Xinjiang

• Chinese: 新疆 (Xīnjiāng)

Xinjiang (lit. "new borders"), also known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, is an autonomous region within the People's Republic of China. Home to many ethnic Uyghurs and members of other ethnic minorities, most of them adherents of Islam, Xinjiang is one of the chief sites of ethnic tension and agitation against the Chinese government today, along with Tibet.

It covers a territory also known as East Turkestan or Chinese Turkestan, first conquered and incorporated into Chinese territory during the Qing Dynasty, in the 1750s. The various Turkic and Uyghur regions conquered at that time were consolidated into a single "new territory" (Xīnjiāng) in 1768, and incorporated into the Chinese empire as a province like any other (i.e. rather than as a separate, special type of territory) in 1884.