Buying an apartment in the remote desert town of Kashgar is a little like playing Russian roulette. Developers and their agents don't offer price lists, nor do they bother to show flats to home buyers.
Purchasers - whether they are end-users or speculators - are entirely at the mercy of vendors.
Kashgar borders on the Taklimakan Desert and the Uygur name means a 'gathering of boulders'. It is located at one of the oldest and richest oases in the southwest of Xinjiang province, near the borders of Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan.
Once an important gateway on the fabled Silk Road to Samarkand, Kashgar is now home to the Uygurs and has been earmarked by the central government for economic development along the lines of a new Shenzhen.
Under the plan an 8.5-square-kilometre economic development zone will be created, offering tax incentives to lure direct foreign investment targeting trade with Kashgar's neighbours, a latter-day re-engineering of its Silk Road history.
The transformation of Shenzhen, the nation's first special economic zone initiated by the late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, turned a sleepy fishing village into a thriving industrial, financial and technological hub over 30 years.
Average home prices in Shenzhen, now home to 14 million people, are around 30,000 yuan (HK$34,392) per square metre, up from 5,500 yuan in 1999, and some see the same story unfolding in Kashgar - hence the buying interest despite the risks.