ABSTRACT
This chapter considers some of the historiographical and political implications of Xinjiang’s position as a geographical and cultural crossroads of Eurasia. The region known as Xinjiang today has since prehistoric times lain between Chinese, Indian, Mediterranean and Islamic culture centres and astride the trade routes that facilitated exchanges of goods, ideas and arts between them. The Xinjiang region was also on the front lines of interactions between nomadic powers and oasis-based agrarian states of Central Eurasia; it played an important geostrategic role in relations between states based in north China and nomadic-type Inner Asian states based in what is now Mongolia and Kazakhstan. Xinjiang has always been significant for its intermediate position. Nor has the cultural and geopolitical significance of this ‘betweenness’ lessened as Xinjiang has become more closely integrated with China, for it has simultaneously been drawing closer to the world.
