Uyghurs
Rian Thum explored the concepts of identity among the ancestors of the modern Uyghurs in Altishahr (the native Uyghur name for eastern Turkestan or southern Xinjiang) before the adoption of the name "Uyghur" in the 1930s, referring to them by the name "Altishahri" in his article "Modular History: Identity Maintenance before Uyghur Nationalism". Thum indicated that Altishahri Turkis did have a sense that they were a distinctive group separate from the Turkic Andijanis to their west, the nomadic Turkic Kirghiz, the nomadic Mongol Qalmaq, and the Han Chinese Khitay before they became known as Uyghurs. There was no single name used by them to refer to themselves, the various native names Altishahris used to refer to themselves were Altishahrlik (Altishahr person), yerlik (local), Turki, and Musulmān (Muslim), the term Musulmān in this situation did not signify religious connotations, because the Altishahris would exclude other Muslim peoples like the Kirghiz when referring to themselves as Musulmān. Dr. Laura J Newby has also noted that the sedentary Altishahri Turkic people felt themselves as a separate group from other Turkic Muslims since at least the 19th century.
Uyghurs in Kazakhstan
By 1897, there were already roughly 56,000 Uyghurs in what is today Kazakhstan, according to the Russian Empire Census. In the 1940s, high-ranking Communist Party officials in the Kazakh SSR planned to create an Uyghur autonomous oblast in a large part of the territory of modern-day Almaty Province. However, as the intention of the government was to bring Xinjiang further into the Soviet orbit rather than afford local Uyghurs genuine autonomy, the plan was scrapped after the Communist victory in China in 1949. During the 1950s in China, ethnic tensions and repression of minority separatist movements led to a mass exodus from Xinjiang to the Kazakh SSR, consisting of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Mongols, and Kyrgyz. Following the Sino-Soviet split and border conflict, the Chinese government closed the Xinjiang–Kazakh SSR border, both to prevent flight by ethnic minorities, and to prevent the penetration of Soviet secret agents into China.