Tangwang, formerly known as Tangwangchuan (唐汪川) is a town of

Dongxiang Autonomous County Dongxiang Autonomous County (; Santa: Dunxianzu Zizhixien) is an autonomous county in the Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture, province of Gansu of the People's Republic of China. It was established as a Dongxiang ethnic autonomous area in 1950. Hist ...

Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture (, Xiao'erjing: ), formerly known as Hezhou (河州) and Baohan (枹罕), is located in Gansu Province, south of the provincial capital Lanzhou, bordering Qinghai to the west. It is an autonomous prefecture for the ...

Gansu Gansu (, ; alternately romanized as Kansu) is a province in Northwest China. Its capital and largest city is Lanzhou, in the southeast part of the province. The seventh-largest administrative district by area at , Gansu lies between the Tibet ...

, China. The town had a multi ethnic populace, the Tang () and Wang () families being the two major families. The Tang and Wang families were originally of non-Muslim Han Chinese extraction, but by the 1900s some branches of the families became Muslim by "intermarriage or conversion" while other branches of the families remained non-Muslim. People in the area have changed their ethnicity by marrying members of other groups or converting to their religion. The Tang and Wang families are now composed of all three different ethnic groups, with

Han Chinese The Han Chinese () or Han people (), are an East Asian ethnic group native to China. They constitute the world's largest ethnic group, making up about 18% of the global population and consisting of various subgroups speaking distinctive va ...

Hui The Hui people ( zh, c=, p=Huízú, w=Hui2-tsu2, Xiao'erjing: , dng, Хуэйзў, ) are an East Asian ethnoreligious group predominantly composed of Chinese-speaking adherents of Islam. They are distributed throughout China, mainly in the n ...

and

Dongxiang people The Dongxiang people (autonym: ''Sarta'' or ''Santa'' (撒爾塔); , Xiao'erjing: دْوݣسِيْاݣذُ) are Mongolic people and one of 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China. Most of the Dongxiang live in ...

. The Hui and Dongxiang are Muslims. Tangwangchuan and Hanjiaji were notable for being the lone towns with a multi ethnic community, with both non-Muslims and Muslims. The

Kuomintang The Kuomintang (KMT), also referred to as the Guomindang (GMD), the Nationalist Party of China (NPC) or the Chinese Nationalist Party (CNP), is a major political party in the Republic of China, initially on the Chinese mainland and in Tai ...

official Ma Hetian visited Tangwangchuan and met an "elderly local literatus from the Tang clan" when he was on his inspection tour of Gansu and Qinghai. In the local music of Hezhou/Linxia, a Han and Hui song called "Hezhou" contains the verse "tang wang chuan you yi ge" () in its third Ling. In 1956, ancient pottery was found at the town, giving its name to the Tangwang Culture. In 2009, murals dated to 1673 were found in a cave in Tangwang.

References

Township-level divisions of Gansu {{Gansu-geo-stub

See also

References