Tu

The origin of the Tu as a distinct people traces back to 1227, when a garrison of the Mongol Empire was sent to control the area they still inhabit today, on the plateau between Qinghai and Gansu. The soldiers remained in the region after the campaign and married women from local tribes, giving rise to a lineage that combined Mongol ancestry with the customs of the populations already established there.

Over the following centuries, this group consolidated a distinct identity, separate from both the Mongols of the steppes and their Tibetan and Han Chinese neighbors, preserving the self-designation of Monguor while absorbing religious and agricultural practices from the surrounding area.

Most Tu people live off agriculture on small plots on the hillsides and valleys of Qinghai and Gansu, growing barley and vegetables, with the raising of sheep, goats and yaks as a traditional supplement. Many still migrate seasonally to work in nearby cities before returning to their villages.

Social life revolves around the clan, which historically determined who one could marry and organized cooperation between families. Until recently, girls were expected to marry around age 15, and unmarried women above that age wore a single ponytail as a sign of availability to suitors.

The Tu are faithful followers of Tibetan Buddhism, with the Youning Monastery, founded in 1604, as their main religious center, still serving as a spiritual reference point for the region. Alongside formal Buddhist practice, shamans and mediums maintain an active role in the religious life of the villages, meeting everyday needs that the temple does not cover.

This combination appears with great force during the Nadun Festival, an annual celebration in which a medium called a huhu falls into trance, believed to be possessed by a warrior deity, in a ritual that blends devotion, protection of the harvest and reinforcement of the people’s collective identity.

To be Tu is, for the vast majority, to be a Tibetan Buddhist: faith is intertwined with clan identity and with the calendar of festivals that sustains community life, and abandoning that heritage is seen as breaking with one’s own family. Attachment to shamans, mediums and the trance ritual reinforces a spiritual world that is already occupied, which demands preparation and discernment from those who approach with the message of Jesus, without being intimidated by the resistance that naturally arises.

Many Tu families live off small-scale subsistence farming on mountainous terrain, which brings constant challenges of income and access to services in the rural areas of Qinghai and Gansu. Seasonal migration to the cities in search of work also draws young people away from their home communities.

In the spiritual realm, the need is even greater: there is no known church among the Tu today. An entire people remains without any Christian community of their own where they can hear and live out the gospel within their own culture.