chapotraphouse

its kind of a touch and go situation, theres always been waxing and waning influence from various chinese groups over the area for thousands of years now. even before uighurs were even there. a lot of liberals like to imagine it as a modern settler colonial situation even though china has very strict internal migration laws

you can find a basic summary of this history here https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=-6Wu0Q7x5D0

here's some old ass mummies from the tarim basin too, theyre of the tocharian material culture which is now defunct (though it survived long enough to have a written language! its very interesting, its indo european but is its own branch), it moved westward at one point and mostly deserted the tarim basin and as far as we know it was the first organized material culture of the basin in 2k BCE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarim_mummies

the more or less 'modern' borders of china were defined by the qing empire during the 1600s-1700s but there were chinese groups there with centralized power as early as 100 BCE, though arguably much earlier than that in terms of migrations and soft influence