[UIGHUR NATIONAL POEMS PRINTED IN LAHORE] Nevâ-yi Ruhi
MUHAMMAD ROHI UIGHUR AL-KASHGARI, (18.-19. centuries), Türk Uygur Millî Kültür Birligi., Lahore, [ca. 1920].
Contemporary burgundy cloth bdg. Foolscap 8vo. (17,5 x 12,5 cm). In Uighur. 31, [3] p. A Turkic printing house in Lahore label on the last page titled 'Matbua-yi Cedîd...'.
First and only edition of this extremely rare collection of poems "representing the daily life of the Uyghur people in captivity". Al-Kashgari is a prominent Uyghur national diaspora poets of Muslim China.
There is a small community of Uyghurs in Pakistan, originating from the Xinjiang autonomous region of China. Some members of ethnic minorities of China, primarily Muslim Uyghurs and Tajiks from Xinjiang, have historically migrated to and settled in the northern parts of Pakistan. The earliest migrants, numbering in the thousands, came in as traders during the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the area that is Pakistan was still under British rule. Most of these Uyghurs used to have warehouses and residences in towns in the North and in parts of upper Punjab and used to travel between Kashgar and Yarkand and these places, regularly. Others came in the 1940s in fear of communist persecution. A few hundred more fled to Pakistan in the aftermath of a failed uprising in Khotan in 1954. Later waves of migration came in 1963 and again in 1974. Some Pakistani descendants who previously lived in Xinjiang, especially at Kashgar, have also moved back to Pakistan with their Uyghur spouses. This small community continued to publish and print books in Pakistan as well.