A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Introduction 17
Uighuristan; the former name means “six cities” in Turkic, the cities
being Kashgar, Yarkand, Khotan, Aksu, Kucha, and Uch (or Ush)
Turfan, all in the western half of the Tarim basin.Uighuristan was so
named after the Turkic Uighurs who in the ninth century founded a
kingdom whose capital was Qocho, now an archaeological site a short
distance from Turfan in the eastern half of the Tarim basin.The two
groups thus also indicate a secondary but nonetheless important division
of Nanlu into a western and eastern segment, a division implied by the
names “Altishahr” and “Uighuristan.”
The oasis town of Turfan itself deserves attention for several reasons.
One is geographical, for it lies in a depression – at 154 meters below sea
level, it is the second lowest point on earth after the Dead Sea.Another
is linguistic and cultural, for the inhabitants of this area used to speak
Tokharian, the aforementioned non-Iranian Indo-European tongue,
before they were Turkicized; and they created a remarkable Manichaean
and Buddhist civilization that survived under the Uighur Turks for
several more centuries until the completion of Islamization in the
fifteenth century.And finally, while Turfan functioned as one of the way
stations in Nanlu, it also was the starting point of a route that struck out
northwest through a break in the Tianshan mountains toward Peilu and
joined there the rival network of routes along the northern side of the
Tianshan range.The name Turfan came into current usage only at the
end of the Middle Ages, after the settlement that had existed there grew
and absorbed the population of the historical Qocho, some 30 kilometers
to the east.This was a reprise of an earlier shift when the town of
Yar-khoto (a Turco-Mongol name; the site is also known by its Chinese
name, Chiao-ho), some 10 kilometers to the west of Turfan, was abandoned
in favor of Qocho in the early centuries of the Christian era.Both
Yar-khoto and Qocho are precious archaeological sites today; so would
probably be yet another city that pertained to the same civilization:
Bishbalik or Peiting, some 100 kilometers due north of Turfan.But
Bishbalik was on the other side of the Tianshan mountains, and climatic
conditions are different there: the greater moisture characteristic of the
northern slopes of Inner Asian mountains obliterated Bishbalik, once it
was abandoned, to the point where modern archaeologists had great
difficulties locating the site, at first wrongly identifying it with Urumchi,
which lies some 50 kilometers to the west.
Nanlu and Peilu are terms no longer used, and Sinkiang is subdivided
into a number of districts according to geographical, ethnolinguistic,
and administrative criteria; nevertheless, the two names did express a