HORSEMEN wrestle a goat carcass in the ancient game of buzkashi, a kind of polo played across Central Asia, but in the background a construction crane is at work, building a new future for China's far western Xinjiang region. Zha Minjie reports.

A sudden April snow and wind pours across the high plateau of the Pamir Mountains as we drive along a desolate highway in the land of the ancient Silk Road. There's a mud-brick house, two camels and a calf standing beside the highway linking Kashgar (or Kashi) and Tashkurgan.

The Pamirs is said to form the roof of the world, a domain where the air is rare and people rarer.

For hours, I had been riding in a van together with seven photographers, trying to find a flat place for a rest. We were finally attracted by a red sign reading "hot spring" where the road turned facing a vertical cliff.

The calf quickly disappeared behind a bungalow as I moved with anticipation toward the hot spring surrounded by stones, only to find it's a bathing place for construction workers on a hydraulic and hydro-power engineering project. The water comes from a high tank. The loss of the old hot spring is the latest clue that modern industry is changing the mountain way of life 3,000 meters above sea level.

Disappointed, I lowered my head and stepped into a bungalow near the two camels. Inside are a woman and her daughter, wearing kerchiefs and dark colored boots. The girl embroiders at the bedside, as her mother spins threats. They are Khalkas.

The 18-year-old daughter, Abdul Rahman, just smiled and looked at the sudden visitors. We were surprised she spoke Chinese. She pointed to the old woman and said, "Ma Ma."

The bungalows were made of the usual mud bricks, but plastered with finer mud to make smooth walls. Carpets - mostly red and black in geometric designs - hung from the walls.

I tried to ask the girl whether the nearby construction project and bath house have had any impact on their daily life. She seemed to have no clue what I was talking about, though the bath area was a few steps away.

No one can tell us how long the family has been living here. But their ancestors, viewed by the Chinese as ethnic Turks, migrated and finally settled in the mountains centuries ago, traveling along the Silk Road or pushed westward by conflicts.

A small television, several vacuum bottles and a box of Western medicine are the only visible symbols of modern life here, maybe brought along with the highway we are following.

As I left, the mother, Malika Keram, insisted on giving me a crusty round pancake known as nang, a staple consumed at every meal.

The trip to Kashgar from Khunjerab Pass, a key land port with Pakistan, was a winding journey on mountain roads to the lofty homeland of various ethnic groups, Tajiks, Uygurs and Khalkhas. The journey makes one feel the vastness of the land as well as its myths and exoticism.

From the road overlooking a distant village in the valley near Kongur Mountain, the villagers gathered to watch buzkashi, a form of polo in which horsemen wrestle a goat carcass across a field to score goals. The air was filled with dust and shouts.

It's another example of a relaxed ethnic way of life now tested by economic development and change.

"Merchants from this country travel to all parts of the world," wrote 13th-century adventurer Marco Polo, one of the first to reach the place (today's Xinjiang). "Everything necessary for human life is here in the greatest plenty."

"Businessmen and merchants come and go like swarms of fishes, and various goods are exchanged here, making it a renowned market," said Bento de Goes, a Portuguese traveler sent to China in the late 16 century.

Marco Polo's travels took him to the sun-scorched southern half of Xinjiang, where the Silk Road, a web of caravan routes, shifted liked the sands of the Taklimakan Desert. The two main routes looped around the desert, covering on Kashgar at the southwest fringe of the desert.

Through Kashgar's gates passed the goods, the people, the riches and the ideas of East and West. And now comes the money.

"Where the Oriental civilization ends the Western civilization begins," said Lu Yong, deputy director of the Yarkand County education bureau. Yarkand, or Shache in Chinese, is the most populated area in Kashgar.

Lu is a Shanghai education official appointed to the county for at least three years, part of the long-term support project initiated by the central government 13 years ago.

Starting from 2010 the assistance soared, and every 6 yuan of 1,000 yuan in Shanghai's financial revenue goes to Xinjiang, mainly in Kashgar area. This year 1.68 billion yuan (US$266 million) is expected to be donated.

The construction workers in the sands and wind at the fringe of the Taklimakan Desert are building a modern "Silk Road" out of the desert.

A 233km-long expressway is being built to link several counties in Kashgar and expand the system of roadways in the region. The three-year project, with an investment of 12 billion yuan, just got underway.

However, not many locals such as Uygurs (the dominant minority) are involved in the highway project or the mountain hydro-power engineering project.

"We hire the Uygurs, but not many of them," said a manager, adding that most workers come from inland looking for opportunities on the frontier.

As I watched Uygur farmers in a gripping buzkashi match in Shache, in the background I saw a construction crane at an unknown complex. The builders come from inland provinces such as Henan.

This promising land, still struggling between poverty and the looming modern world, sees its vast landscape, century-old houses gradually reshaped by growing industry and incoming migrants.

"Xinjiang lags behind Shanghai at least 20 years," says Lieutenant Mansur, a rare Uyghur officer, who has been serving in the Chinese Armed Police for eight years. He was on duty during a traditional Xinjiang almond festival. "It's good Shanghai people bring investments and technologies," he said.

The next time I saw him, the lieutenant was standing high on the top of a fire engine, keenly watching buzkashi and cock fighting.

Born in 1987, Mansur left school and joined the armed police, a way for Uygurs to see and merge into the outside world, and also advance.

"I'd like to save enough to buy my parents a home and car first, then I will consider getting married," the officer said. He seems to have the same goals as almost every other young man elsewhere in China.

But Jumakar Muhamed, a 25-year-old painting teacher in an elementary school, plans to be married this year.

After graduating from a Xinjiang college with a degree in art, he traveled around China but still decided to return to his hometown, earning 2,600 yuan a month, quite high in the poverty-stricken county.

Relatively fluent in Mandarin, Jumakar Muhamed said he intends to try living outside Xinjiang. "But not now."

He lives with his parents and will have to rent a home once he gets married.

Getting a higher education is rare in the county. Among the 16,000 middle school graduates in Shache, more than 10,000 will go home to help with farm work, said the education official Lu.

On a trip to a new modern agricultural seeding factory built with Shanghai aid in Shache, I met Hayrigul, a 15-year-old Uygur girl with a warm smile who earns 40 yuan per day planting seeds that will sprout and be planted elsewhere.

She and 50 others, mostly Uygur women, were recruited from nearby villages when farm work is slack. The factory is headed by a Han Chinese.

"My family is poor," said Hayrigul, using halting Mandarin, saying she had to drop out of school. Her younger brother and sister are now in school, however.

Next to Hayrigul is another young woman worker who took her toddler daughter with her to work.

The salary is good for the women who may earn more money in two to three months than their families can expect to make in a year in their village.

I did not have a chance to be caught up in the frenzied Sunday bazaar in Kashgar city, said to be the largest market in Central Asia - a square mile of tent arcades and open stalls, like the one described by the National Geographic magazine 16 years ago.

Back in the 1990s, the scene was described this way: "People jostled with one another to buy live chickens and caged songbirds, spices and shrieking stereos, red silk dresses and jeweled knives, firewood and bleating sheep, horse and camels."

The landscape changed a lot as the years passed and the stalls moved indoors, as in every big retail market in the wealthy Yangtze River Delta Region. But now the goods are dried fruits, furs and handicrafts. Tourists are the main customers.

I stopped by a stall, hanging a complete fox pelt on my broad cap. At another a Uygur salesman tried (without success) to persuade me to buy a small handmade knife, saying the workmanship was extraordinary. It was a reminder of the business talent in the frontier city along the Silk Road where centuries ago merchants' caravans were outlined on the horizon, and the goods were truly exotic.

The bazaar, a tradition perhaps as old as the Kashgar oasis, is now less about culture than the market economy. Only when I walked in the city's alleys in the so-called old town did I feel the atmosphere of the ancient site and get a sense of culture.

Many of the very old mud-and-brick houses in the old city are being demolished by the city government which will allow residents to move back after new homes are finished. Each relocated household from the old quarter receives around 500 yuan per month from the government for outside rental until they can return.

During my visit in early April, the city seemed subdued and it was hard to imagine the power and passion of religion during festivals, such as the feast of Qurban, when families go out together, men and boys pray and later dance in the great Id Kah Mosque, the largest in Central Asia. More than 100,000 Muslims pour into the mosque, kneeling toward Mecca in the west and praying.

When I removed my shoes and stepped into the mosque on a quiet Thursday morning, there was only one man praying in the vast space where colored blankets covered the floor. A Uygur guide gave a brief introduction and left me alone to imagine the moment when thousands of the faithful listened to an imam in the minbar or pulpit.

Outside on the square, a line of bootblacks were busy shining the shoes, vendors were persuading tourists to take pictures riding horses and wearing costumes and nearby a sound box blared rap music in Uygur.