a blondie in the crowd

believe it or not i am not the only blonde(ish) hair colored person in xining. buy you would not believe that the others are actually chinese.

every once in a while i will be walking down the street and some blonde head will pop out of a shop or walk by carrying a load of boxes. these are the salar. not all of them are blonde. in fact most of them are not. but those few that are look more like they should be walking the streets of prague or zagreb. they look totally eastern european. in fact they are central asia, and of a very special and mythic heritage.

a few years ago i remember seeing a documentary on central asia nomadic herders and part of the show dealt with these blonde-haired, blue-eyed outliers. apparently there was a tribe of warriors, many of them female, who roamed the central asian grasslands. as they went along pillaging and conquering, individuals settled and began having children. so, these blondies that i see are supposed to be the children of some warrior tribe from centuries ago. it's really quite neat to see them and think about this. i wonder if they know about this myth?

on another note, the salar are from the former empire of samarkand. for you history buffs you might recognize this name; they were the ones who controlled a major portion of the silk road and even pressured the western parts of china to be tributary states in the 14th-16th centuries. they are a very famous people in the history of western china.

so, the moral of the story: even though people in xining stare at me all the time, i am not the only blonde head in town, and in fact, i am not even the most unique blonde hair either. that's a relief.