and they started weeping and one asked for some dust from her jacket,” Mr. Thum recalled. “This gives a sense how important this place is to people, even when they cannot visit.”
The previous closures and bans on visits to the shrines were a prelude to a more aggressive campaign by the government.
By early 2018, the Ordam shrine, isolated in the desert and almost 50 miles from the nearest town, had been leveled, eradicating one of most important sites of Uighur heritage. Satellite images from that time showed the shrine’s mosque, prayer hall and simple housing where its custodians once lived had been razed. There is no news of what happened to the huge cooking pots where pilgrims left meat, grain and vegetables that custodians of the shrine cooked into holy meals.
Satellite images of the Ordam shrine from May 2011:
and Oct 2018:
[Satellite images by Maxar Technologies]
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