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The Chinese Tatars (simplified Chinese: 塔塔尔族; traditional Chinese: 塔塔爾族; pinyin: Tǎtǎ'ěrzú; Tatar: Cyrillic Кытай татарлары, Latin Qıtay tatarları) form one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China.

Chinese Tatars
Total population
3556 (2010)
Regions with significant populations
China: Xinjiang
Tatar, Mandarin

Their ancestors are Volga Tatars tradesmen who settled mostly in Xinjiang and Crimean Tatars who suffered from Joseph Stalin's expulsion at 1940s.

The number of Chinese Tatars stood at 3556 as of the year 2010, and they live mainly in the cities of Yining, Tacheng, and Ürümqi in Xinjiang.

Chinese Tatars speak an archaic variant of the Tatar language, free from 20th-century loanwords and use the Arabic variant of the Tatar alphabet, which declined in the USSR in the 1930s. Being surrounded by speakers of other Turkic languages, Chinese Tatar partially reverses the Tatar high vowel inversion. They do not have a writing system.[1]

Chinese Tatars are Sunni Muslims.[2]

Jadid schools were founded in Xinjiang for Chinese Tatars.[3]

See alsoEdit


  1. ^ Minglang Zhou (2003). Multilingualism in China: the politics of writing reforms for minority languages, 1949-2002. Volume 89 of Contributions to the sociology of language (illustrated ed.). Published Walter de Gruyter. p. 183. ISBN 3-11-017896-6. Retrieved 2011-01-01.
  2. ^ "Joshua Project - Tatar of China Ethnic People Profile".
  3. ^ Ondřej Klimeš (8 January 2015). Struggle by the Pen: The Uyghur Discourse of Nation and National Interest, c.1900-1949. BRILL. pp. 80–. ISBN 978-90-04-28809-6.