Salar
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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| Total population |
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| 104,503 (2000 census) |
| Regions with significant populations |
| China: provinces of Qinghai, Gansu, Xinjiang |
| Languages |
| Religion |
| Related ethnic groups |
| History of Islam in China |
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History |
| Major figures |
|
Lan Yu • Yeheidie'erding |
| Culture |
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Cuisine • Martial arts |
| Cities/Regions |
| Groups |
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Hui • Uygur |
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Salar people (Salar: Salır, Turkic: Salar, Chinese: 撒拉族, Pinyin: Sālāzú) are a Turkic people. Their language belongs to the Oghuz group, along with the Turkish language and Turkmen language.
The Salars are one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China.
The Salar people numbered 104,503 people in the last census of 2000. They live mostly in the Qinghai-Gansu border region, on both sides of the Yellow River, namely in Xunhua Salar Autonomous County (循化撒拉族自治縣) and Hualong Hui Autonomous County (化隆回族自治縣) of Qinghai and the adjacent Jishishan Bonan, Dongxiang and Salar Autonomous County of Gansu. There are also Salars in Xinjiang (in the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture).
The Salar's ancestors were migrating Oghuz Turks who intermarried with Han Chinese, Tibetans, and Hui. They are a patriarchal agricultural society and are Muslims.
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[edit] History
[edit] Origin stories
According to Salar tradition, they are the descendants of the Salyr tribe, belonging to the Turkic Oghuz tribe of the Seljuk Turks. They also claimed to be descendants of Oghuz Khan. The word "Salyr meant "those who wave swords, spears and hammers everywhere". During the Tang Dynasty period, the Salyr tribe dwelt within China's borders - later moving west towards Central Asia.
The two brothers Haraman and Ahman, forefathers of the present day Salar tribe once lived in the Samarkand area. They held a lot of prestige at the local Islamic mosques, thus they gained the jealousy and hatred from the local king and ruling class which led to persecution. To flee from all this, the two brothers along with eighteen members of the same tribe saddled a white camel with their local water, soil, and a koran before heading east to looking for a new place to settle.
The wandering party trekked through the northern route of the Tian Shan mountain ranges into the Jiayuguan pass and passing through the present day Suzhou District, Ganzhou district, Ningxia, Qinzhou District, Gangu County, and eventually stopping at Ganjiatan (within today's Xiahe County).
Later, another forty sympathizers from Samarkand also followed their footsteps - they passed through the southern route of the Tian Shan mountain ranges and entered Qinghai. They journeyed along the Qinghai and Hunan coast into what is now Guide County and twelve of them decided to stay there.
The remaining twenty eight travellers met up with the Haraman group at Ganjiatan, and together they journeyed to today's Xunhua region. However during the night, their camel ran away so they lit a torch to try and track down the camel. The next day they climbed unto a nearby mountain to take a glance at the whole area. They saw that the soil was fertile and that it was a good place to settle.
Shortly after coming down the mountain they discovered spring water and found the lost camel lying beside the water. The people then measured the water and the soil and took note that the weight of the soil was the same as the soil which they had brought from Samarkand.
As a result, these two groups of migrants settled in this Xunhua region. As time progressed, these Samarkand people merged with the local Tibetan, Hui, Han Chinese and Mongolian peoples eventually forming the Salar people of today.
During the time of Genghis Khan's conquest, they were known as the Salyr tribe of Khorasan. One Salyr chief agreed to submit his lieutenants Aqman and Qaraman as mercenaries to the Mongol army.
In this way, these Turkmen Salyrs were spared the destruction which was brought upon the Khwarezmian Empire by the Mongol army. Forty years after Genghis Khan's conquest of Khwarezm, the Salyr lieutenants Aqman and Qaraman also joined the Mongols in the Siege of Diaoyu in Sichuan, a Song Dynasty stronghold.
[edit] Sufism and rebellions
In the 1670s, the Kashgarian Sufi master Āfāq Khoja (and, possibly, his father Muhammad Yūsuf even earlier) preached among the Salars, introducing Sufism into their community.[1] In the mid-18th century, one of Āfāq Khoja's spiritual descendants, Ma Laichi, spread his teaching, known as Khufiyya among the Salars, just as he did among their Chinese-speaking and Tibetan-speaking neighbors.[2]
Throughout the 1760s and 1770s, another Chinese Sufi master, Ma Mingxin, was spreading his version of Sufi teaching, known as Jahriyya throughout the Gansu province (which then included Salar's homeland in today's Qinghai). Many Salars became adherents of Jahriyya, or the "New Teaching", as the Qing government officials dubbed it (in opposition to the "Old Teaching", i.e. both the Khufiyya and the non-Sufi Islam). While the external differences between the Khufiyya and the Jahriyya would look comparatively trivial to an outsider (the two orders were most known for, respectively, the silent or vocal dhikr, i.e. invocation of the name of God), the conflict between their adherents often became violent.[3]
In 1781, the authorities, concerned with the spread of the "subversive" "New Teaching" among the Salars, whom they (perhaps unfairly) viewed as a fierce and troublesome lot, arrested Ma Mingxin and sent an expedition to the Salar community of Xunhua County to round up his supporters there.[4]
The Jahriyya Salars of Xunhua, led by their ahong (imam) nicknamed Su Sishisan ("Su Forty-three", 苏四十三), responded by killing the government officials and destroying their task force at the place called Baizhuangzi, and then rushed across the Hezhou region to the walls of Lanzhou, where Ma Mingxin was imprisoned.[4]
When the besieged officials brought Ma Mingxin, wearing chains, to the Lanzhou city wall, to show him to the rebels, Su's Salars at once showed respect and devotion to their imprisoned leaders. Scared officials took Ma down from the wall, and beheaded him right away. Su's Salars tried attacking the Lanzhou city walls, but, not having any siege equipment, failed to penetrate into the walled city. The Salar fighters (whose strength at the time is estimated by historians to be in 1,000-2,000 range) then set up a fortified camp on a hill south of Lanzhou.[4]
To deal with the rebels, Imperial Commissioners Agui and Heshen were sent to Lanzhou. Unable to dislodge the Salars from their fortified camp with his regular troops, Agui sent the "incompetent" Heshen back to Beijing, and recruited Alashan Mongols and Southern Gansu Tibetans to aid the Chinese Lanzhou garrison. After a three months' siege of the rebel camp and cutting off the Salars' water supply, Agui's joint forces destroyed the Jahriya rebels; Su and all his fighters were all killed in the final battle.[4] Overall, it is said that as much as 40% of their entire population was killed in the revolt.[citation needed]
As late as 1937, a folk ballad was still told by the Salars about the rebellion of 1781, and Su Sishisan suicidal decision to go to war against the Qing Empire.[5]
In the 1880s-90s, sectarian strife was rife in the Salar community of Xunhua again. This time, the conflict was among two factions of the Hua Si menhuan (order) of the Khufiyya, and in 1895 the local Qing officials ended up siding with the reformist faction within the order. Although the factional conflict was evident not only in Salar Xunhua but in Hui Hezhou as well, the troops were first sent to Xunhua - which again precipitated a Salar rebellion, which spread to many Hui and Dongxiang communities of Gansu too.[6]
[edit] Culture
The typical clothing of the Salar very similar to other Muslim peoples in the region. The men are commonly bearded and dress in white shirts and white or black skullcaps.
The young single women are accustomed to dressing in Chinese dress of bright colors. The married women utilize the traditional veil in white or black colors.
They have a musical instrument called the Kouxuan. It is a string instrument manufactured in silver or in copper and only played by the women.
The Salars have been in Qinghai Province, China since the Mongol Yuan period. For centuries they've maintained their Oghuz language remarkably similar to the Turkmen language spoken in the Qaraqum.
However, culturally they have strictly conformed to the Naqshbandi ways of their Hui coreligionists. Therefore many nomadic Turkmen traditions have been lost, and Turkmen music was forbidden. More secular minded Salars have resorted to appropriating Tibetan or Moghol (a Qinghai Mongolic Muslim group) music as their own.
[edit] Language
The Salar language has two large dialect groups. The divergence is due to the fact that one branch was influenced by the Tibetan and Chinese languages, and the other branch by the Uyghur and Kazakh languages.
In the late 1990s, it was estimated that out of the some 89,000 Salars, around 60,000 spoke the Salar language.[7] In addition to Chinese, many Salar also speak Tibetan. Salar is a written language, as Ma et al. (2001) demonstrate, but the written language is rarely used. There are reported similarities with Turkmen.
[edit] Literature
- Lipman, Jonathan Neaman (1998). Familiar strangers: a history of Muslims in Northwest China. Hong Kong University Press. ISBN 9622094686. http://books.google.com/books?id=4_FGPtLEoYQC.
- Tenišev, E.R: Stroj salarskogo âzyka (The structure of the Salar language). Moscow, Nauka 1976).
- Lin Lianyun (林莲云): 汉撒拉、撒拉汉词汇 (Chinese-Salar Salar-Chinese lexicon. Chengdu, People's Press of Sichuan. 1992.
[edit] References
- ^ Lipman (1998), p. 59
- ^ Lipman (1998), p. 67
- ^ Lipman, pp. 103-107
- ^ a b c d Lipman, pp. 107-111
- ^ Lipman, pp. 108-109. His source is Qianlong Sishiliu Nian ("The 46th year of the Qianlong Era") by Wang Shumin, the ethnographer who recorded the ballad in 1937.
- ^ Lipman, pp. 142-143
- ^ Janse, Mark; World, Linguistic Bibliography and the Languages of the; Tol, Sijmen (2003), Janse, Mark; Tol, Sijmen, eds., Language death and language maintenance: theoretical, practical and descriptive approaches. Volume 240 of Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science. Series 4, Current issues in linguistic theory, John Benjamins Publishing Company, ISBN 9027247528, http://books.google.com/books?id=JdzVePSApMgC&pg=PA147
[edit] External links
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Salar people |
- The Salar ethnic minority (Chinese government site)
- Arienne M. Dwyer: Salar Grammatical Sketch (PDF)
- Ma Wei, Ma Jianzhong, and Kevin Stuart, editors. 2001. Folklore of China’s Islamic ` Nationality. Lewiston, Edwin Mellen.
- Ma Quanlin, Ma Wanxiang, and Ma Zhicheng (Kevin Stuart, editor). 1993. Salar Language Materials. Sino-Platonic Papers. Number 43.
- Ma Wei, Ma Jianzhong, and Kevin Stuart. 1999. The Xunhua Salar Wedding. Asian Folklore Studies 58:31-76.
- Ma Jianzhong and Kevin Stuart. 1996. ‘Stone Camels and Clear Springs’: The Salar’s Samarkand Origins. Asian Folklore Studies. 55:2, 287-298.
- Han Deyan (translated by Ma Jianzhong and Kevin Stuart). 1999. The Salar Khazui System. Central Asiatic Journal 43 (2): 204-214.
- Feng Lide and Kevin Stuart. 1991. Ma Xueyi and Ma Chengjun. Salazu Fengsuzhi [Records of Salar Customs]; Han Fude, general editor. Salazu Minjian Gushi [Salar Folktales]; Han Fude, general editor. Minjian Geyao [Folk Songs]; and Han Fude, general editor. Minjian Yanyu [Folk Proverbs]. Asian Folklore Studies. 50:2, 371-373.
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