I’ve been in a lot off off-the-beaten path places in China, but never have I felt quite so out of place in Tongxin. After stepping off the bus and onto the dusty city streets, I found myself not just the only foreigner, but also almost the only person not wearing the white cap of the town’s Muslim majority population. I attracted plenty of stares, zero shouts of ‘hello!’, and heard several murmurs of ‘foreigner’ in Chinese. Later I would meet several friendly locals, but my first impression was that I was very, very far from home.
Tongxin is a small down and this is its one of its few major intersections.
Tongxin only has a handful of main roads, and the other thoroughfares more closely resemble alleys running through the town’s many warrens of single-storey buildings, usually red brick homes with ochre-colored tile roofs. The low-rise skyline is frequently interrupted by dozens of mosques, their blue-green domes and minarets among the tallest things in town.
Honestly I didn’t spend enough time wandering the streets of Tongxin to get much an impression of the cadences of life in a Muslim minority town. I had planned to allot a couple of hours for exploring after checking out the town’s main attraction (a historic mosque), but I let myself get distracted by other sites on the way into town. I’d say it was worth the sacrifice, though upon leaving I did regret not having more time to venture into the alleys and sample more of the food.
Waiting for the bus back to Yinchuan.
Dispatches from the Paradise of Adventurers 