Who are the Dungans

The Dungans are Chinese Muslims who used to live in Western China but moved further West during the second half of the 19th century. These are the ethnic Dungans who currently live in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and parts of southern Siberia. But later on, during the beginning of the 20th century, there was a tendency by Westerners to call all Muslim Chinese in Western China Dungans. This created quite a confusion in terms of the real ethnicities of people. (Then there is the Dungans and Dragons web forum which is yet another funny misunderstanding...)

The Dungans are perhaps most well-known today for the curious fact that they use the Cyrillic alphabet to write their language, which is clearly a Chinese dialect. Writing Chinese in an alphabetic script has often been thought of as impossible (especially by Chinese) but the Dungans proved this wrong.



Dungans and Chinese from Kashgar practicing shooting.


A Dungan medrese in Chinese style.


Dungan graves