Many people traveling to Xinjiang treat Urumqi as a mere transfer point. The plane lands, they sleep one night, and the next day they head to northern or southern Xinjiang. This city gets compressed into a boarding pass, one night in a hotel, and one meal.

Urumqi is a city of immigrants. For more than 200 years, waves of people from Tianjin, Gansu, Sichuan, Henan, and other places have arrived here one group after another, creating a convergence of diverse cultures. The flight from Beijing to Urumqi takes over four hours. If you stay an extra two days, you will discover that Urumqi itself is a place worth writing about.

Starbucks Enters Urumqi, "Little Sheep Brother" Leaves Urumqi

Walking a few steps from the entrance of the Grand Bazaar pedestrian street, a small shop that previously sold naan and dried fruit has now become the Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX) Xinjiang International Grand Bazaar Intangible Cultural Heritage Flagship Store. Netizens gave it a catchier name 鈥?Xingbazha. "Bazaar" is a Uyghur word meaning "market." This store opened on September 29, 2026, marking Starbucks' first entry into the Xinjiang market, with another location at Tianshan Airport. On opening night at 10 p.m., a reporter observed a long queue still forming at the Starbucks entrance. Some young people held up their phones to record videos, while older local residents stood at the door looking in.

Xinjiang people's awareness of coffee dates back to the 19th century, when Russians and Tatars migrated from the Volga River basin into the Ili River Valley, cultivating a local tradition of coffee drinking.

The most prominent spot in the store is a small stage. Inheritors of the Uyghur Muqam intangible cultural heritage perform here several times a day in a show called "Dancing Bazaar." On stage, a man and a woman dressed in Atlas silk costumes dance. The man's shirt features colorful patterns embroidered on a dark background, while the woman's skirt is made of blue-green silk that ripples like flowing water as she spins. The sound of the rawap and hand drum cuts through the hiss of the coffee machine's steam, and several Uyghur staff members behind the counter gently sway their shoulders to the rhythm.

The menu features a limited-edition salted milk tea with a milk skin topping, inspired by traditional Xinjiang folk milk tea and paired with local ingredients. The milk skin floats on the surface, delivering a savory taste with a hint of creaminess. Store manager Ma Ying explained that during this year's National Day holiday, one Xinjiang specialty beverage and three Xinjiang specialty foods were featured for a limited time in over 2,700 Starbucks stores across 41 cities nationwide.

After finishing my coffee, I took a stroll around the Grand Bazaar. Dried fruit stalls were piled with dried figs, almonds, and raisins. Carpet shops displayed handmade rugs from Hotan. In a musical instrument shop, someone was trying out a dutar, a local instrument. At the Grand Bazaar, I also experienced the internet-famous "Little Sheep Brother's" handmade DIY sheep.

"Little Sheep Brother" is Abdulla Emirla, known online as "Xinjiang Little Sheep Brother." His stall is filled with round, chubby felted wool sheep 鈥?curly-haired, wearing tiny flower hats, and dressed in Atlas silk skirts. The sheep have a simple, endearing expression, with two black beads for eyes. If you look long enough, you'll feel like it's smiling at you. The sheep's design was created by Abdulla himself, inspired by Xinjiang's sheep. Xinjiang has plenty of sheep, but the ones Abdulla makes are not realistic 鈥?they are "imagined": the body is round like a ball, the legs are so short they're barely visible, the flower hat sits crookedly on the head, and the Atlas silk skirt trails on the ground. Some people call it the "Xinjiang version of LABUBU."

The crafting process is well-established: choose a pre-made sheep body, then dress it up with clothes, a hat, and a box of small beads and sequins for decoration. After finishing, looking at the final product, I was surprised to realize that the tiny rhinestones could be arranged into patterns rather than just stiffly stuck along the edge of the skirt. But perhaps that's the whole point of handmade crafts 鈥?it's not about buying a standardized souvenir, but about spending 20 minutes clumsily dressing a sheep in clothes. Once finished, this sheep is one of a kind, a trace of having actually arrived in that place.

Abdulla was appointed as a Urumqi tourism ambassador in July this year. His sheep, starting from a small stall in the Grand Bazaar, have been carried by tourists to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and even abroad.

Eating in Urumqi

In Urumqi, I tasted authentic big plate chicken and hand-grabbed rice. Big plate chicken originated in Shawan, born in the 1980s from roadside restaurants. Long-haul drivers spread its reputation by word of mouth, turning it from a roadside stall dish into Xinjiang's "jianghu cuisine." Writer Liu Liangcheng once wrote: "A big plate of chicken placed before you 鈥?red chili skins and green peppers, white scallions, green celery, and yellow potatoes, piled high 鈥?can open your appetite and add a spirit of hearty eating and drinking."

The whole chicken is chopped into pieces, first stir-fried then braised. The potatoes are cooked until they break apart at the slightest touch. Red chili skins and green peppers are laid on top, and the sauce is thick, dark red with a brownish tint. Beside it is a plate of two-finger-wide "belt noodles." Once the chicken is mostly eaten, you pour the noodles into the sauce and mix. The first bite of chicken brings heat first, then the numbing tingle of Sichuan pepper, followed by the creaminess of the potatoes. The belt noodles, coated in sauce, are chewy, and the sauce clings to every strand, making each bite richly flavored.

Hand-grabbed rice is called "polo" in Uyghur, made by braising lamb, carrots, onions, and rice as the main ingredients. Yellow carrots are the soul of the dish 鈥?Xinjiang people call them "earth ginseng," said to have the effect of boosting qi and nourishing blood. Onions, called "piyaz" in Xinjiang, are also an indispensable seasoning. When a plate of polo arrives, it gleams with oil, the rice grains dyed golden yellow by the carrots, the lamb buried in the rice, with a few raisins scattered on top. As you eat, the rice grains pop in your mouth, the lamb is tender but not falling apart, and the sweetness of the carrots mingles with the fragrance of the onions. Polo is a primary food for entertaining guests during Uyghur festivals and weddings and funerals. During Eid al-Adha and Eid al-Fitr, almost every household makes it. The traditional way to eat is to wash your hands, sit around, and pick from the large plate, though nowadays chopsticks or spoons are more commonly used.

At the table next to me sat a Uyghur family. The elderly man rolled the rice into balls with his hand and put them in his mouth, while a child scooped with a spoon. The plate of polo in the middle was eaten completely clean.

At the Museum and Red Mountain, Feeling the Depth of Time and the City's Dusk

The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Museum is located on Northwest Road in the Saybag District. Established in 1959, it entered a "dual-museum era" after its second phase opened in 2022. Its core attractions are the "Xinjiang Historical Relics" and "Xinjiang Ethnic Customs" exhibitions, along with the famous ancient corpse gallery. Photography is prohibited in the ancient corpse gallery. Inside, the lighting is very dim, and several thousand-year-old corpses lie in glass cases 鈥?skin shriveled, facial features still intact, hair and nails well preserved. One of them is the Loulan Beauty, unearthed at Lop Nur, dating back about 3,800 years.

These dried corpses are not mummies like Egypt's, which were artificially preserved. They are nature's handiwork. In Xinjiang's Turpan, Hami, and Lop Nur regions, the climate is scorching and dry, with extremely low annual rainfall and evaporation rates over a hundred times the precipitation. After burial, the body's moisture evaporates rapidly before putrefactive bacteria can multiply. The decomposition process is interrupted before it even begins, leaving the skin and flesh shriveled but the form completely preserved. At the Astana Tomb Complex in Turpan, the groundwater level is over 20 meters deep, while the tombs sit just a few meters below the surface. Moisture in the soil layers was long ago carried away by intense evaporation, effectively placing the bodies in a natural drying cabinet. The hotter the season of burial, the faster the dehydration, and the more complete the preservation. Conversely, bodies buried in winter are more prone to decay, because the tomb temperature is relatively warm and the humidity sufficient for putrefactive bacteria to thrive.

The Loulan Beauty was unearthed at the Tieban River cemetery on the north bank of Lop Nur, an area with strong winds and abundant sand, where tombs were buried very shallow 鈥?just a few dozen centimeters below the surface. Archaeologists speculate that she was buried in winter, when the severe cold suppressed bacterial activity. The body was desiccated by windblown sand and dry air before it could decay. Standing before the glass case, you suddenly realize: the people of this land have come and gone for thousands of years. Loulan, Qiuci, Gaochang, Uyghur, Mongol, Qing Dynasty garrison reclamation 鈥?layer upon layer accumulated, and only then came today's Urumqi.

Leaving the museum, the sky was beginning to darken. I took a taxi to Red Mountain Park. Red Mountain is in the city center, named for its ochre-red sandstone, with an elevation of 910.8 meters, and is free to enter. At the summit stands the Qing Dynasty six-sided, nine-tier Red Mountain Pagoda. "Pagoda Reflecting the Setting Sun" is one of Urumqi's old eight scenic spots. When I climbed to the viewing platform, the sun was sinking toward the west. The sky was orange-red, the clouds edged in gold, and in the distance Bogda Peak still glowed, its snowfields whitening in the last ray of light.

Photo caption: Red Mountain Park sunset. Source: Zheng Yuxin / Photo

I stood there, watching the sun sink bit by bit, and the city light up bit by bit. If you are willing to pause, this city will tell you: it is not a boarding pass 鈥?it is a book that needs to be turned slowly. The slower you turn, the more you read.