The earliest Uyghurs

The powerful Uyghur Khaghanate of 744–840 CE rose out of remnant tribes from the second Turk Empire (683–734). They were destroyed by a Kyrgyz army, and their survivors scattered across northern China (then under T’ang rule) and Mongol areas. While the medieval and modern Uyghurs share a name and a language family, the connections across 1100 years are not so direct in the eyes of historians and linguists. The Uyghur Khaghanate converted to the Manichaean religion, whereas modern Uyghurs are Muslim. In the intervening centuries other Turkic groups (including modern Kazakhs and Kyrgyz), Mongols, Chinese, Tibetans and Iranians have moved in and out of the area. The name “Uyghur” itself disappeared for centuries; it was revived by nationalists in the 1930s. Historians are equally uncertain about the connection, if any, between the Kyrgyz who destroyed the Uyghurs in the 9th century and today’s Kyrgyz. All of this ebb and flow, combined with sparse documents, means that “We do not have the right kinds of sources to discuss ‘identity’ of Xinjiang peoples in detail for any time before the twentieth century,” [Millward, p. xiv].

After the Mongol Chaghatids

The region that today we call Xinjiang has rarely been a united polity, and so has been called a bewildering variety of names. The area south and east of the Tien Shan mountains was called Kashgaria (named for a major trading town, Kashghar), and/or Altishahar (“six cities”), among other names. Some modern scholars prefer to take a geographic approach and refer to the region as the Tarim Basin, which contains the Taklamakan Desert. Most of the people there were settled farmers and townsmen who lived around oases. The northern section was Mogholistan under the rule of the Chaghatids, and then was referred to as Zungharia, for the Zunghar Mongols (also called Oirats or Kalmyks) who were the dominant population. The Oirats, as well as Kazakh and Kyrgyz tribes in the region, were nomadic pastoralists.

As the Chaghatid khans faded out in the 16th century, they were largely replaced by charismatic Naqshbandi Sufi sheikhs from Transoxiana, the khojas or khwajas. These khojas had begun as spiritual advisers to the khans, and moved into military and political leadership in their own right. The khojas’ independent power was broken in the 1670s by a bloody rivalry between two lines of khojas that outside powers quickly exploited. Tibet’s Dalai Lama, in those days a powerful and ambitious ruler, arranged for his ally the Oirat khan to invade Kashgaria, pacify it, and place the lama’s chosen khoja on the throne. Both Tibet and Zungharia were Buddhist states, while the khojas of course were Muslim, but this takeover appears to have been motivated by power politics, not religion. Nonetheless, being dominated by Buddhist powers would most likely have had the effect of strengthening an Islamic identity among the Turkic peoples of Kashgaria. As under the Chaghatids, the region was ruled by puppets who paid tribute to Mongol (here Zunghar) nomad overlords. The situation remained that way, punctuated by more fighting between rival khojas and their followers, until the mid-18th century. At that point a new power began encroaching from the east, the Manchu or Qing dynasty of China (1644–1911).

Summary of identities in the pre-modern period

It is easiest for historians to define identity on the bases of political, religious, linguistic and geographic factors. Use of these factors enables us to arrange Central Asian peoples into several reasonably neat categories.

Religion
Muslim: Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Turkmen, Kyrgyz, Kara-kalpaks, Tajiks, Uyghurs
Buddhist: Zunghars/Oirats/Kalmyks, Tibetans
Jewish: Jews

Lifeways
Nomadic pastoralist: Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Kara-kalpaks, Zunghars, most Turkmen
Settled farmers: most Uzbeks, Tajiks, most Uyghurs, some Turkmen
Merchants and town-dwellers: Sarts, Tajiks, Jews, some Uzbeks, some Uyghurs

Political structures:
Settled Chingisid khanates: Uzbeks (Bukhara and Khiva), most Jews, Sarts, Tajiks
Nomadic Chingisid confederacies: Kazakhs
Nomadic non-Chingisid confederacies: Kyrgyz, Kara-kalpaks, Zunghars
Nomads governed by consensus under tribal law: Turkmen
Puppet khanates directed by nomad overlords: Mogholistan, Kashgaria/Altishahar

Languages
Turkic: Uzbeks, Uyghurs, some Sarts [Türki]; Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Kara-kalpaks [Qipchaq]; Turkmen [Oghuz]
Farsi: Tajiks, Jews, most Sarts
Mongol: Zunghars

Neatness in history, however, always tells you that there’s a lot being left out. These broad categories cannot accommodate the ordinary people who thought of themselves as members of this or that sub-tribe, clan or family; Bukharans or Kashgarians; merchants, craftsmen, or courtiers. They cannot show the many areas of shading from one culture or language to another. Many town-dwellers were equally fluent in Farsi and Türki, and would not have used language as an identity marker. These categories also tell us nothing about gender and sex roles, which made enormous differences in what it meant to live as a Kyrgyz nomad or Sart town-dweller. That level of information becomes more readily available after the empires of Outer Eurasia—Russia, China, and Great Britain—began to move into Central Asia.