In the early morning, the warm sun dispelled the cold fog, and the Xinjiang International Grand Bazaar, located in Erdaoqiao Street, Tianshan District, Urumqi City, "woke up". On the colorful pedestrian street, each float has its own characteristics. Thirty-five-year-old Feng Fangdi carefully sketches the horse's head on paper, occasionally looking through the window at the flowing crowd.
No bustle, no bazaar. Bazaar, which means bazaar in Uyghur, farmers' market.
Red lanterns are hung high, festive Chinese knots are dotted with trees, and lively social fires come with the Lantern Festival. In the Xinjiang International Grand Bazaar in the Spring Festival, bustling tourists walked into the naan museum with a strong wheat fragrance and observed the changes from a ball of noodles to a naan; Step into the fragrant gift house and smell the dried lavender flowers; Stop at the entrance of the musical instrument store and listen to the musical instrument maker play melodious music......
Look brand-new. The architecture of Xinjiang International Grand Bazaar Pedestrian Street is mainly colored in earthy yellow, full of strong ethnic style. Tourists can take the subway from the airport to the neighborhood and check in at this Internet celebrity bazaar.
Feng Fangdi, who travels from Tianshui City in Gansu Province to Xinjiang to seek development, is the manager of a fiber art fur painting shop. She still remembers the lively scene of the market in her hometown of Tianshui when she was a child, and she has everything she needs in the daily necessities and favorite clothes and toy markets.
In August 2018, Feng Fangdi had a new understanding of the market. At that time, the Xinjiang International Grand Bazaar, located in the old town of Urumqi, was upgraded, and the "bazaar" that originally served tourism was expanded into a cultural block of more than 800 meters in the surrounding Erdaoqiao area, and set up a cultural and creative cultural tourism and intangible cultural heritage project display area, handicrafts of various ethnic groups and Xinjiang local original brand area, a food street, a naan theme pavilion, a fruit bazaar and other functional areas.
In this way, tourists go from rushing to strolling. The brand-new Grand Bazaar is becoming more and more lively, and Feng Fangdi also has more calmness and confidence to run a good shop.
In this way, the situation of homogeneous competition caused by the monotonous sale of dried fruits, silk scarves and other products in stores in the past has also changed. Gao Wenting, deputy secretary of the Party Working Committee of Urumqi Grand Bazaar Street, said that Xinjiang International Grand Bazaar pays close attention to the tourism consumption market and has opened up tourism service functional areas such as pedestrian streets, food streets, and large-scale performing arts blocks such as "Pomegranate Flower Lane", which have injected new vitality into the market.
Witnessing the changes is also 50-year-old Anijan Yunus, whose plucked strings, dutars, jewaf, tambourine and other musical instruments are lined up in the shop, all of which are works by Anijan.
Growing up in Kashgar, he remembers that when he was a child, his father would sell his musical instruments to rural artists on the day he went to the bazaar, and the musical instruments painted with patterns such as flowers and fruits were very popular. Ainijiang learned his father's craft from his ears and eyes, and brought it to Urumqi.
This year is the 27th year that Ainijiang has been here, and as he has seen his bungalows turn into buildings, the streets have changed from crowded with people and cars to tourists strolling, and his business has changed from a small counter selling dried fruits and silk scarves to a shop specializing in ethnic musical instruments, Ainijiang has found the joy of making musical instruments with his father as a child.
Memory Cuisine. Every day at 11 o'clock, 43-year-old Abdul Rahman gets busy. He puts the cleaned fish on the grill, ignites the fruit wood, and rotates it rhythmically to create a grilled fish that is charred on the outside and tender on the inside, with delicious meat, and adds some secret seasonings, attracting tourists to queue up to buy them.
Day and night, the Xinjiang International Grand Bazaar Food Street across the road from the pedestrian street is surging, the smoke is thick, the hawkers are endless, and the delicacies such as grilled buns, grilled fish, grilled eggs, pilaf, lamb skewers, cold skins, sheep's trotters, steamed dumplings and other delicacies are appetizing.
Stinky tofu, grilled squid, and fried skewers, which have the highest appearance rate in other urban food streets, are hard to find in the Grand Bazaar Food Street, where almost all of them are local Xinjiang delicacies.
Abdulimu lived in Moyu County, Hotan Prefecture as a child, and the weekly Bazaar Day is the day he looks forward to the most. Under the leadership of my parents, I made an appointment with four or five playmates, smelled the delicious fragrance in the crowding, looked at the colorful goods, ate a grilled bun, and had a skewer of barbecue, so that I could be happy all day.
When he grew up, Abdul Limu changed from a child who drove the bazaar to a vendor selling food at the bazaar, and the aroma of delicious grilled fish wafted from Moyu County to the Xinjiang International Grand Bazaar in Urumqi, allowing more tourists to experience the taste of the bazaar when he was a child.
Abdulimu has been running a shop in the food court for five years, and he stocks up to 300 grilled fish a day on holidays. What makes him happy is that in the Grand Bazaar Food Street, delicious food has become a bridge between him and tourists, and many tourists will bring their friends to taste the grilled fish after tasting it. During the Spring Festival, Abdulimu took the initiative to reduce the ** by 10 yuan to 20 yuan.
Visitors stop and go, pick and choose, and taste all kinds of delicious food, and each shop and food has a story.
Figs are on the sweet side, apricots are sour and ......As the tourists chose the good taste, Liu Lianhua quickly took out the hot zongzi from the steamer, poured yogurt and boiled jam, and delivered it to the tourists.
In 2008, Liu Lianhua worked in Moyu County. In a bustling village bazaar, in the crowd of people, the bells jingle and an old couple drive a donkey cart to sell yogurt dumplings.
More than 10 years have passed, and the scene and taste of the old man selling yogurt dumplings make Liu Lianhua unforgettable. When she chose to open a store in the food street in 2019, Liu Lianhua's mind flashed through many delicacies that she had tasted at the village bazaar, such as noodles and lungs, liangpizi, and yogurt zongzi, and finally chose the yogurt zongzi that she loved her.
During this year's Spring Festival, Liu Lianhua's yogurt dumplings were sold up to 1,300 in a single day, almost catching up with the sales during the summer tourist season, and this Lantern Festival is destined to be a busy day.
Today, the food street that can meet the needs of more than 3,000 people at the same time, from 10 a.m. to 24 p.m. every day, more than 70 food shops are busy serving hundreds of authentic Xinjiang delicacies for tourists from all over the world.
Rich connotation. In order to welcome the Lantern Festival, Feng Fangdi put a group of red horse fur decorations that symbolize good luck in the New Year to a more prominent place, and this group of red horse fur decorations specially launched for the Year of the Dragon is very popular with tourists.
The excitement of the Grand Bazaar has a richer content: folk artists from Xuchang, Henan Province perform a high-pole dragon dance; Young people from Chaoshan, Guangdong Province danced English songs and dances, beating gongs and drums, which was very lively; Cultural performances such as the Yellow River Flying Dragon Folk Performance, the New Year of the Wandering Gods, and the National Tide Bazaar are constantly staged.
Tourists have more immersive experience projects: Avanti Park, Avanti Naan Theme Pavilion, Fruit Bazaar and other scenes; In the newly opened large-scale performing arts block of Pomegranate Flower Lane, the Grand Bazaar Accordion Theme Pavilion, the Wang Luobin Theme Pavilion, the full-time and all-domain situational installation large-scale performance "Silk Road Mutual Learning" and the Silk Road Cultural and Creative Museum have extended the time for tourists to stay in the Grand Bazaar Street.
At 12 o'clock every day, the opening ceremony of the Xinjiang International Grand Bazaar takes turns to stage special songs and dances such as national costume shows, lion dances, and black horses. It was a great sight to watch, and many tourists joined in and danced.
From a small bazaar to a scenic spot, the Xinjiang International Grand Bazaar has gathered more than 3,000 merchants, and every day is a hot scene: hot naan is freshly baked, special dried fruits are on the shelves, handicrafts are dazzling, various immersive tourism projects are increasing, and the empowerment of modern methods such as live webcasting attracts thousands of tourists and local residents to come and go. Last year, the Xinjiang International Grand Bazaar received 23.6 million visitors; During this year's Spring Festival, the average number of tourists reached 120,000 per day, and the highest single-day passenger flow exceeded 150,000.
As a window to explore the charm of Xinjiang for the first time, the Xinjiang International Grand Bazaar is becoming more and more fascinating.