Who ruled Tashkent?

Tashkent lies in a large irrigated oasis on the Chirchiq River in north-eastern Uzbekistan, where the foothills of the Tian Shan mountains meet the steppe. Water from the mountains made intensive farming possible, and the oasis sat on the border between settled farmers and the nomadic herders of the plains, on caravan routes linking Samarkand and Bukhara with China and the Kazakh steppe. For most of its history it was a provincial trading city; its modern importance dates from 1865, when Russia captured it and made it the capital of Russian Central Asia.

Farming villages existed in the oasis by the first millennium BCE, and the district, known as Chach, appears in Iranian, Chinese and later Arabic sources. In the early centuries CE its people were part of the Sogdian-speaking world of merchants and city states, with Turkic nomads as overlords from the sixth century. Arab armies of the Umayyad Caliphate conquered the region in the early eighth century and brought Islam. Under the Samanids the town, then called Binkath, was a walled city with a citadel, suburbs and canals, and by the eleventh century the name Tashkent, often explained as "stone town", had come into use.

Genghis Khan's armies sacked Tashkent in 1219 or 1220 during their campaign against the Khwarazmian empire, and the city long remained diminished. It revived under Tamerlane and the Timurid rulers in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and in the sixteenth century the Uzbek Shaybanid dynasty governed it and built madrasas and mausoleums, some of which survive. From the end of the sixteenth century the city was often held by the Kazakh Khanate, and later fought over by Kazakhs, Dzungars and local lords. In 1784 Yunus Khoja united the city's four quarters into an independent city state, but in 1809 it was absorbed by the Khanate of Kokand.

In June 1865 a Russian force under General Mikhail Chernyayev stormed the walled city, and in 1867 Tashkent became the seat of the governor-general of Turkestan, the administrative capital of the tsar's new Central Asian territories in the Russian Empire. A planned Russian town with straight, tree-lined avenues grew beside the old Muslim city, and the railway arrived at the end of the century. After 1917 Tashkent became the capital of the Turkestan Soviet republic and, from 1930, of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic within the Soviet Union.

During the Second World War factories and hundreds of thousands of evacuees were moved here from the western USSR, pushing the population past a million. On 26 April 1966 an earthquake centred under the city destroyed much of the old adobe quarter and left hundreds of thousands homeless. Builders from across the Soviet Union rebuilt Tashkent as a showcase socialist city of wide boulevards, apartment blocks and monuments, and in 1977 it opened the first metro in Central Asia. Since 1991 it has been the capital of independent Uzbekistan. With more than three million people, it is the largest city in Central Asia.