At first, the railway station looked no different from so many others I’d seen in China: concrete columns, opaque windows, a traffic circle ringed with idling cars. Urumqi was an industrial city of several million, perhaps best known for being the world’s farthest city from the sea. But what caught my attention was the red script that adorned the station entryway: signs written in Perso-Arabic alongside Mandarin, one bleeding into the other, like two halves of a single, beating whole.
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