The beginning

A History of Uyghur Buddhism by Johan Elverskog:

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Today most Uyghurs are Muslims. Yet this was not always so. For centuries they were Buddhists. In their homeland along the Silk Road in what is now northwestern China, the Uyghurs stood at the center of Buddhist Eurasia and thus drew upon all the surrounding cultures to forge their own distinctive form of the Dharma. In doing so they used their wealth and power to produce stunning Buddhist monuments not only in their own kingdom but also across Asia, from Beijing to Baghdad. In fact, the glories of Uyghur Buddhism were so renowned in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that the Tibetans even came to postulate that their kingdom was the mythical land of Shambhala.