The Uyghurs are a Turkic, mostly Muslim people living in a province of northwestern China called Xinjiang.
Their population in Xinjiang numbers at about 11 million, while another million or so are
scattered around the globe, mostly in Turkic countries in Central Asia like Kazakhstan
and Uzbekistan.
Indeed, while most Uyghurs live in China today, they share much more in common both culturally
and historically with those Central Asian countries than with China proper.
Today, we will explore the complex history of the Uyghur people and follow their centuries-long
journey from the steppes of Mongolia to the oases of Xinjiang.
The modern-day Uyghurs are the result of a mixing of various peoples and cultures over
the centuries, so we cannot pinpoint a single starting point for their history.
But, for the sake of time, we will oversimplify this matter for now and consider 7th century
Mongolia as the stage for the first chapter in our story.
Mongolia prior to the 13th century was home to a variety of Mongolic and Turkic peoples.
These peoples would take turns ruling vast, diverse nomadic empires.
In the 7th century, the dominant force in Mongolia was the Göktürks, who ruled the Turkic Khaganate.
One of the many Turkic peoples that the Göktürks ruled over was the Uyghurs.
These ancient Uyghurs were not Muslims like their descendants but Buddhist and Tengri.
Their language, Old Uyghur, was part of the Siberian branch of the Turkic languages family.
Now, these Uyghurs were part of a confederation of Turkic tribes known as the Tiele.
The Tiele were not very loyal to the Göktürks.
In fact, in the early 7th century, they often allied with the Tang dynasty of China
to fight the Turkic Khaganate.
In the year 630, the Tang dynasty conquered Mongolia with the Uyghurs’ help, but the
Göktürks restored their empire in 682.
In the mid-8th century, the Uyghurs and their allies, the Karluks and the Basmyls, rebelled
against the Göktürks.
In 744, the alliance captured the Göktürk capital and beheaded their leader.
The alliance then fell apart, and the Uyghurs emerged victorious to become the next masters
of Mongolia.
They established the Uyghur Khaganate, with Kutlug Bilge as their first khagan.
Three years later, his son Bayanchur ascended the throne and opened up
a golden age for the empire.
Bayanchur ruled from the planned city of Ordu-Baliq, abandoning the old capital of the Göktürks.
For the first few years of his rule, he solidified the Uyghurs’ control over Mongolia by subduing
opposing tribes.
He also kept up an alliance of sorts with the Tang dynasty, especially during the devastating
An Lushan rebellion of 755, which lasted until 763.
The Uyghurs were paid handsomely for their help, something they would use to their advantage
moving forward.
Following the An Lushan rebellion, the Tang dynasty was significantly weakened and began
to suffer from frequent revolts.
The Uyghurs would show up unsolicited, put down the rebels, and force the Chinese to
pay them for their assistance.
The Uyghurs were allies with another important group: the Sogdians.
The Sogdians were an Iranian people who lived in the Tarim Basin and controlled a major
part of the Silk Road.
The Uyghurs received silk from China and sold it to the Sogdians,
who would then send it westward.
The Old Uyghur alphabet was adapted from the Sogdian alphabet, and in the mid-8th century,
the Uyghurs converted to Manichaeism, the religion of the Sogdians.
Manichaeism was a major, now extinct religion founded in Persia.
It described the universe as a constant struggle between good and evil fought between a good
but not omnipotent God and the devil.
Every worldly process was a byproduct of this eternal conflict.
Speaking of eternal conflicts, the Uyghurs constantly fought two groups: Tibet and the
Yenisei Kyrgyz, another Turkic people who lived north of the empire.
In the early 9th century, the Uyghurs pushed Tibet south, taking control of parts of Xinjiang
and the Hexi Corridor, the trade route connecting China to Sogdia.
However, the empire fell into rapid decline in the 830s, due to famine
and internal power struggles.
In 840, a rival of the Uyghur khagan invited the Yenisei Kyrgyz to attack, and the khagan
was captured and the capital sacked.
This marked the sudden end of the Uyghur empire.
When the empire fell, most Uyghurs fled south.
At this juncture, an important split in the Uyghur population occurred.
Some of the Uyghurs fled to the Tarim Basin and established the Kingdom of Qocho, settling
in the centuries-old oasis towns there.
Others fled for the Hexi Corridor and founded the Ganzhou Uyghur Kingdom.
Both branches of the Uyghurs practiced both Manichaeism and Buddhism.
The Ganzhou Uyghurs are actually not relevant to the history of the Uyghurs living in Xinjiang today.
In 1036, the Ganzhou Uyghur Kingdom was destroyed by the Tangut people, and they never again
ruled their own sovereign state.
The descendants of the Ganzhou Uyghurs are known as the Yugurs with a Y,
or the Yellow Uyghurs, and are a minority group in today’s China.
Only 15,000 remain, and they are Tibetan Buddhists, not Muslims.
They speak two languages: Eastern Yugur and Western Yugur.
Of these, Western Yugur is part of the Siberian branch of the Turkic family
and descends from Old Uyghur.
Now, let’s return to the main lineage of the Uyghurs: those who founded Qocho.
Now living in the Tarim Basin, the Qocho Uyghurs mixed with the various peoples already living
there, such as the Sogdians and the Indo-European Tocharians.
This means that the Old Uyghurs are just one of many ancestors of today’s Uyghurs.
This intermixing is also why the Uyghurs of Xinjiang look more phenotypically Caucasian
than the Yugurs with a Y, who look much more traditionally East Asian.
Qocho was often in conflict with the Kara-Khanids, who were Sunni Muslim Turks in Central Asia.
While this foreshadowed things to come, Qocho retained its Buddhist identity, well-reflected
in the murals of the Bezeklik Caves.
In the 13th century, Qocho became a vassal of the Mongol Empire.
A century later, Qocho was annexed by the Chagatai Khanate, which began as a division
of the Mongol Empire but gradually turned into an Islamic Turkic kingdom.
The 14th and 15th centuries were important for the history of the Uyghurs.
Firstly, as I just stated, the Tarim Basin turned Sunni Muslim.
Secondly, the Old Uyghur language fell out of use.
Instead, the Chagatai language, a Turkic language with Persian and Arabic influence, became dominant.
Chagatai would remain the lingua franca of Central Asia up until the 19th or even the
early 20th century, though it is now extinct.
Chagatai was part of the Karluk branch of the Turkic languages, not Siberian.
Modern Uyghur descends from Chagatai, which means that Modern Uyghur and Old Uyghur are
practically unrelated languages.
Thirdly, the name “Uyghur” itself also fell out of use.
After the 15th century, the descendants of Qocho were vaguely described as “Turks”
or “Turki” by contemporary sources.
This makes their whereabouts following Chagatai hegemony difficult to trace.
But not impossible.
We will discuss what happened to the Uyghurs from the 15th century onwards
in the next video.
Thanks for watching.