TOURISM IN KYRGYZSTAN - Tourism in Central Asia: Cultural Potential and Challenges - page 260

INTRODUCTION
This chapter basically aims to describe the opportunities and obstacles
within the tourism sector in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan, within the framework
of the basic economic and political challenges that the country faces in the
independence era. The first part of the chapter is a brief introduction of
Kyrgyzstan from geographical, economic and social perspectives, all of
which either directly or indirectly affect the tourism sector in the country
in the post-Soviet era. The second and third parts describe the opportuni-
ties and obstacles to the development of tourism in Kyrgyzstan, respec-
tively. The conclusion focuses on the comparative advantage of the coun-
try for the development of tourism despite all odds, and briefly comments
on the possible bright future of this sector.
Kyrgyzstan is a small Central Asian country which shares borders
with the Sinkiang Uygur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic
of China on the east, Tajikistan on the south and west, Uzbekistan on the
west and Kazakhstan on the north. The capital city of the country is Bish-
kek (Frunze during the Soviet era). According to July 2012 estimates, the
population of Kyrgyzstan is approximately 5.5 million in which the eth-
nic Kyrgyz composes 64.9%. However, the country has several minority
groups as well: the Uzbeks compose 13.8%, Russians 12.5%, Dungans 1.1%,
Ukrainians 1%, Uyghur 1%, and others 5.7% of the population. 1 The
Kyrgyz are Turkic, speaking the Turkic dialect of Kipchak that belongs to
the Altaic family of languages.
The ancestors of today's Kyrgyz were nomads who had migrated to
these lands around the late 90s from Siberia (Roudnik, 2007). They used
the pasturelands in the Western Tien Shan Mountains herding their horses
and camels and traveling with their yurts (McMann, 2006). They would
lead a very traditional life that revolved around “the seasons and animals”
(Anderson, 1999). Even though by the late 15th century the Kyrgyz had
formed a large tribal union that would not prevent them from being at-
tacked by the Uzbeks and Kazakhs. They would eventually fall under the
rule of the Russians, first as part of the Tsarist Empire in the 1860s (Roudnik,
2007), and then as part of the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolu-
tion in 1917. The Kyrgyz nomads would settle in the late 1930s when
the Soviet administration started to implement sedentarization policies.
1 https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/kg.html