Tag: #FOWC

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Small Countries A-Z

I like big globes and I cannot lie. Still can’t remember the capital of Uganda, though. Kajmeister photo of Kajmeister.

Somehow, I missed the memo on Nunavut, and my globe ended up broken. However, there is a silver lining. We all get to learn some geography.

During April 2026, I completed an A-Z blog post challenge and in this post I would like to share the post links and tell the story of why I chose this theme. As a quick intro, let me note that the A-Z challenge, created in 2010 by J. Lenni Dorner and friends, encourages bloggers to write 26 posts using letters of the alphabet. People interpret this different ways, but my approach has been to pick a single theme, then write the posts daily during the month of April. The hard part is always Q, J, Z, and X. I cheated on X; I’ll warn you in advance.

I wasn’t sure if I was up to the challenge for this, my seventh year in a row. I learned a lot from previous years, and it kick-started a book-writing career for me: Olympics, Accounting, Silk Road, didn’t we have fun on Ancient Inventions in 2025? You can even peruse prior years in my top menu, under “Books & A to Z.” This year time was scarce; I was partly doing people’s taxes, writing a book, and then cruising around the Panama Canal. I decided, nevertheless, to take the plunge, pledged to shorten them, and keep them thematic: Small Countries.

Who could resist writing about Panama while going through Panama?

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X is for Xinjiang

Not a sovereign state (country), Xinjiang is still huge, bigger than Texas, California, Nevada, and Minnesota combined. Wikipedia photo.

Fast Facts

  • Named for: The full name is the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR)
  • Capital: Ürümqi
  • Long/Lat: 41 N/85 E, about 13 hours or 7000 mi from CV to the Taklmakan Desert, going west.
  • Population: 25,890,000 or 1.3 million CVs
  • Size: 642,000 sq mi or 10x CVs
  • Avg temp in April: 55 F/15 C (mountainous)
  • Median household income: $10,000 GDP/per capita but income???
  • Ethnicity: 44% Uygur/42% Han
  • Main industries: Agriculture, mining for natural resources

At the end of the alphabet, there seem to be a lot of wiggling and hedging. I am chagrined that I had to include non-UN members, countries not really independent, and now this X. Xinjiang is not a country–not even disputed as a country–but simply a region within China. There is a dispute, but we’ll get to that. It’s simply that there are no countries beginning with an “X,” so either it was live with this region, skip the letter, spell names in Catalan (which uses X), or choose a different theme. I’ll take the penalty point and move on.

At over 640,000 sq mi, Xinjiang would be the 16th largest country in the world. It’s bigger than Texas, California, Nevada, and Minnesota combined. At nearly 26 million people, it’s the 60th largest in population, which is more people than Florida. If it were a country, it would dwarf the rest of the Small Countries on my list. (I wonder if it would be bigger than all combined–let’s see, if I put them all in a spreadsheet to add their populations and …nahhh.)

However, Xinjiang has an interesting status. It was designated as the autonomous region of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR) back in 1955. A brisk walk through the history before and after that will remind us of what boundary states are about, even those giant regions within a giant country.

Historically, Xinjiang spread across a wide basin–the Tarim basin–ringed by a series of mountains, Tian Shan to the north and Kunlun to the south. Scholars are careful to note that Xinjiang was not simply a partial stop on the Silk Road, but the road passed through it, which was its claim to worldwide fame.

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W is for Western Sahara

Fast Facts

  • Named for: Part of the Sahara. The Western part.
  • Capital: hard to say
  • Long/Lat: 25 N/13 W, 6000 miles and 13 hours east of Castro Valley
  • Population: 565,000 or 8.5 CVs
  • Size: 105,000 sq mi or 5800 CVs (sparsely populated)
  • Avg temp in April: 77 F/25 C
  • Median household income: GDP per capita is $2,500 but doesn’t necessarily go to the locals.
  • Ethnicity: Berbers
  • Main industries: Fishing. Phosphates. Sustainable energy if Morocco could get in there and build the wind farms.

Western Sahara thinks itself a country. Morocco doesn’t. The border is disputed, as in is there even a border? The indigenous people, the Sahrawis of Western Sahara, think so. The Moroccan don’t, which is why they’ve laid berms–land mines–along one section. We’re in “W” and the world is still cray cray.

Today, technically, Western Sahara is not a country, although it was once. When I was in the 6th grade and memorizing the countries of Africa (see my A-Z inaugural post), it was called Spanish Sahara. Very colonizer-forward. That’s the legacy, of Africa being carved up by the Europeans, after the Islamic Empire carved up Europe and North Africa, and after the Romans carved up Europe, Africa, and Asia, and after Alexander carved up… A country’s borders have always been about the weaponry and the exploitable resources within.

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