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James D. Seymour, "Transmission vs. Termination of Cultures:  The Cases of the Medieval Uighurs and Modern Uyghurs", chapter 6 of David W. Kim, ed., Silk Road Footprints: Transnational Transmission of Sacred Thoughts and Historical Legacy (Wilmington, DE:  Vernon, 2025).

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VHM:  N.B.:  Please note that the pre-publication final draft linked to in the title above is virtually the same as that which appeared in the published book, but any citations or quotations, etc., should be based on what is confirmed as actually appearing  in the book. Spelling in the book is more strictly British. (Apologies for any misspelled/misspelt words in the linked version!)

Post-publication corrections/refinements are in this sans serif typeface.

Key words: Uighur Khaganate, Uighurs, Uyghurs, Xinjiang, Yugurs.

The name "Uyghur", in its various guises and at different times, has caused much confusion among students and scholars of Central Asian history.  This article, by James D. Seymour, who has been researching the topic for more than half a century, strives to straighten out the twists and turns of the history of the name and the peoples who bore it. 

From the medieval period when they first burst upon the stage of world history during the Tang Dynasty till today, when they are experiencing a cultural genocide at the hands of the CCP, the Uyghurs have undergone an unending series of ethnic and linguistic transformations that cry out for investigation and clarification.

Here are the first two paragraphs of Seymour's article:

From the mid-eighth to the mid-ninth centuries CE much of northeast Asia (including the areas now inhabited by Mongols) was dominated by the Uighur nation, that is Eastern Turks, ruled by a series of ‘supreme rulers’, or khagans. These are the medieval (sometimes termed ‘ancient’) Uighurs, usually spelled <p. 118> Uyghurs though they are not to be confused with the modern Uyghurs. The colourful Uighur khaganate was so powerful that it was able to save China’s Tang Dynasty from its enemies. In the mid-ninth century it fell to its own enemies, only to be in a sense ‘revived’ in the twentieth century. But that revival was largely semantic. In many languages (and often in English), the same term is used for both nations. That is also the case in the languages of these two eastern Turkic peoples themselves; both peoples are simply, ئۇيغۇرلار which has been transliterated in various ways. For clarity we will adopt ‘Uighur’ as ethnonym for the medieval khaganate (following Thum 2018), whereas ‘Uyghur’ (spelling preferred by the Chinese authorities for use in roman-script languages) will refer to the modern Xinjiang ethnic group.

This chapter takes a broad look at these two nationalities, looking for any connection between them. Is there any continuity between the two? If not, how did they come to have the same name in Turkic and most other languages? If the connection is purely semantic, how can one account for the odd coincidence? Is anything left of Uighur culture and civilisation? What cultural changes have these two Turkic nationalities undergone, and by what means were the changes effected? And what are the implications of this conflation of ethnonyms for the public’s understanding of history?

And here are the concluding paragraphs:

Actually, in the Soviet Union the old policy of nativisation (korenizatsiya) had long faltered, and began to be phased out in the mid-1930s. The Chinese had somewhat greater ‘success’ realising the model. The largely manufactured Uyghur identity turned out, though, to be a Frankensteinian monster (see Bulag 2021), which could only be contained by extremely repressive means. One does not know what the end result will be, but there must be some Chinese who look back nostalgically to the days when the citizens of places like Khotan, Yarkand and Kashgar did not identify with much of anyone beyond the city limits. Still, the effort to realise a Uyghur nation must be viewed as having failed. As Klimeš (2015, 18) puts it, ‘the Uyghurs are for now a stateless ethnic group ruled by another nation.’ 

In terms of cultures, the saga of the Uighurs and Uyghurs presents quite a fascinating picture. Altogether they experienced three (possibly four) religious transformations: 

    •    Tengrism to Manichaeism in the 860s CE. 

    •    Manichaeism to Buddhism toward the end of the first millennium. 

    •    Buddhism to Islam (by the sixteenth century), though by then the 
descendants of the Uighurs no longer identified as Uighurs. 

    •    Islam is currently under siege, with the Chinese Communists hoping to replace it with atheism. 

In all of these transitions, military invasion played an antecedent but minor role. Generally, the process was political, not military.

As for the narrower question of the Uyghur ethnonym, where does all this leave us in terms of the top-down vs. bottom-up analyses? Certainly, Brophy has given us a necessary corrective of those who argued exclusively for the top-down approach. That said, the top-down analysis still stands basically unscathed. To be sure, developments on the ground in Xinjiang facilitated the emergence of Uyghur nationality and indeed nationalism. But without the rôle of the Soviets (which is to say the activities of members of the Soviet Communist Party), it is difficult to imagine it ever have happening. If one were to remove all Soviet Communist operatives<130> from the scene, the word ‘Uyghur’ would still refer exclusively to the (Uighur) medieval khaganate—there would be no need for us to spell the ethnoyms differently. If we strip away any cold-war mentality that provided some context for the top-down analysis, the analysis itself is not much affected. The involvement of indigenous, on-the-ground actors alone would not have resulted in today’s Uyghurs being called Uyghurs. 

All of this shows, as has been commented by Tristan Kenderdine, that ‘the building blocks of civilisation put in place on both sides of the Sino-Soviet border were not indicative of any ‘Uyghur’ culture being transmitted, but rather another in a series of historical attempts to foster and control the cultural transmission by controlling the mechanisms of civilisational construction’.6 So, just as the continued use of Uighur script had once failed to preserve Uighur culture, the administrative mechanisms introduced by the Soviets and Chinese did little (and were never seriously intended) to preserve Uyghur culture. In the twenty-first century the Chinese have been doing everything they can to reverse the course of Uyghur nationalism and integrate the Uyghurs into Han Chinese society (Human Rights Watch 2018, Zenz 2023, Zenz 2024), committing what some Uyghur exiles deem to be genocide (Ho 2022, Smith-Finley 2020, Zenz 2021). Certainly at least cultural genocide does not seem an impossible outcome of Xi Jinping’s efforts to homogenise the cultures of the People’s Republic. If this were to happen, Uyghur culture, like Uighur culture, could well become extinct. 

It was said above that until the 1920s the term ‘Uyghur’ was neutral in the sense that it meant little or nothing to most ears. But of course, it is not neutral to anyone who properly remembers history. The Uighurs (whose ethnonym we spell that way here in an attempt to preserve their distinct identity) were a great empire whose history should not be eclipsed due to the influence of a few twentieth-century manipulators. But that is what has happened. The result is that one often sees statements like ‘The Uyghurs originated in the steppes of modern-day Mongolia and migrated to the oases in the Tarim Basin between the seventh and ninth centuries’ (Han 2011, 948). Actually, those people (whom the Chinese usually call 回紇 Huíhé and we have been calling Uighurs) can be said to have settled in the Tarim Basin only if the latter is expansively defined.7 Their identity was appropriated and given to someone else, which has given rise to much confusion.8 Of course, while the Uyghurs must continue to enjoy that ethnonym, the foreign academic community would do well to do what the Chinese have done unwittingly, and recognise the Uighurs by a suitable ethnonym of their own. 

Having spent decades in Eastern Central Asia (ECA), and having many Uyghur friends and colleagues, I have a good sense of the culture and the language, but it's still a challenge to place the people securely in the scope of world history.

I'll never forget the serendipitous occasion when I held an international conference on the mummies of the Tarim Basin (Taklamakan Desert) in ECA at the University of Pennsylvania Museum during the latter part of the 90s.  There were more than two hundred members of the audience in the hall, and some of them were wondering what a Uyghur is like because the name had come up a number of times in the papers that were being delivered.  So, during the closing session, I simply and swiftly said, "Would all the Uyghurs who are present please stand up?"

About five people in different parts of the auditorium stood up.  I invited the audience, "If you want to know what Uyghurs are like, behold!"

My experiment worked well, because some of the Uyghurs who were standing looked like Kazakhs or Kirghiz, some looked like Middle Easterners, one looked like a Chinese, and one — with blonde hair, blue eyes, and pale skin — looked like he was from Eastern Europe.  Everybody, including the Uyghurs, gasped.

 

Selected readings

• "Uyghur or Uygur" (10/4/24)
• "American English pronunciation of Uyghur proper nouns" (7/15/09)
• "A Little Primer of Xinjiang Proper Nouns" (7/13/09)
• "Uyghur as a 'dialect' — NOT" (10/1/13)
• "Uyghurish Mandarin and shrike-tongued barbarians" (11/20/25)
• "Xinjiang Uygur" (8/7/19)
• "A taste of Old Uyghur" (8/4/25)
• "4 Uygur Theater" (6/12/09)
• See here for dozens of Wikipedia articles having to do with Uyghur language, people, culture, and history.  There's even a Uyghur Wikipedia that was launched in June of 2012; here's the article on Uyghur language from it.
• "Uyghur language" — simple English Wikipedia
• "Growing up Chinese in Uyghurstan" (12/26/21)
• "Uyghurstan or Uyghuristan?" (6/25/19)
• "Uyghur, Cantonese, and other valuable languages of China " (2/20/16)
• "A confusion of languages and names " (7/8/16)
• "Gibberish Uyghur " (9/28/09)
• "Uyghur basketball player " (6/24/18)
• "Uyghur as a 'dialect' — NOT" (6/28/13)
• "Uyghur as ornament " (9/19/13)
• "Uyghur language outlawed in schools of the Uyghur Autonomous Region" (8/1/17)
• "American English pronunciation of Uyghur proper nouns" (7/15/09)
• "Education in Xinjiang " (1/13/15)
• "Pulled noodles: Uyghur läghmän and Mandarin lāmiàn"  (8/8/14)
• "'Carrot' in Persian, Urdu, Uyghur, Sinitic, Vietnamese, etc." (7/26/20)
• "Outlawed Uyghur names" (10/10/15)
• "Chinese Authorities Ban Muslim Names Among Uyghurs in Hoten" (9/24/15)
• "Yaourter" (7/21/09)
• "'National Language' in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region" (12/14/19(
• "UIGHUR NAMES PRONOUNCED." (7/13/09) — includes this proclamation by Language Hat:

I will issue my standard disclaimer that English spellings and pronunciations are for the use and convenience of English speakers, and it is foolish and presumptuous to expect them to sound correct to speakers of other languages. I seriously doubt that a Uyghur speaker’s rendition of, say, “New York” would pass muster to an English speaker, and that’s as it should be. Different languages are different.

which he has sensibly adumbrated in diverse variations on his blog.

[Thanks to June Teufel Dreyer]

January 24, 2026 @ 9:33 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and ethnicity, Language and religion, Toponymy

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