Photos

Silkroad travels: Ürümqi

A street scene in an Uighur-dominated part of town. We had no problems to order our food, the pictorial menu to the left helped!
Throughout the centuries the Uighurs used the following scripts: 
1. Confederated with the Kok Turks in the 6th and 7th centuries, they used the Orkhon script, which was developed from the Sogdian (Central Asian) alphabet.
2. In the 5th century they adopted Sogdian italic script which became known as the Uighur script. This script was used for almost 800 years not only by the Uighurs, but also by other Turkic peoples, the Mongols, and by the Manchus in the early stage of their rule in China. 
3. After embracing Islam in the 10th century the Uighurs adopted the Arabic alphabet, and its use became common in the 11th century  (from http://the_uighurs.tripod.com.)
4. With the policy of "assimilation" minorities are obliged to use the Mandarin script.