Dungan people

The Dungans (Chinese 東干族, pinyin dōng gān zú; Russian Дунгане) are a Muslim-Chinese minority living mainly in the Central Asian successor states of the Soviet Union. Their language, a Chinese dialect, is Dungan (東干語); the two main dialects are the Gansu and Shaanxi dialects. There are about 110,000 Dungans worldwide.

Origin of the ethnic groups

The term "Dungans" is now used for Hui Chinese who have left China and live in Central Asia. It seems to be primarily a foreign term for these population groups (see origin of term), which has since developed into a name in its own right. Before the founding of the People's Republic, the term was also used in part for the Hui within China.

Dungans are found particularly in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, with smaller minorities also living in Uzbekistan and Russia. The ancestors of these groups were Hui Chinese who fled China during the Muslim uprisings in the 1970s and 1980s. Dungans are predominantly of Han Chinese origin with a common religion, Islam.

Isolation from the centers of Islam also led to deviations in religious practices.

Dungan restaurant in Bishkek

Hui riots of the 19th/20th century

On the circumstances that led to emigration from China in the 19th century:

In 1818, 1834-1840 and 1855-1873, the Muslims in Yunnan rose up. The uprising, triggered by economic rivalry between Han Chinese and Muslim workers, was bloodily put down (the so-called Panthay Rebellion), with a million people losing their lives. Then, from 1862 to 1878, the so-called "Dungan uprisings" against Chinese rule occurred in the provinces of Shaanxi, Gansu, and Xinjiang, paralleling the Hodja uprising in Kashgaria (see Jakub Bek), temporarily creating independent territories and ultimately claiming an estimated 10 million lives. The following decade saw increased emigration of Muslims to the Tsarist Empire.

The suppression of these uprisings reinforced the tendency to create separate residential quarters and to practice occupations typical of these ethnic groups. Around 1937, there was renewed unrest among the Hui in Gansu, under Ma Zhongying (马仲英), which threatened to spread to Xinjiang as well.