Tursun Gul, a local Uighur woman on a crutch, shouts at Chinese armored personnel carriers and soldiers wearing riot gear as a crowd of angry locals confront security forces on a street in the city of Urumqi on July 7, 2009. Click on the image to access more pictures. Warning, some photos are shocking.

I found a testimony on a blog on Le Monde.fr, a French newspaper. Here is an excerpt.

I was in Urumqi on July 5th. The demonstration started at 5 pm. It had been announced on the web the day before. That was mainly students who were asking for justice after what had happened on June 26th at Shaogan. Rebiya Kadeer has nothing to do with that. Around 5 pm we started to gather on the People’s square, in front of the prefecture, with black t-shirts to show our message. I was with my girlfriend. We were around 200, 300 people, mostly students. Then some more came to support us. Ultimately we were more than 3000. Among us were even some Uyghurs officials working for the government.

Please follow the story here.

The Taklamakan Desert (or 塔克拉玛干沙漠) is situated in the far west of China and I recently saw a documentary some 3000 years old forgotten mummies! I hope there is a way for me to get to visit some of the half buried cities from ancient civilizations, and maybe the mummies themselves! The mummies should not be too hard to find (as they usually don’t move so much) but the buried cities in the middle of the desert will be something else.

Indeed I doubt that there are shuttle buses crossing the desert every hour, and their is probably no accomodation either (since the cities are actually buried!). Anyhow I am currently trying to find other travellers’ blog to see if it has been done.
But not so much results until now…