Beyond Kashgar, motorways as smooth as the M4 have been built over the haunting Gobi desert to tie these distant provinces into the Han heartland. Oil platforms and gigantic wind-farms stretch over the wilderness. Supermarkets, skyscrapers and glistening ultra-sleek airports have sprung up in the major cities. China is marching west. Beijing is determined fully to absorb these traditionally Muslim and restless expanses it has long claimed in Central Asia. 

Known as Xinjiang, the "new frontier" in Chinese, this rocky wasteland — the country's largest province — extends across more than 1.5 million square kilometres north of Tibet, arcing out to border Russia and five of the 'stans. The Uighurs, unfortunately, live in China's territorial crown jewel. The soil is a treasure-trove of hydrocarbons and minerals. 

Xinjiang is as essential to China's geopolitical ambitions and sense of self as Siberia is to the Russians. Without Xinjiang, China would not be able to feed its factories with oil, gas, coal, uranium and gold. These territories hold more than half its proven minerals reserves and more than 80 per cent of the various kinds of deposits present in the country. Without Xinjiang, Beijing would not have been able to open gas pipelines that reach to the Caspian Sea through Kazakhstan or have plugged itself into precious reserves in Turkmenistan. Without Xinjiang, there could be no plans for a railway connecting Beijing to Istanbul to the Trans-Siberian, or pipelines crucial to growth being built to funnel out Russia's oil. Without Xinjiang, there would be no Chinese roads being cut through the mountains and the steppes into the 'stans, flooding the regions with economic produce and Han migrants.

Takeaway: China will replace the old mud huts of Kashgar with a new sparkling metropolis for the Hans 

Chinese dynasties have dreamed of mastering the Silk Roads since the third century BC when the first legions traversed the Great Wall during the Han dynasty. Centuries of cyclical protectorates and governorships endured for a few generations each only to be defeated by collapse in the centre, constant Turkic rebellions and the region's fierce geography. Mao, who towards the end of his life explicitly modelled himself on China's founding "Yellow Emperor", Huang-di, was only continuing a long tradition when he launched the Communist Party's "Develop the West" campaign that continues to this day.

The province's recent history begins when it was annexed along with Tibet in the 18th century to the Manchu Qing dynasty's empire. Almost immediately, they fell into a grey zone between suzerainty and outright incorporation. The early 20th century saw the territory descend into anarchy before coming under heavy Soviet influence. For a while, Stalin even toyed with the idea of annexing it himself. Moscow established a base in the region and Russian workers heavily influenced the evolution of the Uighur language, which adopted the words for both a train and China itself — symbolic of how far the territory had spun from Beijing's orbit. In the late 1940s, a Soviet-inspired East Turkestan Republic flickered into life.