Destination China
A project by Cartography Magazine, Published on Issue 06
Video and Photographs by Luca De Santis

Setting off from Shanghai and coming back to Shanghai, we found it hard to believe that we’d been in China all the time; in the end we understood that there are places “of China” that aren’t necessarily “Chinese”. It was a mad but precise journey. We traced the lightning, intentional path of a ping pong ball touching an edge, called Shanghai, literally “on the sea” (Eastern Chinese), and bouncing back onto the other edge, the extreme west of “Middle Eastern” and Islamic Xinjiang, overlooked by difficult and promising frontiers.  

A journey towards the outermost reaches of China, in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Here, where mosques and Zoroastrian temples coexist alongside each other, and the land is inhabited by Turkic-looking Uyghurs and blond blue-eyed Tajiks – we explore what once was the buzzing heart of the Silk Road