Educating a Frontier Capital: Schooling, Language, and Urban Modernity in Urumqi (Dihua), 1906–1949
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Keywords
Urumqi, Xinjiang, multilingual education, frontier modernity
Abstract
Schooling was a key engine of Urumqi’s transformation from a garrison town into a frontier provincial capital in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet its urban impact, and its entanglement with ethnicity and gender, has received little attention. This paper takes a different angle on Xinjiang’s state-making by placing schools, curricula, and translation work at the center of Urumqi’s urban history. It shows how institutional nodes, a Russian-Chinese-Uyghur language regime, and the gendered geography of women’s education reshaped streets, neighborhoods, and public space. In doing so, it defines a form of “frontier modernity” that was uneven, multiethnic and education-led rather than purely state-designed.
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