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 (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
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. 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),As per Ma Tong (2003) 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 ( 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. 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 to move to the Russian side of the border. Many chose to do so; according to Russian statistics, 4,682 Hui moved to the Russian Empire under the terms of 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 'Eastern Gansu' (, donggan), 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" ("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 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".James Prinsep, "Memoir on Chinese Tartary and Khoten". The Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, No. 48, December 1835. P. 655.On Google BooksPrinsep's article is also available in "The Chinese Repository", 1843, p. 234 On Google Books. A modern (2003) reprint is available, . 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.Karl Ernst von Baer, Grigoriĭ Petrovich Gelʹmersen. "Beiträge zur Kenntniss des russischen Reiches und der angränzenden Länder Asiens". Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1839. p. 91. On Google Books R.M. Martin in 1847 mentions "Tungani" merchants in Yarkand.Robert Montgomery Martin, "China; political, commercial, and social; an official report". 1847. p.19. On Internet Archive
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, European and American authors applied the term Tungani to the Hui people both in Xinjiang,For example, Thomas Edward Gordon writes of "Tunganis" with taifu wall pieces (small cannons) guarding the walls of Yaqub Beg's capital Kashgar (in today's Western Xinjiang) in his book The roof of the world: being a narrative of a journey over the high plateau of Tibet to the Russian frontier and the Oxus sources on Pamir. A Times journalist in "Russia and China in Central Asia" (reprinted by The Brisbane Courier, Wednesday 8 January 1879) distinguishes "the Tungan Country" (today, eastern Xinjiang) and "Eastern Turkestan" (corresponding to Yaqub Beg's state in today's western Xinjiang). He talks about "the Tungani who had erected in the various cities of Hamil, Barkul, Guchen, Urumtsi, and Manas a confederacy of no mean power". 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.See e.g. an anonymous article, "Mohammedanism in China", in The Living age, Volume 145, Issue 1876. 29 May 1880. Pp. 515–525. Reprinted from the Edinburgh Review. While using "Mohammedans" as the generic description of Chinese Muslim's throughout the article (including e.g., the Panthays then recently rebelling in Yunnan), the author describes "[a]n insurrection, beginning in Singan-fu, and spreading to Kan-suh in 1862, in which the Tungani (a mysterious race of Muslims dwelling in that region, supposed to be the remnant of the armies of Kublai Khan) were the chief actors" (p. 524).
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 [i.e., NE China] 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.. A 1966 reprint by Paragon Book Reprint is available. Relatedly, the Russian word for China is also Kitai (), and in Chinese it is kitaitsy (), a label that is not applied to the Dungans ( in an ethnic sense; that is, Dungans and kitaitsi (Chinese) were regarded as different ethnic groups or nationalities. 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 looked and spoke Chinese, but had 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 the 17th–18th centuries, vs. e.g. "Gansu Moslems" or generic "Chinese Moslems".Owen Lattimore. Inner Asian Frontiers of China. Page 183 in the 1951 edition. 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,. Twitchett's definition (p. 215) is in line with the authors of 1870s–1880s, rather than with that of more recent Lattimore: for Twitchett, "Tungans" include the Huis of Shaanxi and Gansu as well, not just of Xinjiang 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 (, sometimes Караконыз or Караконуз) as "Ingpan" (, Yingpan; ), 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 statesman of Soviet Kazakhstan.
The following table summarizes the 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 characters is as in Ma Tong (2003).