The chubby restaurant cashier looked over the steamy dining hall and looked satisfied: Half of the tables in his Muslim restaurant were occupied by Han and Uygur customers hours after lunchtime.

"Look around and you see that nothing can be easily affected despite all that fuss," said the 46-year-old cashier of the Bugda Muslim Restaurant in western Beijing.

There are a few thousand immigrants from Xinjiang in large cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. Their lives seemed undisturbed by the deadly riot back home yesterday, but they voiced worries about what might come next as tensions appeared to be rising.