Who ruled Kashgar?

Kashgar is an oasis city at the western edge of the Tarim Basin in Xinjiang, in the far west of China. To its east lies the Taklamakan Desert; to its west and south rise the Tian Shan and Pamir ranges, crossed by passes into the Fergana Valley, Afghanistan and the Indian subcontinent. Every caravan going round the desert had to meet here, which made Kashgar one of the key stations of the Silk Road. Its history is a long sequence of rule by Chinese, Turkic, Tibetan and Mongol powers, while its settled population became, over the last thousand years, the Turkic-speaking Muslim people now called Uyghurs.

The first written records of Kashgar come from Chinese histories of the Han dynasty, which call it Shule, a small kingdom of a few thousand households. The Han general Ban Chao fought for control of the Tarim oases in the 70s CE, and Kashgar swung between Chinese protection, the Xiongnu and, in the 2nd century, the influence of the Kushans to the west. Its people were then mostly Buddhists who probably spoke an Iranian language; the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, passing through in 644, recorded hundreds of monasteries. The Tang dynasty made Kashgar one of its garrison towns in the 7th century, but the Tibetan Empire contested the Tarim Basin for decades and held the city at several points between the 670s and the late 8th century.

In the 10th century the Kara-Khanids, a Turkic dynasty, made Kashgar one of their capitals. Their ruler Satuq Bughra Khan adopted Islam, and from his time the city became a centre of Muslim and Turkic culture. In about 1070 Yusuf Khass Hajib wrote the long poem Kutadgu Bilig here, and Mahmud al-Kashgari, from the Kashgar area, compiled the first great dictionary of the Turkic languages. In the 12th century the Kara-Khanid Khanate became a vassal of the Qara Khitai, and in 1219 the region passed to the Mongols. Kashgar was then governed by the Chagatai Khanate and its successor khanates; Marco Polo's book describes it in the 1270s, and Timur's armies ravaged it around 1390. From the 16th century the Yarkent Khanate and then rival lineages of Sufi leaders, the khojas, dominated the city, at times under the overlordship of the Dzungar Khanate.

The Qing dynasty destroyed the Dzungars and took Kashgar in 1759, ruling through local officials beside a Manchu garrison. Revolts led by exiled khojas broke out repeatedly in the 19th century. In 1865 Yaqub Beg, a commander from Kokand, made Kashgar the capital of an independent state that dealt with both Britain and Russia, but after his death in 1877 Qing armies reconquered the region, which became the province of Xinjiang in 1884. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Kashgar was a listening post in the rivalry between the British and Russian empires, both of which kept consulates there. After the fall of the Qing, Xinjiang was run by largely autonomous Chinese governors. In November 1933 Uyghur and other Muslim rebels proclaimed a short-lived East Turkestan republic at Kashgar, which was crushed within months. The city came under the People's Republic of China in late 1949.

Since the 1990s Kashgar has seen periods of unrest and violence. From 2009 the government demolished and rebuilt large parts of the old city, citing earthquake and fire safety, while critics argued that the project destroyed historic Uyghur neighbourhoods. Since 2017 Chinese policies of mass security detention and surveillance across Xinjiang, described by Beijing as counter-terrorism and vocational training, have been criticised by the UN human rights office and many governments as serious rights violations; China rejects these accusations. Kashgar today has roughly 700,000 people and is the administrative centre of a prefecture of several million, with the Id Kah Mosque still at its heart.