East is next: a dispatch from Tashkent

Air conditioning wars in the navel of the world

Jul 18, 2025

Article voiceover

1×

0:00

-5:35

We’re sitting in Tashkent traffic in a German-designed, locally-made, 1990s car, under license by the US giant General Motors. Watching the engine doing its best to simulate what might pass for conditioned air is a salutary experience. This is a life lesson in recent world history and the shaping of 21st-century geopolitics. An early fruit of globalisation is beginning to show its age.

Our unlovely car’s small 2-litre petrol engine does its valiant best against an outside temperature of 42 degrees, but cuts off without warning every time we slow down or stop at traffic lights. It seems that the German designers or their international colleagues had little idea of what challenges their offspring might be facing. The expression “global warming” fails to describe what the Uzbek capital is experiencing – the hottest summer for 150 years, the driver tells me, excitedly opening a temperature app on his phone on which the green to red colour bar is edging into purple and black. “That, the temperature of shadow,” he says in strongly Russian English.

While up to 50% of the cars on the streets of Tashkent are the same make and model – any colour, as long as it’s white – the other half are of an entirely different genesis, if not world. Sailing along above us by two or three feet, in cool serenity, is a parade of Chinese electric cars with unfamiliar and uncar-like brand names: Leap Forward and Build Your Dreams. In outward appearance and inner workings, they represent 40 years of advances in car-dom. Tinted windows reveal merely a hint of their serene occupants, merrily watching cartoons on TV screens large enough for a home.

From our vantage point, one can get an idea of how a Homo Sovieticus might have felt, sometime in the 1980s, looking up from his coughing Lada with a malfunctioning heater at a purring Porsche on the snowy streets of St Petersburg. Who are these people that tame such beasts to their will, in what comfort and with what joy? As a man told Svetlana Alexievitch in her 2013 collection of interviews, Second-Hand Time: the Last of the Soviets, “We were the first ones in space … and manufactured the best tanks in the world. But there was no toilet paper.”

Tashkent is a mille-feuille of cultures, religions and ideologies. Uzbekistan was a founding member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in 2001, which, as it happens, held its annual get-together in China earlier this week. Once touted to become a future global power bloc, made of the countries in what was then the rising Asian powers, the future is already here: chilling, watching cartoons in the back seat. Tashkent urbanism is multi-layered; Tsarist and Communist Orientalism vie for attention with scrumptious examples of Mid-Century Soviet Modern. Uzbekistan is rich in resources: gas, gold and abundant agricultural production, chief among them cotton, which was so intensively farmed here from the 1950s that it led to one of the 20th century’s greatest environmental collapses, the draining of the Aral Sea. But all of this is but mere varnish sitting at the top of a multi-millennial civilizational foundation. The region has been described as the “navel of the world”, at the heart of what was once the Silk Road; now, it’s once again central to Asia’s Belt and Road project of world prosperity. In the Chor Su market, substantial ladies with gold teeth represent a kaleidoscope of humanity: Tajiks, Uzbeks, Koreans, Turks, Chinese, Afghans, Persians, Kyrgyzs and blonde ethnic Russians made blonder by the sun. Distinct ethnicities too numerous to index mingle with deliberate casualness and grace. Later, a master potter tells us of his time in Tokyo learning from Tokoname masters and teaching at London’s Royal College of Art, while in the background his father (in his 80s) applies with a steady hand a hair-thin brush to a long-necked vase. Two caged canaries chirp happily behind him in the cool of the air-conditioned studio, having been rescued from the midday heat of the courtyard.

In the State Museum of Applied Arts, we see plates commissioned in the 1970s in the style of the Timurid period, the “seven beauties”, representing the faces of idealised Oriental women. There are Chinese, Indian and Iranian courtly ladies on display. The remaining four, however, are a mystery, as the museum only has cabinet space to showcase three. The museum is in what was once a house built by a rich Russian merchant in the 19th century in Orientalist styles, richly decorated by Central Asian builders and craftsmen, with wood, ceramics, glass and delicately-cut plaster features. A marble cooling fountain in the central hall leads into corridors and further rooms. Over the door, a poem is framed in classical Persian: “The world is like a house my friend, and each day different relatives come to visit”.

Masoud Golsorkhi