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As a student I spent many happy hours raiding the lower shelves of SOAS library for the dusty volumes of late 19th- and early 20th-century missionary and traveller's tales from Xinjiang, Eastern or Chinese Turkestan as it was then more commonly known. They were redolent of Empire and every imaginable Orientalist cliché, but also cracking yarns, richly evocative of time and place. It is a great pleasure to find this rich material put to systematic use through Ildikó Bellér-Hann's exemplary and careful scholarship. Her mission is to "fill out the hollow concept of 'tradition" (p. 19), a much-invoked and slippery term in contemporary Xinjiang, and to bring a new perspective to a field so heavily dominated by studies of politics, ethnicity and conflict: a view of social relations in the context of the everyday life and ritual practices of Uyghurs in pre-socialist Xinjiang.
Bellér-Hann draws...