The more you look, the more you'll love it

Walking on the crisscrossing paths of Kazanqi, you can occasionally hear the "clip-clop" of horses' hooves. Carriages covered with gorgeous fabrics pass by, and the coachmen wearing square hats always smile kindly at passersby. Uzbek merchants once unloaded blue dyes loved by the people here. Now, those blues are deposited on the lintels and window frames of every household, washed by the years into shades of varying depths. In the cultural concept of the Uyghur people, blue symbolizes the sea and the blue sky, representing tranquility and gentleness. In this blue maze, the cool colors within sight take away the oppression of the scorching sun. A girl in an adras silk dress rides a bicycle with a watermelon in her basket. Orange printed cloths drying on the grape trellis stretch in the wind, revealing exquisite badam patterns. White mist rises from the naan pit next door, and the aroma of wheat, cumin, and chickpeas climbs up the blue walls to the carved balcony on the second floor. When the Ili River glistens like gold in the dusk, the rammed earth of the old city walls exudes the scent of history. This is not the neat ink fragrance of history books, but the complex scent of Sogdian caravan camel bells, the blood rust on the arrows of the Chagatai Khanate, and the ice and snow on the armor of the Xibe Battalion archers, fermented in the evening breeze into a secret history of the border town. Let history rewind, and we will see the scenes that took place on this land: the Wusun people inlaid the skull of the Yuezhi king with silver to make a vessel for mare's milk wine; the plows of the Tang army's reclamation turned over the black calcium soil, unearthing silver coins from the ancient Dayuan Kingdom buried in the ground; the documents of the governor's office and the Sanskrit palm-leaf manuscripts of the Buddhist temple flickered alternately on the Silk Road. Whenever the wind sweeps over the broken battlements, the sound of the bili from the distant Western Regions tavern can be heard; the iron hooves of Genghis Khan's army rolled over the Ili River Valley, and the crosses of Christian churches and the crescents of mosques coexisted in the dust of war. Qiu Chuji traveled west to this place and wrote in "The Travels of Changchun Zhenren" the spectacle of "getting up in the morning and seeing people of three different religions dressed in different clothes."