This paper will explore the interplay of hagiography and documentary sources in constructing a narrative personality from the world of Sufism to accompany a prominent shrine. It centers on a largely unstudied Chaghatay Turkic hagiographical text, compiled at the end of the eighteenth century, about a saint called Zayn al D?n Q?ghr?q?, whose shrine, known as that of “?a?rat i Mull?m,” was prominent near the town of K?shghar, in Eastern Turkist?n (i.e., Xinjiang in the P.R.C). The work’s author, a certain Mu?ammad ?Abd al ?Al? of K?shghar, creates a hagiographical narrative that appears largely formulaic and paradigmatic, with a minimum of ‘life-specific’ content. He hangs the narrative, rather, on a set of legitimizing elements with special local resonance: the saint is linked genealogically with the Islamizing ruler-saint Sat?q Bughr? Kh?n, and with a prominent Naqshband? shaykh of the fifteenth century; he is identified as an Uvays? saint (i.e., one with no living master), a frequently-evoked legitimizing motif for shrine-saints of Eastern Turkist?n, but is nevertheless linked initiatically with the ‘founding’ saints of the Yasav? and Naqshband? lineages; he is linked in a reciprocal sainthood/patronage relationship with a prominent local ruler of the 15th century; and he is also portrayed sanctifying the site of his shrine by making the Ka?ba appear there. Although the author clearly signals the priority of the shrine, rather than the saint, in inspiring the work, he also appeals (in different ways) to the evidentiary authority of three types of written sources—an earlier hagiography, a genealogy affirming sayyid-status, and a waqf?ya drawn up for a ruler—in order to locate the shrine’s saint in the social context of Sufism’s initiatic, hereditary, and social components. The work thus focuses on a shrine linked with a saint who may have had only tenuous links with an actual Sufi community, but it can nevertheless reveal interesting aspects of late eighteenth-century expectations regarding what a Sufi life should look like. The recent re-identification of shrines in this region by local scholars suggest the ongoing relevance of creating an updated narrative, and a new identity, for the ‘inhabitant’ of a prominent shrine.