![]() So unfolds “The Backstreets”, the first Uyghur novel ever translated into English, and a haunting portrait of what Chinese domination felt like in the Uyghur homeland. Scorned by his Han Chinese superiors and ignored by strangers, the protagonist wanders the city streets in search of a place to live. Columbia University Press 168 pages $20 and £17.63Ī nameless Uyghur man arrives in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, as a diversity hire for an office job. ![]() By Perhat Tursun, translated by Darren Byler and Anonymous. The people of Altishahr, Mr Thum notes, have long fashioned their own historical and religious identities independently of the forces that sought to control them. ![]() Rather than “Xinjiang”, Mr Thum prefers “Altishahr”, meaning “six cities” in the Uyghur tongue. The people who call themselves Uyghurs have not used that name for long: in 1911 “Uyghur” was first used as an ethnonym, derived from words in pre-Islamic kingdoms that were historically based in the region. Rian Thum is more interested in how Xinjiang’s residents understand themselves and their past. Readers learn that Xinjiang is far more than merely China’s western borderland, and that earlier Chinese leaders found that Uyghurs were best governed when they were allowed some autonomy. Reading Xinjiang’s history thus requires understanding texts written in the now-extinct Tokharian tongue, in Soghdian, an ancient Iranian language that was once the lingua franca of the Silk Road, and in many other languages. Its importance lay in its position as the meeting point of many trade routes across Asia and Europe. James Millward offers a survey of the region now called Xinjiang from prehistoric times to the present day. These two histories of the Uyghur region take different approaches. Harvard University Press 316 pages $46.00 and £36.95 “The dehumanisation,” he writes, “was created at least in part in computer labs from Seattle to Beijing”.Įurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (Revised and Updated). He shows how China’s surveillance technology was made possible by Silicon Valley and how 9/11 supercharged China’s campaign against those it accused of being terrorists. His book also zooms out from the camps and examines the forces that built them. Mr Byler’s interviewees are scarred, both mentally and physically, by their ill-treatment. Overcrowded cells had no plumbing clothing was infested with lice. One woman killed herself by leaping, headfirst, from the top of a bunk bed. In at least two camps, he writes, inmates were forced to sit straight and unmoving for several days until their intestines “fell down”. ![]() Darren Byler, an anthropologist, draws on interviews with people who were locked up to illuminate life in the gulags. This slim volume is an authoritative account of how China implemented the largest internment of a religious minority since the second world war. ![]()
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