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Xinjiang: A vast cauldron of humanity

By Li Xing (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-07-13 08:32

Once a upon a time, a great sea of blue water spread across the land of what is today China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

As the Earth's plates moved and squeezed into each other, three great mountain ranges, the Tianshan, the Altay and the Kunlun, soared. With the seawater receding, the onetime seabeds turned into two huge basins.

Meanwhile, the giant mountain ranges also formed an almost full U, blocking the way in the north, south and west. In contrast, the flat Gobi desert stretches far into the east, allowing the earliest settlers in the region and the people and communities living in the east to interconnect with each other.

Over the decades, local archaeologists have unearthed a lot of relics across the region that dated back more than 5,000 years.

According to Tian Weijiang, director of History Research Institute of Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences, stone tools and pots shared similar shapes, colors and decoration with those found in Gansu, Inner Mongolia and Ningxia.

"The similarities in economic and social life indicate that the ancient people in those areas had some cultural links with each other," Tian wrote in his book, History of Xinjiang.

Classical Chinese literature before the era of the first Chinese emperor (who had the terracotta warriors made to guard his tomb) described in detail the landscape of Xinjiang. One of the pre-Qin kings even toured the Western region around the 11th century BC.

More than 2,200 years ago, with the Han Dynasty (206 BC - AD 220) extending its rule throughout China, silk production enjoyed an unprecedented boom, thus giving a boost to the trade along the Silk Road. The Han Dynasty rulers began to establish local administrative outposts while migrants from the heartland of the Middle Kingdom started to farm in the oasis there.

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During the Han Dynasty, silk reached as far as the Mediterranean Sea and Rome. A Han Dynasty envoy and his entourage even went on the journey to Byzantine in the year of AD 97. However, he didn't make it to Byzantine and was stopped at what was then Persia.

In the vast Western Regions, with open routes and stops for the trades people, local communities thrived and introduced broad bean, flaxseed, garlic, grapes as well as various types of leather to China's heartland.

At the same time, soldiers and farmers from central China brought with them advanced iron tools and shared farmong skills with local people.

It was through those migrants that Han Dynasty historians in their books noted down the lives of the people in tiny city states in the Western Region.

Since then, the empires of the Middle Kingdom continued sending their administrators to the Western Region. The history of Xinjiang was thus closely woven into the Chinese history, as proven by the vast amount of ancient documents unearthed over the years. Many were classical Chinese documents carved on to bamboo slips or written on ancient paper, but documents of other languages also shared the tales of local life and society.

Some finely woven robes and other dresses bore Chinese characters that spoke of fortune, happiness and admiration for the land called the Middle Kingdom.

As the main passageway between the East and the West, Xinjiang also experienced encounters, and sometimes conflicts, between different religions.

Before Islam arrived the southern part of Xinjiang at the turn of the 9th and 10th centuries, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Taoism, Manichaeism and Nestorianism had spread to Xinjiang along the Silk Road and thrived together with the local primitive religions.

For centuries before the 10th century, devout Buddhists from over the country as well as from India and Central Asia went into the mountains in Xinjiang to create beautiful statues and murals to express their devotion to their religion.

The mural they produced still indicated how much the locals had contributed to the diverse cultures and arts that China's Tang Dynasty enjoyed in its heyday.

However, after Islam became widely enforced, a lot of Buddhist grottoes were vandalized.

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However, other religions, including Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism, remained, with Protestantism and Catholicism introduced into the area later in the 18th century.

Throughout the ages, so many ethnic groups converged or even absorbed and melted into each other that only historians specialized in the history of this part of China can talk about the names with ease. Many groups disappeared into historical oblivion, leaving only cemeteries or ruins.

Naturally, there were also battles over religion or territories, but a lot of the local ethnic rulers, such as the Uigurs, whom some say were ancestors of today's Uygurs, kept their loyalty to and respect for the emperors of the Middle Kingdom, Tian noted.

Mahmud Kashgar, a Uigur scholar who lived between 1008 and 1105, said he was a member of the Middle Kingdom. He created the first Turkic dictionary, which, in eight volumes, contained some 6,860 entries of words, phrases, proverbs and folk poetry. No one knows where the original manuscript is. The only hand copy is now kept in a library in Istanbul, Turkey.

One reason for the creation of the dictionary was because of the Middle Kingdom's advanced economy and rich culture, Tian said. Another was the interdependence between the largely nomadic ethnic groups living in the grassland in north and northwest China.

The nomadic herders needed to exchange their extra cattle and sheep with the mostly farming Han people for grain and handicrafts, while the Han farmers needed horses and cows, he pointed out.

"The cultural and economic exchanges between ancient herding and farming ethnic groups were natural and that was the economic base for China to become the unified but multi-ethnic nation," Jiang Yingliang, in his book, History of Nationalities, pointed out. "Although there were splits during political struggles, eventually the country was united and each union covered almost the same land territories largely because of the wholeness of its economy and culture."