Yining[3] (Chinese: 伊宁), also known as Ghulja (Uyghur: غۇلجا) or Kulja (Kazakh: قۇلجا), is a county-level city in northwestern Xinjiang, China.

Yining's population is primarily Uyghur, Han, Hui, and Kazakh, along with smaller numbers of people of Mongolian, Xibe, Uzbek, Russian, or other ethnicity.

In the 19th and early 20th century, the word Kuldja (from Russian: Кульджа) or Ghulja was often used in Russia and in the West as the name for the entire Chinese part of the Ili River basin as well as for its two main cities.

The usage of 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica is fairly characteristic; it defines Kulja as a "territory in north-west China" bounded by the Russian border and the mountains that surround the Ili basin.

The city and the rest of the Ili River basin were seized by the Russians in 1871 during Yakub Beg's independent rule of Kashgaria.

The Geographical Magazine in 1875 by Sir Clements Robert Markham stated: What little industry Kulja possesses is all due to the Chinese, who transplanted the taste for art, assiduity and skilfulness of their pigtailed race, even to these western outskirts of "the celestial flowery dominion of the Middle."

Had the Taranjis and Kalmuks been left to themselves, or had they remained in a preponderating majority, Kulja would not be a bit farther advanced than either Yarkand or Aksu.

There are, moreover, some confectionaries in which cakes of all shapes are baked of rice and millet, overlaid with sugar; also maccaroni-makers, the Taranjis being notoriously very fond of dried farinaceous food.

In Eastern Turkistan there still exist many similar trades, and although their products are not equal to European articles of the same kind—I mean here the fabrics of the formerly western Chinese provinces— they are still said to be profitable.

In 1997, in what came to be known as the Gulja Incident or massacre, the city was rocked by two days of demonstrations or riots[7] followed by a Chinese Communist Party government crackdown resulting in at least 9 deaths following the execution of 30 Uyghur activists.

Yet the influence of the Dzungarian Alatau to the northwest and Borohoro Mountains to the northeast helps keep the city warmer than more easterly locales on a similar latitude.