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| Urumqi, capital of XinJiang, the Uyghur province of China |
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| Kashgar, largest city in the southern part of Xin Jiang |
The Northwestern most province in China, Xinjiang, is home to approximately 10-11 million Uyghurs. A decade ago, only about 50 believers were thought to exist among them. Today, a hopeful estimate is there might be as many as 2,000 believers scattered across this desert province.
"Traditionally, the Uighurs were shepherds and oasis farmers. Today, however, many of them are involved in businesses such as manufacturing, mining, oil drilling, trading, and transportation.
Various political, religious, and ethnic conflicts have characterized the history of the Uighurs. Nevertheless, they are still described as being a "proud, happy, and independent people." They possess a unique blend of cultural elegance all their own. While remaining isolated enough to preserve their rural simplicity, they successfully made many contacts with other cultures. Such a rare mixture of simplicity and sophistication has given the Uighurs a unique and obvious charm.
Until recent times, the Uighurs lived in self-governing villages. This is gradually beginning to change, however. Over the past few years, the Chinese government has placed many Han Chinese into collective farms that are located among the Uighurs of Xingjiang. This has brought about drastic changes in the lifestyles of the Uighurs. The Chinese, aided by the growing number of Han in this area, have attempted to harness the independence of the Uighurs by forcing their self-governed villages to become communes. Such changes have stirred the desire of the Uighurs to remain autonomous. Nevertheless, their thousand-year-old traditions are slowly beginning to disappear as they are forced to embrace this new way of life." (This section quoted from PrayWay web site.)
(Info below reposted from Joshua Project.)
Before 1921 the various Turkic groups in Xinjiang called themselves by the name of the oasis near which they lived. When Turkic leaders met in Tashkent in 1921, they chose the name Uygur as the mark of their identity. Uygur means "unity" or "alliance."
Uygur is a Turkic language, related to Uzbek, Kazak, and Kirgiz. It also contains loanwords from Chinese, Arabic, Persian, Russian, and Mongolian.
In the mid-eighth century the Uygur inhabited part of present-day Mongolia. Around AD 840 they were attacked from the north by the Kirgiz and fled southwest to their current homeland.
Many Uygur cultivate cotton, grapes, melons, and fruit trees through an ingenious irrigation system which pipes mountain water into the desert oases.
Most Uygur follow a folk Islam mixed with superstition. Islam is stronger in southern Xinjiang than in the north. Today, although almost all Uygur confess to be Muslims, few are aware of the time in history when the majority of Uygur were Christians.
When Nestorian missionaries first appeared in China in 635 AD, after they had already been working in Central Asia for a century. One of the forerunners of today's Uygur were the Turkic Keirat tribe. By AD 1009, 200,000 Keirat had been baptized. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries "the whole tribe were considered Christian." It has recently been estimated there were as many as eight million Christians in Central Asia. In the fourteenth century Christianity disappeared from among the Uygur for 500 years, and they converted to Islam. The Swedish Missionary Society recommenced work among the Uygur in 1892. By the 1930s more than 300 Uygurs had been converted, primarily in Kashgar. When Abdullah Khan came to Yarkant in 1933 he expelled the missionaries and eliminated the Uygur believers in a mass execution. Abdullah claimed, "It is my duty, according to our law, to put you to death, because by your preaching you destroyed the faith of some of us."
Despite the presence of many Han Christians in Xinjiang, few have a vision to reach the Uygurs. One visitor reported, "Many [church] leaders openly acknowledge, without guilt or shame, that they do not have such a burden for these people." One church elder, when asked about evangelizing Uygurs, responded by shouting, "You're crazy!'"
