and in the Xinjiang region the Muqarnas ornament appears only in this part of a building.
Since the circumferential walls withstand the horizontal stress of earthquakes, they have no window openings, only uplifting some points of the roof to get light to the inside. The Zaojing in the ceiling had colorful paintings of floral design, but most of them have been peeled off.
The mosque has no Rear Mihrab Hall unlike Chinese style mosques, and yet the wall around the Mihrab is decorated with geometric design and Arabic calligraphy.

 

The word Maza written in Kanji characters is the transliteration of the Arabic ‘Mazar’, which indicates the mausoleum of a Sufi saint. It originally meant the place of pilgrimage, being a religious word rather than architectural, while the word Gongbei, the transliteration of the Persian Gonbad, originally meant a dome, being an architectural word. So the previously mentioned work, Hui Wangling, is a Gongbei and is not to be called a Maza, for it is not a mausoleum of a Sufi saint.
On the other hand, the mausoleum of Gaisu, here on the western outskirts of Hami, can be called both Gongbei and Maza. Sufi tombs are more often called Gongbeis in the interior of China, while Xinjiang people have preferred more to call them Mazas.

Gaisu is a legendary person related to Woges, about whose tomb I wrote in the section on Guangzhou, southern China. The story derived from a forged document, “Huihui Yuanlai” in the 17th century, which was intended to fabricate the time of the advent of Islam to China, making it much earlier than it actually was. It claimed that Muhammad dispatched three propagators to China in the second year of the Zhenguan age during the Tang era (628), among which two died on the way and only one arrived in China and engaged in missionary work.

They were nominated the names of Gaisu, Wuaisi, and Woges. Woges has been connected with the tomb in Guangzhou, while the one who came to China was identified with Gaisu and was connected to a tomb left at Xingxing Xia in Gansu Province. A monarch of Hami built a dome on it to make it a Maza, and then the Muslims of Hami moved it to Hami and erected a new Maza in 1939. Since its dome is finished with green tiles, it is also called Lu Gongbei (Green Mausoleum).

Gaisu Maza is a simple building, a brick tomb chamber surmounted with a dome and surrounded with a wooden corridor. As the corridor is narrow, its roof is built on beams between columns in the mud walls and external free-standing ones.
The height of the dome is 15 meters. On the side of the Maza is a house for the custodian and to the rear is a graveyard.

 

In the center of the Tulufan Basin, next to the Hami Basin, is the oasis town of Tulufan. The Silk Road branched off to Tianshan North Road and Tianshan South Road from here. Tulufan is nowadays a middle-sized city with a population of 250,000 people, 70 percent of which are said to be Uyghur Muslims. The tower in the suburban village of Muna, 2 km east of Tulufan, is the most famous minaret in China, the Sugongta Tower, also known as Emin Minaret after the name of the king who made it constructed.
Its height of 44m is certainly superb; the largest scale in China, but the splendor of its ornamental effects of the brick-piling-pattern on the wall makes it the best brick-made minaret in the whole world along with the Kalan Minaret of Bukhara, Uzbekistan. Consequently, despite the principle that a minaret primarily belongs to a mosque, it looks here on the contrary as if the mosque belongs to the minaret. So much so that the whole ensemble, including the Great Hall, came to be called the Sugongta (Tower) Mosque.

The story is that: Emperor Qianlong (1711-99) of the Qing dynasty subdued East Turkestan, making it his territory with the name Xinjiang, literally meaning new land. The khvaja (governor) of the Uyghur people, Emin (Amin), was nominated monarch of the Tulufan Region as a result of his contribution to the emperor’s success. He launched into the construction of a new mosque at the age of 83 in gratitude to the emperor, but he died before it was completed. His son, Sugong (Sulayman), succeeded his father to the throne and accomplished the mosque in the following year, 1778, hence the name of the tower. It was also referred to as ‘Khwaja Emin’s Requital Tower’. The name of the architect is known as Yibulaxin (Ibrahim).

The sphere of Persian civilization, from Bagdad, capital of the Abbasid Empire, to Central Asia, belongs to the desert climate, having to use earth as the main construction material, due to the lack of wood and good quality stone. Persian buildings were mainly built with ‘sun-dried brick’ and ‘burnt brick’, both made of earth. Although Persia would develop colorful faience tiles after the 13th century, its architecture was overall finished with brick until then. The method was to engender geometric patterns by the contrivance of piling brick in various ways, occasionally employing sculptors to carve even Arabic calligraphy into the surface of the bricks.

Since a minaret is fundamentally a tower for calling followers to come and worship, building a tower on such a huge scale as the Sugongta Tower is not strictly necessary. The reason for the construction of this colossal minaret, with 14m diameter at its bottom and 2.8m at its top, must have been the intention to give it a monumentality like the Qutub Minar in Delhi as a ‘Tower of Victory’, otherwise a military function as a watchtower. This mosque actually has the appearance of a fortress, so Liu Zhi-ping conjectured in his book “Islamic Architecture in China” that this mosque would have been given a military role under the pretext of a religious facility.

The external appearance of the Sugongta Tower is divided into fifteen stories, each of which is geometrically patterned in a particular way by brick pilings, such as triangular, four-foiled, waving, and lozenge. The most conspicuous one is a series of floral patterns, not octagonal but nonagonal, which is quite difficult to draw, showing the builders’ enthusiasm for geometry. Inside is a spiral staircase of 75 steps leading to a room on the summit.

Plan of Sugongta Mosque in Tulufan (From Liu Zhi-ping : Islamic Architecture in China, Urumqi, 1985)

Apart from the minaret, the composition of this mosque is also unprecedentedly unique. In the first place its grand forecourt, encircled with low walls, is raised more than one meter as a platform, to which the entrance of the worship hall, in the form of a Persian-style Pishtaq, protrudes with an Iwan, except for which the periphery walls of the hall have no other openings. The Great Hall is entirely made of sun-dried brick finished with mud plaster, without any ornament or color paint.
The rear of the entrance Iwan is a domed vestibule, from which one can go to a room on the right with a stairway to the rooftop, and the left corridor to the spiral staircase of the minaret. From the rooftop one can still go up to the summit room of the Pishtaq, an observatory, which alone has windows as if to respond to an attack from an outside enemy.

The worship hall, admitting more than 1,000 people at one time, is rectangular, 45m wide and 53m deep. Although its plan gives an impression of being a courtyard-type mosque in the Persian style, the central space, usually treated as a courtyard, is actually a wooden hypostyle hall for worship. This can be said to be a blended structure of a Persian brick mosque and a Central Asian wooden one. The slightly gloomy worship hall of five spans in width and nine spans in depth has a flat ceiling without a gabled roof structure. Since there is so little rainfall in this region all year round, it is enough to cover the flat roof with trodden earth.

The frames of the hall are made of slender poplar columns and beams, showing well the feature of Islamic architecture in hypostyle mosques. The system is that the thick perimeter walls are made of heavy material to resist the horizontal stresses of earthquakes, while the inner columns are burdened only with vertical stress through pin-joints. This Sugongta Mosque clearly displays this character with brick outer walls and wooden inner columns. Furthermore in the mosques of Uzbekistan and Central Asia, the tops and bottoms of wooden columns are made quite thin, showing more conspicuously the pin joint design.

 

The peripheral building of mud brick makes the plan more like a monastery than a mosque, encircling the wooden hall by a cloister with a line of small cells, which are used for the Ahon’s residence, pilgrims’ accommodation, sacristy, or storage. Putting all functions together into a single building might have been convenient, but it would have been difficult to keep silence in the worship hall. The layout seems also to indicate that this mosque could have been a fortress.

The inmost part is the Rear Mihrab Hall covered with a dome, which corresponds to that of the vestibule. The interior is all finished with mud plaster without any decoration. On the squinches stands a sixteen-agonal drum, every side of which has a window.
The cloisters also have a small dome on each bay with a small window to make the floor lighter. What is singular is that the continuous arches are not circular but in shallow triangular shape. Probably the mud brick arches could not bear the load of a dome, so they were reinforced with timber. It is more clearly shown at the corners of each bay, propped by a horizontal timber beam instead of a squinch, which one would usually expect to be used. Thus these cloisters of an extremely curious form came into existence.

 

The capital city of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is Wulumuqi, an important focus on the Tianshan North Road since ancient times. Wulumuqi is said to have derived from a Mongolian word meaning ‘beautiful pasture’. It is now a large city of 1.5 million people, with plenty of high-rise buildings in its center. It is located on a plateau of 700 to 900 meters above sea level, so not in a desert area but in a temperate zone, surrounded by forests and mountains. Partly for this reason, and partly due to its source of funds coming from Hui people, the largest mosque in the city, the Great Mosque of Shanxi, is not a brick building in the Central Asian style but a wooden edifice in the Chinese inland style.

Its first construction is said to have been under the emperor Qianlong (1735-1796) during the Qing era but other sources suggest it may have been under the emperor Jiaqing (1796-1820). Later in 1906 under the emperor Guangxu during the Qing era, it was extensively repaired and enlarged. After considerable destruction during the Cultural Revolution, the mosque was fairly revived recently with financial assistance from the government, and has been designated as a Key Heritage Conservation Unit of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

The precincts of the mosque are overall encircled with walls, along which, facing the front street, are attached Muslim foods and clothing shops, like at most old mosques in urban districts. Those shops are lined under a continuous roof, back to back with a cloister of the Great Hall. At a rift in this alignment is the brick Great Gate with an arched entrance, resembling a mosque entrance breaking the shop line in a Souk of the Middle East.

In a ravine of modern buildings, the green tiled roof isthe Great Mosque of Shanxi. (From the website of EDUSHI.COM, Ｅ-cities, Wulumuqqi)

The Great Hall consists of a single-room worship hall, without the usual front hall, and the Rear Mihrab Hall. The ensemble stands on a stone platform, about a meter high from the ground, in front of which is an extensive terrace. The worship hall accommodates a hundred followers for normal services, and yet a thousand, using the terrace together, for the Eid festivals. To the north of the terrace is a lecture hall, to the south is a ritual ablution facility, and to the east are the Ahong’s study rooms.

The worship hall is covered with a single story gambrel roof and encircled by a colonnade. Since it is a single building without segmentation, the summit of the roof is lifted more than ten meters. It is principally made of wood, but its outer walls are brick, hence it is considered as a mixed structure. Though its breadth is five spans, eight columns stand in the frontage, for both ends are half-span colonnades. Those vermilion-painted stout columns, standing on a stone base and surmounted with a multi-colored bracket-set, are quite magnificent.

The Rear Miharab Hall is as large as three spans in width and three spans in depth, separated from the worship hall by a screen, looking more independent than is usually found in general. It gives an impression of being a mosque by itself, rather than a Rear Mihrab Hall.
As the circumferential colonnade is narrow, its columns look as if they were pushed out from inside rather than intentionally constructed to make cloisters. On the other hand at the right and left of the Rear Mihrab Hall are detached L-shaped cloisters, making the intermediate space look like an elongated courtyard. It is this mosque’s major characteristic to have engendered complicated but captivating courtyard-like spaces surrounded with L-shaped cloisters with a line of paired columns.

The external appearance of the Rear Mihrab Hall is an octagonal pavilion surmounted with a double-storied roof, the boldly turned up eaves of which give the building conspicuous accents. This pavilion also functions as a moon watching tower with a surrounding balcony, where the Ahong announces the start of fasts by watching the waxing and waning of the moon. Its interior is a high ceiling space in front of the Mihrab, with a greatly decorated Zaojing coffer accompanied with windows for lighting the Mihrab space.

 

This area neighbors the Republic of Kazakhstan of the former Soviet Union and is inhabited by, besides Uyghurs, not a few Kazakhs and others, so it is referred to as Ili-Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture, whose capital is Yining, a tranquil town with a population of 400,000. As it is sandwiched between the Tianshan and Kokiruchan Mountains, it is an area of high rainfall and plentiful woods, which results wooden architecture in the main.

The Great Mosque of Shanxi, the same name as that of Wulumuqi, occupies land as extensive as 6,000 square meters, arranged around various wooden Chinese style buildings. It was called the Great Mosque of Yugu in ancient times and is nowadays also called the Great Mosque of Huis. Besides, the aerial view of its Great Hall resembles a phoenix, hence it is also called Phoenix Mosque too.

There are various opinions regarding the date of its first construction. The most reliable is that it started in the 25th year of the emperor Qianlong during the Qing era (1760) and after gradual construction it was finally completed in the 46th year of Qianlong (1781). In spite of having a majority of Muslims in the population nowadays, they were minority in those days, so the mosque was erected based on fund-raising by Hui people in Shanxi, Gansu, Ningxia, and Qinghai Provinces, hence the name of the mosque became the Grand Mosque of Huis, and was built in the inland Chinese style. Especially, the layout of the buildings followed the Huajuexiang Mosque of Xian in Shanxi Province, probably from which the formal name was fixed as the Great Mosque of Shanxi. It is now designated as a Key Heritage Conservation Unit of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

To the rear of the bustling Qingzhen Street with Muslim food shops, there are the east and west mosque entrances to the calm precincts. The main Grand Gate to the east is a three storied wooden edifice, which also functions as the Bangke Tower (minaret). Its top floor is a hexagonal pavilion, quite symbolic with its pointed, curved corner eaves.
In the city is a larger Bangke Tower of the same style in the Grand Mosque of Baidula, which stands on a high brick-made stereobate, the center of which is a tunneled passage to enter the precincts, while the minaret of the Great Mosque of Huis is not usually used as the official entrance and people enter the premises through small gates on both sides.

Although the formation of the mosque is modelled after the Huajuexiang Mosque of Xian, its garden is not divided into sequential courtyards as in Xian, rather the extensive verdurous garden has lecture halls, a library, and a Madrasa (school) arranged on the right and left, and the Great Hall at the inmost place on the central axis.
The Great Hall is a large hypostyle hall of seven spans in width and about 40m in depth, probably enlarged through a series of additional constructions. It consists of three buildings, the central of which is covered with a gambrel roof and the other two with humpbacked tiled roofs. Together with the Rear Mihrab Hall, the total floor area is over 600 square meters. It is encircled with colonnades, the front one of which forms an open rolled-shed roof hall where worshippers take off their shoes.

The most conspicuous part of the Great Mosque of Huis, both in its external appearance and interior space, is the tower of the Rear Mihrab Hall. It is four-storied, and its interior is a single high-ceiling space of magnificence, lit inside from its high windows, with balconies around the second story. Among the Rear Mihrab Halls of such kind of architectural configuration, with a complicated structure of multi stories without a central pillar and painted colorfully, this is one of the finest examples.

   

Going more 90km northwest beyond Yining in Ili-Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture, one can reach the town of Khorgos near the border of Kazakhstan. In the village of Maza, close by the town, is the Tughuluk Timur Maza (mausoleum).
espite having the same name, the Timur here is not for the originator of the Timur Dynasty in Central Asia but Tughluk Timur Khan（c.1331-63）, the founder of the state of Moghulistan Khan, succeeding to the Chagatai Khan. ‘Khan’ was the title for monarchs, only given to the descendants of Chinggis Khan (1167-1227) after the height of the great Mongolian Empire. Tughuluk was seven generations after Chinggis, and more six generations after him would be Babur who would found the Mughal Dynasty in India, so ‘Mughal’ was the synonym of Mongol.

Tughluk Timur lived bravely, playing a significant role in the Islamization of the Xinjiang region. He became the monarch of the Moghulistan Khan at the age of only sixteen. Four years after he became a Muslim at the age of eighteen, he is said to have converted his 160,000 subjects to Islam from Buddhism.
When he died his mausoleum was constructed with brick in 1363. As it is said that it was designed by an architect from Iraq, it was the first Persian-style building in Xinjiang, known as a ‘non-beam edifice’ in Chinese, namely it was made by arch-and-dome structure. Its facade with an Iwan of a pointed arch is decorated with blue-tone glazed tiles. The tiles are not large panels but small mosaic pieces, in an archaic style, of 26 kinds of shapes in four colors; blue-green, indigo-blue, white, and black. They compose geometric patterns inserted with foliage designs. On the walls of both sides of the Iwan and on the central arch is formed mosaic-calligraphy in Arabic, praising Tughuluk Timur.

It is not on a huge scale, unlike later kings’ mausoleums, measuring 14m in height, 10.8m in width, and 15.8m in depth. The roof and walls, except the main façade, are all finished with white plaster. Over the entrance to the tomb chamber is written ‘The Light of Islam’ in Arabic. The walls are about two meters thick, inside which is a staircase to go up to the upper floor circular passage within the wall, from which one can go up to the roof through another staircase within the wall.
In the tomb chamber are tombstones of Tughuluk and his son. The dome is sustained by four walls and corner squinches, but probably because of technical immaturity, timbers are buried to reinforce the transitional parts from octagon to sixteen-agon of the drum.

This mausoleum is precious not only as the only extant edifice from the Yuan dynasty in China, but also as one of the few existing mausoleums of the early Islamic architecture, descended from that of the Samanids in Bukhara in the early 10th century.
One more mausoleum, adjacent to the Tughuluk’s, slightly smaller but almost in the same form, is said to have been built for his sister or perhaps his daughter). Since this has no inner staircase, one climbs a wooden ladder up to the roof.

 

Kuche is a city at the southern foot of the Tianshan Mountains, once called Qiuzi or other names in Chinese. It was an important prosperous city from of old along with Hetian to the south. Buddhism was the ruling religion here in ancient times, as recorded in Xuanzang’s “Great Tang Records on the Western Regions” (seventh century), which states that there were more than a hundred temples with 5,000 monks, while nowadays the majority of the population is Muslim Uyghurs.

The Great Mosque is said to have been first constructed in the 16th century by Ishaq Ali, who was a Sufi propagator of the Yiran sect and stayed in Kuche, but another opinion is that it was first erected in the 11th year of the reign of Chongzhen in the late Ming era (1638).
Although it was repaired and enlarged during the Qing era, it was burned down in 1931 and in the following year reconstruction began thanks to a large contribution by the millionaire of Kuche, Halimu Aji, completed in 1934. The extent of its current precincts is 20,000 square meters, the second largest in Xinjiang next to the Aidikaer Mosque of Kashi, comprising a mosque, a madrasa (Koranic school), and an orchard.

The magnificent Great Gate is made of brick in the style of Central Asian Pishtaq, having a large Iwan accompanied with two minarets. The Iwan does not embrace the usual half-outside space, because only the upper half under the arch is deeply hollowed while its lower half has an entrance door on the road side. This method is characteristic in the Xinjiang region, as seen in the Jiamai Mosque of Hetan, and most other mosques here also have shallow Iwans. Instead, the Kuche’s mosque provides a domed entrance hall beyond the door. The height of the minarets is 16 meters.

The greatest wonder is the dissimilarity between the right and left side façades of the Great Gate: the right shows the dome over the low wall, while the left has a high wall like the front façade with the third minaret at the inmost corner. The reason is probably the large setback of the Great Hall on the left side, causing the explicit exposure of the left façade of the Great Gate.

Contrary to the Great Gate, the Great Hall is a wooden building with a flat roof. It is a hypostyle hall with 64 columns, seven spans in width and nine in depth. All the columns are painted red and some capitals have Muqarnas decorations. The central wider span has a higher ceiling space for lighting. Only this part is roofed in humpbacked form and their beams have curved brackets.

To the north of the Great Hall is a mosque-like space, which once functioned as a ‘religious court’ under the theocracy. It is rare to find such facilities so well preserved.

 

This is a mosque with the mausoleum of the Sufi saint, Molana Eshiding, who is said to have led Tughuluk Timur, before mentioned in the previous section, and his 160,000 subjects, including Mongolian lieges, nobles, and ministers, to Islam. The mausoleum is also called Mona Arushinding Khoja Maza. Mona or Molana is an honorific title for a Sufi saint and Khoja is a distinguished Sufi family in Xinjiang, which is said to have derived from an ancestor in Prague in Czech region and exiled to Xinjiang at the time when Chinggis Khan conquered Prague in the 13th century.

Although there is a tradition that the wooden mosque was first erected in the Sung era, all the extant buildings were rebuilt in the 19th century. The mausoleum’s earthen walls are encircled with a wooden colonnade surmounted with a flat roof.
The Great Gate is made of brick, the lower part of which is covered with glazed green tiles. Its Iwan and small niches on both sides are all in gabled form, not with a semicircular arch, one of the very rare cases along with the Hui Wangling (Monarch Mausoleum) in Hami.
This mosque-mausoleum was designated as a Key Heritage Conservation Unit of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

 

Atushi is a small city located only 30km in a straight line from Kashi. It was formally called Artush and got its current name in 1935. In southwestern suburbs of the city is the Sulitang Maza (musoleum), which is designated as a National Key Heritage Conservation Unit, not from its architectural value but due to its historical importance as the first Islamic mausoleum in China.

Sulitang Satuke Bogela Khan, who was the third Khan of the Qarakhan Dynasty, which was of Turkish origin and ruled the vast area from Central Asia to the western part of the Xinjiang region from the 9th to the early 13th centuries.
Satuke Bogela Khan was converted to Islam by a Samanid noble, Mansur ibn Nasr, who had come to ask protection in the 10th century. As the first Muslim Turkish monarch, Satuke Bogela Khan established Islam as the state religion for the Qarakhanids and became the Sultan. Atushi is the locus where he became Muslim at the age of twelve and where he died in 955, hence his mausoleum was constructed here. It is said that in 960 during the age of his son, Musa, 200,000 Turkish families were converted into Islam.

After his death, Satuke Bogela Khan gradually became a fous of adoration, and this spot became a sacred place for Muslims in Central Asia. However, the building was restored and rebuilt many times and probably destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. The current mausoleum was reconstructed in 1996. The mosque facing the mauoleum, which is said to have first been erected by Mansur, has also been rebuilt in recent years.

The current mausoleum is on a square plan with a small minaret at each corner and likewise a small minaret on both sides of the entrance. The facing mosque at a long distance ahead has a pair of high magnificent minarets, looking as if it were the Great Gate of the mausoleum. This complex is made of plain brick, while the mausoleum is completely covered with blue-tone tiles from the top of the roof to its foot. The tiles are not very decorative but rather mono-tone, and their grades are not as minute as those in Central Asia and Persia, looking as if they are only ready-made tiles casually arranged.
There are no Muqarnas decoration on its Iwan and no calligraphy on the tile designs. That is, when current Chinese Muslims are not erecting a Chinese style mosque or Gongbey but a Middle Eastern style one, they do rely on domes and pointed arches but do not consider calligraphy or Muqarnas carvings to be integral.

 

Kashi is a middle-sized oasis city, located at the far western end of China, with a population of about 350,000 people. Since it embraces a rich heritage of Islamic architecture, it is the most important city in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region from the architectural point of view.
As it is blessed with a mild climate at an altitude of 1,200m, it has been prospered as a pivotal place of transportation since ancient times. In the seventh century Xuanzang dropped in here on the way back from India and wrote in his book that there were several hundred Buddhist temples with more than 10,000 monks. However, that Buddhist city was gradually Islamized after the 10th century, and once became the capital city of the Eastern Qarakhanids. Nowadays 80% of its population are Turkish Uyghurs.

After the 12th century the city was ruled by various dynasties, losing its political importance. Instead, it developed as a religious center for the Uyghurs, having leaving many mosques, madrasas, and mausoleums, so the city was designated as one of the National Historical and Cultural Cities. When Uyghurs revolted to establish the Republic of East Turkistan in 1931 in Kashi, it was overthrown within just several months. Even now an antipathy against domination by Han people smolders here. The current formal name Kashi is the abbreviation of the former name Kashghar.

The Great Mosque of Kashi has been known in various ways such as Attika, Etikar, Eidigarh, and Id Kah, while its current normal name is Aidika’er Mosque. As explained later, this name is a corruption of ‘Idgah’, narrating the derivation of the unique plan of this largest mosque in Xinjiang region.
A legend says that a Muslima (female Muslim) died here in 1798 on the way to Pakistan and the unused traveling expenses that she left behind were used for the restoration of this mosque, so her name, Aidikaer, was given to it. If so, it would indicate that the mosque took its current Idgah-like plan in the 19th century or later, being difficult to be accepted.
It is more reliably said that the mosque was first built in the seventh year of the Zhengtong period during the Ming era (1442), and this small mosque was reconstructed on a grand scale in 1524. It was further enlarged at the end of the 18th century, and in 1937, along with the addition of annex buildings, its garden was improved to the current size. Its front square was neatly arranged in 1937 and extensive restorations in 1955 and 1981 brought the mosque to its current state.

Plan of Aidika'er Mosque in Kashi （From " Ancient Chinese Architecture" by Qiu Yulan, 2003, Springer）

The precincts of the Aidika’er Mosque are 140m from north to south and 115m from east to west, covering as large as 13,800 square meters in total. It can admit tens of thousands of worshipers at the Eid Festivals using the courtyard together with the front square. This scale is a match for that of the Ibn Tulun Mosque in Cairo (120m x 140m), the largest in Egypt, although inferior to the Great Mosque in Samarra.

What is more interesting is the plan of the Great Hall, which is divided into two parts, the interior hall and exterior hall. It is overall covered by a grand wooden flat roof supported with as many timber columns as 136, encircled with solid brick walls on its three sides.
The probable cause of the division was that the interior hall corresponds to the early stage mosque and later it was enlarged to the right, left and front. Furthermore, like wooden mosques in northern Pakistan, the two parts served as a ‘winter mosque’ walled for heating, and as a ‘summer mosque’ open to the outside air, respectively. For this purpose, the outer wall of the interior hall, facing the courtyard, has a Mihrab.

Be that as it may, the huge width consisting of 37 spans of the façade in this mosque is quite unusual. One would be immediately reminded of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, which has almost the same length. However, in contrast to the Damascus, this long and shallow hypostyle hall, except for the interior hall, is totally open to the vast courtyard without any partitions such as walls or doors. As a result this mosque looks like an Idgah, and it can be thought to have actually functioned as one too.

Islam has the festival of Eid twice a year: Eid al-Adha for the end of the pilgrimage season and Eid al-Fitr for the end of Ramadan. Since all the city residents gather for worship at an open-air worship place in the city on the morning of these festive days, this place is called Idgah in Persian. The indispensable elements for this worship place (mosque) are a Qibla wall with a Mihrab and a Minaret, not necessarily surrounded with walls.

Although the Great Mosque of Kashi has a roofed worship hall, its whole plan is akin to an Idgah. Though the current courtyard is treated like a Chahar Bagh (four quartered garden) with many trees, its original state might have been rough land. A usual Idgah is located in the suburbs, while this place is in the center of the city, having become a religious center uniting the functions of a Friday mosque, an Idgah, and a Madrasa.

 

In the courtyard are two small pavilions just like primitive minarets and the buildings in the north and south include lecture halls, a dormitory for students, and a house for the Ahon. It is said that 400 students resided here in the past. The Great Gate with minarets is made of brick in the style of Persia or Central Asia, but is not located on the main axis of the mosque. This is a peculiar characteristic of Xinjiang’s mosques. As opposed to the mosques of Beijing and Xian, Great Gates in Xinjiang are often arranged on a right angle to the Great Hall, partly because mosques here do not take a Four-Iwan form.
Especially in Kashi, the Great Gate itself is not symmetrical, with two minarets in different distances from the central doorway and different forms. The height is 12m on the Great Gate, 13.5m on the minarets, which have ornamental bands with geometric and floral patterns.

As for the interior of the Great Hall, the columns, all painted in green, have no capitals, supporting beams directly. Instead there are many Zaojings (ornamental coffers) in the ceiling, with flowers or foliage depicted on geometrical patterns, sometimes quite realistically.

 

Kashi’s famous mausoleum is Yusuf Maza, which is said to have been first built in around 1070. Yusuf Khass Hajib (1019-1085?) was a Uyghur poet and scholar, serving as a Lord Chamberlain for the Qarakhan Dynasty. He wrote the most ancient extant work in Turkish Islamic literature, “Kutadgu Bilig”, which is as long verse as over 13,000 lines. Exceeding its intrinsic role as a book of mental education for a monarch, it became an encyclopedia of the Turkish Uyghur society in the 11th century.
After living a court life in Kashi and passing away, he was buried in Badige, but due to the danger of floods from the Tuman River, he was reburied here.

However, another theory suggests that this mausoleum is for the Sultan of Qarakhan, Yusuf ibn-Hassan Qadir, who conquered the state of Hetian. His tomb is said to have been constructed in 1032 and later he might have been identified with Yusf Khass Hajib.

In any event the mausoleum complex rebuilt in 1874, including a mosque and small tombs, was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution, and the current one was reconstructed recently in 1987-88, using concrete. It principally followed the form of the former buildings, and yet the layout of the facilities in the precincts was largely changed. In particular, strangely, the position of the tower gate was altered to the exact opposite side from the surveyed former site plan.

The existence of more than ten turrets on this gate and other buildings gives us a rich impression. The mausoleum itself is entirely covered with faience tiles, in a bluish-violet tone for the façade, and bluish-green tone for the dome.
The façade is the standard type in Xinjiang region, but here on the square frame around the Iwan’s arch is a band of calligraphy of a paragraph from the Koran. In contrast, its interior is overall whitewashed, except the tiled podium of the tombstone. Latticework in peripheral openings reminds us of Indian stone Jalis.

Afaq Khwaja Maza Complex. (From " Ancient Chinese Architecture" by Qiu Yulan, 2003, Springer)

The Naqshbandy order, a Sufi sect of Sunnis born in the early 13th century, is also known as the Khoja order, since its chief was called a Khoja (Khvaja), a word derived from Turkish or Arabic, generally used as an honorific for nobles and sages. After a faction of this order came to Xinjian in the 14th century to evangelize, it gradually obtained religious authority in the Kashghar region, and then also political power in the latter half of the 16th century. This faction is the ‘Kashghar-Khoja Family’, to which the aforementioned Sufi saint, Molana Eshiding of Kuche, belonged.

The Kashghar-Khoja broke up into the Black Mountain Party and White Mountain Party in the 17th century. Khoja Afaq (1625-94) of the White Mountain Party succeeded his father and spread the group in the 1670s into inland China, such as Xining, Lanzhou, and Linxia. His disciples later founded some Chinese ‘Menhuans’ (Sufi sects).
Khoja Afaq’s true name was Xida Yetula, while Afaq was his honorific title, meaning the Lord of the World. Based on its transliteration he was called Apake Hezhuo or Aba Huojia in Chinese.

As he gained stronger power than the political ruler, the Sultan, in the Kashghar district, he continued throughout his life keen conflicts with the Black Mountain Party for both religious and political domination. His ruling teritory spread from Kashghar to Hetian, Shache, Aksu, Kuche, Tulufan, up to Tarim. It is said that the followers of the White Mountain Party reached 300,000 during the 17th and 18th centuries.
The cemetery of Afaq and his relatives is located in a village 5km northeast of Kashi, being referred to as Afaq Khwaja Maza. It originated with his father, Muhammad Yusuf, establishing a Madrasa (Koranic school) here, and then his own mausoleum in 1640. Through the successive erection of Afaq’a mausoleum and other facilities, it has become the largest tomb-garden, of 2.7 hectares, in Xinjiang. It is still an important pilgrimage spot for Chinese Muslims.

The current Afaq Khwaja Maza Complex consists of the gate facing a garden with a pond, the High-Low Mosque, lecture halls, an Ahong’s house, Afaq Khwaja’s Mausoleum (also called Xiangfei Mu), the Green Top Mosque, the Great (Jiaman) Mosque, and a large number of tombs. Due to the obligation of turning to Macca, all buildings are laid out in parallel, but we cannot find any methodical intention in the spatial sequence from the main gate to the other buildings.
It was already the 17th century, when the new magnificent city plan of Isfahan had been completed in Persia, so it could have been possible here too to make an impressive regional plan with mighty axes and spacious squares. Actually however, each building exists alone without any consciousness of mutual relations with others.

Overall, including its Central Asian style domed masonry structure, its Chinese style wooden edifices, and the compromises between them, this complex plainly shows the features and aspects of Xinjiang Uyghur region’s culture.

The High-Low Mosque in this complex consists of two small combined mosques on an irregular plan. As one is called High Mosque and the other Low Mosque, they are collectively referred to as High-Low.
The Lower Mosque, built of brick in the 18th century, is a semi-basement mosque, for its floor is a half-story dug down into the ground. It is a simple building, divided into two parts, with inner and outer halls, lacking almost any embellishment, but with a dome over the inner hall. Utilizing its outer wall as the Qibla wall, the High Mosque was erected on an elevated floor nearly one meter above ground level. The result is that the Low Mosque has almost no windows, being somber but comfortably chilly in summer.

The High Mosque also consists of inner and outer halls, the inner of which (winter mosque) was first constructed in 1873, surrounded with brick walls, while the foreground outer hall (summer mosque), an open wooden hypostyle hall, was built in the 20th century, in 1926.
On the rear of the Low Mosque is a courtyard-style Madrasa, and on the right of the High Mosque is the Great Gate to the entire precincts of the Afaq Khwaja Maza Complex. On the further right is the Ahong’s house.
These buildings are lined east and west adjoining each other, but there are no inner connections and no axes penetrating them. We cannot but consider the layout plan incomprehensible from the modern architectural point of view. It must be the result of those buildings added at irregular intervals without any master plan.

The Great Gate is made of brick covered with enameled tiles of pale violet color, resembling Yusuf Maza in the previous section. The wonder is that in spite of all facilities deep in the precincts being approached through this gate, buildings adjacent to this gate are each entered directly from the front garden.
As this gate is said to have been constructed in 1811, when the High-Low Mosque was not yet there, the builder’s intention might have been that the gate was not the entrance to the whole precincts but simply the introduction to the Afaq Khwaja Mausoleum.

 

What is most ornamental is the outer hall of the High Mosque. It has two small brick minarets at its corners, and the inner wooden columns have Muqarnas capitals, and all the columns and ceiling are gaily painted. The carved patterns of the capitals are thoroughly different from each other. There are no such painted Muqarnas capitals in inland China, but they spread from Xinjiang to Anatolia in Turkey through Central Asia.
The most elaborately carved ones from top to the bottom are seen in Uzbekistan, while in Anatolia the lower part is rather slender. The wooden Muqarnas capitals can be supposed to have originated in the wooden Talar in Persia, and was brought to Anatolia in the west and Central Asia in the east, but there is no corroboration.

 

This is the main, largest building in the Afaq Khwaja Maza Complex, being the pivotal architectural work here. Although it is called the Afaq Khwaja Mausoleum, it was actually what his father, Muhammad Yusuf, constructed as his own mausoleum in 1670, when Afaq was as yet 45 years old. After the death of his father, he succeeded to the ruler of the White Mountain Party and acquired more fame. When he died in 1694 he was buried in his father’s enlarged mausoleum, which would come to be referred to as the Afaq Khwaja Mausoleum. His family members were also buried here, the total number reaching 72 through five generations, leaving 58 tombs in this edifice.

The mausoleum is also called Xiangfei Mu (Tomb of Xiangfei) in this region, since one of the tombs was confused with the queen consort of the sixth emperor of the Qing dynasty, Qianlong. Her name was Rongfei, and yet also poetically called Xiangfei, literally meaning fragrant queen due to her skin having the fragrance of jujube. However, she was actually buried in the Yufei Garden in Hebei Province and it is said that only her dress was dedicated here.

Architecturally, this mausoleum is entirely in the Central Asian style, without any Chinese style elements. Its size is 36m in width and 29m in depth, accompanied at each corner with a tower that has entasis in their outer shape and a staircase within, but fundamentally, as it is a pure mausoleum, minarets are not strictly needed. They are only decorations like at the Taj Mahal. Such Chhatri-like decorative elements on the top can be seen here and there, such as over the Iwan and at the top of the dome as a finial, the height of which is 24m. Those on the top of the minarets are most decoratively designed in this edifice.

AFAQ KHWAJA MAUSOLEUM, Cross Section (From " Ancient Chinese Architecture" by Qiu Yulan, 2003, Springer)

The structure of this building is quite unique: its outer walls do not take part in supporting the dome, and yet four large pillar-walls, separated from the outer walls by an inner circular passageway, form a large arch between each other, which directly support the dome of 16m in diameter. Together with half domes on the four sides of the main dome, it makes a great continuous inner space. Every half dome is supported by tripartite arches. Overall, this structural system is unparalleled.

Its interior is entirely whitewashed except for a horizontal line of tiled band, while its exterior is almost completely finished with tiles except the white painted walls demarcated by pilasters and arches. The tiles, based on green and pale violet, have been partly lost over time and repaired with tiles of different colors such as orange and brown, so its total color scheme has become disharmonized.bii However, the entrance side Iwan is the most elaborately composed and finished among all examples in China. It can be said that this mausoleum is one of the most westernized styled pieces of architecture, along with the Sugongta Tower of Tulufan, in China. This is said to have been the result of reconstruction in 1874, though it was also largely repaired after reat damage by an earthquake in 1948.

On the northwestern rear of the Afaq Khwaja Mausoleum is a small mosque erected in nearly the same period, the 17th century of the early Qing era, referred to as the Green Top Mosque. It consists of a wooden flat-roofed front hall and a brick-made rear hall surmounted with a dome, which is covered, like the Araq Khwaja Mausoleum, with green enameled tiles, hence comes the name. It is said that Khoja Afaq used this spot to read the Koran.

Architecturally this mosque takes the same form as the High-Low Mosque with two contrastive halls; a closed brick inner hall as a winter mosque and an open wooden outer hall as a summer mosque. It does not make a symmetrical plan as a whole, for, betraying the impression of its external appearance, the inner hall is on the right from the direction of Macca and the outer hall on the left, having a brick Mihrab on the Macca side respectively.

The outer hall is open on its two sides apart from this Mihrab side, with four spans in width and three spans in depth. Its columns each have a wooden Muqarnas capital, but in simpler shape than those of the High Mosque, painted entirely in green, unifying with the color of the dome. Though its beams are said to have been figuratively painted in multi-colors, there are no traces left now.

The inner hall’s dome is as unexpectedly large as 11.6m in diameter, and its height is about 16m. The transitional part from a square room to a round dome forms squinches at the four corners, making overall eight continuous encircling arches, over which are 16 arches, and then a further 32 arches, over which is set the dome.

The Great Mosque (Jiaman)is located at the westernmost (i.e. Macca side) place of the Afaq Khwaja Maza Complex. Jami Masjid (Friday Mosque) is transliterated as ‘Jiāman’ in Chinese.
The Xinjiang region rose in revolt against the Qing dynasty in the middle of the 19th century. In the convulsion of the upheaval it was Yakub Beq (1820-77) who invaded Xinjian as the general of Buzurg Khan, a descendant of the Kashghar Khwaja Family, and finally established his own political power based on Islam. He repaired the site of Afaq Khwaja Maza, adding many new buildings, one of which is this Great Mosque from 1873. After his death this vast region was conquered by the Qing dynasty, renamed Xinjiang Province, which literally means New Land (for the dynasty).

The Great Mosque takes a shallow U-shaped plan. It looks as if enclosing a kind of courtyard, but actually the garden has some lines of verdant trees, quite different from western mosques’ dry courtyards without plants, giving an impression of a peripatetic garden rather than a place of worship. This is a characteristic of Chinese mosque gardens, showing the disparity of natural and cultural climate from the Middle East. Together with this point, the mosque can be considered as a kind of Idgah-mosque following the Aidika’er Mosque in the city of Kashi.

 

Structurally, it consists of a brick closed inner hall and a wooden open outer hall like other mosques here. The interior of the inner hall resembles that of the Sugongta Mosque of Tulufan, encircled by plastered massive walls and having a Mihrab room surmounted with a large dome in the center. Actually, it is not in the exact center, lying one span toward the north. It is also a characteristic of Chinese Islamic architecture to be not necessarily attached to the axis of strict symmetry. Over the two wings of this U-shape plan are successive small low domes.
In the outer hall, its columns and the ceiling of the central bay are colorfully painted and some Muqarnas capitals emulate each other’s elaborateness.

Plan of the Great Mosque in Kashi (From Liu Zhi-ping: Islamic Architecture in China, Urumqi, 1985)

Yarkand is an oasis town located 210km south of Kashi, at the western end of the Taklimakan Desert. Since it was the center of the country of Shache in the ancient Han era, the town is still formally referred to as Shache even now.
The area was Islamized during the 9th to 11th centuries, and Said Khan, a descendant of Tughluk Timur who founded the state of Moghulistan Khan, occupied the Kashghar region, established the state of Yarkand Khan (also called Kashghar Khan) in 1514, and made this town the capital (1514-1680).

In the northeast of the city is a group of buildings called Altunruk Complex, which includes this Said Khan’s mausoleum, a mosque constructed by the second Sultan, Abdul Rashid, and his queen consort’s tomb, Amanishakhan’s mausoleum. Though there was also a royal palace, it was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Altun, meaning noble, is used as the eulogistic name of this Maza (graveyard).
Every building was first constructed in the 16th century, during the late Ming era or early Qing era. In the 19th century they were repaired and the precincts were enlarged, but the current buildings are all recent reconstructions.

The Altun Tombs, including those of the Khoja family, are spread on a low hill, the central one of which is Sultan Said’s wooden mausoleum. It has four corner columns on a square plan, which are surmounted with a refined Muqarnas capital. Structurally it is a pavilion sustained by these four columns only, making the four sides curtain walls, all minutely trellised like stone Jalis in India.
The entire large wooden box looks like a wood-ization of a typical marble casing around the central tomb with subtle latticework, settled inside a mausoleum in Iran. Although its system, making it possible to see through and allowing for ventilation, is interesting, it is uncertain how faithfully it had succeeded the original design.

 

As for the mausoleum of Amanishakhan, it was the tomb of an excellent Uyghur woman poet and musician, also the Sultan’s queen consort, Aman Isa Khan (1526-60), who died as young as 34. It is much larger than the Sultan’s mausoleum; the central hall, surmounted with a brick dome, is surrounded with a wooden colonnade. Despite looking like a two-storied edifice, its inside is a one-story space with a high dome exquisitely set on four corner squinches.
Although it was first built in the 16th century, the current one is a 1933 reconstruction, with a possibility of it having been made of reinforced concrete. As its external appearance differs from traditional mausoleum style in no small amount, the degree of its fidelity to the original design is also uncertain.

 

Although one view says that the Altun Mosque was constructed in the 10th century, during the Qarakhan dynasty, it was probably first built in the 15th century or so. The current edifice was reconstructed in the 19th century and still more recently restored to a great extent.
The Great Gate facing the square along the main street is a comparatively new one, elaborately finished in an orthodox way. It is thoroughly in the Persian style, with decorative patterns of brick piling and partially covered with faience tiles. It has minaret-like ornaments on each end of the top parapet.

Beyond the Great Gate is a deep courtyard, facing the longer side of which is the worship hall of a great width. Its outer walls are made of brick, with a minaret on both sides, obviously modelled after the Aidikaer Mosque in Kashi.
Like at Aidikaer a small central inner hall (winter mosque) is surrounded with an outer hall (summer mosque) that embraces many timber columns, extending north and south. Further like the Aidikaer, its courtyard is full of verdurous trees, almost hiding the façade of the worship hall, and most unusually has a vineyard in its eastern part.

The outside line of columns in the outer hall have a Muqarnas capital each, and its ceiling bays are colorfully painted in geometric or floral patterns. Curious is that there is no Minbar on the side of the Mihrab.
Among the important mosques in the Xinjian region, only at this one was I prohibited from taking photographs, seeming to be closed to non-Muslims.

Hetian is a city located on the southernmost part of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Although its area was Buddhist territory in ancient times, it was Islamized after the 11th century, and most of its current population are Uyghur people. It embraces the Great Mosque and the Aidikaer Mosque, the former of which, the Jiamai Mosque, I am going to comment on here.

The mosque’s whole formation is almost the same as the Great Mosques of Shache or Kuche in the previous sections, being able to be called a typical mosque of the South Xinjiang-type across the Tianshan Mountains. These mosques have the following traits.
First: a brick Great Gate (Pishtaq) of the Central Asian or Persian style with a minaret-like pinnacle on both ends, facing a front street or a square.
Second: as the pointed arched Iwan of the Great Gate faces the south, through which one goes into a deep courtyard, the worship hall is not on the front but on the left hand (west side), indicating that the gate is not located on the central axis.
Third: the courtyard has many trees, not after the fashion of a square but a green garden.
Fourth: the worship hall is oblong, with small depth and great width.
Fifth: a two-parts constitution with an inner hall (winter mosque) encircled with brick walls and an outer wooden hall (summer mosque) open to the front garden.
Sixth: its timber columns are surmounted with a Muqarnas capital and painted colorfully.
Seventh: the coffer directly in front of the Mihrab in the inner hall is covered with a dome.

 

The brick-made Great Gate at the Hetian’s Jiamai Mosque is a recent reconstruction, elaborate in and out. The way exquisite geometric patterns have been created by piling bricks in various ways is especially excellent, although one can know it is not a masonry structure but a reinforced concrete building when going around to the back. Since bricks were only stuck on concrete with mortar, it enables any kind of delicate pattern. Such a construction system is typical in Chinese mosque reconstruction after the Cultural Revolution.

In its courtyard are two lines of poplar trees arranged regularly, which recalls to us the courtyard of the Mezquita in Cordoba. The Great Hall facing it has a colonnade with very slender wooden columns in front, then a hypostyle outer hall with thick whitewashed pillars, and a closed inner hall surrounded with walls at the innermost place. As all these whitewashed parts are made of reinforced concrete, apertures have horizontal lintels than arches.

Thus, through having seen Islamic architecture in the Xinjiang Uyghur region, we have recognized that not a few religious buildings have changed into more or less superficial seeming ones despite their traditional appearance or even in cases following Middle Eastern architecture when reconstructing. It is just like the change of townscapes of many towns in China from what was once a similarity to those of Samarkand or Srinagar (both are surprisingly near on the map) to modern cosmopolitan ones. The crucial reason for losing their valuable historical legacies is the Cultural Revolution during the latter half of 1960s and the first half of the 1970s. The cultural loss is unfathomable for China and for the architectural society in the world.

（01/07/2009）