Ürümqi means beautiful pasture at Xinjiang's inland crossroads
Ürümqi is capital and largest city of China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, with about 4.05 million people in the 2020 census—second in the northwestern interior only to Xi'an. Since the 1990s it has boomed as a transport, political, and commercial hub.
Oirat etymology reads ürü plus mchi as beautiful pasture; another view links Old Uyghur yürüng, white or bright, to a Tang White Water garrison. Qing forces took the site in 1755, walled Dihua—'enlighten and civilize'—between 1763 and 1767; the Communist Party restored Ürümqi on 1 February 1954 as less chauvinist.
Long before the Qing, nomads known in Chinese records as the Jushi, likely forerunners of the Tocharians, lived on the nearby Tianshan slopes, and the oldest known town, Urabo, lay about 10 kilometres from today's southern suburbs. The Tang founded a city called Luntai in 648 to govern the area and tax Silk Road caravans. Afterwards the district passed to Uyghur rulers and later to the Oirat-speaking Dzungars, and it remained a minor town next to Turpan, 200 kilometres to the southeast.
The Qing conquest brought the Dzungar genocide, leaving what the writer Wei Yuan described as a vast empty plain. Han migrants and Hui Muslims from Gansu and Shaanxi followed, opening more than 500 shops by 1762, and a separate city for Manchu bannermen, Gongning Cheng, rose nearby in 1771. In 1870 Yaqub Beg's forces burned Gongning Cheng during the Battle of Ürümqi. After the Qing fell, warlords ruled Xinjiang from here, from Yang Zengxin in 1911 to Zhang Zhizhong until 1949, and during the Kumul Rebellion Ma Zhongying's 36th Division fought two battles for the city against Jin Shuren and Sheng Shicai.
Source: Ürümqi
