Guangzhou Mosque

There is a little mosque in Guangzhou.

Uncertain of what to do with myself with an unexpected extra day in the city, I decide to seek it out, and find it along a road named for a radiant pagoda, built in classical Chinese style but surmounted with a crescent.

A number of Uighur enterprises have sprung up protectively arround it, including a Uighur canteen opposite its main entrance. It is here that I choose to end my journey, in this place with its pale women wrapped in headscarves and its weather-beaten men, and an air thick with Turkic consonants and the promise of another trip - some other time, insh'allah - into the heart of Central Asia...

They are wary of me at first. I look too Han, my sweaty clothes too western. I am the only diner. They address me in startlingly fluent Mandarin. I order a large bowl of spicy mutton noodle soup, a chicken kebab, a large flat bread and a pot of tea - all for little more than the price of a latte at the Starbucks on Shamian Dao.

Halfway through my meal, a couple of old men appear, faces taut under gleaming white skullcaps. They sit for a while, eyeing me up, then come over to sit with me. One of them helps himself to a cup of tea from my pot.
'Are you Muslim?' he asks me in Mandarin.
'No,' I reply, somewhat sorry to disappoint.
'We are,' he says, gesturing at the mosque.
'I know.'
'What is your faith?'
I shrug my shoulders non-committally.
'Would you like to make a donation?'
'For the mosque?'
The man launches into a well-rehearsed spiel that I don't understand, although I catch what I fancy are snippets of Arabic: 'juma', 'salat' - or perhaps 'zakat'.

I suddenly feel a strange urge to be part, in some small way, of this little community of exiles, far - so very far - away from their sprawling steppe and desert homeland. I slip the old man a few small notes, uncertain if the mosque administration would ever see a yuan, and he reaches over unexpectedly to clasp my hands. 'Bismillah!' he exclaims, and he and his companion bustle out.

I stumble out not long after, sated, dredging my memory for faded fragments of Turkish. 'Teşşekür,' I murmur at the staff, hoping I've managed to get it right, and disappear into the sticky afternoon.