Xinjiang, similar to Israel, has been at the crossroad of cultures since the dawn of history. Yes, this has been a strategic point on the silk route, but even before then, it has been on the path between Asia and Europe. The hords of Dshenghis Khan roamed through Xinjiang, and the Uyghurs are actually the remnants of those hords. This route was traveled since the time of the big migration, caused by the drying out of the central Asian lake, that brought the hords of the Huns and the Vandals all the way to Europe.
The result of this migratory pattern is that, to this day, people of different cultures speaking different languages live relatively closely together in a stretch of lands from Xinjiang in the East to the Caucasus in the West.
This can best be seen in Afghanistan, an area that can only be successfully governed by a loose cooperation between individual tribal leaders, because each tribe represents a different group of people having different cultural heritage and using different languages that are hardly related to each other.
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