Dentist office sign

A hand-painted sign in Uyghur script for a dentist’s office in Kashgar, an oasis city in Xinjiang Province, in the early 1990s. The Uyghur language was traditionally written using a version of the Arabic alphabet, but after the 1940 revolution, an adapted form of Cyrillic was introduced. However, it never became popular. In 1982, the Cyrillic alphabet was abolished, and schools and official offices in Xinjiang once again began using an alphabet based on Arabic.