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UYGUR 831
on either side of the Bogdo-Ula range separating Turfan from Pei-ting. South
of the Taklimakan wastes, other Uygur occupy settlements on the northern slopes
of the Kunlun ranges. A rather large group is concentrated in villages just to the
west of the Lop Nur desert and marshes.
Around 1960 the Uygur were the largest single nationality unit in the Xinjiang-
Uygur Autonomous Region. Their total population, then 3.9 million, represented
more than 60 percent of the entire population. Although no exact figures are
now available, it is probable that the massive influx of Han Chinese into Xinjiang
from 1950 to 1960 has altered this percentage.
The Uygur began to make the transition from pastoral nomadism to settled
agriculture almost as soon as they settled in Chinese Turkestan after their flight
from the Mongol steppe in the ninth century. Although some continued as nomads
for a time, the oasis life-style, with its emphasis on irrigated agriculture and
caravan trade, eventually became dominant.
By the twentieth century the Uygur were almost all settled agriculturalists or
urban dwellers working small independent farms producing melons, cotton,
maize, peaches, plums and wheat, all crops unknown to lowland China. Urban
Uygur lived in a relatively more sophisticated life as landlords, merchants,
shopowners, caravansary keepers, Muslim shaikhs, poets and a variety of other
occupations. All this changed with the advent of the People's Republic of China
and the social change introduced after 1951. As Chinese influence and authority
have grown in Chinese Turkistan, there have been great alterations in the traditional
life-style of its population. Most of the previously independent farmers
have been drawn together into communes. In addition, new programs to reforest
mountain slopes are opening up millions of acres of land to irrigation, while
expansion of the industrial base of the new territory has led to a massive reshuffling
of the populace. It seems probable that the Uygur are being intermixed
with other nationalities to the point that much of their previous national identity
will be lost.
The Uygur are relatively tall people with brown hair, brown or lighter eye
color, aquiline noses and light skin. The men wear thick moustaches and beards
of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia.
There are many schematic linguistic arrangements used to describe and categorize
the Turkic language family, of which Uygur is a part (see Turkicspeaking
Peoples). In most such schemes, modern Uygur is linked with certain
Uzbek and Kirghiz dialects and with other quite small language groups, such as
the Yellow Uygur and yet another Turkic group of China's Gansu Province, the
Salars. A more general designation for all these languages as a group is Turki
(see Salars).
The origin of the first Uygur may be found in the struggles of various nomadic
peoples for control of the Mongolian plateau in the sixth century. Among the
major protagonists were two hostile Turkic confederations. One, the Toghuzoghuz,
included nine major Turkic tribes of which one was the Uygur. The
other, the Kao-ch'e, was composed largely of forest dwellers from the Altai and