Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Kashgar
Summary
Kashgar (قەشقەر) or Kashi () is an oasis city in the Tarim Basin region of southern Xinjiang, China. It is one of the westernmost cities of China, located near the country's border with Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. Kashgar was a strategically important city on the Silk Road between China, the Middle East, and Europe for over 2,000 years. It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world and has a population of 711,300 people (). Kashgar's urban area covers , although its administrative area extends over .
At the convergence point of widely varying cultures and empires, Kashgar has been under the rule of the Chinese, Turkic, Mongol and Tibetan empires. The city has also been the site of a number of battles between various groups of people on the steppes.
Now administered as a county-level city, Kashgar is the administrative centre of Kashgar Prefecture, which has an area of and a population of approximately 4 million . The city was declared a Special Economic Zone in 2010, the only city in western China with this designation. Kashgar also forms a terminus of the Karakoram Highway, the reconstruction of which is considered a major part of the multibillion-dollar China–Pakistan Economic Corridor.
The earliest recorded names of the city are Shufu (疏附) and Shule (疏勒). Shufu originally referred to the Kashgar Old City inhabited by the Uyghurs, while Shule referred to the new city built for Han Chinese settlers, located from the old one. Shule may have been an attempt by the Chinese to transcribe the Sanskrit name for Kashgar, Śrīkrīrāti (fortunate hospitality).
The origin of the name Kashgar is not known for certain and is the subject of academic debate. The Roman geographer Ptolemy (90–168), in his work Geography, refers to the city as Kasi. The Buddhist scholar Xuanzang meanwhile recorded the name Kasha after passing through the city in 644. The name Kashgar did not appear in Chinese records (as ) until the Song dynasty (960–1279), but it was likely to have been used orally long before then.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.