About the Uyghurs

Xinjiang-Uighur is currently an autonomous region in China's extreme northwest. It is sometimes called "Chinese Turkestan. The Uighur homeland is a region of oasis towns separated by great distances and, until the last few decades, accessible only by arduous journeys by camel train through deserts and over mountains. In times of peace, the oases dwellers of this region traded in the goods which passed along the Silk Road from China to the Near East and to Europe.
Contemporary Uighur trace their ancestry back to the Uighur Turks and ancient Hungarians, whose steppe kingdom flourished on China's north-western borders during the eighth and ninth centuries. After the fall of this kingdom, a portion of it's people fled westwards into the region now called Xinjiang, where their descendants mingled with the indigenous inhabitants and established a series of local kingdoms and khanates.
Islam first arrived in this region under the Qarakhan khanate in the tenth century. Historically, Sufism has been a strong influence amongst the Uighur, as it has across Central Asia.

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