Rma

The Rma, known in Chinese as the Qiang, are a Qiangic-speaking people of northwestern Sichuan, above all the upper Min River valley around Maozhou, Wenchuan and Songpan. Peoples called Qiang appear in Shang oracle bones of the second millennium BC.

Many of these groups were sinicized or merged into other Tibeto-Burman peoples. By the Ming dynasty the name had narrowed to the non-Han villagers of the upper Min and Beichuan area from whom the Rma trace their descent. Chinese settlement at Maozhou from the fifteenth century and the frontier wars of the 1580s bound them to the Ming order.

Rma society kept a polytheistic religion centered on sky and mountain gods, white stones and spirit towers, with the sheep as its totem. An epic tradition told of the battle against the Go people, after which the victors took the name Rma.