Land of Strangers

At the close of the nineteenth century, near the end of the Qing empire, Confucian revivalists from central China gained control of the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang, or East Turkestan. There they undertook a program to transform Turkic-speaking Muslims into Chinese-speaking Confucians, seeking to bind this population and their homeland to the Chinese cultural and political realm. Instead of assimilation, divisions between communities only deepened, resulting in a profound estrangement that continues to this day.In Land of Strangers, Eric Schluessel explores this encounter between Chinese power and a Muslim society through the struggles of ordinary people in the oasis of Turpan. He follows the stories of families divided by war, women desperate to survive, children unsure where they belong, and many others to reveal the human consequences of a bloody conflict and the more insidious violence of reconstruction. Schluessel traces the emergence of new struggles around essential questions of identity, showing how religious and linguistic differences converged into ethnic labels. Reading across local archives and manuscript accounts in the Chinese and Chaghatay languages, he recasts the attempted transformation of Xinjiang as a distinctly Chinese form of colonialism. At a time when understanding the roots of the modern relationship between Uyghurs and China has taken on new urgency, Land of Strangers illuminates a crucial moment of social and cultural change in this dark period of Xinjiang’s past.

An expert collector, reader, and translator of difficult materials, Schluessel provides us with a window into frontier society in the late nineteenth century. Land of Strangers is an exceptionally well-researched work grounded in a stunning assortment of primary sources, replete with memorable close-up encounters with an engaging cast of characters., Eric Schluessel combines prodigious linguistic skills with exhaustive archival research and conceptual sophistication to bring the Turpan oasis to life in all its human complexity. Land of Strangers is a fine-grained account of history from below, unlike anything we have on any part of Central Asia. A stellar achievement., Through this theoretically rich exploration of Qing philosophy and practice of colonial rule, we see how violence and forced intimacy shape enduring group identities in Xinjiang. Using his multilingual skills to draw on diaries, memorials, and documents from court cases, Schluessel uncovers the interactions of everyday life among colonizing Chinese, intermediaries, and colonized Uyghurs in late Qing Xinjiang., In this fine monograph, Eric Schluessel describes the local articulation and hardening of boundaries between people in late Qing Xinjiang. Using Turkic, Manchu, and Chinese sources on Turpan, he introduces (among others) local elites, Hunanese Confucian statecraft ideologues, mediatory tongchi interpreters, and Chinese-speaking Muslim brokers. His narratives describe culture clashes, identity negotiation, gender ideologies, colonial discipline, and naming practices, persuasively and subtly connected to today’s troubled conditions., A valuable contribution to our understanding of the actions of the modern Chinese state to pacify Xinjiang through this same combination of force and cultural transformation first attempted by the Xiang Army one hundred and fifty years ago.

Eric Schluessel is assistant professor of modern Chinese history at the George Washington University.