From Barbarians to Citizens: Shifting Representations of the Salar Myth of Origin in Media

The Salars, as many groups of Muslim Chinese, have long been framed as foreign others on the margins of Chinese society. Since the early Tang dynasty many of these groups, in fact, reached China traveling from the Middle East and Central Asia along the network of routes referred as the Silk Roads. Not surprisingly, the theme of travel figures prominently in the vast corpus of Muslim Chinese’s oral and written folk narratives. The myth «Camel Spring» (luotuo quan) narrates the thirteenth century migration of the Salar ancestors from the Samarkand area to Alitiuli, in present-day Qinghai Province. Oral accounts of this myth have circulated for centuries among the Salars and their neighboring communities. Earlier extant written records of the myth – most likely related by Tibetans or Han Chinese narrators – portray the Salars as barbarians, a representation echoed in official Qing documents. After Mao’s demise and even more prominently since the early 1980s, public institutions and local-Qinghai entrepreneurs have purged negative portrays of the Salars and favored more sympathetic representations of the «Camel Spring» in written, visual, and more recently digital media to pursue State and market-oriented agendas. These representations of the «Camel Spring» are indeed geared at both validating the State-assigned designation of the Salars as a distinct ethnic minority (shaoshu minzu) and at generating profit for the local tourist industry. To these ends, representations of the «Camel Spring» have tended to emphasize both the Salars’ foreign origin and their long permanence in China. Thus, I suggest, the case of the Salars counters pre-modern representations of ethnic minorities as barbarians. No longer framed as Muslim others, the Salars are represented as a Chinese group that can bridge China to Central Asia. This discourse has become prominent especially after the launch of the Belt Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013. At the same time, the insistence on selected ethnic features – most apparent from the almost ubiquitous inclusion of stereotypical elements reminiscent of the Salar ancestors’ travel on the Silk Road – folklorizes the Salars positioning them as foreign others.