ABSTRACT
Historically, population migration was a tradition of the peoples of Xinjiang. The Uyghur, one of the major ethnic groups of the region, were seen in the past hundreds of years migrating among the oases on the edge of the Tarim Basin and to areas as distant as central Asia and even western Asia, where they were engaged in trade and farming; they made contributions to the cultural exchanges and the development of the economy of the areas through which they were moved. That the Uyghurs of Xinjiang have revitalized this tradition since the early 1980s can be seen from the large-scale migration of the rural Uyghurs to towns in Xinjiang and other parts of China during the past twenty years.
