Urumqi is not an easy place to live, and I do have to remind myself occasionally that I’m not here to enjoy myself or even to be happy especially, but rather to complete a journey I began four years ago, to see all of China, to get a comprehensive picture of the country, and to see everything, both the good and the bad. I’ve seen plenty of good things over the last few years, so I suppose it’s about time I see some of the less appealing aspects of the country too. Xinjiang is not only the most difficult province to get permission to live in, it is also the most difficult in terms of the living conditions. The part of Urumqi I’m living in is very poor and underdeveloped. Everything here, from the flickering lights of the underground supermarkets, the maze of barbed wire fences and chaotic roads, the groups of heavily armed men standing outside the school gates, the police stations every one hundred meters along the road, the number of stray dogs everywhere, the heavy pollution that gives you a constant headache, all makes one feel more like one is in Afghanistan than in China. The only place with worse quality vegetables in the shops is North Korea.

Despite the fact that the distance between Harbin and Urumqi is greater than that between London and Moscow, the time zone is the same. This means that the sun rises very late, and in the summer doesn’t set until midnight. As a result, people here live ‘2 hours ahead of time’. The school day starts at 10am, and ends at 6.30pm. Shops open late and don’t close until about midnight. It does give me the illusion of having a lie in every day, however, which is something I like very much.

Nobody seems to notice I’m a foreigner: everybody thinks I’m Uyghur. Everybody here lives in gated communities, and one has to first scan one’s ID and then one’s face to enter. As a foreigner I cannot get an ID card, and so have to get special permission every time I want to enter my own apartment. The security guards get annoyed at me, but the school can’t fix this problem easily, and apparently this has only become a policy in the last year or so. Previously foreigners never had this problem.

On the plus side the school, and especially the international department, behind the high walls, and heavily guarded gates, is a little serene oasis of green trees and tranquillity. The office is beautifully furnished and spacious. The teachers are all Han, and none can speak a word of Uyghur. Of my hundred or so students, only two are Uyghur. My boss, on seeing my camera, looked slightly worried, and told me to be careful taking pictures. If I go near a mosque, or God forbid take a picture of one, then I wont be allowed to stay in China.

It looks like the teaching will be fairly light, the classes are between ten and twenty students, and I’ll be teaching IELTS, something I have a lot of experience of, and relatively enjoy teaching. The first apartment I was put in was simply disgusting, filled with trash, had no running water, or electricity, or working toilet, and the lock to the front door was so poor that the door would keep opening by itself. It reminded me of the song ‘Mile End’ by Pulp, used in the soundtrack for Trainspotting. After complaining, I was put in a nicer apartment, which was furnished better, had a good working lock, although it still hasn’t been cleaned for two years and has no wifi. Foreigners are unable to register for wifi (or bank cards, or a phone number).

One thing that is a little surprising is that Han everywhere think I am Uyghur. This makes it difficult for me to enter restricted areas, and getting a taxi is impossible. All taxi drivers ignore me, and I always just have to wait until an Uyghur driver pulls to the side and offers to take me.

The other foreigner working at the school is a man called Ray. He has lived in Urumqi some eleven years and has a Chinese wife and son. His Chinese is perfectly fluent and he can also speak a good amount of Uyghur, though warned me that doing so these days is not a good idea.

On his first year in China, whilst working in an Uyghur district, the Urumqi riots broke out. For two days the sound of explosions was constant. Surprisingly Ray blames the Uyghurs for the riots, pointing out that before the riots they had a good amount of freedom. But he has seen the riots first hand, and that is bound to shape his opinion. For several days gangs of Uyghur men armed with knives and rocks stabbed and beat to death any Han they came across. The pavements were, according to Ray, dotted with corpses, including the corpses of people he had known. Two days later the government sent in the army, and suddenly the streets were filled with tanks and soldiers. In the south of the province, where the Han are a small minority, the violence continued sporadically for over a year.

Whenever I walk around the city with Ray he will talk about how it has changed. One area he described as once being full of vendors, people in diverse and colourful clothing, groups of minorities dancing on the street, is now just a bland boring Chinese high street. It is undoubtedly safer, and certain areas that were once no-go zones are now perfectly safe to walk around. But it is dull, and Ray often talks about his nostalgia for the city he knew when he first came.

There is one very small area, surrounded by police checks, where the traditional customs have been allowed to continue. There is Uyghur street food, old mosques, and a group of almost impossibly beautiful Kazakh women doing traditional dances. Riot police are everywhere, of course. The Uyghur women are wonderfully matriarchal in appearance, with fierce expressions, enormous bosoms, and even more enormous African looking dresses and purple headscarves.

Last year the police turned up at Ray’s apartment and told him he would have to leave the country, along with all other foreigners in the city. He returned to his home country with his wife and son, and found a job as a middle man for Chinese businessmen there. He was making a good salary, but his wife missed her family, so this year they decided to come back to Urumqi for one last year. Like me, his background check has been going on for some four months. But because he has a marriage visa he can stay as long as he likes, whereas I will have to leave in six weeks if the background check doesn’t finish soon.

Living here is a challenge, but had Urumqi been pleasant, comfortable, and not much different from other places in China, I would definitely have been disappointed. There are a lot of cities I want to see here – Kashgar, Turpan, Ili – and the natural scenery here is spectacular. Even in Urumqi one can see snow capped mountains in the distance. Xinjiang contains both the second highest and second lowest place in the world, and has forty degree summers, and minus thirty degree winters. Water is scarce – Urumqi is the further away from the sea of any city in the world. So far from the sea, in fact, that the rivers dry up before they get there. Although Xinjiang is described as an ‘Uyghur autonomous region’, it is home to a multitude of Kazakhs, Mongolians, Kyrgyzs, and Tajiks. For all the hardship, I’m glad to be here.