A camo-coloured drone hovers over an elaborately decorated Bactrian camel as it lollops through the arched gate of Kashgar Ancient City, a red-caped jockey on its back and a crowd of mostly Chinese domestic tourists watching on. It is a spectacular, carnivalesque scene, and it raises an immediate question: what exactly am I doing here, as an Australian journalist, touring Xinjiang as a guest of the Chinese National Tourism Office?

A Region Unlike Anywhere Else in China

Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region sits in China's far northwest, a vast province-level territory bordering eight countries including Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan. It straddles the Pamir Plateau, known as the "roof of the world," and the immense, arid Tarim Basin. Unlike the Han-majority heartland of China, Xinjiang is home to significant numbers of Turkic-speaking Muslim communities, the largest of which are the Uyghurs, alongside Tajik, Hui, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Kazak and Mongolian populations.

The regional capital, Urumqi, has a population of 4.1 million and sits roughly a six-hour flight from Hong Kong. At first glance it could pass for any busy Chinese regional city, complete with a sprawling new airport and streets dense with electric vehicles. But a walk through the main bazaar quickly reveals its Central Asian character. Mosque minarets rise above the skyline. Stallholders with Turkic features sell nang flatbread and other foods common to the neighbouring "Stans." The city nominally runs on Beijing time, some 4,000 kilometres to the east, though locals rarely begin work before 10am in winter.

Kashgar and the Performance of Uyghur Culture

Kashgar, a city more than two millennia old, is considered the unofficial cultural and spiritual capital of the Uyghur people. The daily opening ceremony at Kashgar Ancient City is a vivid, layered spectacle: warriors on horseback with bows drawn, turbaned men in black pointy boots spinning dervish-like alongside women in red-velvet gowns, and a costumed ensemble performing the Uyghur Muqam on traditional instruments including the rawap, a pear-shaped string instrument. The Muqam has been recognised by UNESCO as a "masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity."

Overseeing it all are conspicuous nests of CCTV cameras, and a drone that descends onto a pedestal once the parade concludes. Rising in the distance is the 169-metre Kashgar Kunlun Tower, a striking modern structure jutting above the sprawling cityscape. The ceremony presents itself as a tribute to local Uyghur heritage, yet the layers of surveillance technology and the manufactured quality of the performance make the picture considerably more complicated.

The Human Rights Question That Hangs Over Everything

The official purpose of the trip is to attend the 19th Xinjiang Winter Tourism Industry Expo and to explore the region's growing skiing scene across three mountain ranges: the Altay, Kunlun and Tianshan ranges. Journalists on the trip are also encouraged to "immerse themselves in ethnic folk customs."

Yet the context is impossible to ignore. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has described Xinjiang as a site of "systematic human rights violations" against the Uyghur people, including credible allegations of torture, forced medical treatment, sexual and gender-based violence, and coercive enforcement of birth control policies. The Chinese Communist Party has denied all such claims.

Travelling through the region as a government guest, roaming freely on an Australian mobile plan that bypasses the so-called Great Firewall, encountering landscapes and cultures that are genuinely extraordinary, the dissonance is acute. For travellers drawn to remote, rarely visited corners of the world, Xinjiang offers remarkable experiences. But arriving as a guest of the authorities promoting it demands a reckoning with what that endorsement means, and what it might obscure.

The beauty of the place is not in question. The controversy surrounding it is equally undeniable.