Dungan people
Dungan is a term used in territories of the former Soviet Union to refer to a group of Muslims of Hui origin. Turkic-speaking peoples in Xinjiang also sometimes refer to Hui Muslims as Dungans. The Dungans in Central Asia, however, refer themselves by their endonym Hui.
In the censuses of the countries of the former Soviet Union, the Dungans are found in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia.
History
Migration from China
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 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. 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 in the 19th century. According to Rimsky-Korsakoff, 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, also known as Ma Da-lao-ye, reached Osh in Southern Kyrgyzstan.
- The second group, originally from Didaozhou in Gansu, led by ahong Ma Yusuf, also known as Ah Ye Laoren, were settled in the spring of 1878 in the village of Yrdyk some 15 km from Karakol in Eastern Kyrgyzstan. They numbered 1130 on arrival.
- The third group, originally from Shaanxi, led by Bai Yanhu ', 1829, one of the leaders of the rebellion, were settled in the village of Karakunuz, in modern Zhambyl Province of Kazakhstan. 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 and Muhammad Ayyub.
Name
In the Russian Empire, Soviet Union, and the post-Soviet states, the Dungans continue to refer to themselves as the Hui people.The name Dungan is of obscure origin. One popular theory derives this word from Turkic döñän, which can be compared to Chinese 回, which has a similar meaning. Another theory derives it from 'Eastern Gansu', the region to which many of the Dungan can trace their ancestry; however the character gan used in the name of the ethnic group is different from that used in the name of the province.
The term "Dungan" 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 inside the Ming Empire, where the Kashgarian preacher is told to have converted 'ulamā-yi Tunganiyyān into Sufism.
Presumably, it was from the Turkic languages that the term was borrowed into Russian ; дунганин, dunganin ) and Chinese, as well as to Western European languages.
File:Zerrspiegel-Taifurchi-shooting-exercises-i125.jpg|thumb|left|Caption: "Shooting exercises of taifurchi . Dungans and Kashgar Chinese". A French engraving from the Yaqub Beg's state period
In English and German, the ethnonym "Dungan", in various spellings, has been attested as early as the 1830s, typically referring to the Hui people of Xinjiang. For example, James Prinsep in 1835 mentioned 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 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 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, European and American authors applied the term Tungani to the Hui people both in Xinjiang,
and in Shaanxi and Gansu. 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 are designated, as distinguished from the Chinese Buddhists who were spoken of as Kithay." The reference to "Kithay" shows that he was observing 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", and "The Tungans of Chinese and Russian Turkestan", who still looked and spoke Chinese, but had often also learned the "Turkish" language.
Later authors continued to use the term Dungan 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", 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 continues to be used by many modern historians writing about the 19th century Dungan Rebellion.
Dungan villages in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan
The Dungans themselves referred to Karakunuz as "Ingpan", which means 'a camp, an encampment'. In 1965, Karakunuz was renamed Masanchi, after Magaza Masanchi or Masanchin, a Dungan participant in the Communist Revolution and a statesman of Soviet Kazakhstan.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. The Cyrillic Dungan spelling of place names is as in the textbook by Sushanlo, Imazov ; the spelling of the name in Chinese characters is as in Ma Tong.
The position of the Kazakhstan villages within the administrative division of Jambyl Region, and the total population of each village can be found at the provincial statistics office web site.
Besides the traditionally Dungan villages, many Dungan people live in the nearby cities, such as Bishkek, Tokmok, Karakol.
Soviet rule
During World War II, some Dungans served in the Red Army, one of them who was a Dungan war "hero" who led a "mortar battery".Reportedly, Dungans were "strongly anti-Japanese". During the 1930s, a White Russian driver for Nazi German agent Georg Vasel in Xinjiang was afraid to meet Hui general Ma Zhongying, saying: "You know how the Tungans hate the Russians." Vasel passed the Russian driver off as a German.
Present day
As Ding notes, "he Dungan people derive from China's Hui people, and now live mainly in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Their population is about 110,000. This people have now developed a separate ethnicity outside China, yet they have close relations with the Hui people in culture, ethnic characteristics and ethnic identity." Today the Dungans play a role as cultural "shuttles" and economic mediators between Central Asia and the Chinese world. Husei Daurov, the president of the Dungan center, has succeeded in transforming cultural exchanges into commercial partnerships.In February 2020, a conflict broke out between ethnic Kazakhs and Dungans in the Korday area in Kazakhstan, near the border with Kyrgyzstan. According to official Kazakh sources, 10 people were killed and many more were wounded. In the altercation, cars and homes were burned and rifles were fired. 600 people fled across the border to Kyrgyzstan.
Language
The Dungan language, which the Dungan people call the "Hui language", is similar to the Zhongyuan dialect of Mandarin Chinese, which is widely spoken in the south of Gansu and the west of Guanzhong in Shaanxi in China.Like other varieties of Chinese, Dungan is tonal. There are two main dialects, one with four tones and the other, considered standard, with three tones in the final position in words and four tones in the non-final position.
Some Dungan vocabulary may sound archaic to Chinese people. For example, they refer to a President as an "Emperor" and call government offices yamen, a term for mandarins' offices in ancient China. Their language also contains many loanwords from Russian, Arabic, Persian and Turkic. Since the 1940s, the language has been written in Cyrillic script, though the language has historically also used Chinese characters and Xiao'erjing, though these are now considered obsolete.
Dungan people are generally multilingual. In addition to Dungan Chinese, more than two-thirds of the Dungan speak Russian and a small proportion can speak Kyrgyz or other languages belonging to the titular nationalities of the countries where they live.