What is it about?
The Sibe are one of the officially recognized ethnic minorities in the People’s Republic of China. Their language belongs to the southern group of the Manchu-Tungusic languages within the Altaic language family. The Sibe population within China’s borders today is just over 190,000. The majority of them live dispersed in the north-east provinces of China, but a larger Sibe group lives at a distance of approximately 5,000 kilometres to the west in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. This separation is the outcome of a long historical process, and the genealogy writing tradition has always played a crucial role in constructing the self-imagining of the two large Sibe groups: genealogies were the material carriers of knowledge preserved about their ancestors and their past. Unfortunately, many of the genealogies were lost during the turbulent time of the twentieth century. This study is intended to present and highlight the significance a specific collection of genealogies compiled by a self-taught Sibe historian.
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Why is it important?
Combining analysis of primary sources and text based data with ethnographic observations, this study aims to give an insight and to highlight the significance of a specific collection of genealogies: the heritage preserved by a self-taught Sibe historian, Guan Wenming. Guan Wenming was born in 1938 in today’s Qapqal Sibe Autonomous County in Xinjiang. He did various jobs to earn a living but he never gave up the interest he had developed at a young age in the history of his ethnic group. He has collected and preserved a number of manuscripts in the Sibe language on the history and religion of the Sibe in Xinjiang, and his collection of genealogies in the Manchu/Sibe and Chinese languages contained in fifty-seven folders is also the outcome of several decades of work. The folders contain materials gathered among Sibe clans that come from or live in one of the historical villages in Qapqal Sibe Autonomous County. The materials, for most part, were written in the Manchu/Sibe languages and occasionally in Chinese. The total of the above described documents, mainly written in the Manchu/Sibe language, come to about 641 pages, and offer valuable sources for research on Sibe history, society, culture, and language.
Perspectives
My friendship with Guan Wenming goes back to many, long years. I became acquainted with him in the spring of 2012 while doing fieldwork in the Qapqal Sibe Autonomous County. It was then that he allowed me to have a look at his collection and involved me in his researches aimed at writing the genealogies of the Sibe in Qapqal. He had plans to publish his collection and make it accessible to the general public. More then ten years have passed since we first met, and the collection of genealogies was still hidden before the public. This study in English is one of the important results of our collaboration.
Ildikó Gyöngyvér Sárközi
Institute of Ethnology, Research Centre for the Humanities
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A Piece of Qing History, Ming Qing Yanjiu, June 2023, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/24684791-12340069.
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