Salar

The Salar are a Turkic Muslim people whose villages line the Yellow River in Qinghai and the Jishishan hills of Gansu. Their tradition traces them to the Oghuz Salur, who in the thirteenth century travelled east from the Samarkand region under the brothers Qaraman and Aqman, carrying a Quran on a white camel.

They mixed with Tibetan, Hui, Han and Mongol neighbours; lore remembers Tibetan women as their first wives. In 1370 their chief Han Bao submitted to the Ming, becoming hereditary centurion while Salar clans kept self-rule.

In the 1670s Afaq Khoja introduced Sufi orders, and in the eighteenth century Ma Laichi's Khufiyya and Ma Mingxin's Jahriyya fought for followers. Their rivalry became the Jahriyya revolt of 1781 under Su Sishisan. Agui crushed it after a three-month siege near Lanzhou, killing perhaps two in five Salars and exiling survivors to Ili.