[Photo provided to China Daily]

Chen, who was born in Korla, about 340 kilometers southwest of Urumqi, now has more than 3 million followers on his Sina Weibo account. He caught the hip-hop bug at high school when he played basketball, he says, and gained further exposure to it when, aged 15, he went to Australia to study. He stayed there for three years, and during that time started creating his own songs. One of the songs he performed in The Rap of China was Korla, dedicated to his hometown.

The origins of hip-hop culture in Xinjiang predate Chen's discovery of it by about 10 years-so in the late 1990s, when young people in the region became interested in street dance.

One of the pioneers was Firkat Bahadeer, 40, a Uygur who was born and grew up in Urumqi. His father, who taught mathematics at Xinjiang University and studied in Japan in the early 1990s, showed Bahadeer a video of Japanese street dancers.

Bahadeer graduated from the law school at Xinjiang University and held down a stable job briefly, until 2001, before deciding to quit and travel to Shenzhen and then Shanghai looking for opportunities to learn with professional street dancers.

Bahadeer recalls the first time he attended a hip-hop party in Shanghai, after having traveled alone and with just a backpack to the city, which in those days would have been a shadow of the modern metropolis it has since become.

"Even before I entered the room I was overwhelmed by the loud music and the hip-hop beat. My body moved to the boom bap rhythm, and everything I saw-the dancers, the DJs and me in the mirror-seemed like scenes from a slow-motion movie. For someone like me, a young guy from remote Xinjiang, it was like an amazing dream."