Salar People

The Salar people (Salar: Salır; Chinese: 撒拉族; pinyin: Sālāzú) are an ethnic minority of China who largely speak Salar, in the Oghuz family of languages.

The Salar people numbered 104,503 people in the last census of 2000. They live mostly in the Qinghai-Gansu border region, on both sides of the Yellow River, namely in Xunhua Salar Autonomous County and Hualong Hui Autonomous County of Qinghai and the adjacent Jishishan Bonan, Dongxiang and Salar Autonomous County of Gansu. There are also Salars in Xinjiang (in the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture).

The Salars' ancestors were migrating Oghuz Turks who intermarried with Han Chinese, Tibetans, and Hui. They are a patriarchal agricultural society and are predominantly Muslim.

Read more about Salar People:  Culture, Language, Literature

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