Erdaoqiao is Ürümqi's main Uyghur quarter, the neighbourhood that surrounds and extends beyond the Grand Bazaar. The name means "Second Bridge" in Chinese — a reference to an irrigation channel that once ran through here — but its character is Central Asian rather than Chinese. The streets are narrower, the signage more often in Arabic script, the smells different: cumin-roasted lamb, fresh-baked naan pulled from a tandoor, the sweetness of dried apricots.
Walking through Erdaoqiao is the closest you will come in Ürümqi to understanding what the city looked and felt like before the large-scale Han migration of recent decades. Small noodle restaurants line the alleys, butchers hang lamb carcasses in open shopfronts, and elderly men sit outside teahouses in embroidered doppa caps. The neighbourhood has shrunk compared to its pre-2017 extent, and some sections have been demolished in urban redevelopment programmes. What remains is still worth an afternoon of wandering, but do so with an awareness that the community here has been under severe pressure, and what looks like ordinary commercial life takes place in an extraordinary and difficult context.