Essays & Documentation

The Uyghur Archive

Timeline

Twelve centuries of Uyghur history in one page: empires, oases, republics, and the present crisis. The essays tell the full story; this is the map.

The Silk Road Centuries

  1. 744–840

    The Uyghur Khaganate

    An Uyghur empire rules the Mongolian steppe, powerful enough that Tang China pays it tribute. After its fall, the Uyghurs migrate southwest into the oasis towns of the Tarim Basin, their homeland ever since.

  2. 10th century

    Islam arrives

    Satuq Bughra Khan of the Karakhanid dynasty converts, and Islam spreads gradually eastward across the oases over the following centuries, layered over older Buddhist, Manichaean, and Christian pasts.

  3. 11th century

    A golden age of letters

    In Kashgar, Yusuf Khass Hajib writes the Kutadgu Bilig, and Mahmud al-Kashgari compiles his great dictionary of the Turkic tongues: the twin foundations of Uyghur literature.

  4. 13th–17th c.

    Khanates and khans

    The region passes through Mongol rule and local Muslim dynasties. By the sixteenth century the oases are overwhelmingly Muslim, and the muqam tradition takes its classical shape.

Wall painting of three Uyghur princes in red robes from the Bezeklik caves, 8th to 9th century
Uyghur princes, wall painting from the Bezeklik caves near Turpan, 8th–9th century. Ethnological Museum, Berlin. Photo: Daderot, CC0

Between Empires

  1. 1750s

    Qing conquest

    The Qing empire conquers the region. The name it later gives the territory, Xinjiang, means “new frontier.”

  2. 1864–1877

    Rebellion and Yaqub Beg

    Great rebellions break Qing control; Yaqub Beg rules an independent state from Kashgar for more than a decade before the Qing reconquest.

  3. 1884

    A Chinese province

    Xinjiang is formally made a province of the Qing empire.

  4. 1933

    First East Turkistan Republic

    As China convulses, Uyghurs declare the Turkish Islamic Republic of East Turkistan in Kashgar. It is short lived.

  5. 1944–1949

    Second East Turkistan Republic

    A Soviet backed East Turkistan Republic governs the north of the region until the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

The yellow facade and minarets of the Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar
The Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar, at the heart of Uyghur religious life since the fifteenth century. Photo: Radosław Botev, CC BY 3.0 PL

Under the People’s Republic

  1. 1949

    The PLA enters

    The People’s Liberation Army takes the region, which has been governed from Beijing ever since.

  2. 1955

    Autonomy on paper

    The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is established, a status that promises self government but delivers little of it in practice.

  3. 1950s–2000

    Demography transformed

    State sponsored migration, much of it through the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, raises the Han Chinese share of the population from around six percent to around forty percent.

  4. 2005

    The muqam honored

    UNESCO proclaims the Uyghur muqam a masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity; the meshrep follows onto its urgent safeguarding list in 2010.

  5. 2009

    The Urumqi riots

    Ethnic violence in the regional capital in July leaves nearly two hundred people dead and marks a turning point toward ever harder policies. Kashgar’s old city is largely demolished and rebuilt in the years that follow.

An elderly Uyghur musician playing the rawap in Kashgar
A rawap player in Kashgar, 2011. The music lives on; the gatherings it belonged to are described in essay four. Photo: John Hill, CC BY-SA 4.0

The Crackdown

  1. 2014

    “Strike Hard”

    Beijing launches the Strike Hard campaign against violent terrorism. The economist Ilham Tohti, an advocate of dialogue, is sentenced to life imprisonment.

  2. 2016

    Chen Quanguo arrives

    The party secretary who built Tibet’s security grid takes over the region and applies the model at greater scale.

  3. 2017

    Mass internment

    Camps expand across the region; credible estimates put the number detained at a million or more. Intellectuals, artists, and clerics disappear, among them the folklorist Rahile Dawut and the musician Abdurehim Heyit.

  4. 2019

    The leaks begin

    The Xinjiang Papers and China Cables put the state’s own documents on the record. The Xinjiang Police Files follow in 2022 with photographs from inside the camps.

  5. 2021

    The world responds

    Coordinated EU, US, UK, and Canadian sanctions in March; genocide determinations and parliamentary resolutions; in December, the Uyghur Tribunal’s judgment and the signing of the US Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.

  6. 2022

    The UN speaks

    The UN human rights office concludes that the treatment of Uyghurs may constitute crimes against humanity. The US forced labor ban takes effect, presuming goods from the region are tainted unless proven otherwise.

  7. Today

    The record continues

    Documentation, litigation, and diaspora cultural work carry the story forward. The essays in this archive describe each of these threads in detail.