The Uighurs, Turkic nomads living north of the Gobi Desert, ruled over a powerful empire between 744 and 840. Its capital was Karabalghasun on the upper Orhon River in Mongolia. Although of nomadic origin, the Uighurs presided over flourishing commercial centers and agriculture. After their empire dissolved, a group of them who fled west created a new state centered in the oases north of the Taklamakan Desert and extending up into the mountains of the eastern Tien Shan. It would survive until nearly the end of the thirteenth century. The cosmopolitan culture and economic prosperity of these two Uighur states form a notable chapter in the history of the Silk Road.

The rapid rise of the Uighurs in the eighth century coincided with a period when the Tang dynasty in China was weakening. During the An Lu-shan rebellion against the Tang from 755-763, the Uighurs saved the dynasty and in return received rich payments of silk and other Chinese goods. The quantities of Chinese silk flowing into the northern steppes rivaled those that had been sent to the Xiongnu centuries earlier. The peak of Uighur power was under kaghan Mou-yü, who ascended the throne in 759. We know that his court and that of his successors was heavily influenced by Chinese culture, not the least of the reasons being the frequent marriages to Chinese princesses.

Mou-yü established Manichaeism as the state religion amongst the Uighurs. This dualist belief in the powers of good and evil and separation of matter from spirit had originated in Persia in the third century and was one of many foreign religious which made their way to China. The bearers of Manichaeism were the Sogdian merchants (link to Sogdian pages) from Central Asia, who became prominent in the Silk Road trade. Sogdians enjoyed some prominence at the Tang court, even though their religion was only just tolerated. Mou-yü's adoption of the Sogdians' faith in part reflects his desire to distance himself from the Tang and in part the reality of his heavy reliance on Sogdians for the creation of his state administration and for the trade on which Uighur prosperity depended. The Uighur scribal culture would later become the basis for writing Mongolian.

After the disintegration of this Uighur empire, some of its survivors created the kingdom of Kocho (Gaochang) (ca. 860-1284), whose urban centers were in the Turfan oasis north of the Taklamakan desert astride the northern branch of the Silk Road. This was a region that previously had been occupied by Indo-Europeans, whose language now was replaced by Turkic Uighur. The Uighurs of western Gansu and Xinjiang today are the descendants of the mixed ethnic population of the kingdom of Kocho.

The dominant religion in that region had long been Buddhism, as we know from accounts such as that by the famous Chinese pilgrim Xuanzong in the middle of the seventh century. Important Buddhist monasteries were located in and around the oases of Turfan. Their wall paintings providing striking evidence of the transmission and transformation of Buddhist art along the roads leading from India into China. Buddhism became the religion of the Uighur elite in the Kocho kingdom, although Manichaeism and Nestorian Christianity were prominent as well. The German archaeologists who excavated the Uighur ruins in the early twentieth century took back to Berlin some striking Manichean manuscript fragments and other evidence of what had once been a vibrant and truly cosmopolitan urban culture.

The penetration of Islam into the Tarim Basin (that is, the region around the Taklamakan Desert) was gradual. As early as 821 an Arab ambassador visited the Uighur capital at Karabalghasun. Islam spread east under the Karakhanids in the eleventh century (one of their capitals was Kashgar), but only much later would become the dominant religion of the Uighurs of Xinjiang in modern times.

-- Daniel C. Waugh

Colin Mackerras, "The Uighurs," Ch. 12 (pp. 320-342) in The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia, Denis Sinor ed. (Cambridge, etc.: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1990).

Denis Sinor, "The Uighurs in Mongolia and the Kyrgyz," and Geng Shimin, "The Uighur Kingdom of Kocho," Ch. 9 (pp. 191-206) in History of civilizations of Central Asia, Vol. IV. The age of achievement: A.D. 750 to the end of the fifteenth century. Part One. The historical, social and economic setting, M.S. Asimov and C. E. Bosworth, eds. (Paris: UNESCO, 1998).