“China my motherland, you are far, far away. As are my brothers and sisters, whom I never see…” In his courtyard in Kazakhstan’s Masanchi Village, Suahunov Dau, a 60-something Dunganese poet, recites his self-penned verse in a strong Shaanxi accent. When he is finished, his eyes gaze in the direction of the distant majestic Tianshan Mountains, a seemingly insurmountable barrier between him and the land of his ancestors: China.

In May 2010, I joined a group of five journalists in a visit to Kazakhstan and the villages of Masanchi and Sortobe in Zhambyl Province, nearly 300 kilometers away from Almaty. There live the Dungan, an enigmatic ethnic group of Chinese origin who still preserve folk customs and traditions of the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Mr. Dau is a noted Dunganese poet who has written verses inspired by a feeling of homesickness towards the China of his imagination. He has given himself a Chinese name, Su Zunshi, which means “respecting the facts.”

According to An Husai, president of the Kazakhstan Dunganese Association (KDA), there are about 130,000 Dungan people in Central Asia, mostly living in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. The Dungan population in Kazakhstan is somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000. 

Remnants of the Qing Lifestyle

A group of the Hui people, following a failed rebellion against the Qing court in the late 19th century, fled northwestern China’s Shaanxi and Gansu Provinces and settled in Central Asia. Here, they became know as the Dungan. Despite living in Central Asia for more than 130 years now, they still preserve the Qing-Dynasty lifestyles and folk customs, carefully handed down from generation to generation. Some aspects of Chinese culture that have disappeared in China can still be found in Dungan villages.

Most Dungan speak Russian, but at home they still communicate using old Shaanxi dialect, which is believed to differ little from that used during the Qing period. Most Dungan can’t read Chinese though: The majority of first-generation Dungan were poorly-educated farmers, and the ethnic group has long been separated from China. Instead, they write using a complex hybrid language which combines Shaanxi pronunciation and Russian letters. Each of them has both Chinese and Russian names.