Chinese terms in the text are romanized according to the now-standard pinyin system. Uyghur is a Turkic language currently written in the Arabic script. Because there is no one generally agreed-upon system of romanization, I have largely followed the scheme in Reinhard Hahn’s Spoken Uyghur (1991), with the following exceptions: for the alveo-palatal affricate, I have used “c” rather than “č”; for the voiced uvular fricative, I have used “gh” instead of “ğ”; for the voiceless fricative, I have preferred “kh” to “x”; and for the velar nasal, I have used “ng” instead of “ņ.”
For names, I have generally followed these rules except for widely used variants and for Turkic rather than Chinese (or Arabic) spellings of Turki names. Thus it is Muhämmäd Imin Bughra, rather than Memtimin, Muhammed Imin, Mehmet Emin, or Maimaitiming; and Säypidin Äzizi rather than Seypidin, Seyfettin, Saif al-Din, or Saifudin(g). At the same time, I refer to Chiang Kai-shek instead of Jiang Jieshi and Sun Yat-sen rather than Sun Zhongshan (or Sun Yixian). For Uyghur place-names, I have generally followed the orthography indicated earlier; hence Ürümci, rather than Ürümchi or Urumqi. But I have followed older convention in referring to two of Xinjiang’s cities best known in English as Kashgar and Yarkand, instead of Qäšqär and Yäkän.