Türkistan (also spelled Turkistan or Turkestan) is a region in Central Asia, largely inhabited by Turkic people.

It is subdivided into West Türkistan and East Türkistan.

West Türkistan was conquered by the Russian Empire, thus sometimes called Russian Türkistan . After the Russian Revolution, a Turkistan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union was created, which was eventually split into the Kazakh SSR (Kazakhstan), Kyrgyz SSR (Kyrgyzstan), Tajik SSR (Tajikistan), Turkmen SSR (Turkmenistan) and Uzbek SSR (Uzbekistan). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, these republics gained their independence.

East Türkistan, often called Chinese Türkistan, was conquered by the Manchu Empire and was named Ice Jecen or Xinjiang (new frontier). It was taken over by the People's Republic of China by which it is now administered as the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.

Notable References

The fictional character Arslan , in a novel by the same name, was the ruler of Turkistan before taking over the rest of the world.

External links

• Welcome to Turkistan http://geocities.com/ai320/turkistan.htm