Kazanqi Courtyard Hosts Carry Yining’s Blue City Boom

Kazanqi in Yining logged 2.8 million visits by July 21, 2025, without charging a gate ticket. The blue quarter in Xinjiang’s Ili Kazak autonomous prefecture still houses about 120,000 people, and the cash moves through 88 home-visit courtyards.

Those doors, plus more than 30 horse carts and a few thousand local jobs, are the product. A 180 million yuan rebuild is due to finish in October 2026 as the site chases a national 5A rating it does not yet hold.

88 Courtyards Now Pay the Visitor Bill

Walk past the pigeons at the gate and the postcard is a cobalt wall. The wage is inside. Families set long tables under grape vines, pour milk tea, bake naan, and let strangers into rooms they still sleep in at night.

Kurbanjan, 69, is one of those hosts. In peak season he told interviewers that 500 to 600 people a day come through his house, and that a month can bring in nearly 20,000 yuan. A few years earlier the published average for a home-visit household was 5,000 yuan a month.

Come back in August, when the grapes are ripe. Bring your family.

Kurbanjan, courtyard host, Kazanqi

Hu Cheng, party secretary of the Dulaitebagh subdistrict office, has been walking the lanes asking residents to tidy courtyards and open the gate, so the household can take a tourism wage without leaving the block. Elyar Nurmamat, a local guide, put the same idea more plainly: income rises when visitors sit down in the yard.

What a Peak-Season Home Visit Pays

A listed home-visit stop is a working house with a sign, tea, fruit, and a host who has learned enough Mandarin to greet a tour group. In 2023 the published average for each of the 88 families was 5,000 yuan a month. By 2025, busy yards were clearing far more, and side trades in the same lanes were paying in cash by the day.

Zuliayati Nurtai, who opened a stop at 22 Xinlu Street Lane 2, said a peak day can bring a thousand people and a month can top 10,000 yuan. She added a small crafts stall after the district took its new scenic name. Entizar Tayilijiang, who paints eyebrows with Usman grass, a local herb, said 300 to 400 visitors a day try the custom when it is bundled into tour tickets. Abdusalam Abliz, selling dried fruit and ice cream on the street, said a good day can bring in nearly 1,000 yuan.

Yining’s culture and tourism group counts 20 guesthouses, more than 30 food businesses, about 100 craft and souvenir shops, and more than 30 Hadike cart operators alongside those 88 courtyards. Direct work is put at more than 3,000 people. Indirect work is put at more than 20,000.

Yining Spent 120 Million Yuan on a Living Block

Kazanqi was not built as a park. It was a south-city neighborhood with broken drains, muddy lanes, and roofs that leaked. Subi, a dancer who grew up there, still describes rain turning the streets to soup.

In 2007, when Yining’s fiscal revenue was under 600 million yuan, the city put 120 million yuan into a protective rebuild of the core and aimed it at tourism. The site opened to the public in April 2008. In 2015 it entered China’s first batch of historic and cultural streets.

Ma Liying, general manager of the Yining Kazanqi Folk Tourism Development Co., has said the city never really stopped the work: roads, pipes, trees, and house repairs have run for years. Nanjing’s paired-assistance funds later paid for the Pomegranate Flower Exhibition Hall, which opened in August 2024, along with a south-gate visitor center and repairs to courtyards such as the Uzbek compound.

THE MAKING OF A SCENIC NEIGHBORHOOD

1. 2007: Yining invests 120 million yuan in a protective rebuild of the Kazanqi core and points it at tourism.
2. April 2008: The folk tourism area opens to the public with residents still living on the streets.
3. 2015: The district is listed in the first batch of historic and cultural streets in China.
4. September 5, 2024: It passes a national landscape-resource review under the Ili Old City name and enters the 5A creation file.
5. July 21, 2025: Year-to-date visits reach 2.8 million, still with no gate fee.
6. October 2026: A 180 million yuan scenic-area upgrade is scheduled to finish.

A World Bank social assessment already treated the Kazanqi sub-district in a Yining city plan as a lived-in place with tourist coaches stacking up at the gate and no proper bus park. The tension has not gone away. The attraction is still a neighborhood.

Why Are the Houses Painted Blue?

Blue is the street color because Uyghur houses in Ili mixed local taste with Russian-influenced joinery, and blue became the common wash for walls, doors, window frames, and even cart panels. Hosts and guides describe it as a sky color, a sign of calm, not a copy of a Moroccan hill town. The result is a continuous run of cobalt lanes that cameras find before they find the kitchens.

The palette is not only blue. Yellow, green, and pink houses sit in the mix, with carved wood, brick screens, and the odd Byzantine dome or Persian courtyard. More than 300 buildings date from the Qing Qianlong years onward. More than 20,000 local courtyards sit across a district of about 22.9 square kilometers. Thirteen ethnic groups live here, including Uyghur, Han, Hui, Uzbek, Kazakh, Xibe, Russian, Mongol, Tatar, Tajik, and Kyrgyz families.

The Tudahong Bayi Courtyard, built after the merchant Tudahong came back from Kyrgyzstan in 1929, is often sold as the largest Tatar house still standing in China. It is one showpiece. The 88 open homes are the volume business.

Kazanqi, the People Who Cast Pots

The word is Uyghur. It means the people who cast pots for a living. Seventeenth-century settlers from southern Xinjiang came to Ili to open land and work metal, and the quarter took their trade as a name. Other lanes carried other craft tags, each ending in the same occupational suffix.

THE CRAFT NAMES ON THE OLD STREETS

• Kazanqi: Pot casters, the name that still labels the whole district in speech.
• Takeqi: Smiths who nailed horseshoes, a trade that fits the carts still working the lanes.
• Tonuqi: Builders of naan ovens, the same tandoor heat that now feeds tour groups.
• Dopuqi: Makers of doppa caps, still sold and, on some days, taught to visitors.
• Dawaqi and qilekeqi: Potters and makers of iron buckets, two more workshop trades that clustered here.

That cluster is why a free-entry old town can support about 1,000 folk artisans and 53 tourism-product firms. Leather burn-paint, woodwork, and sand pictures have been pushed into the “Xinjiang Gifts” line. The craft street is the argument for a higher scenic rating. It is also the thing a generic “old city” title flattens.

The District Dropped Its Craft Name for a 5A Bid

On September 5, 2024, Yining filed the site as the Ili Old City Cultural Tourism Area and passed the Ministry of Culture and Tourism’s landscape-resource review. That is the first gate in the national 5A file. It is not the award. The district remains a 4A site.

Wang Li, deputy director of Yining’s culture, sports, radio, television and tourism bureau, said the city surveyed the area in 2024 against the 5A rulebook and then started the upgrade. By National Day 2025, most on-street and online signs had been renamed Ili Old City Cultural Tourism Area.

Ma Liying told local reporters the change came with new kit: 1,450 meters of barriers to split people from carts, 865 seats, four themed walking lines, four sales zones, three new car parks with 220 spaces, and two new public toilets. A Nanjing-backed smart-tourism system went in during late 2025, with a bilingual site, a WeChat mini-program, and an e-ticket stack that had sold more than 1,500 tickets after October, a small paid layer on a free street.

Zuliayati put the rebrand in household terms. If the scenic area has a new name, she said, the people who open their yards have to give visitors more than tea and a photo wall.

Two Rebuilds and an October Deadline

Two bills sit on the same lanes. They are easy to mash into one number. They are not the same job.

The historic-street project is listed at 186 million yuan on 0.74 square kilometers, which the city says is 17.6 percent of the core. It recast about 5 kilometers of Qianjin Street, Xinlu Street, and 16 side lanes, replaced about 3,100 meters of water pipe and 1,800 meters of drains, put 357 lamps in, repaired 23 historic buildings, and restored about 3,000 meters of waterways. By July 9, 2025, crews were laying the last alley asphalt. Tursun Jumahong, a resident, said the outer walls had been repainted and that lamps and buried cables were next.

The separate 4A-to-5A works are the 180 million yuan scenic-area upgrade posted by the Ili prefecture government in September 2024. That file covers protective repairs on 10 historic buildings totaling 1,906 square meters, 10,950 square meters of new two-above, two-below courtyard-style buildings, 5,250 square meters of craft street, 6 kilometers of slow carriage road, 6,808 square meters of parking, and two toilets. Finish date: October 2026. The management office has been handing residents free elevation drawings so private facades can match the plan.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The rating: The site is still 4A; the 5A file opened after the September 5, 2024 landscape review.
• The name: Signs were largely switched to Ili Old City by National Day 2025.
• The street: There is still no gate ticket, and people still live on the routes the carts use.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The award: No public notice has granted 5A status.
• The calendar: The 180 million yuan package is scheduled to finish in October 2026, not proven finished.

Ma Liying keeps repeating the same order of work, because the product is a lived-in street that can break if the rebuild treats it like a set.

Protection is far more important than development. Repairing the old as old lets the street keep its flavor, and lets residents make a living from tourism in a comfortable home.

Ma Liying, general manager, Yining Kazanqi Folk Tourism Development Co.

South of the North Gate, the Neighborhood Still Works

The north gate is where the cameras stop. Pigeons, blue eaves, a carriage bell, a rented dress. Costume studios have turned those walls into a standing set, and the comparison with Morocco’s blue town is now a tired caption. It misses the kitchens.

Travelers who peel off toward the south gate, along orchard streets and Ili Street, still find people shopping for themselves. That split is the district’s real risk as the 5A file thickens. A higher rating wants toilets, barriers, heat maps, and a craft street that looks finished. The wage wants 88 doors that still open onto someone’s lunch.

VISITS AND WORK, AS PUBLISHED

Those local counts sit inside a much larger Xinjiang wave. Hong Kong Trade Development Council figures put 323.1 million tourist visits in 2025 across the region, up 8.0 percent, with spending of 370.1 billion yuan, up 8.4 percent. Ili is trying to hold a piece of that flow in a neighborhood that still hangs laundry in the same blue lanes.

Yusuf Abdukeram, who grew up in a cart family, now runs a fleet of 40 Hadike carriages. The cart used to be how his father moved people who lived here. It is how visitors now buy a loop that includes one or two courtyards. The street is free. The stop is the bill.

October 2026 is when the 180 million yuan works are supposed to be done. The 88 courtyards will still be the reason a count like 2.8 million means anything, as long as the doors stay homes first.