Ethnic groups of China
The Qiang (羌) people are an ethnic group. They form one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China, with a population of approximately 200,000 living in northwestern Sichuan province. Nowadays, the Qiang are only a small segment of the population, but they are commonly believed to be an old, once strong and populous people whose history can be traced to the Shang dynasty and whose offspring include the Tibetans and many minorities in southwestern China.
1 Early history
In ancient China, Qiang was usually used as a generic term for the non- Han peoples in the west. These peoples were frequently at war with the inhabitants of the Yellow River valley, the ancestors of ethnic Hans. Not until the rise of the state of Qin under Duke Mu was the Qiang expansion effectively checked.
The structure of the graph 羌 also reflects this view. Anciently, it was composed of two elements: 人 (man) and 羊 (sheep), suggesting a sheep-herding people. During the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220 AD) and Wei-Jin periods (221-419), Qiang were widely distributed along the mountainous fringes of the northern and eastern Tibetan Plateau, from the Kunlun Mountains (崑崙山) in Xinjiang province (East Turkestan), and eastern Qinghai area, to southern Gansu, western Sichuan, and northern YunnanYunnan ( Simplified Chinese: , Traditional: , pinyin: Yunnan) is a province of the People's Republic of China, located in the far southwestern corner of the country. Yunnan Sheng ''Province Abbreviation(s): (Din) or (Yun Capital Kunming Area Total % water.
Later, the Chinese restricted the term Qiang min 羌民 (Qiang people registered with the Chinese government) to refer to sinicized non-Han living in the Min River valley in Sichuan and used the term Fan Qiang 番羌 (barbarian Qiang) to refer to less sinicized non-Han living in the vicinity.
