The region's history has been coloured by such personalities as Tamerlane, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun and even Alexander the Great. More often, though, in counterpoint to the great movements of history, Xinjiang has been at the mercy of its isolation and the feudal warring between the rulers of its oasis kingdoms, or khanates.

The influence of China has been far from constant. The area - commonly referred to in the West as Eastern (or Chinese) Turkestan until 1949 - first passed under Han control in the second century BC, under Emperor Wu Di. But it was only during the Tang dynasty (650-850 AD) that this control amounted to more than a military presence. The Tang period for Xinjiang was something of a golden age, with the oases south of the Tian Shan largely populated by a mysterious but sophisticated Indo-European people, and the culture and Buddhist art of the oases at their zenith. Around the ninth century, however, came a change - the gradual rise to dominance of the Uigurs , and their conversion to Islam.

Subsequent centuries saw the conquests of the Mongols under Genghis Khan and later, from the west, of Tamerlane. Both brought havoc and slaughter in their wake, though during the brief period of Mongol rule (Yuan dynasty 1271-1368) the Silk Road trade was hugely facilitated by the fact that, for the first and only time in history, east and west Asia were under a single government.

After the fall of the Mongols, and the final disappearance of the Silk Road, Xinjiang began to split into khanates and suffered a succession of religious and factional wars. Nonetheless, it was an independence of a kind and Qing reassertion of Chinese domination in the eighteenth century was fiercely contested. A century later, in 1862, full-scale Muslim rebellion broke out, led by the ruler of Kashgaria, Yakub Beg, armed and supported by the British who were seeking influence in this buffer zone between India and Russia. Ultimately the revolt failed - Beg became a hated tyrant - and the region remained part of the Chinese empire.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Xinjiang was still a Chinese backwater controlled by a succession of brutal warlords who acted virtually independently of the central government. The last one of these before World War II, Sheng Shizai , seemed momentarily to be a reforming force, instituting religious and ethnic freedoms, and establishing trade with the newly emergent Soviet Union. However, he ended by abandoning his moderate positions. Slamming the door on the Soviets and on leftist influences within Xinjiang itself in 1940, he began a reign of terror resulting in the deaths of more than two hundred thousand Communists, intellectuals, students and Muslim Nationalists.

The drive towards the defeat of the Guomindang in 1949 temporarily united the conflicting forces of Muslim nationalism and Chinese communism. After the Communist victory, however, there could be only one result. The principal Muslim Nationalist leaders were quietly murdered, allegedly killed in a plane crash, and the impetus towards a separate state was lost. The last Nationalist leader, a Kazakh named Osman, was executed in 1951.

Since 1949, the Chinese government has made strenuous attempts to stabilize the region by settling Han Chinese from the east, into Ürümqi in particular - the number by 1996 was up to six million from just two hundred thousand forty years earlier. The Uigur population of Xinjiang, from being ninety percent of the total in 1949, had slipped to just below fifty percent by 1982, and is probably still slipping, in spite of the minorities' exemption from the One Child Policy. Today, however, the Chinese government is still nervous about Xinjiang, especially given the enormous economic potential of the area, in terms of coal mining, oil exploration and tourism. In recent years there have been outbursts of Uigur dissent , most notably in 1992, in the city of Kashgar, when the army and air force were called in to suppress demonstrations, and the city was temporarily closed to foreigners. Bombs, allegedly set by separatists, exploded in Ürümqi in 1992 and Kashgar in 1993. Prior to that, in 1986, there had been protests in response to China's nuclear tests at the desert site near Lop Nor, prompted by what seemed to be numerous cases of early death from cancer and a high incidence of deformity in lambs and newborn children. In the meantime the nuclear tests go on, and in the aftermath of the break-up of the Soviet Union, the possibility of a new outbreak of violent nationalism among the Xinjiang Uigurs cannot be ruled out.