Amelia Smith interviews Abdugheni Sabit, a Uyghur activist who left China in 2007 and settled in the Netherlands. Sabit is currently appealing to the international community to put pressure on the Egyptian government to stop the forced deportation of Uyghur students to China where they will be imprisoned. Three months ago China’s spy agency contacted Uyghur students living in the US, Europe, Turkey and Egyp ...

Joshua Hammer The second-story rooms of the centuries-old mud-brick houses were cantilevered atop log beams and nearly touched each other across an alleyway paved with hexagonal stones. Women wearing dark veils leaned out of tiny windows. Poplar doors, painted bright blue or green and adorned with brass floral petals, stood half open—a subtle signal that the master of the house was inside. The aromas of fre ...

By Michael WINES, Published: May 27, 2009 KASHGAR, China — A thousand years ago, the northern and southern branches of the Silk Road converged at this oasis town near the western edge of the Taklamakan Desert. Traders from Delhi and Samarkand, wearied by frigid treks through the world’s most daunting mountain ranges, unloaded their pack horses here and sold saffron and lutes along the city’s cramped streets ...

Henryk SZADZIEWSKI 22 May 2012 China's plan to transform the heart of Uyghur culture, learning and urban settlement - Kashgar old city - is well underway. The fact that the Uyghurs themselves have no voice in this process gives the experience a wider significance, says Henryk Szadziewski. Time is almost up for the old city of Kashgar. For the last three years, and over the silence of the international commu ...

Background: Uyghur, the language of the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang, is a Turkic language closely related to Uzbek and less closely to Kazakh and Kyrgyz.  It is written in a modified Arabic script which helps to identify its speakers as Muslims, although a Latin script also exists and was used during the 1970s and 1980s.  It has been the main language of instruction in many schools in Xinjiang alongsid ...