What is the significance of bread-making in Uyghur society? What are the impacts of Chinese colonisation on this set of practices and know-how? To what extent has bread-making been mobilised as a resource allowing Uyghur society not only to endure colonisation, but also to resist it? This dissertation proposes to answer these questions by combining historical and anthropological approaches to food in colonial contexts. It draws on seven months of fieldwork in China and Türkiye, as well as a cross-analysis of Uyghur, Chinese and Turkish sources. Bread, which Uyghurs refer to by using the Persian word “naan” (Uy.: nan نان), is thus approached as a cultural and political object that can help us situate Uyghur society in different processes, past and present: (1) its development as a Central Asian sedentary society, whose lifeways and social organisation are deeply anchored in peasant agriculture, oasis climatic architecture and Sufi Islam; (2) the Chinese colonisation of East Turkestan, today officially named the Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region, and the progressive transformation of this territory in a settler-colony of the People’s Republic of China; (3) the emergence of practices of endurance and resistance to Chinese settler colonialism in which bread-making and naan have played, and continue to play, a decisive role.