Ongkor

The story of the Ongkor begins in 1763, when the Manchu dynasty sent Solon Evenki soldiers, with their families, from Manchuria to Xinjiang. It was a long journey across China. The mission was to guard the western region, considered hostile, and to establish the authority of the empire there.

When Manchu rule came to an end, the soldiers and their families decided not to return. They stayed in Xinjiang, far from their homeland, and over the generations they blended with the surrounding peoples, above all the Daur and the Xibe. What remains is a remnant of a journey that is now more than two centuries old.

Today the Ongkor keep few customs that set them apart from those around them. They have adopted, to a large extent, the lifestyle of their neighbors, and the everyday language of many is no longer that of their ancestors. What is still preserved is, above all, the memory of a common origin and the awareness of belonging to a small community.

They live gathered in a village near Yining. There, daily coexistence and marriages with people from other peoples have, over the decades, reduced the number of those who recognize themselves as Ongkor. A census in 1945 still counted thousands of them; today very few remain, and each family carefully keeps what it remembers of its own history.

Unlike other Evenki groups in China, which maintain shamanic practices, the Ongkor have lost these customs. There is no organized religious structure to sustain traditional faith in the life of the community, and few still know how to explain where their ancestors’ religious customs came from.

Among the youngest, most follow no religion at all. Many grew up without any spiritual teaching passed down by the family, which leaves a gap: a people who no longer have the old rituals and have not yet come to know the one who answers the deepest questions of the heart. This emptiness is also an open door, since there are no ties of faith binding a person to another religious system.

The Ongkor’s own language has reached a critical point, with very few remaining speakers, and today they communicate mainly in the languages of neighboring peoples. There is no record of Scripture, audio or other biblical material prepared especially for them. In practice, the Word of God can reach them only through the languages they already use in daily life, especially Chinese, and through audio and video materials that do not require reading.

The greatest barrier is the almost total absence of contact. Throughout their entire history, the Ongkor have never been reached by Christianity, and no church is known to have arisen among them. They live in a region with a strong Islamic presence, one of the least evangelized in the world, and they are so few that they hardly draw the attention of those who could bring the message. The very dissolution of their ethnic identity means the people are easily forgotten, even by those who are willing to serve unreached peoples.

The Ongkor need, above all, someone who will seek them out. A community so small and so mixed with its neighbors risks disappearing without anyone noticing its story, its name and its future. They need genuine friendship, respect for the memory they still hold, and people willing to live alongside them in the Ili Valley.

They also need hope that goes beyond everyday life. Many young people grow up with no faith and no spiritual direction, and a people who have lived for centuries without hearing about Jesus deserve to know him clearly, in their own home and in the language they understand.