from Ghazi Ämät's mural in an Ürümçi hotel

Why I made this Uyghur Culture and History Site

On the web it is difficult to get accurate information about Uyghur history and culture. This page is an online introduction to Uyghur history and culture, and to my research on the politics of Uyghur musical history. Many of the sources I have linked here are biased presentations, either assuming with the Chinese that what they call the Xinjiang (meaning "New Territory") Uygur Autonomous Region was always a part of China, or presenting the Uyghur nationalist view that there should be a separate Uyghur state. This makes these interesting materials to read, but highly rhetorical. The Xinjiang region is neither purely Uyghur, nor historically a part of China. It is more realistic to celebrate the diversity of Uyghur historical and cultural origins, rather than arguing that they have a unified culture and history, just as it is more realistic for Chinese to admit that China's political ties to the region were weak until the Manchu conquest under the Qianlong Emperor in the eighteenth century. Even though China has ruled Xinjiang since the eighteenth century, economic and cultural ties and influences have only become strong in the twentieth century. By trying to create a uniform identity, Uyghur nationalists imitate China's own rhetoric which suggests that the Chinese are a unified people who share 5000 years of history. The "imagined community" of China is persuasive for many people, but is historically inaccurate and covers up the many rifts in Chinese history and society. China is not a culturally unified whole, nor has it been politically unified in its present form for very long. In fact, all nation states have long been in flux, even in the twentieth century, in which the nation-state has become the dominant ideal for political organization. It is hard to imagine that China will escape the ongoing changes to the nation-state form. A fixed, bounded territory is only a temporary phenomenon in political evolution, and even as it has become desperately important to many ethnic groups, such as in the Balkan Peninsula, it is at the same time becoming less important as Western Europe transforms itself into the European Union. Of course, for Uyghurs who feel culturally threatened by Chinese political domination, territorial independence seems like a good way to preserve their cultural identity during the long, slow, but inexorable political changes that will move even China into a post-national world. China and the present Xinjiang region have been historically connected in a variety of ways in different periods. The territory of Xinjiang includes people from many different ethnic groups, including Qazaq, Qirghiz, and Han, as well as smaller groups of Mongols, Tatars, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Sibo, and so on. And each of these ethnic groups is a complex whole made up of many different communities with their own distinctive histories, and often subsuming groups that think of themselves as separate and different than the larger group. The Dolans and the Lopliqs are two of the many officially unrecognized subgroups of the Uyghurs that could be considered separate ethnic groups. Many Uyghurs in the Kashghar and Khotan regions now recognize themselves as descendants from the many ethnic groups that once lived there, such as Sogdians and other Iranian peoples, and South Asians as well. The many communities that make up the officially recognized ethnic groups have all had complex cultural, political and economic relationships with the surrounding peoples and states for thousands of years. Many of the communities have moved to their present residence from elsewhere during the past thousand years. It is this long history of population movement that makes the "Caucasian" mummies less worth the hype that they are getting. While Chinese official discussions always claim that the Uyghurs have long been an integral part of China, many Uyghur nationalists have been working for independence for Eastern Turkistan or Uyghuristan. These nationalists try to delegitimate China's 18th century conquest of Eastern Turkistan/Kashgharia/Xinjiang. Quite a few of the web sites I have linked above support this interpretation of Uyghur history. Chinese web-sites give only general platitudes about Xinjiang politics and history. Chinese descriptions of Xinjiang avoid discussing the rich history of the region, in order to suppress the fact that the Chinese did not control the region during the fifteen hundred years from the Han to the Qing dynasty. In fact, it reveals something about the populist nature of the WWW that the Chinese government does not have a huge propaganda presence on the web. When one thinks of the ways that the airwaves have long been used to cram ideology down people's throats, the lack of hierarchy on the web can be seen in the fact that there is no way that a Voice of America or Radio Moscow can drown out everyone else's point of view. Whether freedom on the web will last, and what effect it will have on nationalist movements remains to be seen, but it is clearly a part of the weakening control of media by elites who support state territorial integrity. Music is central to Uyghur understandings of their past, and Ghazi Ämät's paintings are one expression of this concern. I have created this page in order to help non-Uyghurs to go beyond limited ideas about Uyghur culture and history based in popularized archeology and romanticized travel accounts, towards a deeper recognition of the Uyghurs' rich cultural traditions that endure despite present political difficulties and economic changes. Fortunately Abdulrakhim Aitbayev's page presents some Uyghur poetry, although the special characters are displayed incorrectly. He also has a limited introduction to Uyghur music. It is unfortunate that the web should have so much about Uyghur political aspirations, and so little about their religion, literature, music and cultural history. Annotated bibliography I append here a brief bibliography of works for those who want to find out more about the culture and history of the Uyghurs and the little known region of Xinjiang. Historical studies before the modern period in English are very limited. Owen Lattimore's study Pivot of Asia; Sinkiang and the inner Asian frontiers of China and Russia (Boston: Little, Brown, 1950), is an excellent overview of the historical situation of Xinjiang in relationship to China from an ecological perspective. Similar issues around Chinese-Nomadic border relations have been discussed in the more recent The perilous frontier: nomadic empires and China by Thomas J. Barfield (Cambridge, Mass.: B. Blackwell, 1989), Peace, war, and trade along the Great Wall: Nomadic-Chinese interaction through two millennia by Sechin Jagchid and Van Jay Symons (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), and a rather pro-Chinese presentation based in artifacts: Traders and raiders on China's northern frontier by Jenny F. So and Emma C. Bunker (Seattle: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, in association with University of Washington Press, 1995). For the history of the early Uyghurs (usually writtern Uighur for this period), see Colin Mackerras's article in The Cambridge history of early inner Asia edited by Denis Sinor (Cambridge University Press, 1990), and for the region see the somewhat outdated East Turkistan to the twelfth century; a brief political survey by William Samolin (The Hague, Mouton, 1964). The articles in the multivolume Cambridge history of China have some Sino-centric discussion of China's relationship to surrounding states. See especially volume 6: Alien regimes and border states, 907-1368 . The period of Mongol and Uighur rule is complex. There are many sources but inadequate treatments of them. For a native persspective, see A history of the Moghuls of central Asia; being the Tarikh-i-Rashidi of Mirza Muhammad Haidar, Dughlat, edited, with commentary, notes, and map by N. Elias, translated by E. Denison Ross (London: Curzon, 1898). Recent historical studies appear in China among equals: the Middle Kingdom and its neighbors, 10th-14th centuries edited by Morris Rossabi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), in Joseph Fletcher's collected articles in Studies on Chinese and Islamic Inner Asia edited by Beatrice Forbes Manz (Aldershot, Great Britain: Variorum, 1995), and in Isenbike Togan's article in Muslims in Central Asia: expressions of identity and change edited by Jo-Ann Gross (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992). The best works for the modern period are Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia: a political history of Republican Sinkiang 1911-1949 by Andrew D.W. Forbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) and The Ili Rebellion: the Moslem challenge to Chinese authority in Xinjiang, 1944-1949 by Linda K. Benson (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1990). There is a dissertation which does a nice presentation of the nineteenth century: The Muslim rebellion and the Kashghar emirate in Chinese Central Asia, 1864-1877 by Ho-dong Kim (Harvard University, 1986). Another useful book is Macartney at Kashgar: new light on British, Chinese and Russian activities in Sinkiang, 1890-1918 by C. P. Skrine and Pamela Nightingale (London: Methuen, 1973). James Millward's revised dissertation should be available soon: Beyond the pass: economy, ethnicity, and empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759-1864 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Many excellent travel accounts from the period of early exploration and archeological work also give some background on historical events as well. See especially the very interesting Visits to high Tartary, Yarkand, and Kashgar by Robert B. Shaw, with an introduction by Peter Hopkirk (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1984, originally published 1871). Owen Lattimore's High Tartary (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1930), is one of his better books. Peter Hopkirk's Foreign devils on the silk road: the search for the lost cities and treasures of Chinese Central Asia is a good introduction to the archeological and linguistic research that began in Xinjiang in the late nineteenth century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980). The only current anthropological study of Uyghur society is Oasis identities: Uyghur nationalism along China's Silk Road by Justin Jon Rudelson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). An interesting but error-ridden study of one work of Uyghur traditional literature is Imaginary Muslims: the Uwaysi Sufis of Central Asia by Julian Baldick (New York University Press, 1993). Gunnar Jarring's many works are a more detailed introduction to a range of Uyghur written and oral literature, but they are often difficult to find and do not give enough cultural background. The place to start is with Jarring's account of his early research and subsequent return to Kashgar after fifty years:Return to Kashgar: Central Asian memoirs in the present (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1986). Among his many collections and annotations of Uyghur literature is Literary texts from Kashghar (Lund: CWK Gleerup, 1980). An interesting book in German is Die ujghurische Literatur in Xinjiang 1956-1966 by Michael Friederich (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997). Issue 25 of the journal Cahiers d'etudes sur la Mediterranee orientale et le monde turco-iranien (CEMOTI) is a 320 page collection entitled "Les Ouigours au vingtieme siecle" and contains a variety of articles in English and French on modern Uyghur culture, society and history (No. 25, january-june 1998). There is more recent scholarship on Xinjiang Qazaq history and culture than on that of the Uyghurs. See Kazakh traditions of China by Awelkhan Hali, Zengxiang Li, Karl W. Luckert (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1998). The Kazaks of China: essays on an ethnic minority edited by Linda Benson and Ingvar Svanberg (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1988). China's last Nomads: the history and culture of China's Kazaks by Linda Benson and Ingvar Svanberg (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1998). And my own look at Qazaq history from an anthropological perspective: Qazaqs of China: The Local Processes of History Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana Center on Global Change and World Peace, Occasional Paper No. 22, 1994). The best bibliography for doing more in depth research is Thomas Hoppe's Xinjiang-Arbeitsbibliographie II: Autonomes Gebiet Xinjiang der Uiguren, China = Xinjiang provisional bibliography II: Xinjiang Uigur Autonomous Region, China: (natural conditions, history, ethnic groups, land use)(Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1987).

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revised 3/8/2001.