Aksai Chin is a region administered by China partly in He'an County and Hekang County of Hotan Prefecture, Xinjiang, and partly in Rutog County of Ngari Prefecture, Tibet, and constituting the easternmost portion of the larger Kashmir region that has been the subject of a dispute between India and China since 1959. China administers the region and claims it as part of the Xinjiang and Tibet autonomous regions. India meanwhile claims it as part of Leh district in the union territory of Ladakh.

Aksai Chin was first mentioned by Muhammad Amin, the Yarkandi guide of the Schlagintweit brothers, who were contracted in 1854 by the British East India Company to explore Central Asia. Amin explained its meaning as "the great white sand desert". Linguist George van Driem states that the name intended by Amin was Aqsai Chöl (Uyghur: ﺋﺎﻗﺴﺎﻱ چۆل; Cyrillic: ақсай чөл) which could mean "white ravine desert" or "white coomb desert". The word chöl for desert seems to have been corrupted in English transliteration into "chin".

Some sources have interpreted Aksai to have the Uyghur meaning "white stone desert", including several British colonial, modern Western, Chinese, and Indian sources. Some modern sources interpret it to mean "white brook" instead. At least one source interprets Aksai to mean "eastern" in the Yarkandi Uyghur dialect.

The word "Chin" was taken to mean "China" by some Chinese, Western, and Indian sources. At least one source takes it to mean "pass". Other sources omit "Chin" in their interpretations. Van Driem states that there is no Uyghur word resembling "chin" for China.

Amin's Aksai Chin was not a defined region, stretching indefinitely east into Tibet south of the Kunlun Mountains. In 1895, the British envoy to Kashgar told the Chinese Taotai that Aksai Chin was a "loose name for an ill-defined, elevated tableland", part of which lay in Indian and part in Chinese territory.

The current meaning of the term is the area under dispute between India and China, having evolved in repeated usage since Indian independence in 1947.

Because of its 5,000-metre (16,000 ft) elevation, the desolation of Aksai Chin meant that it had no human importance. However, for military purposes the region was strategically important, as it lay on the only year-round passable route between the Tarim Basin and Tibet.

Ladakh was conquered in 1842 by the armies of Raja Gulab Singh (Dogra) under the suzerainty of the Sikh Empire. The British defeat of the Sikhs in 1846 resulted in the transfer of the Jammu and Kashmir region including Ladakh to the British, who then installed Gulab Singh as the Maharaja under their suzerainty. The British appointed a boundary commission headed by Alexander Cunningham to determine the boundaries of the state. Chinese and Tibetan officials were invited to jointly demarcate the border, but they did not show any interest. The British boundary commissioners fixed the southern part of the boundary up to the Chang Chenmo Valley, but regarded the area north of it as terra incognita.