Id Kah Mosque

Id Kah means a place of praying and celebration in festival. The Id Kah Mosque is located on the central square in Kashgar City, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The present Id Kah Mosque was built in 1442 as a very small structure. Several renovations and enlargements have created it with today’s scale and style. The whole complex occupied 16,800 square meters and consists of the courtyard, the hall of prayer, and the gate tower and as well as some other attached structures.

Visiting Guide

The mosque’s main door with yellow bricks is 12.6 meters high. On both sides of the gate are eighteen-meter high round brick columns half embedded in the wall. On top of the column stands a tower where the imam would call out loudly at dawn every day to wake up the Muslims and summon them to attend service in the mosque.

Entered the gate is a huge domed arch worship which is 16 meters high, 10 meters in diameter. In the middle part of the wall in the main hall, there is a deep shrine in which a stepped throne is placed. During service, the first Maola stands in the shrine to lead the prayer.

Every day, thousands of worshippers come here to pray. Every Friday afternoon, Muslims living far and near gather here to worship. On the Kurban Festival and Fast-breaking Festival, the two most important grand Islamic festivals, the Uygur people gather on the square in front of the mosque to celebrate the festivals. And Uygur young men in their holiday-celebrating suits dance, with great enthusiasm, to the cheerful drumbeats and music.

Today, it remains one of china’s largest mosques, frequently hosting ten to twenty thousand worshippers on holy days.