The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History

THE SACRED ROUTES OF UYGHUR HISTORY THE SACRED ROUTES OF UYGHUR HISTORY Rian Thum Cambridge, Massachusetts London, En gland 2014 Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First Printing Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Thum, Rian Richard. The sacred routes of Uyghur history / Rian Thum. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0- 674- 59855- 3 (alkalne paper) 1. Uighur (Turkic people)— Historiography. 2. Uighur (Turkic people)— Travel. 3. Uighur (Turkic people)— Intellectual life. 4. Uighur (Turkic people)— Religion. 5. Manuscripts, Uighur—History. 6. Islam— China— Takla Makan Desert Region— Manuscripts—History. 7. Pilgrims and pilgrimages— China—Takla Makan Desert Region— History. 8. Sacred space—China—Takla Makan Desert Region— History. 9. Takla Makan Desert Region (China)— History, Local. 10. Nationalism— China—Takla Makan Desert Region— History. I. Title. DS731.U4T48 2014 951'.60072—dc23 2014006244 CONTENTS Note on Orthography vii INTRODUCTION 1 1. THE HISTORICAL CANON 16 2. MANUSCRIPT TECHNOLOGY 52 3. THE SHRINE 96 4. HISTORY IN MOTION 133 5. SAINTS OF THE NATION 163 6. THE STATE 210 CONCLUSION 245 Notes 257 Ac know ledg ments 311 Index 313 NOTE ON ORTHOGRAPHY American Library Association— Library of Congress (ALA- LC) roman- ization systems are used for Persian, Uyghur, Rus sian, and Arabic. For the Turki dialect used in Altishahr before the development of the mod- ern Uyghur alphabet, I have used the ALA-LC Persian transliteration system, with some vowel changes, mainly in words of Turkic origin. Pin- yin is used for Chinese. Names and words with common En glish equiva- lents are written in the common En glish form that most closely matches the ALA- LC transliteration systems, for example, the prophet Muham- mad and the Quran. The towns of Altishahr are given in the common En glish forms of the Turki/Uyghur names, for example, Kashgar instead of Kāshghar (Turki and Persian), Qăshqăr (Uyghur), or Kashi (Chinese). Non- English words that appear frequently in the text are italicized the fi rst time but not thereafter, for example, tazkirah. The names of the personages discussed in the book have been written and pronounced differently in different periods. Because my transcriptions of these names from the original sources refl ect such variations, the names of some personages appear with varying spellings. vii Map copyright © Rian Thum INTRODUCTION Like all historical works, this study is an attempt to link past and present, to make the cryptic realities of other times relevant, usable, and un- derstandable today. In par tic u lar, it aims to tell the story of one community’s imagination of the past as it changed over time. It is a biography of Uyghur history, the history created and learned by the oasis- dwelling Tur- kic Muslims of what is today far western China. I use the term “biography” fi guratively, to emphasize the continuity and connectedness of Uy- ghur notions of the past across time, and because I want to imply that its story is less arcane than the word “historiography” would suggest. The story of Uyghur history making is a tale of conquests and rebellions, long journeys and moving rituals, oasis markets and desert shrines, foreigner saints, handwritten newspapers, friendships made, books loaned, censors duped. Because historical practice is an engagement with time, which it- self exists in time, the story of histories past, the history of a history, is al- ways at risk of sinking into a mire of abstraction. Moreover, the on-the- ground reality of history making, with its myriad associated practices, geographies, intellectual genealogies, and community dynamics, exposes the weaknesses of narrative explication. The central challenge in writing this study has been to make the biography of these accumulated embraces of the past, marching through time, seem as straightforward and natural as their reality deserves, without suppressing their complexity. The “Uyghur history” that this study aims to understand is, in more precise terms, the Uyghur historical experience: the sum of those practices of learning and creating history that defi ned Uyghur interactions with the past. The focus is on history, not in the sense of those things that happened in the past, but rather, the habits and strategies by which people have engaged, consciously and intentionally, with what happened in the 1 2 THE SACRED ROUTES OF UYGHUR HISTORY past (or with what they believe happened in the past). There are many defi nitions of this kind of history to choose from, but most share an em- phasis on the text.1 A particularly compelling conception from Greg Den- ing calls history “the texted past for which we have a cultural poetic,” the past “transformed into texts— texts written down, texts spoken, texts caught in the forms of material things.”2 My own research began as an attempt to understand the world of the Uyghur texted past but quickly expanded to an investigation of the whole range of human activities that supported and shaped that texted past, including practices such as book handling, shrine veneration, and travel. When we broaden our enquiry to include the means by which people experience history, the Uyghur example shows the text to be an essential element of historical practice, but only one among several. Conceived in this broader fashion, the historical experience shares some of its territory with notions of memory, such as Halbwachs’s “collective memory” or Assmann’s “cultural memory.”3 In the many instances where the phenomena of history and memory overlap, I have taken history as my subject. Unlike memory— collective, cultural, or otherwise— history connotes a curiosity about the past on the part of either the producer or consumer. It tends to involve discovery in a way that memory does not.4 Historical practice is a conscious, explicit effort to connect with the past, and its product exists outside its practitioners’ minds. “Memory,” on the other hand, connotes a mostly involuntary participation and a phenome- non rooted in the private realm of thought, even when those thoughts are held in common with others. The senses of curiosity, discovery, and effort were all quite immediately apparent in the attitudes toward history I en- countered among Uyghurs. They are also present in the local historical works examined here, wherein the lost tombs of hero- saints are sought and found. Thus, while this book delimits history quite broadly in terms of the activities that constitute historical practice, it restricts “history” to intentional and active engagements with the past. Names and Power, Past and Present The nomenclature for the people and places involved in this study is both po litically problematic and deeply entangled in the history of China’s relationship with Inner Asia. And yet, this history cannot be discussed without reference to the peoples and places whose names are po liti cally contentious. For this reason, an explanation of the terminological en- Introduction 3 tanglements must unfold simultaneously with an introduction to the politi cal and social upheaval of the last three centuries, the context in which this biography of Uyghur history proceeds. The place in question is that area of Central Asia, now controlled by China, in which Uyghurs and their ancestors have constituted the majority of the inhabitants. It is known among many Uyghurs as Altishahr, the Uyghur for “six cities.” But the name Altishahr is not to be found on any map; it is a term used by people who are denied the po liti cal power to draw maps. The Uyghurs today live under Chinese rule, in a politi cal system calibrated to strictly limit knowledge production and dissemination to ideas that support the status quo. In this environment, only the Chinese word, Xinjiang, and its Uyghur transliteration, Shinjang, are acceptable names for the region in offi cial public discourse, while Uyghur terms such as Altishahr persist in everyday speech. These tensions over geographic names are, in a basic sense, a product of conquest and colonization, though not of a simple us-versus- them dy- namic. Indeed, the most powerful actors in the story of Altishahr’s at- tachment to China were neither Chinese nor Uyghur. The initial incorpo- ration of Altishahr into a China- based empire in 1759 was a historical accident, an unintended consequence of a transgenerational power strug- gle between the Manchus and the Dzungar Mongols. The Manchu ruler who brought a violent end to this feud was the Qianlong emperor, ruler of the Great Qing Empire, which encompassed Manchuria, Mongolia, China, and Tibet. From his capital in Beijing, Qianlong directed an enor- mous assault on the Dzungars, sending primarily Manchu and Mongol soldiers on a thousand- mile trek to the steppes beyond the western bor- der of his empire. Qianlong’s grandfather had subjugated the Dzungars before, and upon defeating the Dzungars in 1759, Qianlong took steps to ensure that they would never challenge Manchu supremacy in Inner Asia again. He ordered, and appears to have achieved, the complete extermi- nation of the Dzungars. However, the Dzungars left behind a trouble- some inheritance, one that continues to haunt its masters. The Dzungar state that Qianlong annihilated was a different entity from the one his grandfather had humbled. Between the time of Qian- long’s grandfather and Qianlong’s own day, the Dzungars had extended their rule beyond the nomad- dominated steppes into the agricultural oases that ring the Taklamakan Desert to the south, namely, Altishahr. Some oasis elites saw the defeat of the Dzungars as an opportunity to throw off the extractive outsider rule of non-Muslims. Qianlong, however, was 4 THE SACRED ROUTES OF UYGHUR HISTORY determined to take possession of everything that his vanquished Dzungar foes had owned, and so, although there is no hint that the emperor had previously held any interest in conquering the oases of Altishahr, he in- structed his generals to enforce his new claim.

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