Utsuls
ethnic group
The Utsuls ([hu˩ t͡saːn˧˨]; traditional Chinese: 回輝人; simplified Chinese: 回辉人; pinyin: Huíhuīrén) are a Chamic-speaking ethnic group which lives on the island of Hainan and are considered one of the People's Republic of China's unrecognized ethnic groups. They are found on the southernmost tip of Hainan, in the two villages of Huihui (回辉) and Huixin (回新) of Tianya, Sanya.
History
The Utsuls are thought to be descendants of Cham refugees who fled their homeland of Champa in what is now modern Central Vietnam to escape the Vietnamese invasion. After the Vietnamese completed the conquest of Cham in 1471, sacking Vijaya, the last capital of the Cham kingdom, a Cham prince and about 1,000 followers moved to Hainan, where the Ming dynasty allowed them to stay. Several Chinese accounts record Cham arriving on Hainan even earlier, from 986, shortly after the Vietnamese captured the earlier Cham capital of Indrapura in 982, while other Cham refugees settled in Guangzhou.
While most of the Chams fled Champa to Cambodia, a small business class fled northwards. How they came to acquire the name Utsul is unknown.
Their population was greatly reduced during the Second Sino-Japanese War by the Japanese. More than 4,000 Utsuls were killed in Sanya by the invading Japanese in the Hainan Island Operation. Hundreds of Utsul Muslim houses and mosques in Sanya were destroyed by the Japanese in order to build an airport.
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This entry incorporates text from “Utsuls” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.