Every culture lives in small things. A lullaby in the language your mother spoke, a pilgrimage your grandfather made, a book of poems passed between friends, the name you are allowed to give your child. What has happened in the Uyghur homeland over the past decade is often described in the language of security and statistics, of camps and surveillance. But it can also be described as an assault on the small things, and that description may come closer to what it feels like from inside. This essay is about those small things: the language, the music, the mosques, and the memory of a people, and about what survives of them, at home and in exile.
The Language
The Uyghur language has been the first casualty of what the state calls integration. For decades, schools in the region taught in Uyghur alongside Mandarin. From the early 2000s, a policy officially named bilingual education shifted instruction step by step toward Mandarin, and after 2017 the shift became something closer to replacement. In that year, education authorities in Hotan prefecture issued a directive banning the use of Uyghur in schools at every level, down to activities in the schoolyard. Kindergartens and boarding schools now raise a generation of Uyghur children primarily in Mandarin, and researchers have documented that many of these children live apart from their families, some because their parents are detained, others because boarding is required. A language survives by being spoken at the dinner table and in the classroom. When the classroom forbids it and the dinner table is empty, it does not die at once. It thins, generation by generation.
The written culture has been pressed just as hard. Uyghur publishing, which flourished in the 1980s and 1990s, has been gutted. Prominent editors of Uyghur language textbooks were arrested and sentenced in secret trials, accused of separatism for including folk tales and classical poems that had been approved by the state itself for years. Novels and histories have been pulled from shelves. Writers who once published openly now exist in an archive of PDFs traded quietly across the diaspora.
The Music
Essay one described the muqam, the twelve great song cycles that UNESCO recognized as a masterpiece of human heritage. The muqam has not been banned; the state showcases it on television, in costume, on festival stages. What has been suppressed is the living context around it: the meshrep, the traditional gathering of men in a neighborhood or village where music was played, disputes were settled, and manners were taught. UNESCO placed the meshrep on its list of intangible heritage in need of urgent safeguarding in 2010, and in the years since, independent gatherings of that kind have become impossible in much of the region, because any unsupervised assembly of Uyghur men is treated as a security risk.
The musicians themselves have not been spared. The dutar player Abdurehim Heyit, one of the most beloved performers in the Uyghur world, was detained in 2017, reportedly over the lyrics of a single song about the sacrifices of forefathers. Reports of his death in custody in 2019 brought a formal protest from Turkey, after which the Chinese state released a video of him alive, a rare event that showed both the international pressure and how far things had gone: proof of life had become the good news. Singers, wedding performers, and folk musicians appear in the long lists of the detained compiled by researchers and relatives abroad.
The Mosques and the Shrines
Religious life has been narrowed to the point of disappearance. Praying in public, fasting during Ramadan, owning an unauthorized Quran, wearing a veil, or giving a child a name judged too Islamic, such as Muhammad, have all been treated at various times as signs of extremism, documented in leaked police manuals and government directives. Imams have been imprisoned in large numbers. The great pilgrimages that once structured the religious year, such as the gathering at the desert shrine of Ordam, were banned outright, and the shrine pilgrimages that survived into the 2010s have been shut down since.
The buildings themselves tell the story most plainly. Researchers at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, using satellite imagery, estimated that roughly two thirds of the region’s mosques were damaged, altered, or destroyed in the years after 2017, along with many of the shrines and cemeteries that anchored Uyghur sacred geography. Some famous mosques still stand, like the Id Kah in Kashgar, but as monuments and photo backdrops more than as houses of worship. And the scholar who knew the shrines best, the folklorist Rahile Dawut of Xinjiang University, who spent her career documenting them, disappeared in 2017; in 2023 it was confirmed that she had been sentenced to life in prison. A woman who mapped a sacred landscape is imprisoned, and the landscape itself is being unmade.
The Memory
Alongside the buildings and the books, the state has targeted the people who carry memory: the intellectuals. The economist Ilham Tohti, who argued for dialogue between Uyghurs and Han Chinese within the Chinese constitution, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2014 and was awarded the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize five years later. The novelist Perhat Tursun, the anthropologist and university president Tashpolat Tiyip, and hundreds of other academics, doctors, editors, and poets appear in the databases of the detained. What connects them is not any crime but their role: they were the people through whom a culture explains itself to itself.
And yet memory is proving harder to erase than buildings. In the diaspora, the work of preservation has become a movement. Uyghur weekend schools from Istanbul to Munich to Adelaide teach children the alphabet their cousins at home can no longer study. Exiled linguists are building digital dictionaries and corpora so the language has a future on the internet even if it is squeezed out of the schoolyard. Musicians in exile record the muqam and the folk repertoire; archivists collect the banned books; and Uyghur writers have begun to reach readers worldwide, most famously the poet Tahir Hamut Izgil, whose memoir of escaping the crackdown became an international bestseller. Organizations of exiles document the camps and the disappeared precisely so that, whatever else is lost, the record will not be.
A culture under pressure is not a culture destroyed. The Uyghur language is still spoken in a million kitchens, hummed in songs, whispered in prayers, taught by mothers who were themselves taught in it. But a culture cannot live indefinitely on memory and exile alone, and that is the wager now being played out: whether the pressure lifts before the thread of transmission breaks. The essays in this archive exist to keep attention on that question, because attention, for those who cannot speak freely, is a form of protection.