Chinese Ethnic Minorities

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has historically shared a contentious relationship with its ethnic minority population. This thesis delves into the ups and downs of the relations between the modern Chinese state and its major ethnic minority communities through the lens of cultural policies and popular literature. Ethnic minority literature can serve as a bridge between various minority communities and modern Chinese state policies by representing popular responses to political changes. Through a comparative study of Tibetan and Uyghur ethnic minority literature published after 1978, the thesis explores the way minority intellectuals use literature as a platform to shape and navigate their cultural and political identity. Likewise, the thesis examines the role of literature as a political tool for the twentieth and twenty-first century Chinese state as it attempted to shape a national identity through managing popular culture. Ultimately, the thesis traces the oscillating relationship between the modern Chinese state and its ethnic minority populations over time by studying the way political changes and state attitudes are both reflected in and driven by literary culture.

[From the introduction].
The Reb gong Vale  is a densely populated high-altitude agricultural oasis that runs north-to-south for approximately twenty kilometers through the northeastern Tibetan Plateau, surrounded by barren pastoral hills that rise to rocky snow-capped peaks. The majority of the vale's residents self-identify as Tibetan, but this population contains considerable diversity along religious, sectarian, and linguistic lines. We explore how the linguistic diversity of the region might have been maintained despite communities sharing a common identity, being engaged in inter-communal ritual networks, sharing common trade and pilgrimage sites, and living in close proximity in the absence of geographical barriers. Given their contiguity and interconnectedness, what enabled certain communities to remain distinct from nearby populations? Under such circumstances, how did relatively small communities maintain distinct languages? What prevented them from being linguistically assimilated into the Tibetan population?

“The Indigenous Tribes from the Uplands of Southwestern China: Colonial Projects and Livelihood Strategies in Historical Perspective”

This essay examines the livelihood strategies adopted by Miao and Lolo-Yi indigenous communities from the upland regions of Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou in the course of modern history. Special attention is attached to the modalities through which: (1) local resources (material and symbolic) are mobilized to oppose the external influence of Confucian state bureaucracy; (2) the experience of Christian missions and European colonialism has been internalized and exploited to serve specific community interests. By making use of Chinese primary sources of the late imperial period and ethnographies written by adventurers and priests of various religious orders (Methodist, Catholic and Protestant) at the beginning of the 20th century, the dynamics of slave trade, opium smuggling, clan feuds, ethnic banditry and insurrectionary resistance based on messianic-millenarian motifs are extensively debated.

Consapevoli del fatto che molti studiosi hanno trascorso tutta la propria vita per raccontare anche soltanto una piccolissima parte della storia della Cina e delle sue etnie, ci stiamo impegnando a mettere il nostro tempo e la nostra volontà al servizio della ricerca… Vorremmo riuscire a contribuire anche in una parte infinitesimale a raccogliere materiale e testimonianze che riguardino le molte " minoranze etniche " , purtroppo ormai quasi estinte, che hanno trovato origine o si sono stabilite sul territorio cinese lasciando un segno più o meno evidente nella storia di questo paese. …per non dimenticare che essere umani è quanto di più vario eppure uguale possa esistere in natura. Gli articoli che seguono sono l'inizio di un percorso che parte da un viaggio fatto da xiulung due anni fa nel Sichuan. Questa breve relazione sulle etnie cinesi, in particolare la Naxi, costituisce quindi un primo passo in un percorso di studio e di esperienze che si sta continuamente trasformando, attraverso cui abbiamo avuto modo di contattare persone che hanno già riversato da parecchi anni grande impegno e passione in questa stessa ricerca… …piano piano un universo si sta schiudendo dinnanzi a noi e tutto ciò, quanto meno, ci porterà ad arricchire il nostro mondo interiore… Voglio quindi ringraziare Stefano per l'impegno che ci mette e per avermi coinvolto in questa avventura…

Alessandro Ferro - Tiebaozi

The Kalmyk Cultural Heritage Documentation Project aims to video-audio document Kalmyk culture in the broadest sense and to produce a comprehensive database on the endangered cultural heritage of the Kalmyks in Russia and their kinsmen, the Torghuts, in China. The project hopes that this on-line knowledge will not only provide the communities with a resource that they can draw upon to compare, study and popularise their culture but also contribute to cultural preservation and revitalisation both in Kalmykia and beyond. The majority of documentation will be carried out in the Republic of Kalmykia - the focus area of the project - and the adjacent Astrakhan region. In China, we will document the cultural heritage preservation activities in three widely dispersed Oirat/Torghut communities: Chengde /Weichang in Hebei, Ejene in Inner Mongolia, and Bortala/Hoboksar in Xinjiang, respectively. The project is a collaborative endeavor involving international academics from the UK, Mongolia, Russia, China and other countries.

The Kalmyks are a unique people of Mongolian origin, known both for engaging in the last long-distance nomadic migration in world history, and also as 'the only Buddhist nation in Europe'. The Kalmyks are the most western of all the Mongolian peoples in this respect. Having settled in the lower Volga region of Russia in the first half of the seventeenth century after a long migration from Dzungaria (today corresponding to the northern half of China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the western part of Mongolia and eastern Kazakhstan), half of the Kalmyk population returned to their homeland of Dzungaria in 1771.

By 'Kalmyks' we mean those people who separated from the Oirats of Dzungaria in the seventeenth century, went to Russia, formed the Kalmyk khanate (1633 - 1771), and thereafter scattered. We hold that these people have a common culture, even though as a result of historical migration processes some of them later adopted other identities and now are no longer called Kalmyk (in China and Mongolia they are known as 'Torghut').

Kalmyk culture has been considered to be endangered not only by international scholars but by Kalmyks themselves. The Kalmyk Cultural Heritage Documentation Project focuses on five different locations in Russia and China, which are home to the majority of the world Kalmyk population of about 300,000. In collaboration with local scholars, the project aims to undertake an extensive audiovisual documentation of the endangered elements of Kalmyk cultural heritage, including material, intangible, religious and other aspects of culture.

The phrase “the Chinese problem” is used to describe the fragmentation of the ethnic Chinese group from the Indonesian nation, and their subsequent discrimination . In other words, the failure for ethnic Chinese Indonesians to be accepted as ‘fully’ a part of the Indonesian imagined community- following the definition of a nation as an imagined community, provided by Anderson . Ethnic Chinese Indonesians are a minority group in Indonesia, large in number and strong in the economic and trade industries . Recorded to make up 3% of the population according to the latest 2010 census , they are not a homogenous group, as Chinese in Indonesia have historically come from diverse ethnic backgrounds including Hakka, Hokkein, Teochieu and Cantonese. The minority is also religiously diverse. However, it has become commonplace in the literature for the primary distinction to be made between totok (Chinese migrants) and pernanakan (ethnically ‘mixed’ Indonesian born) Chinese. There has existed an unshakeable tendency for discrimination towards the Chinese minority, that has manifested into violence several times since the beginning of the Suharto era. Although the Chinese have existed in Indonesia since the pre-colonial period and are in many ways another segment of the diversity that Indonesia is characterised by, there remains a distinct attitude from pribumi (indigenous Indonesians) of racialized animosity towards Chinese Indonesian groups. This was demonstrated in 2017, when huge riots occurred which resulted in the arrest of the ethnically Chinese former Jakarta governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (known by his Hakka nickname ‘Ahok’). This essay asks the question; What are the fundamental causes of this longstanding discrimination? The problem seems to boil down to a history of tension over several issues. Economic jealousy provides the dominant explanation, coupled with a nationalist suspicion of the peranakan as holding loyalties to China, not Indonesia. Homogenisation of peranakan and totok groups, a lack of cultural assimilation, and religious differences are also factors. All of the aforementioned causes have, at some point, been perpetuated by the actions (or inactions) of Indonesian governments. Ergo, this essay primarily uses a state centred approach, grounding its analysis in Indonesian political eras in order to better understand the history and origins of the discrimination of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia. It begins with an analysis of the colonial era at the end of the 19th century.

KING OF YALU IN MASHAN, GUIZHOU: AN “EPIC” IN CONTEMPORARY CONTEXTS. Chinoperl Papers. Volume 33 Issue 1 (July 2014), pp. 82-93.  In this field report I will discuss aspects of a recent site visit to the Ziyun Buyi and Miao Nationality Autonomous County (Ziyun Buyi Miaozu zizhixian 紫雲布依族苗族自治縣), Guizhou province, where I met with local researchers and officials who are documenting and promoting the “newly discovered” King of Yalu (Yalu wang 亞魯王) oral tradition, a prominent narrative-ritual tradition in Miao communities in this region of Guizhou province.

Because communication features and underlying values are not shared across all cultures, understanding how communication happens in cultures different from our own is a complex task. This analysis of an oral personal narrative demonstrates ways in which cultural norms, values, and linguistic features significantly impact communication in Nuosu [iii], a minority ethnic group in southwest China. The study provides an example of important features to look for and pay attention to in order to more deeply understand cultural communication.

This article suggests that the Yao religious domain should be considered as an interface where the Chinese imperial state attempted to assert its "civilizing" power by incorporating local society into official governance, yet also where the Yao not only assimilated but also transformed imperial influences in the light of their own cultural values. It explores these issues by describing the patrilineal ideology of Yao ordination and its impact on the transmission of ritual manuscripts. Another key issue centres on the ways in which the ideological basis of filial piety, an important Confucian value at the core of ancestor worship, has been re-employed to sustain the practice of Yao ordination as well as their manuscript culture. Yao ritual manuscripts have generally been regarded as literary manifestations of the success of the imperial "civilizing project" among non-Han peoples, with previous scholarship considering Yao ritual manuscripts in terms of their contents and treating them as mere "textual artefacts". In contrast, this essay argues in favor of conceptualizing Yao ritual manuscripts as "objects of value", and shows * I thank two anonymous reviewers and the editorial board for their constructive suggestions and comments. I also want to express my gratitude to my English editor, Rosemary Robson, for her professional and moral support.

Mission is God’s work of coming into the world to make a difference in the lives of the people he created to have relationship with him. This paper is about God's work among the Lisu of SW China who recently celebrated more than 100 years of Christian work among them. Of particular interest is the ministry of CIM missionaries who worked among them in Yunnan Province.

Neben der Han-chinesischen Mehrheitsgesellschaft leben in der Volksrepublik China (VRCh) insgesamt 55 offiziell anerkannte ethnische Minderheiten (shaoshu minzu 少数民族), die zusammen rund 8,5% der Bevölkerung ausmachen (knapp 114 Mio. Menschen). Die meisten dieser ethnischen Gruppen haben ihre Position innerhalb der VRCh mehr oder weniger akzeptiert, wenn auch zum Teil widerwillig. Sowohl bei Tibetern als auch bei Uiguren führt die chinesische Minderheitenpolitik zu offenem Widerstand, der auch im Ausland zur Kenntnis genommen wird. Dennoch existieren neben vielen Parallelen auch weitreichende Unterschiede zwischen der jeweiligen Lage dieser beiden Ethnien in China, was den Vergleich äußerst interessant macht.
Der Beitrag gliedert sich in drei Abschnitte: Er stellt zunächst knapp die Ausgangslage der beiden Minderheiten und ihre Stellung innerhalb der VRCh dar. Zweitens widmet er sich der Minderheitenpolitik, die beispielhaft anhand der Wirtschafts- und Entwicklungsförderung und im Bildungsbereich dargestellt wird. Drittens geht er auf die offenen Ausbrüche von Widerstand ein, die sich vor allem seit 2008 in beiden Fällen deutlich zugespitzt haben. Das Fazit diskutiert die Reaktionen der chinesischen politischen Führung auf diese Herausforderungen.

S.V. Dmitriev and S.L. Kuzmin. 2014. The Qing Empire as China: an Anatomy of Historical Myth. – Oriens (Moscow) (1): 5-17.
It is often considered that China is a unique state in the world which has been several times won by foreigners, but never became a part of any other state, thus retaining continuity of its history and statehood based on consecutive row of ruling dynasties. This view is based on ancient sinocentric model which does not satisfy testing by comparative historical approach. Our analysis revealed that the Qing Empire cannot be equaled to China. Although the latter term has been broadly used, it had different meaning at different times. Actually, China was only a part of the Qing Empire. Manchu declarations that their state is China (i.e. Middle State, most important in the world), are similar to those by German, Ottoman, Russian and other monarchs on their states' continuity from the Roman Empire. These declarations have only historical value and cannot be used for modern international law. The Qing and other "conquest dynasties of China" were actually different empires created by non-Chinese peoples. The Han nation-state: Republic of China and People's Republic of China (PRC) had acquired almost whole territory of the Qing Empire as a result of occupation of weaker neighbors, instead of continuity of one state. Modern concept of PRC as a multinational state of "one Chinese nation", that included "minority nationalities" at least from the Middle Ages, is a historical myth.

Editor's Note

Articles

Tsering Bum. "THE CHANGING ROLES OF TIBETAN MOUNTAIN DEITIES IN THE CONTEXT OF EMERGING ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES: DKAR PO LHA BSHAM IN YUL SHUL"

Limusishiden (Li Dechun) and Gerald Roche. "SOCIALIZING WITH GODS IN THE MONGGHULBOG RITUAL"

Jacqueline H. Fewes and Abdul Nasir Khan. "MANUSCRIPTS, MATERIAL CULTURE, AND EPHEMERA OF THE SILK ROUTE: ARTIFACTS OF EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY LADAKHITRADE BETWEEN CENTRAL AND SOUTH ASIA"

Libu Lakhi (Li Jianfu). "NAMUYI TIBETAN pha tsә RITUALS AND ORAL CHANTS"

Duojiezhaxi (Dorje Tashi, Rdo rje bkra shis) and CK Stuart. "A MDO TIBETAN NAMING PRACTICES AND NAME POPULARITY"

Gary Sigley. "THE MOUNTAIN CHANGERS: LIFESTYLE MIGRATION IN SOUTHWEST CHINA"

Folklore

Timothy Thurston and Caixiangduojie. "An A mdo Tibetan Wedding Speech from Ne'u na Village"

Bkra shis bzang po. "Oral Narratives from Bang smad: Deities, Demons, Bla ma, and Leaders

Reviews

Bettina Zeisler. Mountains, Monasteries, and Mosques
Barbara Gerke. The Social Life of Tibetan Biography

Francesca Fiaschetti. China's Encounters on the South and Southwest

Francesca Fiaschetti. Inner Asia, and the Spatial Politics of Empire: Archaeology, Mobility, and Culture Contact

M. Alyson Prude. Pilgrim of the Clear Light

Sienna Craig. At Home in the World

Tristan G. Brown. China From Empire to Nation-State

Robert Entenmann. In the Land of the Eastern Queendom: The Politics of Gender and Ethnicity on the Sino-Tibetan Frontier.

Jonathan Z. Ludwig The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China

Jonathan Z. Ludwig. India-China Borderlands: Conversations Beyond the Centre

Tricia Kehoe. Ethnicity in China; A Critical Introduction

Hilary Howes. Towards Sustainable Use of Rangelands in North-West China

Lei Duan. War Finance and Logistics in Late Imperial China

Magnus Fiskesjö. Chieftains into Ancestors

Nikolas Broy. The Origins of Religious Violence

Kali Cape. Eminent Buddhist Women

Andrew Nelson. The Brave New World of Ethnicity in Nepal

Christine Murphy. The Unbearable Dreamworld of Champa the Driver

Enrico Beltramini. Healing Traditions of the Northwestern Himalayas and Being Human in a Buddhist World

Katia Buffetrille. Mapping Shangrila

Christine Murphy. Tibetan Folktales (World Folklore Series)

Tshe ring skyid. 2015. An Introduction to Rgya tshang ma, a Monguor (Tu) Village in Reb Gong (Tongren) IN Gerald Roche and CK Stuart (eds) Asian Highlands Perspectives 36: Mapping the Monguor, 276-332.

ABSTRACT
This article provides basic background information on Rgya tshang ma Village, one of three villages where the Ngandehua (Wutun) language is spoken in Reb gong (Rma lho [Huangnan] Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Mtsho sngon [Qinghai] Province). Information presented includes population
and location; housing; language; subsistence and income, focusing on the annual agricultural cycle; and religion and rituals, focusing particularly on communal rites. The text also includes one table, twenty photographs, and a narrative in Ngandehua, transcribed in Pinyin and translated into English.

KEYWORDS
Monguor, Ngandehua, Reb gong, Tongren, Tu, Wutun

Limusishiden. 2015. Health and Illness Among the Mongghul IN Gerald Roche and CK Stuart (eds) Asian Highlands Perspectives 36: Mapping the Monguor, 30-63, 301-332.

Personal accounts of health, illness, and healing among the Mongghul of Huzhu Mongghul (Tu) Autonomous County, Haidong Municipality, Qinghai Province are given. These are followed by an examination of the causes of illness, medical practitioners, disease names and treatments, anatomical
terms in the Mongghul language, preventative measures, narratives of the experiences of a Huzhu Mongghul doctor in Xining (capital of Qinghai Province), and a brief description of contemporary healthcare infrastructure in Huzhu County.
          In the traditional Huzhu Mongghul worldview, illness is  unrelated to such modern biomedical concepts as bacteria and viruses. Instead, it is related to an ontology that posits that such entities as pudog mudog 'evils', yiile 'ghosts', purghan 'deities', and foori aadee aanee 'graveyard spirits' that can influence human well-being. Within this worldview, for example, a herpetic infection may be attributed to disturbances of an ancestral grave.  Personal accounts of health, illness, and healing among the Mongghul are given. These are
followed by an examination of the causes of illness, medical practitioners, disease names and treatments, anatomical terms in the Mongghul language, preventative measures, narratives of the experiences of a Huzhu Mongghul doctor in Xining (capital of Qinghai Province), and a brief description of contemporary healthcare infrastructure in Huzhu County.  There are no written records of Mongghul medicine in Chinese or Tibetan.

It has been pointed out by many researchers that under the rule of the Mongol empire 2 (including the Yuan dynasty) the inhabitants of China were broadly divided into "Mongolian people" or Mongols (Menggu ren 蒙古人), "various peoples" (Semu ren 色目人), "Chinese" or northern Chinese (Han ren 漢人), and "southerners" or southern Chinese (Nan ren 南人) 3 and that these divisions were not mere categories but constituted a ranking system. According to these studies, in contrast to the Menggu ren and Semu ren, who represented the privileged classes, the Han ren and Nan ren were subject to official restrictions in appointment to government posts, punishment, prohibitions, civil service examinations, succession to office, and taxation and labour services. This so-called "system of four classes" 4 is also frequently mentioned in general works and textbooks, and its existence has been widely accepted for explaining the state of politics and society in China at the time. 5 This theory of a system of four classes, and also the question of how the government of the Mongol empire treated the various peoples under its rule, especially the Chinese, are important issues that touch on the very foundations of the rule of China by the Mongol empire, which was a multiethnic state.

This paper investigates how a regional identity can be maintained in a nonmodern context, focusing on the case of southern Xinjiang in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The argument focuses on one aspect of this identity system, the popular historical tradition, arguing that its deployment through both manuscript technology and regional shrine pilgrimage contributed to the maintenance of Xinjiang's settled Turki identity group before the construction of the “Uyghur” identity. In the absence of a national history, separate histories of local heroes were linked together through custom anthology production and networked travel to shrines, yielding a modular historical tradition that accommodated local interests in regional narratives. Central to the operation of this system were community authorship in the manuscript tradition, the creation of a new genre for local history, and the publicly recorded circulation of pilgrims who heard performances of historical texts. This constellation of phenomena underpinned an alternative type of imagined community: a reasonably homogeneous, regional, writing-facilitated identity system flourishing in a nonmodern context.

AHP 36 Cui Yongzhong, Zhang Dezu, and Du Changshun (Keith Dede, translator). 2015. The Origin of the Monguor IN Gerald Roche and CK Stuart (eds) Asian Highlands Perspectives 36: Mapping the Monguor,  18-22, 301-332.

This translated excerpt from the Comprehensive History of Qinghai examines two theories regarding the origin of the Monguor: the 'Mongol Theory' and the 'Tǔyùhún Theory'. The Mongol Theory, which is given most space in this text, suggests that the Monguor are descendants of thirteenth century
Mongol soldiers. In contrast, the Tǔyùhún Theory suggests that the Monguor originate in an older population that migrated into the region in the third century CE. In addition to discussing these theories of Monguor origins, this text also provides various ethnonyms used to describe the Monguor in Chinese historical records, and gives extracts from Míng (1368-1644) and Qīng (1644-1911/12)  dynasty records referring to the Monguor.

This volume is the first work to systematically investigate the diachronic and synchronic relationships between regional varieties of Lalo, a Ngwi (Loloish) language cluster spoken in
western Yunnan, China. The empirical basis for the research is linguistic data, as well as intelligibility tests and sociolinguistic interviews on contact, dialect perceptions, and
ethnolinguistic vitality from nineteen Lalo-speaking villages. The volume uses these data to present a phonological and lexical reconstruction of Proto-Lalo, as well as a phylogenetic
subgrouping of the different Lalo varieties. As a complement to this, a synchronic classification of Lalo varieties according to phonetic distance, intelligibility, and speaker
perceptions is also given. This combination of methodologies enable an integrated synchronic and diachronic depiction of Lalo dialect diversity.

Through an analysis of Chinese migration to Europe, this volume examines the most pressing migration and integration issues facing many societies today: from the political and policy challenges of managing increasingly diverse communities to the individual lived experiences of identity and belonging.  In addition to chapters on the UK, France and Italy, the book spotlights one of the most extraordinary places of Chinese migration in Europe right now: the city of Prato, just 20km from Florence in Tuscany, Italy. Renowned for its historic textile industry, Prato is now home to one of the largest populations of Chinese residents in Europe, a phenomenon that is remarkable not only for its magnitude, but also for the speed with which it has developed. This edited collection involving 27 contributors deepens our understanding of the case of Prato within the context of Chinese migration to the new Europe.

Siheyuan and the spirit screen plays an important role in the traditional Chinese architecture. The spirit screen appears in front of various types of buildings. The purpose of this thesis is to study the origin, name, position, function, significance, and presence of the spirit screens in the architecture of ethnic minorities in China.

The most used Chinese names of the spirit screen are yingbi 影壁 and zhaobi 照壁, before the Tang Dynasty, the wall was known as xiaoqiang 萧墙, fusi 罘罳, ping 屏 or shu 树. The xiao 萧 character was interchangeable with the character su 肃,  which has the meaning of eliminating an enemy, such as in the term sufan 肃反, its other meaning is respectable, such as in suran 肃然. Therefore, we can see that the shadow wall was established to earn the respect of the viewers.

There are three main types of shadow wall: the character "yi" shaped shadow wall (一字型影壁), the character "ba" shaped shadow wall (八字形影壁) and "mountain" shadow wall (山影壁). A typical shadow wall has three main parts: the base, the body and the roof. As a base, they often use sumi base 须弥座, which is originally a base for Buddhist sculptures and statues. The body of the wall is proportionally the biggest part of the wall, it often has a "wallheart" 影壁心 in the middle, which is a type of engraved part in the middle of the spirit screen.

There are many functions of the spirit screen: the brick carvings on the wall not only play a decorative role, but also have other uses. One of them is that people who want to enter the door will be astonished by the bountiful decoration. Even if the main gate of the building remains open, the shadow wall can block the view from the outside. The wall also protects the residents from any evil spirit: if the evil spirits try to get into the courtyard, it will see its shadow on the wall, therefore it will get frightened and dispels the idea of ​​entering the door. For the same reason, people also decorate the walls with the characters fu 福, shou 寿 and many other protecting symbols.

The position of the wall is also one of the topics mentioned in this paper. The position of the wall is either outside or inside the main gate. According to Xunzi's "The Grand Digest", Ban Gu's description and Cui Bao's "Notes to Things Old and New", the Son of the Heaven set up a shadow wall outside the main gate to avoid arrogance, and princes of the vasall states set up a shadow wall inside the main gate to avoid boasting. The original meaning of the word fusi 罘罳 used by Cui Bao in the text is rethinking (fusi 复思), referring to the outer shadow wall,as if you have to rethink your intentions if you are passing the shadow wall when you are going to audience to the Son of the Heaven.

About the history of the shadow wall,we know that it appeared first in the Western Zhou Dynasty, in Shaanxi province Qishan county, specifically in Fengchu village.In this location there was a palace before, built by King Zhou Tai 周泰王, and even though the capital was later moved to another city by King Zhou Wen 周文王,the Fengchu Palace was still flourishing. The shadow wall in front of the Palace was made of mud.
Later, from the Spring and Autumn Period, the authority of the emperor has gradually weakened, therefore building a shadow wall was no longer the privilege of the emperor and its family, so common people could also build spirit screens. Since the Tang Dynasty, people decorated the walls with complex patterns to express their artistic taste. In the Yuan Dynasty the siheyuan culture spread to Southern China. At that time, the shadow wall was mainly built from stones and bricks, however, after the Ming Dynasty, people began to use glazed ceramic technology to build the walls, a great example is the Nine Dragon Walls 九龙壁.

The greatest topic of this thesis is the existence of shadow walls in other areas and ethnic minorities of China. Figure 4 in the appendixes of the paper shows the areas and minorities that are included in my research.
Firstly, I introduced Beijing as one of the capitals of the shadow walls, given the fact that most of the courtyard houses and hutongs 胡同 - the long and narrow alleys - are situated in the capital of China. The history of the hutongs began in the Yuan Dynasty. In order to obtain drinking water, residents at that time built their houses around wells.

The hutong culture in the Ming and Qing Dynasties flourished unprecedentedly. After the establishment of the Qing dynasty, the Manchu officials who worked for the palace moved into the alleys where the Chinese residents lived. During the Cultural Revolution, many hutongs, courtyards and shadow walls were demolished, but nowadays, the demand for renovating hutongs and other ancient architectural forms in Beijing is increasing.

The Forbidden City is one of the pinnacles of Beijing’s architecture and was used as the palace during the Ming and Qing Dynasties. This palace is famous for its wooden roof structures and beautifully decorated halls. You can also find shadow walls in the Forbidden City, such as the walls on both sides of the Tianyi Gate, the shadow wall in front of the Taiji Temple or the Nine Dragon Wall in front of Ningshou Palace. The Nine Dragon Wall is about 30 metres long, and there are 9 dragons on the wall. The dimples protruding between the dragons are shaped like cliffs, dividing the dragons into five groups.In addition to the Forbidden City, there are two other Nine Dragon Walls existing in China, one in Beijing's Beihai Park and the other one in Datong, Shanxi.

According to a survey from 2004, city of Datong has 214 spirit screens, most of which are usually attached to the southern or eastern wall of the building. The interesting thing is that some of the shadow walls are actually not on the property of the building, but on the other bank of the Shili River 十里河.
To find some other examples to the shadow walls of the Han people, Tuxiu Tujie Temple is a good place to start. The buildings there are built in the form of traditional courtyard houses, but they also incorporate several Taoist elements. You can find mythological creature motifs on some shadow walls of Hou Tu Temple, such as the dragon playing with a bead (xian zhu zhi long 衔珠之龙) or the Chinese unicorn, the qilin 麒麟; but there are also landscape depictions and engravings of supplies of scholars, such as a piano, a chessboard, and books.

The Hui people are one of these minorities. They try to protect their identity and live in a closed community. The most unique type of architecture for the Hui people is Gongbei 拱北, a tomb built for religious leaders. They started building Gongbeis from the Yuan Dynasty, when the architectural style was only Islamic. But after the Ming and Qing Dynasties, this style merged with traditional Chinese architecture.At this time, people built Gongbei along the east-west axis, and the rooms inside were divided symmetrically. Texts of the Quaran, plants and flowers or Confucius scenes are quite common engravings on the shadow walls of the Gongbeis. A great example for the mixed architectural characteristics is Jiucaiping Gongbei 九彩坪拱北 in Ningxia Province Haiyuan County. The building's gate and the front of the shadow wall decoration are really similar. The wall has carvings of plants and other traditional Chinese flower patterns that are native to the surrounding mountains. The decoration of the ba character shaped spirit screen in front of the gate of the Great Mosque of Tongxin also includes a variety of natural elements, Islamic calligraphy and other symbols.

The shadow wall plays a particularly important role in the architectural culture of the Bai people in Dali and Xizhou, Yunnan. Because the Cang Mountain 苍山 is behind Xizhou and the Erhai Lake 洱海 is in the west, the buildings of this city only need one wall to protect the inhabitants from the wind. The Bai people have three types of shadow walls: the "one corner" shadow wall, the "holey" spirit screen and the "three drops of water" spirit screen. There is no tile roof on the top of the three drops of water spirit screens, which are arched like the roofs of the traditional Chinese palaces. These walls are generally white, with fortunate characters written on the middle part of them, still life paintings or depictions of the Cangshan and the Erhai Lake. Yan Family Courtyard and Shaxi Old City God Temple can be regarded as great representatives.

The fact, that the footprints of the spirit screen can be found in Mongolia is astonishing. Looking back at history, this is because the Manchu emperors used to give spirit screens as a gift to well known Mongolian palaces and temples. This also shows thee preciousness of the spirit screens. However, at the moment there are only three known shadow walls in Mongolia, the others that might be there before have all disappeared. One of the still existing spirit screens is located in front of the Choijin Lama Temple (the Chinese name is Xingren Si 兴仁寺).

The majority of academic works relating to Islam in China discuss the Hui people as a Muslim-majority ethnic group predominant in certain areas of China, however, this is an oversimplification that fails to adequately represent historical reality. Furthermore, presenting the Hui in terms of ethnic designation without a critical consideration of how that designation evolved can lead to broad misunderstandings in this topic. This thesis describes how the meaning of 'Hui' has shifted over time from designating geographic origin, to religion, to nation, and finally ethnicity and highlights important social and political causes and effects of those changes. I encourage scholars to carefully note these changes in order to be more precise about how the term 'Hui' should be interpreted in various historical contexts. See also this timeline of Chinese Muslim identity: https://goo.gl/DFsRzJ

Trilingualism is a powerful fact of life in many parts of the world, including most autonomous regions inhabited by minority ethnic groups in China. Although much research has been conducted on the language attitudes of stakeholders from minority ethnic groups, the attitudinal object is usually an individual language (e.g. the ethnic language, the national language, or a foreign language). Few empirical studies have investigated 'trilingualism' as an attitudinal object. Aiming to narrow this gap, the present study examined the attitudes toward trilingualism of students from four Chinese universities and the influence of selected sociobiographical variables on their attitudes. An exploratory factor analysis showed the 'trilingualism attitudes' scale, developed for use in the present study and possibly beyond, to be unidimentional, with sufficient reliability (Cronbach alpha =.83). On this scale, the participants (N=310) achieved a mean score of 4.52 (out of five), reflecting very favourable attitudes toward trilingualism. Furthermore, regression analyses identified 'attitudes toward non-ethnic languages (viz. Putonghua and English)', 'attitudes toward the ethnic language (viz. Mongolian)', and gender as statistically significant predictors for attitudes toward trilingualism, respectively explaining 20%, 5.5%, and 1.3% of the trilingualism attitudes variance. Policy and research implications were also discussed.