The Tujia Ethnic Group of China

Many years ago, my wife and I, accompanied by our two young children, spent several years in China, teaching English and researching minority languages. For the last eighteen months of that period we taught in Jishou University in Hunan Province, and carried out research into the Tujia language under the auspices of the university. Besides a grammar of the language, published by Lincom, we produced a popular-level introduction to the Tujia, Imperial Tiger Hunters, which is now available as a free download (click on the link, the 5.5Mb PDF file is formatted for A5).

The Tujia ethnic group are unusual among the 56 ethnic minority groups officially recognised in modern China. Very few of them speak the Tujia language, and the majority are not markedly culturally distinct from the Han population. As a result, although they are a very large group, they were not officially recognised until 1964, ten years after the original determination of ethnic groups.

The reasons for this lie in their history. Most minorities in the southern part of China found themselves pushed out of the valleys and into the hills as Han Chinese settlers spread into their area, and they tended to become somewhat isolated from the wider context as a result. The Tujia, however, lived in an area of inaccessible karst limestone topography, in a feudal system organised along military lines, and were well able to defend their territory. They thus resisted extensive immigration and moreover represented a significant potential threat to the various Chinese dynasties. Until their final integration into China proper by the Qing Dynasty, the Chinese emperors gave them a high degree of autonomy, but also made extensive use of them as an informal border control between the Han heartlands in the north and the wilder lands in the south, with their potentially restive minorities. The Tujia elite soon adopted the Chinese language and Chinese culture (a number became proficient poets in the Chinese language) and developed such skill in their dealings with their political masters that they became valued providers of mercenary troops for Chinese military adventures as far afield as Hainan in the south and Liaoning in the north.

Full integration was achieved under the Qing dynasty in the 1730s, primarily by means of rich pensions offered to those members of the elite who peacefully ceded their positions. The Tujia peasantry, finally freed from their oppressive feudal elite, adopted a relatively pragmatic attitude to the subsequent influx of Chinese settlers hailing from the overpopulated coastal plains. While their rich cultural heritage long persisted, the Tujia language was increasingly dropped in favour of the local Mandarin dialect which came to serve as a lingua franca for the region. By the time we arrived in 2002, only in one rural township, Pojiao, with a total population of some ten to twelve thousand, was the Tujia language still spoken by young children.

Linguistically, it has been sad to see the almost inevitable demise of the language; even if efforts were made to revive it today, much of its rich vocabulary and oral literature has already been irretrievably lost. On the other hand however, it has been heartening to see the relatively smooth economic and social integration that has taken place to make the Tujia full citizens of modern China.