The Tocharians, (also spelled Tokharians), originally nomads, lived in today's Xinjiang; they spoke the Indo-European Tocharian languages.

They were known by the Chinese as the Daxia (大夏, although popular sources have argued that they were in fact the same as the Yuezhi). By the Greeks they were known as Tocharoi and by the Turks as Twghry. A branch of the Yuezhi were the Kushan, whose loosely-constituted empire was at its height in the first centuries of the Common Era, and stretched from the Indus Valley to the Aral Sea, embracing much of the route of the Silk Road.

Earlier mummified burials suggest that precursors of these easternmost speakers of an Indo-European language may have lived in the region of Xinjiang and the Tarim Basin from around 1000 BC until finally they were assimilated by Uighur Turks in the 8th century CE. According to a controversial theory, early invasions by Turkic speakers may have pushed Tocharian speakers out of the Tarim Basin and into modern Afghanistan, India, Turkmenistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

Their late manuscript fragments, of the 7th and 8th centuries, suggest that they were no longer either as nomadic or as barbaric as the Chinese had considered them. Besides the religious texts, the texts include monastery correspondence and accounts, commercial documents, caravan permits, and medical and magical texts.

Tocharians, living along the Silk Road, had contacts with the Chinese and Persians, and Turkic, Indian and Iranian tribes. Their Buddhism, like their alphabet, came from northern India. The Kushan Tocharians may have played a part in the transmission of Buddhism to China. Many apparently also practised some variant of Manichaeanism.

See external links at Tocharian languages. See also Yuezhi and Kushan.