Urumqi, 乌鲁木齐, capital of the autonomous region Xinjiang. This is one of the most multi-cultural places I have seen. After a five-hour flight from Shanghai I was still in the same country! The Han-Chinese female taxi driver who took me from the airport to the Xinjiang University 新疆大学 asked me to which ethnical group I belonged. I think this was the first time in my life someone asked me this. Soon I found out that this question is almost like saying hello in Xinjiang. This place is so colored with ethnical groups that it hardly feels like China (and still it does very much in a way). This is the only place in the whole of China were people are not surprised when you speak Chinese as a white person, since 'Russians' are one of the ethnic groups here. The biggest minority group here are the Uyghur 维吾尔, people who speak a language related to Turkish written in Arab, and who are Muslims.
Signs and slogans in the city are written in Chinese, Uyghur, Russian and English. The book and music in the Xinhua bookstore here (there are Xinhua bookstores in every single place in China) is partly in Chinese and partly in Uyghur. With most of the region being desert, this was one of the places that made you realize how big and vast China is.