The transformation of the Uyghur-majority lands of Southern Xinjiang known as Alte Sheher, or the Six Cities, came in waves, first in the 1950s when systematic political changes to Uyghur and Kazakh social life began, and then in the 1990s when resource extraction infrastructure, industrial farming, Han settlers, and the Chinese market changed all aspects of Uyghur life. An elderly Uyghur farmer in Khotan I interviewed in 2015 illustrated this process using the lives of trees as an example. He said that, in the Uyghur homeland, there were three generations of trees: First, there were the trees that still remained from before the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. These trees were quite rare and viewed as sacred. Then there were trees that were planted in the villages organized as work brigades (大队 dàduì) during the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s. During this period, Uyghur farms were consolidated into communes and farmers were moved from standalone farming homesteads into villages, where most houses were the same height, and for at least some periods …