Sarta

The Sarta, better known by their Chinese name Dongxiang, are a Muslim Mongolic people of the loess hills of southern Gansu, centred on the eastern part of old Hezhou prefecture, from which their name, meaning the eastern district, is taken.

Chinese historians trace them to Central Asian soldiers and settlers brought east under the Yuan dynasty of 1271–1368, who kept their Islamic faith and were joined in the 1340s by the missionary Hamzeh. Over time they abandoned their original Central Asian tongue for a Mongolic language.

Their surnames record the mixture of the frontier, drawn from Mongol, Han, Hui and Tibetan stock. Their villages lived by farming potatoes, barley and wheat on the dry uplands and by weaving carpets known across the north-west.