Final Observation

The other thing I noticed from looking out the window was the village architecture. Almost all the villages looked the same. They had the same baked-bricks used for walls and the ceramic roof tiles on the slopping roofs in the traditional Chinese style. A lot of the villages we passed were very small, and maybe had 20 families from what we could see from the road. Other villages were larger. In villages where they could afford to have one special building, one building that was nicer or more beautifully built than any of the other buildings in the town, do you know what that building was? It wasn’t a school or a clinic or a community center. It was a mosque. At least, I think they were mosques. They had the onion-shaped dome and the crescent moon emblem on the roof. I wasn’t expecting that.

It is true that this region once belonged to a kingdom known as the Sultanate of Dali which was independent of China for a long time. There are many Muslims in this area. I do not know if the mosques I saw predate the Cultural Revolution, but they looked new enough that it wouldn’t surprise me if they were built fairly recently, now that the Communist Party is finally easing up on the practice of religion.