Dungans

Dungan, Xiao'erjing: ; zh, s=东干族, t=東干族, p=Dōnggān zú, w=Tung¹kan¹-tsu², , Xiao'erjing: ; russian: Дунгане, ''Dungane''; ky, Дуңгандар, ''Duñgandar'', دۇنغاندار; kk, Дүңгендер, ''Düñgender'', دٷڭگەندەر is a term used in territories of the former Soviet Union to refer to a group of Muslim people of Hui origin. Turkic-speaking peoples in Xinjiang Province in Northwestern China also sometimes refer to Hui Muslims as Dungans. In both China and the former Soviet republics where they reside, however, members of this ethnic group call themselves Hui because Dungans are descendants of historical Hui groups that migrated to Central Asia.

In the censuses of the countries of the former Soviet Union, the Dungans (enumerated separately from Chinese) are found in Kazakhstan (36,900 according to the 1999 census), Kyrgyzstan (58,409 according to the 2009 census) and Russia (801 according to the 2002 census).Aleksandr Nikolaevich Alekseenko (Александр Николаевич Алексеенко), "Republic in the Mirror of the Population Census" («Республика в зеркале переписей населения»)
''Sotsiologicheskie Issledovaniia''. 2001, No. 12. pp. 58-62.

History

Migration from China

In the Ferghana Valley, the first Dungans to appear in Central Asia originated from Kuldja and Kashgar, as slaves captured by raiders; they mostly served in private wealthy households. After the Russians conquered Central Asia in the late 19th century and abolished slavery, most female Dungan slaves remained where they had originally been held captive. Russian ethnographer Validimir Petrovich Nalivkin and his wife said that "women slaves almost all remained in place, because they either were married to workers and servants of their former owners or they were too young to begin an independent life". Dungan women slaves were of low status and not regarded highly in Bukhara.

Turkic Muslim slave-raiders from Khoqand did not distinguish between Hui Muslim and Han Chinese, enslaving Hui Muslims in violation of Islamic law. During the Afaqi Khoja revolts Turkic Muslim Khoja Jahangir Khoja led an invasion of Kashgar from the Kokand Khanate and Jahangir's forces captured several hundred Dungan Chinese Muslims (Tungan or Hui) who were taken to Kokand. Tajiks bought two Chinese slaves from Shaanxi; they were enslaved for a year before being returned by the Tajik Beg Ku-bu-te to China. All Dungans captured, both merchants and the 300 soldiers Janhangir captured in Kashgar, had their queues cut off when brought to Kokand and Central Asia as prisoners. It was reported that many of the captives became slaves. Accounts of these slaves in Central Asia increased. The queues were removed from Dungan Chinese Muslim prisoners and then sold or given away. Some of them escaped to Russian territory where they were repatriated back to China and the accounts of their captures were recorded in Chinese records. The Russians record an incident where they rescued these Chinese Muslim merchants who escaped, after they were sold by Jahangir's Army in Central Asia and sent them back to China.

The Dungan in the former Soviet republics are Hui who fled China in the aftermath of the Hui Minorities' War (also known as the "Dungan Rebellion") in the 19th century. According to Rimsky-Korsakoff (1992), three separate groups of the Hui people fled to the Russian Empire across the Tian Shan Mountains during the exceptionally severe winter of 1877/78 after the end of the Hui Minorities' War:
# The first group, of some 1000 people, originally from Turpan in Xinjiang, led by Ma Daren (馬大人, 'the Great Man Ma'), also known as Ma Da-lao-ye (馬大老爺, 'the Great Master Ma'), reached Osh in Southern Kyrgyzstan.
# The second group, originally from Didaozhou (狄道州) in Gansu, led by '' ahong'' Ma Yusuf (馬郁素夫), also known as Ah Ye Laoren (阿爺老人, 'the Old Man O'Granpa'), were settled in the spring of 1878 in the village of Yrdyk (russian: Ирдык or Ырдык) some 15 km from Karakol in Eastern Kyrgyzstan. They numbered 1130 on arrival.
# The third group, originally from Shaanxi, led by Bai Yanhu (白彦虎; also spelt Bo Yanhu; often called by his followers "虎大人", 'The Great Man Hu (Tiger)', 1829(?)-1882), one of the leaders of the rebellion, were settled in the village of Karakunuz (now Masanchi), in modern Zhambyl Province of Kazakhstan. It is 8 km north from the city Tokmak in northwestern Kyrgyzstan. This group numbered 3314 on arrival. Bai Yanhu's name in other romanizations was Bo-yan-hu or Pai Yen-hu; other names included Boyan-akhun ( Akhund or Imam Boyan) and Muhammad Ayyub.

The next wave of immigration followed in the early 1880s. In accordance with the terms of the Treaty of Saint Petersburg (1881), which required the withdrawal of the Russian troops from the Upper Ili Basin (the Kulja area), the Dungan (Hui) and Taranchi ( Uyghur) people of the region were allowed to opt for moving to the Russian side of the border. Many chose that option; according to Russian statistics, 4,682 Hui moved to the Russian Empire under the treaty. They migrated in many small groups between 1881 and 1883, settling in the village of Sokuluk some 30 km west of Bishkek, as well as in a number of locations between the Chinese border and Sokuluk, in Southeastern Kazakhstan and in Northern Kyrgyzstan.

Name

In the Russian Empire, Soviet Union, and the post-Soviet states, the Dungans continue to refer to themselves as the ''Hui people'' (, Huízú; in Cyrillic Soviet Dungan spelling, xуэйзў).

The name ''Dungan'' is of obscure origin. One popular theory derives this word from Turkic ''döñän'' ("one who turns"), which can be compared to Chinese 回 (huí), which has a similar meaning. Another theory derives it from the Chinese 东甘 (Dong Gan), 'Eastern Gansu', the region to which many of the Dungan can trace their ancestry; however the character ''gan'' (干) used in the name of the ethnic group is different from that used in the name of the province (甘).

The term "Dungan" ("Tonggan", "Donggan") has been used by Central Asian Turkic-and Tajik-speaking people to refer to Chinese-speaking Muslims for several centuries. Joseph Fletcher cites Turkic and Persian manuscripts related to the preaching of the 17th century Kashgarian Sufi master Muhammad Yūsuf (or, possibly, his son Afaq Khoja) inside the Ming Empire (in today's Gansu and/or Qinghai), where the Kashgarian preacher is told to have converted ulamā-yi Tunganiyyān'' (i.e., "Dungan ulema") into Sufism.. Lipman's source is: Joseph Fletcher, "The Naqshbandiya in Northwest China", in

Presumably, it was from the Turkic languages that the term was borrowed into Russian (дунгане, ''dungane'' (pl.); дунганин, ''dunganin'' (sing.)) and Chinese (), as well as to Western European languages.

In English and German, the ethnonym "Dungan", in various spelling forms, was attested as early as the 1830s, sometimes typically referring to the Hui people of Xinjiang. For example, James Prinsep in 1835 mentions Muslim "Túngánis" in "Chinese Tartary". In 1839, Karl Ernst von Baer in his German-language account of Russian Empire and adjacent Asian lands has a one-page account of Chinese-speaking Muslim "Dungani" or "Tungani", who had visited Orenburg in 1827 with a caravan from China; he also mentions "Tugean" as a spelling variant used by other authors. R.M. Martin in 1847 mentions "Tungani" merchants in Yarkand.

The word (mostly in the form "Dungani" or "Tungani", sometimes "Dungens" or "Dungans") acquired some currency in English and other western languages when a number of books in the 1860-1870s discussed the Dungan Rebellion in Northwestern China. At the time, one could see European and American authors apply the term ''Tungani'' to the Hui people both in Xinjiang,
and in Shaanxi and Gansu (which at the time included today's Ningxia and Qinghai as well). Authors aware of the general picture of the spread of Islam in China, viewed these "Tungani" as just one of the groups of China's Muslims.

Marshall Broomhall, who has a chapter on "the Tungan Rebellion" in his 1910 book, introduces "the name Tungan or Dungan, by which the Muslims of these parts .e., NE Chinaare designated, in contradistinction as the Chinese Buddhists who are spoken of as Kithay"; the reference to " Khitay" shows that he was viewing the two terms as used by Turkic speakers. Broomhall's book also contains a translation of the report on Chinese Muslims by the Ottoman writer named Abd-ul-Aziz. Abd-ul-Aziz divides the "Tungan people" into two branches: "the Tunagans of China proper" (including, apparently all Hui people in "China proper", as he also talks e.g. about the Tungans having 17 mosques in Beijing), and "The Tungans of Chinese and Russian Turkestan", who still look and speak Chinese, but have often also learned the "Turkish" language.

Later authors continued to use the term Dungan (in various transcriptions) for, specifically, the Hui people of Xinjiang.
For example, Owen Lattimore, writing c. 1940, maintains the terminological distinction between these two related groups: "T'ungkan" (i.e. Wade-Giles for "Dungan"), described by him as the descendants of the Gansu Hui people resettled in Xinjiang in 17-18th centuries, vs. e.g. "Gansu Moslems" or generic "Chinese Moslems". The term (usually as "Tungans") continues to be used by many modern historians writing about the 19th century Dungan Rebellion (e.g., by Denis C. Twitchett in The Cambridge History of China, by James A. Millward in his economic history of the region, or by Kim Ho-dong in his monograph).

Dungan villages in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan

The Dungans themselves referred to Karakunuz (russian: Каракунуз, sometimes Караконыз or Караконуз) as Ingpan (, Yingpan; russian: Иньпан), which means 'a camp, an encampment'. In 1965, Karakunuz was renamed Masanchi (sometimes spelt as "Masanchin"), after Magaza Masanchi or Masanchin (Dungan: Магәзы Масанчын; ), a Dungan participant in the Communist Revolution and a Soviet Kazakhstan statesman.

The following table summarizes location of Dungan villages in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, alternative names used for them, and their Dungan population as reported by Ma Tong (2003). The Cyrillic Dungan spelling of place names is as in the textbook by Sushanlo, Imazov (1988); the spelling of the name in Chinese character is as in Ma Tong (2003).
}; kk, Масаншы) or Masanchin (Russian: Масанчин; Cyrillic Dungan: Масанчын; 馬三成), prior to 1965 Karakunuz (Каракунуз, Караконыз). Traditional Dungan name is Ingpan (Cyrillic Dungan: Йинпан; Russian: Иньпан; , Yingpan)
, () Korday District, Jambyl Region of Kazakhstan (8 km north of Tokmok, Kyrgyzstan)
, Spring 1878. 3314 people from Shaanxi, led by Bai Yanhu (白彦虎).
, 7,000, current mayor: Iskhar Yusupovich Lou
, -
, Sortobe ( kk, Sortobe; russian: Шортюбе, Shortyube; dng, Щёртюбе; , Xinqu)
, () Korday District, Jambyl Region. On the northern bank of the river Chu opposite and a few km downstream from Tokmok; south of Masanchi (Karakunuz)
, (Karakunuz group)
, 9,000
, -
, Zhalpak-tobe, ( kk, Жалпак-тобе; , Jiaerpakeqiubai)
, Jambyl District, Jambyl Region; near Grodekovo, south of Taraz
,
, 3,000
, -
! colspan="4", Kyrgyzstan - total 50,000 (Ma Tang (2003)
, -
, Yrdyk (; dng, Эрдэх; , Erdaogou)
, () Jeti-Ögüz District of Issyk-Kul Region; 15 km south-west from Karakol.
, Spring 1878. 1130 people, originally from Didaozhou (狄道州) in Gansu, led by Ma Yusu (馬郁素), a.k.a. Ah Yelaoren (阿爺老人).
, 2,800
, -
, Sokuluk (; Dungan: Сохўлў; , Saohulu); may also include adjacent Aleksandrovka (Александровка)
, Sokuluk District of Chüy Region; 30 km west of Bishkek
, Some of those 4,628 Hui people who arrived in 1881-1883 from the Ili Basin (Xinjiang) .
, 12,000
, -
, Milyanfan (; dng, Милёнчуан; , Miliangchuan)
, Ysyk-Ata District of Chüy Region. Southern bank of the Chu River

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