Uyghurs

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The name Uyghur first belonged to a steppe empire, not to the oasis farmers of the Tarim Basin who carry it today. In 744 the Uyghur Khaganate rose in Mongolia after its founders overthrew the ruling Gokturks, and in 762 its ruler adopted Manichaeism as the state religion, making the khaganate the faith's last great imperial patron anywhere in the world. That state fell in 840 to a Kyrgyz invasion, scattering Uyghur groups southwest into the Tarim Basin and Turfan, where some founded the Kingdom of Qocho, and toward the Gansu corridor.

The Turkic Muslim population of the Tarim Basin oases that the name Uyghur describes today took shape more slowly and from different sources. Islam reached the region through the Kara-Khanid Khanate from the tenth century, spread by Karluk and other Turkic groups who settled among the oases over the following centuries and gradually displaced Buddhism there. The Qing conquest of 1759 brought the region under Chinese administration as Xinjiang, New Frontier, and two short-lived East Turkestan republics declared independence in 1933 and 1944 before the region was incorporated into the People's Republic of China in 1949, becoming the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in 1955.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Historians disagree about how continuous the line from the eighth century Uyghur Khaganate to today's Uyghur people really is. James Millward's history of Xinjiang describes the modern ethnonym as substantially a twentieth century revival: Soviet and Chinese administrators promoted Uyghur from the 1920s onward as a unifying name for the mixed Turkic, Muslim, oasis-dwelling population of the Tarim Basin, a population that had mostly called itself by local town names, Kashgarlik or Turfanlik among them, rather than by a single shared ethnic label. On this reading the Khaganate supplies a name and a distant memory rather than an unbroken community.

Whatever the ethnogenesis debate settles, the Hanafi Sunni Islam that most Uyghurs practice today is documented as severely restricted under current Chinese government policy in Xinjiang. The United Nations human rights office's 2022 assessment described credible allegations of restrictions reaching mosque attendance, fasting and other religious observance, alongside the mass internment system this atlas records separately. The independent Uyghur Tribunal in London and the legislatures of several states have gone further, finding the campaign amounts to genocide, a conclusion the government of China disputes in full.