Kashgar > Kashi Xinjiang Uygur Zizhiqu (Sinkiang) China
1074 CE
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The Great Crossroads
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Ban Chao enlists the aid of the Kushan Empire, occupying the area of modern India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan, to subdue Kashgar and its ally Sogdiana.
When a request by Kushan ruler Vima Kadphises for a marriage alliance with the Han is rejected in 90 CE, he sends his forces to Wakhan (Afghanistan) to attack Ban Chao.
The conflict ends with the Kushans withdrawing because of lack of supplies.
The office of Protector General of the Western Regions is reinstated in 91 when the Han government bestows it on Ban Chao.
Ban Chao sends his assistant Gan Ying on a mission to the Roman Empire in 97, but Gan turns back after reaching an unnamed shore—which might have been the shore of the Persian Gulf or the Mediterranean Sea.
…Kashgar, which, in turn, opens communications once again to the countries further west, such as Ferghana, Kangju (Sogdiana) and the Yuezhi (the Kushan Empire); …
The Yagma people (a branch of the Toquz Oghuz, the later Uyghur) occupy the southern part of Zhetysu; they also hold Kashgar.
The Kara-Khanids convert to Islam in the mid-tenth century and adopt Muslim names and honorifics, but retain Turkic regnal titles such as Khan, Khagan, Ilek (Ilig) and Tegin.
They will later adopt the Arab titles sultan and sultān al-salātīn (sultan of sultans).
A Karakhanid prince named Satuk Bughra Khan (d. 955) was according to the Ottoman historian known as Munajjim-bashi the first of the khans to convert.
After conversion, he had obtained a fatwa that permitted him in effect to kill his presumably still pagan father, after which he had conquered Kashgar.
There was a mass conversion of the Turks (reportedly "200,000 tents of the Turks") later in 960, according to Muslim historians Ibn Miskawaih and Ibn al-Athir; circumstantial evidence suggests these were the Karakhanids.
Mahmud al-Kashgari, having studied the Turkic languages of his time, in 1072-74 writes the first comprehensive dictionary of Turkic languages, the Dīwānu l-Luġat al-Turk (Arabic: "Compendium of the languages of the Turks").
It is intended for use by the Caliphs of Baghdad, the new, Arabic allies of the Turks.
Mahmud Kashgari's comprehensive dictionary, later edited by the Turkish historian, Ali Amiri, contains specimens of old Turkic poetry in the typical form of quatrains, representing all the principal genres: epic, pastoral, didactic, lyric, and elegiac.
His book also includes the first known map of the areas inhabited by Turkic-speaking peoples.
This map is housed at the National Library in Istanbul.
He advocates monolingualism and the linguistic purism of the Turkic languages, and holds a belief in the superiority of nomadic people.
Most of his Turkic-speaking contemporaries, however, are bilingual in Tajik, which is the prestige language of Central Asia, as well as its indigenous language before forced Turkification.
One of al-Kashgari's most famous poems relates to the Turko-Islamic conquest of the Buddhist, Tocharian Kingdom of Khotan, which existed for over a thousand years in the region of present Xinjiang, China, until it was conquered by Muslim invaders in 1006: We came down on them like a flood! We went out among their cities! We tore down the idol-temples, We shat on the Buddha's head! (Elverskog, Johan (2010). Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road. University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 95.)
Apart from the remaining Dzungars, they are also joined by the Kyrgyz peoples and the Oases Turkic peoples (Uyghurs) in Altishahr.
After capturing several towns in Altishahr, there are still two rebel fortresses at Kashgar and ...
A Chinese army from Ili (Kulja) invades Turkistan and consolidates their authority by settling Chinese emigrants in the vicinity of a Manchu garrison.
The Chinese have thoughts of pushing their conquests towards Transoxiana and Samarkand, the chiefs of which have sent to ask assistance of the Afghan king Ahmed Shah Abdali.
This monarch had dispatched an ambassador to Beijing to demand the restitution of the Muslim states of Central Asia, but the representative had not been well received, and Ahmed Shah is too closely aligned with the Sikhs to attempt to enforce his demands by arms.
One of the most serious of these had occurred in 1827, when the territory and the city had been taken by Jahanghir Khoja, a member of the influential East Turkestan Appaki khoja clan; however, Chang-lung, the Chinese general of Ili, regains possession of Kashgar and the other rebellious cities in early 1828.
The forty-year-old Jahanghir Khoja, captured and delivered to Beijing, is carried for several weeks in a mobile iron cage through the main streets of Beijing.
He is finally brought to the Daoguang Emperor for interrogation, but, having gone mad due to bad treatment, he cannot answer any questions.
Immediately after the interrogation is completed, he is executed, his body cut into numerous pieces and his bones thrown to dogs.