| Summary: | "Today most Uyghurs are Muslims, but this has not always been so. For centuries they were Buddhists, forging their distinctive tradition along the Silk Road at the center of Buddhist Eurasia. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries they were so renowned for their monuments, which spanned Beijing to Baghdad, that Tibetans considered their kingdom to be the mythical land of Shambhala. And yet, during the Qing period they converted to Islam, rewriting their past and erasing their Buddhist history. In the early nineteenth century the European orientalists rediscovered Uyghur Buddhism but did not develop their knowledge until the late 1800s when explorers discovered the treasures of the long-lost civilizations of the Silk Road. The Uyghurs, it turned out, had been not onlyBuddhists but also Christians and Manichaeans, raising questions about why they became Buddhists and why they converted to Islam"--
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