The Salar people, also called Salır Turkmens or Salır Turks are a Turkic ethnic minority in China who speak Salar, a Turkic language of the Oghuz sub-branch. They numbered 165,159 people in 2020, according to that year's national census.
The Salars live mostly in the Qinghai–Gansu border region, on both sides of the Yellow River, namely in Xunhua Salar Autonomous County and Hualong Hui Autonomous County of Qinghai and the adjacent Jishishan Bonan, Dongxiang and Salar Autonomous County of Gansu. There are also Salars in some parts of Henan and Shanxi, as well as in northern Xinjiang, in the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture. They are a patriarchal agricultural society and predominantly Muslim.
History Origin According to Salar tradition and Chinese chronicles, the Salars are the descendants of the Salur tribe, belonging to the Oghuz Turk tribe of the Western Turkic Khaganate. During the Tang dynasty, the Salur tribe moved within China's borders and have lived since then in the Qinghai-Gansu border region. Over the centuries, they mixed with neighboring Tibetans, Hui, Han Chinese and Dongxiangs, developing the distinctive modern Salar language and culture.
Islamic legend According to a legend, two brothers named Haraman and Ahman, possibly forefathers of the present day Salar tribe, lived in the Samarkand area. They were highly ranked at local Islamic mosques, which led to persecution from local rulers. The two brothers fled along with eighteen members of the tribe on a white camel with water, soil and a Quran before heading east. The group trekked through the northern route of the Tian Shan range into the Jiayu Pass, passing through what is now Gansu (Jiuquan, Ganzhou, Zhangye; Ningxia, Qinzhou, Tianshui, and Gangu County), eventually stopping at the present Xiahe County. Later, another forty people from Samarkand joined the group. The group passed through the southern route of the Tian Shan and entered Qinghai. They arrived at the present Guide County and twelve of them settled there.
The Quran the two brothers brought on their journey to China is to this day still preserved in Xunhua Salar Autonomous County at Jiezi Grand Mosque in Haidong, Qinghai. The Nanjing Museum has repaired the Quran to protect it from decaying.
Ming dynasty The Salar clan leaders voluntarily capitulated to the Ming dynasty around 1370. The chief of the four upper clans around this time was Han Baoyuan and the Ming government granted him office of centurion, it was at this time the people of his four clans took Han as their surname. The other chief, Han Shanba, of the four lower Salar clans got the same office from the Ming government and his clans were the ones who took Ma as their surname. (Volume 51, Issue 4 of new series, American Philosophical Society Volume 51, Part 4 of Transactions Series Volume 51, Part 4 of Transactions of the American Philosophical Society new ser v. 51, no. 4) (Original from the University of California) The ethnogenesis of the Salar started from when they pledged allegiance to the Ming dynasty under their leader Han Bao. Han Bao's father was Omar and Omar's father was Haraman, who led the Salars on their journey from Central Asia to China.
According to Salar oral history, Tibetan women were the original wives of the first Salars to arrive in the Qinghai region. Supposedly, they were only permitted to marry the women after a compromise between the Tibetan ruler of Wimdo Valley and the newcomers. He demanded that the Salars install prayer flags, which are a Tibetan Buddhist practice, on the four corners of their homes, that they pray with prayer wheels with mantras on them, and to bow before statues of Buddhas. The Salars initially refused the demands based on their religion but eventually compromised on the flags by placing stones on the corners of their houses instead, which is still practiced to this day. For this reason, Salars are often bilingual in Amdo Tibetan and the two groups often use the term "maternal uncle" to refer each other, referencing the Salars' Tibetan ancestry. Many Salar customs and practices have been influenced by Tibetan culture and there are numerous Tibetan loanwords in the Salar language.
In eastern Qinghai and Gansu, there were cases of Tibetan women who remained Buddhists while marrying Hui men; they had sons who would be Buddhist or Muslim. The Buddhist sons became lamas while the other sons were Muslims. The Kargan Tibetans, who live next to the Salar, have mostly become Muslim due to their influence.
Hui and Salar often intermarry due to their cultural similarities and shared religion, especially after the Ming Dynasty established control over the Xunhua Salars in 1370 and gave control to Hezhou officials. Many Hezhou Hui began to migrate to the region afterwards On the other hand, there are comparatively few Han-Salar marriages. The Salars do use Han surnames, however. Compared to Salar men, few Salar women married outside; the sole exception is Hui men taking Salar women as their wives while Tibetan women make up the majority of the spouses of Salar men who marry outside their ethnicity and it has been reported that Salars have a total avoidance of marriages with Han. As a result, Salars are heavily mixed with other ethnicities.
Salars in Qinghai live on both the northern and southern banks of the Yellow River; northern Salars are called Hualong or Bayan Salars while southern Salars are called Xunhua Salars. The northern region is a mix between discontinuous Salar and Tibetan villages while the southern region is more solidly Salar, as the Hui and Salars pushed out the Tibetans prior.
After moving in, the Salars originally practiced the same Gedimu variant of Sunni Islam as the Hui did and adopted Hui practices, such as Hui Islamic educational practices, which were derived from Yuan Dynasty era Arabic and Persian primers. One such Salar primer was called the "Book of Diverse Studies" ().
Salars were often multilingual, having knowledge of Salar, Mongol, Chinese, Tibetan due to historically trading on the Yellow River in Ningxia and Lanzhou in Gansu. The Salars were permitted an enormous amount of autonomy and self-rule by the Ming dynasty, which gave them command of taxes, military and the courts. The Ming and Qing dynasties often mobilized Salars into their militaries as soldiers, with the Ming government recruiting them at 17 different times for service and the Qing government at 5 different times.
Qing dynasty In the 1670s, the Kashgarian Sufi master Āfāq Khoja (and possibly his father Muhammad Yūsuf) preached to the Salars and introduced Sufism into their community. In the mid-18th century, one of Āfāq Khoja's spiritual descendants, Ma Laichi, began to spread his teachings, known as Khufiyya among the Salars, as well among their Chinese-speaking and Tibetan-speaking neighbors.
The Kangxi Emperor incited anti-Muslim sentiment among the Mongols of Qinghai in order to gain support against the Dzungar Oirat Mongol leader Galdan. Kangxi claimed that Chinese Muslims inside China, such as Turkic Muslims in Qinghai, were plotting with Galdan, who he claimed had turned his back on Buddhism and the Dalai Lama in favor of Islam. According to Kangxi, Galdan was plotting to invade in conspiracy with Chinese Muslims and wished to install a Muslim as ruler of China. By contrast, under Qianlong Emperor, he had a more appeasing policy toward the Turkic Muslims in Qinghai, including recruiting them for the conquest of Dzungaria later on; many Salars, largely under the Hui umbrella, took part in the Dzungar genocide, in which Salars, alongside the Karluk Uyghurs, openly massacred en masse the Dzungars, as well as the other nomads like Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, as well as serving under the Qing banner in the First Sino–Kazakh War.
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 Sufi order and the non-Sufi Gedimu 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.
Sectarian violence between the Jahriyya and Khufiyya broke out repeatedly until the major episode of violence in 1781. 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. In the Jahriyya revolt sectarian violence between two suborders of the Naqshbandi Sufis, the Jahriyya Sufi Muslims and their rivals, the Khafiyya Sufi Muslims, led to a Jahriyya Sufi Muslim rebellion which the Qing dynasty in China crushed with the help of the Khafiyya Sufi Muslims.
The Jahriyya Salars of Xunhua, led by their ahong (imam) nicknamed Su Sishisan ("Su Forty-three", ), 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. 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. Some Han Chinese, Hui and Dongxiang (Santa) joined the Salar in the rebellion against the Qing.
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 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. Overall, it is said that as much as 40% of their entire population was killed in the revolt.
As late as 1937, a folk ballad was still told by the Salars about the rebellion of 1781 and Su Sishisan's suicidal decision to go to war against the Qing Empire.
The Qing government deported some of the Salar Jahriyya rebels to the Ili valley which is in modern-day Xinjiang. Today, a community of a few thousand Salars speaking a distinct dialect of Salar still live there. Salar migrants from Amdo (Qinghai) came to settle the region as religious exiles, migrants and as soldiers enlisted in the Qing army to fight rebels in Ili, often following the Hui. The distinctive dialect of the Ili Salar differs from the other Salar dialects because the neighboring Kazakh and Uyghur languages in Ili influenced it. The Ili Salar population numbers around 4,000 people. There have been instances of misunderstanding between speakers of Ili Salar and Qinghai Salar due to the divergence of the dialects. The differences between the two dialect result in a "clear isogloss".