Ask most people in Europe who the Uyghurs are and you will often get a hesitant answer, something about China, something about camps. That is usually where the knowledge ends. But the Uyghurs are not a footnote to a news story. They are a people of roughly twelve million in their homeland alone, according to China’s own 2020 census, with their own language, literature, music, and cuisine, and a history in Central Asia that stretches back well over a thousand years. To understand what is happening to them now, it helps to first understand who they are.
A People of the Oases
The Uyghur homeland lies in the far northwest of what is today the People’s Republic of China, bordering eight countries, from Mongolia and Russia in the north to Pakistan and India in the south. The Chinese state calls it the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region; the name Xinjiang means “new frontier” and dates from its conquest by the Qing empire in the eighteenth century. Many Uyghurs prefer to call it East Turkistan, or simply the Uyghur Region. It is a vast territory, larger than France, Germany, and Spain combined, divided by the Tianshan mountains into a greener north, whose largest city is the regional capital Urumqi, and the arid Tarim Basin in the south, where Uyghur life has always been concentrated in the oasis towns strung along the edges of the Taklamakan Desert: Kashgar, Hotan, Turpan, Aksu, Yarkand.
These oases were the arteries of the Silk Road. For centuries, caravans carrying silk, jade, paper, and ideas passed through Uyghur towns on their way between China, Persia, India, and the Mediterranean. The Uyghurs were traders, farmers, scribes, and musicians at one of the great crossroads of the world, and their culture absorbed influences from every direction while remaining distinctly its own. The Uyghurs are also not alone in the region: Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Hui, Tajiks, Mongols, and others have long lived alongside them, which is one reason the region’s story cannot be told as a simple tale of two peoples.
Anyone who has walked through a Uyghur bazaar knows that this culture is above all a lived one. It is in the food: laghman noodles pulled by hand, polo rice cooked with carrots and lamb, samsa baked against the walls of clay ovens, and the flat round bread called nan, which carries such significance that tradition forbids placing it face down. It is in the crafts: the shimmering tie dyed atlas silk of Hotan, hand hammered copperware, and the knives of Yengisar, famous across Central Asia. It is in the doppa, the embroidered square cap whose patterns tell you which town its wearer comes from. And it is in hospitality itself, for a guest in a Uyghur home is rarely allowed to leave without tea, a full table, and a long conversation.
Language and Faith
The Uyghur language is Turkic, closely related to Uzbek and more distantly to Turkish. A Uyghur trader and an Uzbek trader can understand one another with little effort. It is written today in a modified Arabic script, though the diaspora also uses Latin transcription, and it has a rich literary tradition. Two works from the eleventh century stand at its foundation: Yusuf Khass Hajib’s “Kutadgu Bilig,” a book of counsel for princes written in Kashgar, and Mahmud al-Kashgari’s great dictionary of the Turkic tongues, compiled for the caliph in Baghdad. On the modern side stands a lively culture of novels, poetry, and song. Poetry holds a special place: verses are quoted at weddings and funerals, and modern poets such as Abdurehim Otkur have become national figures whose lines circulate even when their books cannot.
Religiously, the Uyghurs were shaped by nearly everything the Silk Road carried. Their ancestors were at various times Buddhists, Manichaeans, and Nestorian Christians; the cave paintings of Bezeklik near Turpan still show Buddhist monks with Central Asian faces. Islam arrived in the tenth century, when Satuq Bughra Khan of the Karakhanid dynasty converted, and it spread gradually eastward across the oases over the following centuries; for roughly the last five hundred years the Uyghurs have been overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim, mostly of the Hanafi school. Uyghur Islam is traditionally woven together with local custom: the veneration of desert shrines such as those at Ordam and Imam Asim, Sufi devotional gatherings, and the muqam, the twelve great song cycles that UNESCO recognized in 2005 as a masterpiece of the oral heritage of humanity. A full performance of all twelve muqams takes roughly twenty four hours, and their melodies carry the emotional history of the oases in a way no chronicle can.
Between Empires
The political history of the Uyghurs is a history of living between larger powers. An early Uyghur empire flourished on the Mongolian steppe in the eighth and ninth centuries, powerful enough that Tang China paid it tribute, before its people migrated southwest into the oasis towns they inhabit today. Over the following centuries the region was ruled by Turkic khanates, by the Mongols and their successors, and by local Muslim dynasties. The Qing empire conquered it in the 1750s, lost effective control during the great rebellions of the nineteenth century, when the adventurer Yaqub Beg ruled an independent state from Kashgar for more than a decade, and reconquered it in the 1870s; it became a formal Chinese province in 1884.
In the twentieth century, as the Qing empire collapsed and China convulsed, Uyghurs twice declared independent republics: the Turkish Islamic Republic of East Turkistan in Kashgar in 1933, and the Soviet backed East Turkistan Republic in the north in 1944. Both were short lived. In 1949 the People’s Liberation Army entered the region, and it has been governed from Beijing ever since. In 1955 it was designated an autonomous region, a status that promised self government on paper but delivered little of it in practice.
The decades that followed reshaped the region profoundly. State sponsored migration, much of it organized through the paramilitary Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, changed its demography: Han Chinese made up around six percent of the population in 1949, and around forty percent by the end of the century. Economic development concentrated in the Han dominated north while the Uyghur south remained poor, and Uyghur language education was progressively narrowed in favor of Mandarin. The physical fabric of Uyghur life changed too. Kashgar’s old city, one of the best preserved traditional Islamic urban landscapes in Central Asia, was largely demolished and rebuilt from 2009 onward in the name of modernization, and in recent years researchers using satellite imagery have documented the destruction or alteration of thousands of mosques and shrines across the region.
The Present
Tensions between Uyghurs and the Chinese state simmered for decades and broke into violence more than once, most notably in the Urumqi riots of July 2009, in which nearly two hundred people died. Beijing’s answer, beginning with the “Strike Hard” campaign of 2014 and escalating sharply after Party Secretary Chen Quanguo arrived from Tibet in 2016, was a security campaign of extraordinary scale. Researchers, journalists, and the United Nations human rights office have documented a network of internment camps that credible estimates say held a million or more people at its height, pervasive digital and physical surveillance, restrictions on religious practice as ordinary as praying or owning a Quran, forced labor programs reaching into international supply chains, the separation of children from detained parents, and sharp coercive reductions in Uyghur birth rates. The Chinese government describes the camps as vocational training centers and the wider campaign as counterterrorism. The UN human rights office concluded in August 2022 that the treatment of Uyghurs may constitute crimes against humanity. Several parliaments and governments have gone further in their own assessments.
Beyond the homeland, a Uyghur diaspora of several hundred thousand people keeps the culture alive, with the largest communities in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkey, and smaller ones across Europe, North America, and Australia. Munich has been a center of Uyghur exile life for decades and hosts the World Uyghur Congress; in cities from Amsterdam to Istanbul there are Uyghur restaurants, weekend language classes for children born abroad, and archives of books that can no longer be printed at home. For many in the diaspora, an ordinary phone call to a parent or sister in the homeland has become impossible, and exile has turned from a temporary condition into a responsibility: to remember, and to speak.
That present crisis is the subject of the other essays in this archive. This one ends simply, with the point it began with: the Uyghurs are not defined by what is being done to them. They are a people with a long memory, an old and beautiful culture, and communities around the world, including here in Europe, working to keep both alive.