Baima (ethnic group)
The Baima (白马 人) ethnic group , also known as Baima Tibetans (白马 藏人), number around 10,000 to 14,000 people and live in the south-east of Gansu Province and in the north-west of Sichuan Province in the People's Republic of China . Their main settlement areas are Pingwu Counties ( Mianyang City ) and Jiuzhaigou ( Ngawa Autonomous District ) in Sichuan and Wen ( Longnan City ) in Gansu.
Ethnicity
Officially, the Baima are part of the Tibetan nationality . Although there is a strong identity movement among them, e.g. Some of them also demand recognition as an independent nationality within China, but the authorities have so far only recognized them as a special subgroup of Tibetans.
language
The Baima speak a Qiang language, Baima , which is only distantly related to Tibetan.
religion
The Baima have their own autochthonous religion, partly influenced by the Tibetan Bon religion, partly by Buddhism and Daoism . There are no monks, temples or monasteries with them. For many Baima, the mountain spirit is the highest deity.
history
It is said that the Baima are descendants of the Baima Di (白马 氐), a branch of the Di (氐). The Di were a people of western China who lived in large areas of today's Gansu , Qinghai , Shaanxi and Sichuan provinces up to the 6th century and founded several small states in the 4th and 5th centuries. The Di were closely related to the Qiang (羌). The development of the Baima away from the original Di language probably took place in the 7th century, when the ancestors of today's Baima came under the influence of the Tibetan kingdom that began to develop under Songtsen Gampo .
Footnotes
- ↑ http://www.ethnic-china.com/Baima/baimaintro.htm
- ↑ http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/16/21/10/PDF/KatiaChirkova_Xumi_Baima.pdf
- ↑ Katia Chirkova: Baima: From Language to Dialect (University of Leiden Lecture)
