Salar Erotic

The Salar are a Turkic-speaking Muslim people clustered in the bend of the Yellow River where Qinghai and Gansu meet — a high, dry country of loess terraces and mosque towers. They are unusual on two counts. First, their language: Salar is an Oghuz Turkic tongue, which puts it in the same branch as Turkish, Azerbaijani, and Turkmen, not with the Karluk Turkic languages spoken by their nearer neighbors the Uyghurs and Uzbeks. The Salar are essentially the easternmost Oghuz speakers on the map, an island roughly four thousand kilometers from the rest of the family. Second, their origin story is unusually specific. The community traces itself to a group from Samarkand who left for the east in the fourteenth century, guided, in the telling, by a white camel carrying a copy of the Qur'an and a jar of soil and water from home. When the camel knelt and turned to stone at Xunhua, they stopped and built a town. The petrified camel is still pointed out.

That migration left a Central Asian community embedded in northwest China, and the Salar have spent six centuries adjusting the seam. The language has absorbed heavy Chinese and Tibetan vocabulary and some grammatical influence from Mongolic neighbors, while keeping its Oghuz bones. Most Salar are bilingual or trilingual, working in Mandarin or the local Chinese dialect outside the home and in Salar within it. There is no traditional script — Salar has been written in Arabic, in modified Turkic Latin, and in pinyin-based systems, none of them dominant — so the language has stayed primarily oral, transmitted through family and mosque.

Sunni Islam structures the year and the village. The Hua Si and other Sufi orders run deep here, and the Xunhua valley is dotted with mosques, some of them built in a hybrid style that borrows the swept eaves and timber bracketing of Chinese temple architecture and puts a minaret on top. Salar men have a long history as boatmen and traders along the Yellow River, ferrying goods on inflated sheepskin rafts, and as soldiers — Salar units served the Qing and later figured in the Hui-Muslim risings of the nineteenth century, which the community paid for heavily. Today the population sits at roughly 130,000, concentrated in the Xunhua Salar Autonomous County and a smaller pocket in Gansu's Jishishan, with diaspora in the cities of Lanzhou and Xining.