How China threatens prominent Uyghurs — in the US, in China and everywhere

June 23, 2021

In 1992, the head of the Xinjiang Regional Museum’s archeology department and a well known Uyghur intellectual, Abduqeyum Hoja, had taken a rare trip abroad. He had flown with two Tarim Basin mummies to the University of Tokyo on a mission to date the ancient cadavers — an important scientific quest to advance understanding of the anthropological record in China’s Xinjiang region.

But on a stop in Shanghai to present the University of Tokyo’s findings, scientific authorities revised the age of the mummies. They changed the date so it would be consistent with Han Chinese historical presence in the region. The mummies couldn’t be “older than Chinese history,” remembers the archeologist’s daughter, Gulchehra Hoja. Her father, she recalls, came home to Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, shaking with rage. 

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