This traditionally Kazakh stronghold is lush with farmland, pasture and flanking forest-blanketed mountains — a big change from the usual preconceptions of Xinjiang — and from here you can exit China at Khorgas and travel onward to Almaty. Although a train spur line is being built to Yining and Khorgas, the current method of travel for this excursion is by bus or private jeep.

Pliny has a chapter on myomancy, or soothsaying by means of rats and mince, (Nat. Hist., lib. ix. c. 57).

And books were demanded of them, books on Russia, on sailors, on aeroplanes, on scientists, on metro-workers, on kolkhoz labourers, on women and schoolchildren and parachute heroes.

This real-estate drama, however, has a twist: one of the area's gentrifiers is a stylish new restaurant and performance space opened by Michael Dorf, the founder of the Knitting Factory.