Idh kah mosque in Kashgar, said to be the biggest in China, boasts a notice-board recalling the care lavished on its restoration by the central government. The monument is an emblem, it claims, of "the harmony among China's ethnic groups". However, many of the men idling in the shade of the mosque's leafy grounds on a Saturday in the holy month of Ramadan are in an unharmonious state of mind. Xinjiang, the vast region in whose west lies the old Silk Road city of Kashgar, has a history of tension between the ethnic-Turkic, mostly Muslim, Uighurs who used to make up most of its population, and the authorities, dominated by ethnic-Han Chinese. During Ramadan, which comes to an end on August 19th, that tension has been exacerbated by the government's intervention in religious practice.
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