There are 616 party members in the Niya county; 532 are Uighur. The Youth League here has 1,175 members; 1,035 are Uighur. I am the secretary of the party committee; four of the seven members are Uighur.

There's also a bus from Khotan which stays overnight at Niya and starts at about 7.30am, but not every day. On a good day Charchan is 307km, 7½ hours, and ¥20 away. On a bad one it's ¥33 ($4) and 12 hours, depending on who's selling the ticket and the state of the bus.

These buses stop at the oasis towns of Keriya (Yutian; 177km/110 miles; 3 hr.; ¥25), Niya (Minfeng; 294km/182 miles; 5 hr.; ¥55), and Charchan (Qiemo; 603km/374 miles; 8-10 hr.; ¥105-¥147).

The beer festival happened in a village in Niya County in the deep south of Xinjiang, which is overwhelmingly populated by the Muslim Uighur people who call Xinjiang home. Muslims are not meant to consume alcohol, according to the Koran.

A Uyghur woman named Turakhan who lives in a suburban village of Niya (in Chinese, Minfeng) county in Hotan (Hetian) prefecture told RFA’s Uyghur Service on Wednesday that the village chief and police had informed all residents about “the list of forbidden Muslim names.”

In the south, the border of the Taklamakān lies along the nothern ends of the oases, mostly small, which line at intervals the foot of the K'un-lun glacis from Karghalik to Niya (Sheets Nos. 6, 9, 14, 19).

Niya

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