In the early centuries before the Common Era, the region that would come to be called East Turkestan passed through the hands of Hunnic and Chinese powers. By the sixth century, Turkic peoples had moved in. By the seventh and eighth centuries, Uyghur identity began to take shape amid the dominance of the Uyghurs over East Turkestan.
Centuries later, the Qing dynasty launched a brutal campaign against the Dzungar Khanate, a powerful Oirat Mongol state controlling vast tracts of Dzungaria in northern Xinjiang. Between 1755 and 1758, Qing forces killed an estimated 70 to 80 percent of the Dzungar population, a campaign widely recognized as genocide, clearing the way for resettlement by Han, Hui, Uyghur, Sibe, and Manchu communities across the region.
In 1884, the Qing formally transformed these lands into Xinjiang Province, unifying the Tarim Basin and Dzungaria under centralized rule. As imperial China collapsed after 1911, Xinjiang became a volatile arena. Warlords rose and fell amid competing allegiances to Beijing, Moscow, and local tradition.
Hope for a different future flickered in 1933 with the First East Turkestan Republic. Born in Kashgar amid the Kumul Rebellion, this Islamic republic was led by President Khoja Niyaz and Prime Minister Sabit Damolla. It upheld religious freedom, modern education, and local governance. For a time, the blue flag of East Turkestan flew over the Silk Road oases.
But that hope was fragile. In early 1934, Hui forces aligned with the Kuomintang attacked. Soviet-backed militias and Chinese troops crushed the republic. Thousands of Uyghurs were massacred in Kashgar; leaders were forced to flee or betrayed. Within months, the republic had collapsed, its leaders coerced into disbandment or demise. Yet the memory of those months of self-determination remained alive.
A decade later, in the chaos of World War II and Chinese civil strife, a second attempt at independent rule emerged. In November 1944, the Ili TurkiŃ uprising erupted, with Soviet military backing, Uyghur and other Turkic rebels captured Ghulja (Ili) and declared the Second East Turkestan Republic. Soviet influence ran deep; many leaders were Soviet-educated or affiliated.
Violence followed. Han Chinese civilians, particularly those associated with the Kuomintang, were persecuted or killed as retributive and xenophobic fury spiraled. The new republic barred Han from owning weapons, installed Soviet-style secret police, and de-emphasized Chinese language and culture in its domains.
In 1949, just as the People’s Liberation Army neared, another wave of violence engulfed Ghulja. A plane crash killed key ETR leaders. Enraged, an ETR commander ordered a massacre of more than 7,000 Han civilians in retaliation for an atrocity that remains unacknowledged mainly in official histories.
But the final blow came not with cruelty but pragmatism. The PLA arrived. The brief reigns of both ETRs ended; Xinjiang was fully absorbed into the People’s Republic of China. In theory, the region became an autonomous region in 1955. Still, in practice, it remained under tight central control, with Han migration increasing from about 6 percent in 1949 to over 40 percent by the 1970s, forever altering the demographic balance.
Through all these upheavals, conquest, republics, massacres, and colonization, the spirit of the people of East Turkestan endured. They clung to language, religion, and memory. There is hope in whispered prayers, clandestine lessons, and diaspora activism.
To write this history is to honor that unbroken longing, for education, for spiritual integrity, for self-rule, that has survived centuries of aggression. The narrative of East Turkestan is at once tragedy and triumph: the tragedy of repeated suppression and the triumph of enduring identity.
As we bear witness to this fraught past, we affirm that the yearning of a people cannot be erased by the stroke of a sword or the reprogramming of a bureaucracy. Generations later, their voices remain insisting on recognition, respect, and justice.
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