A report on Kashgar, Xinjiang and Tang dynasty

Located in China's Xinjiang region, it is sometimes used synonymously to refer to the southern half of the province, or Nanjiang, as opposed to the northern half of the province known as Dzungaria or Beijiang.

The northern Tarim route ran from Kashgar over Aksu, Kucha, Korla, through the Iron Gate Pass, over Karasahr, Jiaohe, Turpan, Gaochang and Kumul to Anxi.

During the Tang Dynasty, a series of military expeditions were conducted against the oasis states of the Tarim Basin, then vassals of the Western Turkic Khaganate.

The southern stretches of the Silk Road, from Khotan (Xinjiang) to Eastern China, were first used for jade and not silk, as long as 5000 BCE, and is still in use for this purpose.

There are indications that he may have led expeditions as far as Kashgar on the western edge of the Taklamakan Desert, leading to the first known contacts between China and the West around 200 BCE.

Both the Old Book of Tang and New Book of Tang, covering the history of the Chinese Tang dynasty (618–907), record that a new state called Fu-lin (拂菻; i.e. Byzantine Empire) was virtually identical to the previous Daqin (大秦; i.e. Roman Empire).

The Uyghurs are recognized as native to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in Northwest China.

. It is transcribed into Tang annals as / (Mandarin: Huíhé, but probably *[ɣuɒiɣət] in Middle Chinese).

These groups of peoples often identify themselves by their originating oasis instead of an ethnicity; for example those from Kashgar may refer to themselves as Kashgarliq or Kashgari, while those from Hotan identity themselves as "Hotani".

Hotan (also known as Gosthana, Gaustana, Godana, Godaniya, Khotan, Hetian, Hotien) is a major oasis town in southwestern Xinjiang, an autonomous region in Western China.

The main historical sources are to be found in the Chinese histories (particularly detailed during the Han and early Tang dynasties) when China was interested in control of the Western Regions, the accounts of several Chinese pilgrim monks, a few Buddhist histories of Hotan that have survived in Classical Tibetan and a large number of documents in the Iranian Saka language and other languages discovered, for the most part, early this century at various sites in the Tarim Basin and from the hidden library at the Mogao Caves near Dunhuang.

The town suffered severely during the Dungan Revolt (1862–77) against the Qing dynasty and again a few years later when Yaqub Beg of Kashgar made himself master of Kashgaria, ruling the newly founded Turkic state known at the time as Yettishar.

The Shule Kingdom (Chinese: 疏勒) was an ancient Iranian oasis kingdom of the Taklamakan Desert that was on the Northern Silk Road, in the historical Western Regions of what is now Xinjiang in Northwest China.

Its capital was Kashgar, the source of Kashgar's water being a river of the same name.

Although a vassal of the Chinese Tang Dynasty from the 7th century, Shule was conquered by the Tibetan Empire in the late 8th century and was eventually incorporated into the Kara-Khanid Khanate during the Islamicisation and Turkicisation of Xinjiang.

Dzungaria (also transliterated as Zungaria; Dzungharia or Zungharia; Dzhungaria or Zhungaria; Djungaria or Jungaria; or literally züüngar, Mongolian for "left hand") is a geographical subregion in Northwest China that corresponds to the northern half of Xinjiang—hence it is also known as Beijiang.

Before the 21st century, all or part of the region has been ruled or controlled by the Xiongnu Empire, Han dynasty, Xianbei state, Rouran Khaganate, Turkic Khaganate, Tang Dynasty, Uyghur Khaganate, Yenisei Kyrgyz Khaganate, Liao dynasty, Kara-Khitan Khanate, Mongol Empire, Yuan Dynasty, Chagatai Khanate, Moghulistan, Qara Del, Northern Yuan, Four Oirat, Dzungar Khanate, Qing Dynasty, and the Republic of China; since 1950, it has been under the control of the People's Republic of China.

One of the earliest mentions of the Dzungaria region occurs when the Han dynasty dispatched an explorer to investigate lands to the west, using the northernmost Silk Road trackway of about 2600 km in length, which connected the ancient Chinese capital of Xi'an to the west over the Wushao Ling Pass to Wuwei and emerged in Kashgar.

The area lies in present-day Aksu Prefecture, Xinjiang, China; Kuqa town is the county seat of that prefecture's Kuqa County.

Kuchean music was very popular in Tang China, particularly the lute, which became known in Chinese as the pipa.

The kingdom bordered Aksu and Kashgar to the west and Karasahr and Turpan to the east.

The seventh-largest administrative district by area at 453700 km2, Gansu lies between the Tibetan and Loess plateaus and borders Mongolia (Govi-Altai Province), Inner Mongolia and Ningxia to the north, Xinjiang and Qinghai to the west, Sichuan to the south and Shaanxi to the east.

It is a combination of the names of two prefecture (州) in the Sui and Tang dynasty: Gan (around Zhangye) and Su (around Jiuquan).

The next stop, Kashi (Kashgar), was a welcome sight to the merchants.

Famed for their woven carpets in the pre-Muslim era, they were considered a vassal state by the Tang Dynasty after the final conquest of the Transoxania regions by the Chinese in 739.

The southern part of Zhetysu was occupied by the Yagma people, who also held Kashgar.

They then conquered Kankali and subdued Xinjiang.