Who are the Xibe people of Northern Xinjiang?

The Autonomous Region of Xinjiang is of course, widely known across the world for being the home of one of China's most well known minority groups - the Uyghurs.  Xinjiang's official name is, of course, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region with the Uyghurs themselves making up around 46% of the population while the Han Chinese make up around 39%, with ethnic Kazakhs make up 6%. 

Xibe's vertical writing system,
whereby individual words are
written vertically with joined up
letters.

But it's the region's 8th largest ethnic group - the Xibe - that I want to talk about today.  For unlike the Uyghurs or the Kazakhs, the Xibe are not Turkic, and nor are they related to the Han Chinese.  

Yet their history and presence in Xinjiang is closely linked to that of China's last Imperial Dynasty, and perhaps soon the Xibe will be the last surviving native speakers of a language family that once dominated much of north-east Asia.

So who are the Xibe and what is their story?  Well to answer that question, we have to travel to the other side of China, and back four centuries.  The land we are talking about is called Manchuria.

A land called Manchuria

Centuries ago, what we now think of as North-eastern China wasn’t part of China at all, but a separate land sparsely by a partially nomadic people called the Jurchens. 

However, it was in the early 17th Century that the majority of Jurchens united under a single ruler, adopted a vertical writing system based on the Mongol script, and renamed themselves as the Manchus, and thus the land of Manchuria was named as such.

It was soon after this that they invaded and conquered China during the collapse of the Ming dynasty, and set up their own dynasty, the Qing, which would rule the country from 1644 to 1912.  This was easily one of history's most impressive conquests, given how few Manchus there were compared to Han Chinese, but the conquerors were also aided by civil war within the Ming Empire.  

Thus, almost overnight, the Manchu culture and language went from being a tribal one beyond the frontiers of oriental civilization to being that of the ruling class of one of the world's largest and most advanced Empires, much as Anglo-Norman was the aristocratic language of Norman and Angevin England.

However, by conquering China, the Manchus arguably 'signed their own death warrant' as a distinct nation capable of creating their own nation-state since their conquest of China is why there is no independent country called Manchuria today.  

You see, not only did China's Manchu elite eventually become Sinicized and adopt Mandarin, but Manchuria itself, until then sparsely populated, became majority Han Chinese due to a mass migration of ethnic Han, eventually encouraged by the Manchu rulers themselves, during the 18th and 19th centuries.  

At first, in the early 18th century, the Manchus banned Han Chinese migration to Manchuria and built the Willow Palisade to precisely that effect, however by 1800 there had been a change in policy, partly to create a bulwark against potential Korean and Russian expansion into the area.  The Manchus can therefore be described as having 'won China but lost their own country.'

In the three provinces that make up Manchuria today, only 7 million of the 104 million inhabitants were ethnic Manchus in the year 2000, 94 million being Han Chinese.  Furthermore, of the 7 million, it's estimated that the number of native speakers of Manchu could be around 10 individuals, all octogenarian.  And unlike the Uyghurs, the Manchus are the largest ethnic minority in China to not have their own Autonomous Region.

Back to Xinjiang

So, where do the Xibe of Xinjiang come into this?  The Xibe, both those of Xinjiang and those back in Manchuria itself, are a sub-division of the Manchus, with those living in Xinjiang perhaps being best described as an offshoot.   

It was the year 1764 when 18,000 Xibe were relocated to Xinjiang under Emperor Qianlong - perhaps because they had rebelled, or perhaps to help strengthen central control over Xinjian in a Manchu equivalent of the Ulster Plantations.

But what ever the actual motive was, that decision by Emperor Qianlong would later turn out to have saved a whole language from extinction.   For while a majority of ethnic Xibe still live in Manchuria itself, it's the Xinjiang branch that has kept the language alive, with all those back in Manchuria now speaking Mandarin.  

And it's also in Xinjiang that the Xibe people have their only official ethnic homeland in the whole of China - the Qapqal Xibe Autonomous County, which is itself within the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture, which is in turn within the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region - the QXAC is therefore a designated homeland for one ethnic group, instead another, inside yet another.  

I haven't quite managed to find out how many Xibe there are living in Qapqal or what percentage of the overall population they constitute, but on the one hand, it appears that in 2015 there were 42,790 in Xinjiang as a whole, with 30,000 speaking the language in 2000.  This would make the Xibe around one quarter of the population of their own designated homeland of Qapqal, however it also seems that out of the 8 subdivisions of Qapqal, the Xibe ranged from 32.9% of the population to 73.2% , in the year 2000.  

Thus, it is quite difficult to make sense of these two contradicting sources, however, what is certain is that Qapqal has become more diverse in recent decades, with Uyghurs, Kazakhs and Han Chinese moving in, and that the Lingua Franca between all four groups is not Xibe, but Mandarin.   

Sure, Xibe may be the language of the playground if all kids are Xibe mother-tongue, but in a diverse playground, it will inevitably be Mandarin.   However, in 1998, there were eight primary schools in the county where Xibe lessons were compulsory, but where the general medium of instruction was Chinese, and the language is taught at degree level in a nearby University.

Xibe's current situation is of course, infinitely better than that of Manchu back in Manchuria, and as a result, Manchu language revivalists, who now number in the thousands, often travel to Qapqal to see their sister language being spoken natively and the two languages are still mutually intelligible.  

Xibe and Manchu are members of the Tungusic Language Family, whose other languages include those spoken by ethnicities indigenous to the Russian Far East, and the Evenk people of northern Siberia.  Overall, these languages have around 75,000 native speakers, meaning that Xibe makes up some 40% of them, and could easily be the least endangered.

Perhaps one of the striking features of Xibe is it's alphabet, derived from, but not identical to, that created by their Manchu ancestors four hundred years ago.  In Xibe, while sentences are written left to write, individual words are written vertically with joined up letters - it was an alphabet similar to this that Mongolian used before the forced adoption of Cyrillic under Communist Rule, and that Mongols living in China still use to this day.

The Xibe are thus one of fifty-six officially registered ethnic groups within the People's Republic of China.  Readers of this blog can expect me to write about other such ethnicities in the future.

The World’s Most Important Ghost Station?

This Monday, I set out on a mission to find an almost forgotten landmark dating back over a century – a relic of early Republican China in a corner of Nanjing that is now almost forgotten by most city residents, and the planning authorities.

What I was looking for was an abandoned train station built in 1914 that was once the bustling terminus for trains heading to Beijing and the north of the country.  The station is called ‘Nanjing North’, or in Chinese, 南京北站, and was built on the north side of the Yangtze so that rail passengers would alight their trains to cross the river by boat – there was no bridge until 1968.

However, the opening of said bridge half a century ago made this terminal redundant and it was subsequently closed to passenger service. 

Being once a central hub on the Shanghai-Nanjing-Beijing rail corridor in the world’s most populous country, you could easily argue that it is the world’s most important ghost station.  Due to this, and due to it being a clear example of early 20^th century Chinese architecture, I chose to set out to find it.

Getting there.

The north side of the Yangtze, known as Nanjing’s ‘suburban’ Pukou district, is to a great degree, considered the sticks by ‘mainland’ Nanjingers and this was particularly true of the area around the old Nanjing North Station, which my Chinese friends had mostly not even heard of. 

Although the Nanjing subway does extend to Pukou, the nearest stop was perhaps an hour long walk away from the old station, mostly along the Yangtze itself.  

As I walked it, the dense and glitzy high rises within a radius of the subway stop in time abruptly turned into vegetable patches and open fields with chickens – I was entering a completely different China.

Sign on the bottom left informing us that harbor was strictly
off limits to livestock.

And then, when rooftops started appearing again, it was evident that the settlement I was entering was itself nothing short of a time capsule - a China without skyscrapers, a China with the old sense of community - where the street is everyone's summer living room and your neighours are you're extended house mates:

                                                                                                     

   

And there were certainly streets that looked like this - it's best days were most definitely behind it.

 

Here was a community that had once been a railway hub, Nanjing's Swindon if you like, but now with its raison d'etre gone, and today well beyond the normal reach of the nearest subway stop, the settlement really has become part ghost town.

And there it was, Nanjing North Station:

And then as soon as I arrived, I came across the locality's very own tour-guide offering to show me around all the sites, and better still, she was driving around in one of these, which allowed us to drive up stony footpaths to our decaying destinations:

 Such as the old port, where the train-ferries would once dock up:

Me being so childish.

To the rail sidings, where some running locomotives still stood:

This picture we took without disturbing the driver - her idea.  A wee naughty but who cares. 

And then into the old station itself:

When you're so desperate for a holiday...

Sure, most people in Nanjing today may not have heard of Nanjing North station across the river but my tour guide and her colleague were certainly making a living out of this, and they clearly enjoyed doing it.

In fact, that day there was a local couple being taken round by her colleague, and I was shown pictures of previous customers posing amongst the old locomotives - one was a bride posing in her wedding dress, and another was a tourist from India.

My hopes for this community, are of course mixed.  On the one hand, it's nice that it has remained such a time-capsule and a snap shot of 'old China'.  But on the other hand, it is sad that this community is not what it once was - having once been a mega-important railway town and port, it is now part ghost-town.  

It would certainly be great if the metro could be extended, and who knows, use the old station as it's station, bringing it back into modern use.  But then, not only would tower-blocks follow, but my two tour guides would no longer have this decaying venue on their doorstep to show tourists around.   

Thus, when I saw this community, I definitely did not know quite what to hope for.  But then, next to the old station, I saw this - new houses being built in the old industrial style of this area.  Clearly, it's not just the two tour guides and their customers who value the heritage of this area, but the planners too.

And that is clearly a cause for optimism.