Xinjiang Handicrafts: Atlas Silk, Knives & Dolan Bags

I have bought a lot of rubbish in Xinjiang. A “jade” pendant in Hotan that turned out to be dyed quartzite, ¥380. A knife in a Kashgar gift shop with a stamped blade and a plastic handle pretending to be horn, ¥120. A silk scarf that was polyester, ¥90, and I knew it was polyester when I bought it because the seller told me so and I was not listening.

I have also bought things I still use. A Jiya-woven atlas silk length that has been a table runner for six years. A Hotan wool rug the size of a doormat that cost ¥900 and has not thinned. The difference between the two lists is not price. It is knowing what the object is supposed to be.

Atlas Silk: Start at the Source

Atlas — ädrä in Uyghur, 艾德莱斯 in Chinese — is an ikat. The pattern is dyed into the warp threads before anything is woven. Bundles of warp get tied off, dipped, untied, retied, dipped again. Only then does it go on the loom, and because the tied resist is never perfectly precise, the pattern comes out with soft feathered edges. That blur is the signature. A crisp, printed-looking pattern means it is printed.

The place to see it is Jiya township, about 10 kilometres out of Hotan city. The Jiya Lady workshop opened in 1992 and was named a national industrial tourism demonstration site in December 2007; the craft went onto China’s second national intangible heritage list in 2008. The medal ribbons at the 2008 Beijing Olympics were made from it, which locals will tell you within four minutes of your arrival.

The workshop runs as five stations you walk through: silk reeling, dyeing, warp preparation, weaving, and the sales hall. The reeling room is the one that got me. Cocoons sit in water held between 70 and 80°C, a stick lifts the loose end, and 15 to 20 filaments get twisted into a single usable thread. One cocoon yields somewhere between 800 and 1,500 metres of filament. Watching a woman do this without a thermometer, judging the water by hand, reframes what “handmade” means.

What it costs and what to do. A 40-minute scarf tie-dye session runs ¥40 to ¥80 and you keep the scarf. The full 2 to 3 hour experience — dyeing plus time on a traditional wooden loom — is ¥120 to ¥200. Finished goods in the hall: scarves from ¥80, a metre of proper handwoven silk ¥180 to ¥400 depending on thread count and colour count, ties around ¥120, bags ¥200 to ¥500.

Jiya is not a museum village. As of 2024 the township had 798 households weaving professionally on 1,059 looms, with seven companies and four cooperatives. Production that year was reported at 508,300 bolts. You are walking into a working industry.

Telling Real from Fake

Burn test if the seller allows it — real silk singes, smells like burnt hair, and crushes to a brittle black ash. Polyester melts into a hard bead and smells chemical. Most sellers in Jiya will do this without blinking. In a tourist shop, the offence they take tells you the answer.

Second test: look at the reverse. Handwoven ikat shows the same pattern on both faces, slightly softer on the back. Printed fabric has a pale back.

Third: price. Handwoven atlas silk below ¥100 a metre does not exist. Rayon versions do exist, are legitimately sold, are pleasant to wear, and cost ¥40 to ¥70 a metre. Just know which one you are buying.

Yengisar Knives: Decorative, Not Tactical

Yengisar sits between Kashgar and Yarkand and has made knives for centuries. These are not Tibetan working knives and they are not hunting tools. The tradition is decorative — blades are folded and forged with localised quenching, and the handles carry mother-of-pearl inlay, sometimes stone settings, worked into badam (almond) and pomegranate motifs. The good ones are family objects, passed down.

Yengisar County runs six national-level intangible heritage workshops that between them take over 100,000 experience visitors a year. You can grind a blade yourself. The county pottery village is a 3A scenic area and does throwing and stamped-pattern work.

Prices. A tourist-grade knife with a stamped blade: ¥80 to ¥150, and it is fine as a wall object. A hand-forged blade with real inlay: ¥400 to ¥1,500. Master pieces go far past that. Ask to see the maker’s name on the tang.

The transport problem, honestly. You cannot take a knife into an aircraft cabin, and checked-bag rules for bladed items on domestic Chinese flights are applied strictly and inconsistently. Trains are also difficult — station security screening in Xinjiang will pull a knife out of your bag. What actually works is shipping. Reputable workshops arrange courier delivery to a mainland Chinese address; international shipping is a different problem and most workshops cannot help. If you are flying home from China with a stopover, do not assume it will survive. I have posted two knives to a friend’s address in Shanghai and collected them on my way out, which worked both times.

Dolan Bags and the Textile Belt

The Dolan region — Mekit, Awat, the settlements strung along the northern rim of the Taklamakan — has a coarser textile tradition than the oasis towns. The bags are woven from local sheep wool, flat-woven rather than knotted, in bold geometric bands. Historically these were saddle bags and grain bags. They were made to be dragged.

What I like about them is the honesty of the palette. Madder red, walnut brown, undyed cream, and an aggressive indigo. No pastels. A medium shoulder bag runs ¥150 to ¥350 at the Mekit and Awat bazaars, roughly double that if you buy the same thing in Kashgar.

Check the selvedge — hand-woven edges are slightly uneven and the warp ends are knotted by hand. Machine-made copies have a folded, stitched hem.

Hotan Carpets: The 8-Knot

Hotan carpet weaving went onto the national heritage list in 2008. The technique is a knot the weavers call the figure-eight, tied one at a time onto the warp, at densities running from 100 to 300 knots per square centimetre. The wool is local long-staple sheep wool and the dyes are plant-based. A large carpet can occupy a weaver for two or three years.

The place to go is the Naksiwan workshop in Yurungkash town, outside Hotan city, run by a national-level inheritor. A one to one-and-a-half hour session where you tie your own knots costs ¥60 to ¥120 and you keep the fragment. Doing it badly for an hour is the fastest possible education in why a real carpet costs what it costs.

Buying. A 60×90 cm rug at moderate knot density: ¥700 to ¥1,500. A 2×3 metre room carpet in good wool: ¥8,000 to ¥30,000. Silk carpets go higher again. Flip the corner over — hand-knotted backs show the individual knots as distinct nubs and the pattern is fully legible from behind. Machine-made shows a uniform grid and a stiff, glued feel.

Shipping large carpets domestically costs ¥150 to ¥400 by freight. International shipping from Hotan is best arranged through the workshop, and you should expect to spend more on shipping than most people expect.

Mulberry Bark Paper

The obscure one, and my favourite. Sang pi zhi is made from the inner bark of mulberry branches, nothing else, no chemical additives. It resists insects and damp and survives for centuries. It was in the first national intangible heritage batch in 2006.

The workshop is in Buda village, Puqiaqiqi town, Moyu County, about an hour’s drive from Hotan city. The bark stripping and boiling are done in advance, so as a visitor you do the pulp beating, the mould dipping, the water draining and the drying — 1.5 to 2 hours, ¥80 to ¥150, and you take your sheets home. They pack flat, weigh nothing, and cost less than a bad souvenir.

Sheets for sale run ¥10 to ¥60 depending on size and thickness. Painted sheets by local artists go ¥150 upward.

Doppa: The Hat You Should Probably Buy

The four-cornered embroidered cap is called a doppa. Regional styles are genuinely distinct. Kashgar men’s caps are typically white embroidery on black, formal and restrained. Hotan women’s caps can be under 10 centimetres across, dense with beadwork. Some incorporate gold and silver thread, sequins, occasionally peacock feather.

Machine-embroidered doppa: ¥20 to ¥50, everywhere. Hand-embroidered: ¥120 to ¥600. Turn it inside out. Hand embroidery has messy, individual thread paths on the reverse; machine work has a perfectly regular bobbin pattern.

Buy this one. It is light, it costs little, it is the single most recognisable object from the region, and unlike almost everything else on this list you will actually wear it.

Jade, and Why I Am Cautious

Hotan is the jade city. The Yurungkash and Karakash rivers have produced nephrite for over three thousand years and the jade bazaar in Hotan city is a genuine spectacle — people squatting over cloth spreads at 08:00, torches out, arguing.

It is also the easiest place in Xinjiang to lose serious money. Dyed quartzite, serpentine, glass, Russian and Korean nephrite sold as local material, and treated stone are all in circulation. Prices for genuine top-grade Hotan white jade are absurd — five figures for a small piece is normal, and if someone offers you “mutton fat jade” for ¥500 the answer is no.

My rule: buy jade in Hotan as a souvenir at souvenir prices, or do not buy it at all. Under ¥300, enjoy the object and stop worrying about what it is. Over ¥3,000, do not buy without independent certification, and understand that certificates are themselves faked. Our Hotan city guide covers the bazaar timings and where the market actually is.

Where to Buy: A Ranking

Best — the workshop. Jiya for silk, Yurungkash for carpets, Moyu for paper, Yengisar for knives. Prices are the lowest, quality is verifiable because you watched it being made, and the money stays with the maker.

Good — county bazaars. Mekit, Awat, Yarkand, Guma. Sunday markets especially. You are buying from people who buy from makers. Bargaining is expected and starts around 30 percent off the first price. Yarkand has an underrated old bazaar and a fraction of Kashgar’s crowds.

Fine — Kashgar Old Town craft lanes. Real makers work here, especially the coppersmiths and instrument builders around Kokmaidan Road, but the front-of-house tourist shops on the main restored streets mix genuine and imported stock without labelling. Walk two lanes back from anywhere with a queue. The Kashgar Old Town guide has the layout.

Last resort — airport and hotel shops. Two to four times the price for the same object, or a worse object at the same price.

Bargaining Without Being Unpleasant

Bargaining is normal in bazaars and mostly not normal in workshops with fixed price labels. In a bazaar, the opening price to a foreigner sits maybe 40 to 100 percent above the local price. Counter at half, settle around 60 to 70 percent of the asking figure, and do it slowly with tea if it is offered.

Where I draw the line: I do not grind down an old woman selling three embroidered caps to save ¥15. The whole margin on that transaction is smaller than the taxi that brought me there.

Cash still helps in the smaller markets, though mobile payment coverage is now near-universal even in county bazaars. Carry ¥500 to ¥1,000 in small notes anyway.

What I Would Buy With ¥1,000

A hand-embroidered doppa from Kashgar, ¥180. Two metres of handwoven atlas silk from Jiya, ¥400. A Dolan wool shoulder bag from Mekit bazaar, ¥200. Five sheets of mulberry paper from Moyu, ¥60. Dried Hotan roses and walnut kernels from the market, ¥80. That leaves ¥80 for tea while bargaining, which is a real budget line.

None of it is jade and none of it is a knife, and that is deliberate — the first is a minefield and the second is a logistics headache. For a wider list including edible souvenirs and what survives a long flight, see our Xinjiang souvenirs guide.

The dyed quartzite pendant is still in a drawer at home. I keep it as a reminder that the ¥380 was not the cost of the stone, it was the cost of not asking a single question. Everything on this page is an attempt to ask them for you.