©Edward J. Vajda
The Uighur (also spelled Uygur, Uigur; usually pronounced WE-ger in English)
The nearly six million Uighur today live in Xinjiang (which means "Western Frontier" in Chinese), where they constitute more than a three-fifths majority of the population. They are a Turkic people whose history stretches back to the 5th and 6th centuries AD. During this time, the Uighur and other Turkic peoples in what is today Mongolia, alone among all of the nomads of the steppes, developed an alphabetic writing system known as the Orkhon or Orkhon-Yenisei script. From 744 to 840 the Uighur controlled a powerful state. During this time they were converted to Persian Manicheism (a religion which viewed the world as an arena of opposing good and evil forces) and adopted a Sogdian script from Southwest Asia (see the chart of Central Asian writing systems in this packet). Under Chinese influence, this script came to be written vertically. In the early 13th century, the Uighurs submitted peacefully to Chingiz Khan, who borrowed their vertical script and adapted it to write Mongolian. The vertical Uighur alphabet was gradually replaced by Arabic letters.
The main religion among the Uighurs (as among all of the Turkic minorities of China) is Islam. The Uighurs have a rich literary and musical culture, and have much more in common with the Islamic, Turkic-speaking nations in former Soviet Central Asia than with the Chinese. Today the Uighur are the largest minority in northern China, and ethnic tension between them and the Chinese is a perennial problem for the Chinese government in Beijing.
The Yugur
After the collapse of the Uighur state in 840, some of its inhabitants fled eastward into what is today the Gansu Province of China. These Uighur are the ancestors of the ten thousand or so Yugur, who are also known as the Yellow Uighur after their own self designation. The Yugurs converted from Manicheism, the religion of the 9th century Uighur Empire, to Lamaist Buddhism, and many have been able to preserve that faith. Many Yugur retain a Turkic language related to Uighur; others speak a variety of Mongolian called Enger. The Yugur are unusual among the Turkic peoples of China in that they are not Moslems.
The Salar
About 70 thousand Salar live in eastern Qinghai Province to far away from the Uighurs of Xinjiang. The Salar are also Turkic speakers and are thought to be the descendants of a Turkmen tribe who migrated to the area from Central Asia before the 13th century. Their language is essentially a dialect of Uighur, and the Salar differ from the Uighur mainly in geography. Like most Uighur, the Salar are Muslims, but knowledge of Arabic has all but disappeared among them since the communist takeover in 1949. Today, educated Salar write Chinese, and the Salar dialect of Uighur remains unwritten.
***NOTE: In addition to the three Turkic-speaking minorities discussed above, Xinjiang Province is also home to a sizeable number of Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uzbek and Tatar. All are Islamic peoples who have their own independent countries (or in the case of the Tatars, an autonomous republic) in the lands of the former Soviet Union. Consult the political map of northern Eurasia today which is in this packet and learn the location of the following countries: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tartarstan (not yet fully independent from Russia), and Tajikistan (the Tajiks are Iranian speakers rather than Turkic and are related to the populations of present-day Iran, Pakistan, and Afganistan). There is a sizeable minority of Tajiks in the southwestern most part of the People's Republic of China.