The Uyghurs of the Ferghana Valley and Their Recollections of Crossing the Border,
eds. SHINMEN Yasushi, KAWAHARA Yayoi, Tokyo, 2010.
Some of the Uyghur populations who mainly reside in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region ofChina live in communities in the Central Asian states, such as Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, andQirghizstan. Those communities in Central Asia were formed by the migration of the Uyghur people
from Xinjiang in the historical process of relationships between China and Central Asia during theeighteenth to nineteenth centuries.
This volume aims to focus on the historical situations of the Uyghur communities in Central
Asia formed by the migration from the Kashgar region of Xinjiang, and to present firsthand materialon the migrations across the border of China and Central Asia, and in particular, the record ofinterviews conducted with the inhabitants of the Uyghur communities in Ferghana Valley in our fieldresearch conducted in 2003, 2004, and 2006. It consists of text data of all the interviews in the
Uzbek language, their translation into Japanese, commentaries, and an introduction. The contents of
the interviews mainly include historical recollections of the interviewees or their ancestors about
their migrations or moves between the Kashgar region and Ferghana Valley.
The interview records provide valuable data that let us know when and under what conditions
the people migrated from the Kashgar region to the Ferghana region. First, it is known from theinterviews that the ancestors of the interviewees migrated to Ferghana valley not only under thecircumstances of political incidents, such as the invasions of Makhdūmzādas from the Khoqand
khanate to the Kashgar region in the first half of the nineteenth century or the Muslim rebellion in
the second half of the nineteenth century in Xinjiang under the Qing rule, but also on the basis of
their usual moves between the two regions. Second, from the cases of migrations of interviewees
themselves, it is known that in the 1950s, they migrated from the Kashgar region to the Ferghana
region of the Soviet territory, according to their wishes and as permitted by the governments. It is
worth noting that some of them have parents who migrated from the Ferghana region to the Kashgar
region to escape from difficult conditions during the collectivization under the Soviet regime in the
1920s and 1930s, while their ancestors had migrated from the Kashgar region to the Ferghan region
in the nineteenth century. Therefore, it can be assumed that the migrations of the Uyghur people
between the two regions across the border were two-way moves. Accordingly, the formation andchange of Uyghur communities in Ferghana Valley should be considered in the historical context ofmoves and interactions between the Kashgar region and the Ferghana region.
Except for the process of the migrations, some of the interview records also include
recollections about the Xinjiang’s historical situations from the 1930s to 1950s, which theinterviewees saw and experienced while they were staying there if they themselves migrated fromthe Kashgar region to the Ferghana region. The data are useful for research on modern Xinjiang
history, because they contain some information on the political, social, and cultural situations of
Xinjiang, and particularly on the circumstances of the professions its inhabitants were engaged inand the school education they received, as well as Chinese government policies such as land reform
and the influences these policies had on Uyghur society in the early period of the People’s Republicof China.