[noirchen]

There is one issue with Uighur people in your statement that if you dig into history, Han Chinese have been living in Xinjiang much longer than the Uighurs. In fact, Chinese people have been in Xinjiang even before the Han dynasty, and incorporated some Buddhism-worshiping minority groups and formed the so-called Han Chinese. You can still see the splendid ancient Buddhism relics in Xinjiang. Uighurs, a Muslim minority, entered the region several centuries later, mainly after the Yuan dyansty. To compare with, there is another Muslim minority, Hui, descending from the Central Asia and Middle East (Persian) immigrants during Tang Dynasty. So if people argue that “ancestral land”, they really need to see that in good ol’ Asia, history is such a bitch that one can easily get lost. But that thousands of years old bitch still haunts you in the night.