Tsat/ Hainan Champa Utsul | |
|---|---|
| Total population | |
| At least 8,500[1] | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
 Sanya,Hainan | |
| Languages | |
| Tsat,Standard Chinese,Hainanese | |
| Religion | |
| PredominantlySunni Islam | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Chams (Laotian Chams) and otherAustronesian peoples,Hlai |
| Part of aseries on Islam in China | ||||||
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 Islam portal • China portal | ||||||
TheUtsuls ([hu˩t͡saːn˧˨];traditional Chinese:回輝人;simplified Chinese:回辉人;pinyin:Huíhuīrén) are aChamic-speaking ethnic group which lives on the island ofHainan and are considered one of the People's Republic of China'sunrecognized ethnic groups. They are found on the southernmost tip of Hainan, in the two villages of Huihui (回辉) and Huixin (回新) ofTianya district in the city ofSanya.
The Utsuls are thought to be descendants ofChamrefugees who fled their homeland ofChampa in what is now modern CentralVietnam to escape theVietnamese invasion.[2] After the Vietnamese completed the conquest of Cham in 1471, sackingVijaya, the last capital of the Cham kingdom, a Cham prince and about 1,000 followers moved to Hainan, where theMing dynasty allowed them to stay.[3] Several Chinese accounts record Cham arriving on Hainan even earlier, from 986, shortly after the Vietnamese captured the earlier Cham capital ofIndrapura in 982, while other Cham refugees settled inGuangzhou.[4][5]
While most of the Chams who fled Champa toCambodia, a small business class fled northwards. How they came to acquire the name Utsul is unknown.[citation needed]
Their population was greatly reduced during theSecond Sino-Japanese War by the Japanese that more than 4,000 Chams were killed in Sanya as Chinese armies were hiding among them from the invading Japanese.[6] Hundreds ofUtsul Muslim houses and mosques inSanya were destroyed by the Japanese in order to build an airport.[7]
In 2020, it was reported that Beijing had started a religious crackdown aimed at the Utsul community as part of their political efforts. Restrictions included limiting the size of mosques, requiring aChinese Communist Party member on mosque management committees, forbidding the use of Arabic words on food stalls (such as "halal"), and forbidding the wearing ofhijab.[8][9][10]
Although they are culturally, ethnically and linguistically distinct from the Hui, theChinese government nevertheless classifies them as Hui due to their Islamic faith. From reports by Hans Stübel, the German ethnographer who made contact with them in the 1930s, however, their language is completely unrelated to any other language spoken in mainland China.[11]
A genetic study by Li et al. (2013) suggested that the surviving Utsat were genetically much closer to the indigenousHlai people than to the Cham and other mainland southeast Asian populations. The study suggests that there was high assimilation of the indigenous Hlai in the formation of the Utsat.[12]
Some common Utsul family names include Chen, Ha, Hai, Jiang, Li, Liu and Pu.[13]
cham hainan.
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Underlined: the 56 officially recognised ethnic groups ranked by population in their language families according to2020 census | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
