| "Sibo military colonists", picture drawn by Henry Lansdell during his visit to today's Qapqal Xibe County in 1882 |
| Total population |
|---|
| 172,900 |
| Regions with significant populations |
| China (Xinjiang · Liaoning · Jilin) |
| Languages |
| Religion |
| Related ethnic groups |
The Xibe or Sibo[2] ( Sibe; simplified Chinese: 锡伯; traditional Chinese: 錫伯; pinyin: Xībó) are a Tungusic ethnic group living mostly in northeast China and Xinjiang. They form one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China.
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The Xibe originally lived on the Nonni and Songhua river valleys in central Manchuria. They are known as one of the nine states that were defeated by Nurhaci in the Battle of Gure in 1593. They were under loose domination of the Khorchin Mongols even after the Khorchin came under the control of the Manchu Qing Dynasty.
The Xibe started to make direct contact with the Qing Dynasty when it conducted military campaigns against Russia. They provided logistical support to the Qing. In 1692, the Khorchin dedicated the Xibe, the Gūwalca and the Daur to the Kangxi Emperor in exchange for silver. The Xibe was incorporated into the Eight Banners and were stationed in Qiqihar and other cities in Manchuria.
After conquering eastern Turkestan, the Qianlong Emperor garrisoned part of the Xibe there in 1764 to defend the new frontier. They formed a community in the Qapqal region south of the Ili River.
The traditional dress of the Xibe was similar to the traditional dress of the Manchus. Nowadays almost all the Xibe wear Western clothing and the traditional clothing is worn by elders during festivals.
Traditionally, the Xibe were divided into hala, clans consisting of people who shared the same surname. Until modern times, the dwellings of the Xibe housed up to three different generations from a same family, since it was believed that while the father was alive no son could break the family clan and to the house.
The Xibe in northeast China speak Chinese as their first language. In Xinjiang, descendants of the Qing dynasty military garrison preserve their language, which is a dialect of the Manchu. Unlike the Manchu language, the Xibe language is reported to have eight vowel distinctions as opposed to the six found in Manchu, differences in morphology, and a complex kind of vowel harmony. The general vocabulary and structure of Xibe has not been affected as much by the influence of Chinese as Manchu has been. However, there are a number of Chinese loanwords, and a large body of sociological terminology, such as gəming (revolution) and gungshə (commune), have been borrowed from Chinese and incorporated into the everyday vocabulary of the language. They use the Xibe script, a slightly revised Manchu script.
The name "Xibe" have been linked by some people with that of the ancient Xianbei. The modern expert on the Manchu people Pamela Kyle Crossley notes that if such a connection is indeed true, it would imply the Xianbei/Xibe undergoing a language shift from an either early Turkic or Proto-Mongolian language to a Tungusic one at some point in their history. They also note that such a putative connection encounters an obvious problem of explaining "many centuries intervening between the Xianbei and Sibo, during which there is virtually no evidence of a 'Sibo' people".[2]
The same Manchurologist, P. Crossley, suggested that the Xibe "were well known to Russians moving toward the Pacific, who named Siberia after them".[2] This, however, appears rather less likely than the standard derivation of the Russian Sibir (Siberia) from the name of Sibir Khanate and its capital Sibir. The latter names were well attested already in the mid-16th century (see, e.g., "Sibier Provincia" on Sigismund von Herberstein's map of Moscovia dated 1549, or the city and region of "Sibier" on Mercator's map of Asia (1595), while Russian explorers did not even reach today's Inner Mongolia until Ivan Petlin (1618), or the Amur basin, until Vassili Poyarkov (1643).
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