The Kuqa Grand Mosque is one of the largest traditional mosques in Xinjiang, with a capacity of several thousand worshippers and a courtyard shaded by enormous mulberry trees that are themselves centuries old. The mosque was founded in the 14th century and has been rebuilt and expanded several times since; the current structure dates largely from the 17th and 18th centuries, in the Central Asian architectural tradition that characterises the region's historic mosques.
The building's most distinctive feature is its minaret, which rises above the old quarter and marks the mosque's position from some distance. The interior prayer hall has a flat ceiling supported by carved wooden columns, and the courtyard is flanked by colonnaded iwans that provide shade in summer. Friday prayers here are genuinely atmospheric — the congregation fills the courtyard and spills into the surrounding streets, and the sound of the adhan echoes off the mud-brick buildings of the old town.
Non-Muslim visitors are welcome outside of prayer times. The mosque is the natural hub of the old quarter, and the streets around it — selling nuts, dried fruit, copper goods, and religious items — are the most characteristically Uyghur part of modern Kuqa.