Uigur food , unsurprisingly, has far more of a Central Asian than a Chinese flavour. The most basic staple - which often seems to be the only food available - is laghman , which comprises a stew of mutton, tomatoes, hot peppers and other vegetables served on rough, handmade noodles. The mutton is often of poor quality and, to delicate Western palates, laghman can taste a lot better without meat. For the same spicy sauce but without the noodles and with chicken (served chopped up in its entirety, head, feet and all), try tohogish (known in Chinese as dapan ji), which is served in smarter restaurants.

In summer, apart from laghman, street vendors also offer endless cold noodle soup dishes, usually very spicy. Noodles are far more common than rice, though rice does appear in the saffron-coloured pilau, comprising fried rice and hunks of mutton. More familiar to foreigners are the grilled mutton kebabs on skewers - it is normal to buy several of them at once, as one skewer does not make much more than a mouthful. They are often eaten with delicious glasses of ice-cold yoghurt (known in Chinese as suannai), which are available everywhere in Xinjiang. Oven-baked breads are also popular in markets: you'll see bakers apparently plunging their hands into live furnaces, to stick balls of dough on to the brick-lined walls; these are then withdrawn minutes later as bagel-like bread rolls, and nan flat breads, or sometimes permuda (known in Chinese as kaobao), tasty baked dough packets of mutton and onions, which can also be fried - as samsa - rather than baked. The steamed version, manta, recalls Chinese dumplings or mantou.