Four cards in one workshop

On 10 May 2023 a reporter walked into the heritage workshop in Altun village, Huicheng township, Hami. A voice came from the back room. Minawar Abudu, who runs the workshop, explained that Ayixiamu Aimeti, a Hami city-level transmitter of muqam, was livestreaming a sale. She sang a passage, then held up an embroidered bag and asked viewers to type 1 for the song or 2 for the product.

The scene is worth keeping whole. The song is not staged for a hall; it opens a sales pitch. The bag is not a prop; it is what the workshop sells. Neither half is decoration for the other.

The township lists four things as its cultural cards: the muqam, embroidery, peasant painting and gourd carving. The phrase is local, and it is a practical one: it puts a sung repertoire beside three crafts that can be bought, without ranking them.

Altun village was added to the fourth batch of national historical and cultural villages in December 2008, and the city treats it as a rural tourism village. The workshop sits inside that designation, which is why a singer and a sales counter share one room.

The report has Ayixiamu say that what she sings is the Twelve Muqam. Elsewhere the same repertoire is classified by region, with Hami counted as a style of its own. The two statements are not the same claim, and this article keeps them apart: what is documented here is a performance in a workshop, and the local name given to it.

For the classification itself, read the Kashgar essay in this journal. What Huicheng adds is the setting: transmission now happens in rooms that also sell, in front of a phone, in a village that tourism has been asked to carry.