Shops below

The same 2023 culture notice describes Tuan Cheng in the centre of Hotan City. Renovation began in 2016. The work kept the aywan form of local houses, planned street by street and household by household, and added shaded public space, including grape trellises. The notice explains the name through streets that spread out from the centre. What a walker meets is a dense residential fabric: timber, plaster, a court, a vine. It is not a cliff of caves and not a mountain basin. The houses are the document. The grade the notice gives the area is 3A, a label for the managed scenic zone, not a description of the age of the walls.

After the renovation, the notice says, residents live on the second and third floors, and the ground floor is for shops. Among those shops it counts six for atlas silk, four for naan and two for musical instruments, beside carpet, medicinal tea, wood carving, copper, jewellery and restaurants. Making and selling sit under the rooms where people sleep. That vertical split is the scene: cloth or a tray of bread at street level, a household overhead. The change is dated. It began in 2016. It is urban repair with a recorded start, not an undated old town. A shop sign and a line of laundry can belong to the same building.

Kashgar's old city, in the same notice, is a 5A area of 99 lanes and about 126,800 residents, rebuilt on original sites so the houses could resist earthquakes. Tuan Cheng is described differently: aywan houses, life upstairs, trade downstairs, with atlas, naan and instruments among the trades. Both are places where people remain after renovation. They are not one model copied twice. Atlas in a Tuan Cheng shop meets the dye work of Jiya, where the silk was bound before the loom. Naan and instruments appear in other cities as well. Shared crafts do not make the streets the same street.