I picked up this carpet (rug?) at a second-hand shop in Beijing yesterday. Can you tell that I'm an impulse buyer?

I have no idea who this is supposed to be. My only guess from browsing through Wikipedia is Mikhail Kasyanov, the former Russian Prime Minister who was pushed out of power by Putin in 2004. Of course, Russia is just a guess... and this guy could be a Serbian or a Turkmen or whatever.

Any good guesses out there? Or better yet, does anyone know who this is? Feel free to pass this photo on to anyone who might be well-informed on the sorts of people whose faces turn up on used carpets.

Comments are working again! Send in your answers below.

I shot this at the Ditan Park Temple Fair yesterday, where I found Osama selling rubber masks and Ox-themed headgear to the masses. The fair was a total zoo, but as this is my first Lunar New Year in Beijing, I had to check it out.

If you look closely, you'll also see a forlorn-looking George W. Bush mask, and a huge inflatable pile of poop... something to do with good luck and this year's zodiac animal.

Another year, another animal crossed-off the Chinese zodiac, as I slowly but surely move towards completing the whole twelve-year cycle.

I shot the above video last night in the square between the Drum Tower and the Bell Tower here in Beijing. It's more than a bit of a cliché to try and wow people not living in China by describing the ferocity of the Lunar New Year fireworks... and I don't really have a good excuse, except that I'd like to add my own personal video to the genre.

The first 20 seconds show what the square looked like when I arrived at about 11:30 pm. The video then cuts to about 2 minutes before midnight, as all hell begins breaking loose.

As if bringing in the Year of the Ox in the perfect Beijing setting wasn't enough, I was also lucky enough to meet Da Shan yesterday... the most famous foreigner ever, period. Now, I can truly say that life is complete. I'd post the photo, but something's wrong with my blog interface and it's not allowing me to upload. I'll post it soon. Click here for the photo!

So, I wish you all health, wealth, and happiness in the New Year!

Err... also, some of you might wonder why I haven't been blogging. The short answer is: I decided to lower my profile after I seemed to be heading towards becoming the target of a human-flesh search engine. The long answer is: how do you keep writing interestingly about Xinjiang while living in Beijing? Only time will tell...

Well, he cares thiiiiiiiis much:

I'll let you check out the post for yourselves. Needless to say it's not a development I can really welcome... but I suppose it's a badge of honor, of sorts.

I've almost certainly dealt with this person before as a commenter. He's likely a Chinese person living in the United States. The dork uses various names on this site, including "tctdh", "sogdia", and "oldwiseman". His blog on sina.com mostly focuses on pictures of his sister (a flight attendant on Air New Zealand) with Chinese celebrities, rants against France, and... a vaguely homoerotic display of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao photos. Hundreds of them.

Really, you should check it out, if only to peer into the mind of a Chinese ultra-nationalist for just a moment. (And yes, that background in the screen grab above is for real.)

Oh yeah... vote for me in the 2008 China Blog Awards! Just click here, and then click the "+" symbol. Do it everyday.

A stumper for your next quiz night: Name all of the countries that have exploded atomic weapons in Xinjiang.

The answer: China and... Pakistan?

Crazy stuff in today's New York Times nuclear book review smorgasbord. The book in question is "The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and Its Proliferation" due out in January.

The authors drop more than one bombshell recovered from the dustbin of atomic history:

Secret cooperation extended to the secluded sites where nations tested their handiwork in thundering blasts. The book says, for instance, that China opened its sprawling desert test site to Pakistan, letting its client test a first bomb there on May 26, 1990.

That alone rewrites atomic history. It casts new light on the reign of Benazir Bhutto as prime minister of Pakistan and helps explain how the country was able to respond so quickly in May 1998 when India conducted five nuclear tests.

“It took only two weeks and three days for the Pakistanis to field and fire a nuclear device of their own,” the book notes.

In another disclosure, the book says China “secretly extended the hospitality of the Lop Nur nuclear test site to the French.”

France!? Say it ain't so, Xiaoping. Well, it couldn't be any worse than this:

The book, in a main disclosure, discusses how China in 1982 made a policy decision to flood the developing world with atomic know-how. Its identified clients include Algeria, Pakistan and North Korea.

Alarmingly, the authors say one of China’s bombs was created as an “export design” that nearly “anybody could build.” The blueprint for the simple plan has traveled from Pakistan to Libya and, the authors say, Iran.

But why would China do something so stupid? Well, old habits are hard to kick. Nikita Khrushchev said in his memoirs that Mao's attitude towards the nuclear holocaust of World War III was, "Hey, even if China loses 300 million people we'll still have plenty left over."

Why did Beijing spread its atomic knowledge so freely? The authors speculate that it either wanted to strengthen the enemies of China’s enemies (for instance, Pakistan as a counterweight to India) or, more chillingly, to encourage nuclear wars or terror in foreign lands from which Beijing would emerge as the “last man standing.”

Sounds like the kind of plan that will definitely work out in the long run.

On November 16, a self-proclaimed al-Qaeda spokesman named Muhammad Uighuri claimed that Osama bin Laden has appointed a leader for a previously unknown organization called al-Qaeda in China. Uighuri said the new leader of al-Qaeda for China in general and for Xinjiang province in particular was a Chinese citizen named Abdul Haq Turkistani (Tabnak News Agency, November 16). Despite unsubstantiated claims by China’s security services and Foreign Ministry, there is little proof that al-Qaeda has ever engaged in active operations within China.

The last sentence being the most important, of course.

Between China and al-Qaeda's penchants for both opaqueness and obfuscation, it's fairly safe to say that nobody anywhere knows anything for sure when it comes to ETIM, TIP, etc. (The New Dominion has also been down this path before.)

The structure of TIP and the low profile of its new leader, Abdul Haq Turkistani, coupled with doubts about the identification of ETIM with the TIP have made it difficult to understand the real affiliation of this new group with al-Qaeda....

Given the questionable record of prior claims that the mainly Sufi Muslim Uyghur separatists have aligned themselves with the Salafist al-Qaeda organization, the legitimacy of the present announcement remains uncertain. The actual existence of TIP cannot yet be verified and it is important to note that the name Abdul al-Haq Turkistani did not appear on a list of major Uyghur “terrorists” released in October by China’s Ministry of Public Security (Xinhua, October 21).

In other words, nobody knows jack. (h/t China Notebook)
••••

Also, I've been meaning to tell you to take a look at Xinjiang: Far West China, a blog being run out of Karamay in northern Xinjiang. It has a sort of "Xinjiang for the casual reader" feel that will appeal to those of you looking to get a grasp on my favorite autonomous region. The site brings the number of Xinjiang blogs worth reading up to three!
••••

It's easy. Click the plus sign here to vote for me in the 2008 CHINA BLOG AWARDS.

One of the great things about the LIFE photo archive on Google is that it's now possible to pair-up old TIME Magazine articles with their long-lost photos. It takes a bit of detective work, but you can dig up a lot of images that illuminate the plain text in TIME.com's archives.

Take the story of old Sheng Shicai 盛世才 (pictured above), Xinjiang's warlord governor from 1933 to 1944. Some of you may remember him for chasing the Pickle King of Islamistan back to Britain ten years earlier. Others may remember him as Stalin's hand pick for Communist Party membership... who then flipped to the Kuomintang in 1942 and executed Chairman Mao's little brother. (Check out some of his regime's currency from 1941.)

TIME'S Chungking correspondent, Theodore White, and LIFE Photographer William Vandivert (later a founder of Magnum) caught up with Sheng during the brief period between his betrayal of the Communists in '42... and his appointment as the Nationalist's Minister of Agriculture & Forestry in 1944 (and subsequent flight to Taiwan in 1949).

What you'll find if you click through below is perhaps the most awesome article ever written about Xinjiang, "Victory Without Arms: Report from Turkestan" published in TIME on October 25, 1943. I've added some formatting — which TIME.com inexplicably does not do — and more importantly added the pertinent photos from the LIFE archive.

Those of you who still need enticing to read the entire article should take a look at this prescient quote:

To yet another problem the world will be highly sensitive: the Chinese treatment of the minority Moslem race, alien in language, religion and culture. Are the Turks, who form 60% of the population, to be steamrollered into the Chinese pattern or inundated and absorbed by tidal waves of Chinese immigration? Or will China try to preserve the minority languages, schools and courts and let the natives participate in their own Government ? Upon her record in Turkestan, China's claim for trusteeship for other retarded racial groups in Asia may stand or fall.

Was that written in 1943? I think I read the same thing the other day in the New York Times. C'mon, click through...

... you see a photo of muppets in the New York Times and notice a striking resemblance to a number of prominent bloggers.

From left to right, starting on top, I see:

Nels Frye of Stylites; Jonathan Ansfield of Newsweek/Stone Boat; Jeremiah Jenne of the Granite Studio; and, Anna Sophie Loewenberg of Sexy Beijing.

I'm sure Jim Boyce must be in there, too, but I can't pick out which muppet he is. Any other suggestions?

I've been meaning to post these video clips since I shot them last summer. This Journey to the West (西遊記/Xīyóujì) -themed House of Horrors is the centerpiece of a rather large, unattractive, and unattended amusement park/zoo right in the center of Korla.

It's called Peacock Park after the misnamed Peacock River (based on a misleading transliteration from Uyghur, but that's a long story). The bottom line: this place is a huge waste of space on prime riverside real estate. I don't expect it to last for very long.

This particular attraction was one of my favorite quirky finds in all of Xinjiang. Don't miss the awesome string-pulling and recorded loop technology in action!

One thing I can tell you is that no matter how ridiculous it looks from home, this place was more than a little bit freaky to wander through alone. (Alright, I was scared.) Hang around places like this too often and your life's apt to turn into an ugly scene from a B movie.

A few random photos after the break...

Like many of you, I've been spending endless hours browsing through Google's newly debuted LIFE photo archive. There are some real Xinjiang gems in there, which I hope to feature here from time to time.

Click on the image above for the complete photo. Old school!

Just from the way it's spelled, there's fairly clearly a connection to new-ness, timeliness, etc. But if you've never heard the story — although it's been floating around for 10, 20... or even 100 years in some circles — does that automatically make it news?

That's the question I have about a current New York Times story that was briefly listed as the front page feature earlier today, titled "The Dead Tell a Tale China Doesn’t Care to Listen To":

URUMQI, China — An exhibit on the first floor of the museum here gives the government’s unambiguous take on the history of this border region: “Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of the territory of China,” says one prominent sign.

But walk upstairs to the second floor, and the ancient corpses on display seem to tell a different story.

One called the Loulan Beauty lies on her back with her shoulder-length hair matted down, her lips pursed in death, her high cheekbones and long nose the most obvious signs that she is not what one thinks of as Chinese.

The Loulan Beauty is one of more than 200 remarkably well-preserved mummies discovered in the western deserts here over the last few decades. The ancient bodies have become protagonists in a very contemporary political dispute over who should control the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.

Not that I don't get the "hook" to modern-day tensions in Xinjiang, but how is this news? Aurel Stein was picking up European-looking corpses wearing tartan socks a hundred years ago.

And I'm sure this 1998 documentary on the "Mysterious Mummies of China" from the program NOVA wasn't breaking any headlines at the time either:

That Chinese scientist's necrophilia is a bit creepy, no? And did you see the mummy's face?

In the 10 years since that TV program was made, the Loulan Beauty appears to either have a)turned black or b)been shellaced. Here's a comparison:

Now that's what I call news.

Also note that both the documentary and the Times article both use the same Western scientist, Prof. Victor H. Mair, as a primary source. I could do that! So how about a job, Jim Yardley?

P.S. Wait for the last 30 seconds of the video to hear the announcer call Xinjiang's most prominent ethnic group Wiggers. Priceless.

The images depict, respectively: the colorful bristles of a Uyghur broom; a scene at the Uyghur market in Korla; and, the golden leaves of an autumn Diversifolius Poplar tree in the Taklamakan Desert.

standard resolution / high resolution

standard resolution / high resolution

standard resolution / high resolution

••••

In other news, I am most definitely the biggest pimp in Beijing.

No, I don't mean that literally. So why then? I met a very nice girl a few weeks ago, and her birthday just happened to be this past Sunday. I was hoping to get her tickets to Elton John and Tim Rice's Aida, which is traveling here this week.

But I ran into trouble: the only tickets left were in the Y480-1,280 range, and I definitely wasn't forking over that much cash. So, I entered a contest sponsored by City Weekend to win two VIP tix and backstage passes... and won! Sweeeeet.

How could she possibly resist me? Don't answer that.