Eid al-Fitr (Rozi Heyt)
The month of daylight fasting closes with three days of feasting and visiting; restaurants keep daytime hours but the festive tables run in the evenings.
Destinations / Xinjiang / News / Festival calendar
A festival calendar for travellers.
Some festivals arrive on a fixed date, some wander backward through the solar year, and some are simply weekly — a planning note on the region's calendar, written to stay true.
Explore the guide ↓Xinjiang, regional
- The fixed one
- 21 March
- The moving ones
- Lunar calendar
- The bazaars
- Weekly
- The principle
- Ask, don't assume
What lands on the same date.
Nouruz — the spring new year, celebrated across Persian-influenced central Asia — falls on 21 March everywhere, and in the far west it is the year's great public festival: family visits, music, the first spring food, and in the valleys the season's opening. For travel purposes it is the one fixed anchor of the regional year.
The agricultural and market calendar is equally fixed in shape: summer pasture movement in June, harvest in the oases through August and September, the poplar gold and the slaughter-season livestock trade in late October, and the deep-winter quiet from December.
What shifts each year.
Roughly eleven days earlier in the solar calendar each year.
Eid al-Adha (Qurban Heyt)
The greater feast — livestock markets are at their fullest in the days before, and family slaughter and sharing follow the morning prayers.
Market days
The great livestock bazaars run to the week — Kashgar's Sunday ground above all — and shift only for the feasts themselves.
Local equestrian days
Grassland communities hold horseraces and wrestling through the summer months; dates are announced locally and picked up by guides on the ground.
What this means for a journey.
Festival weeks are among the best times to be in the region and among the worst times to assume: transport fills, family businesses close for the feast days, and the famous markets go quiet on the morning after. We confirm the coming year's moving dates each winter and route around them deliberately — sometimes to join them, sometimes to travel before them.
Ask when you enquire: which festivals fall inside your window is one of the first questions our planners answer, and the answer changes what the journey should include.