there's 55 ethnic minority groups in the PRC, more if you include unofficial ones and those in Taiwan.

the sheer majority of threads here seem to focus on Altaic speaking minorities. Mongolians, Manchu, Uyghur, etc
with some small exceptions, Tibetans, Miao, and Hui.

most of the minority groups are actually southern, but there doesn't seem to be too much interest? its not just this forum either but in general other sites I've visited.

The Uyghurs and Tibetans are of interest to more people because of their respective separatist movements. The Mongols and Manchus are interesting because of their history as empire-builders. The Miao are interesting primarily to Southeast Asian Hmong/Miao living in the USA. The Hui are interesting primarily as an ethnic group defined purely by religion and the lack of a distinct language.

I believe most of the southern ethnic groups, including very large ones like Zhuang, Yi, Yao, and Tujia, have attracted little interest for a few reasons:
1) They have no present-day political influence and significance outside China, unlike Tibetans and Uyghurs and to some extent the Hmong
2) They have had little impact on Chinese or world history, unlike Mongols and Manchus
3) They do not inhabit regions with a particularly romantic or exotic image in the Western mind, such as the Silk Road, Tibet, or the Mongolian steppe. Even the Chinese government's renaming of a predominantly Dai area in Yunnan as 'Shangri-La' has not allowed it to replace the Western identification of Tibet with James Hilton's Shangri-La.

Well said, I fully agree with your view.

Well, since the issue has been raised, does anyone know how to find information about 爱泥民族 (I have a little doubt about how the "ni" should be written so I'm not 100% sure the one I have written is correct) ? I have a few friends from Yunnan who belong to this ethnic group but have rarely found reference about it.

The Hani 哈尼 (also written as 爱尼) have a population of about 1.4-1.5 million in the Ailao Mountains region of Yunnan. They are also an officially recognized minority group in Vietnam.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hani_people

There are some ethnic groups in China which only number a few dozen and are practically extinct.

Are they officially recognized as ethnic groups, though? If they are, I doubt they'd be so small.

I don't think so. But they have their distinct customs. The official smallest ethnic group is the Ge Ba 珞巴族, an ethnic group in Tibet with a registered population of 2856.

Thank you Yun, I didn't know that Hani and Aini were the same. That actually explains a lot... lol

The Tuvans are another group thats numbers are too small to get official classification

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuvans

I think the numbers need to be 10,000 minimum to be considered an separate ethnic group status in China.

Wiki says there are 2400 Tuvans in ET/XJUAR. But when I was there, I was told that the numbers are closer to the 500 range !!!

how about the Bai? I think they built two pretty long lasting kingdoms, Nanzhao and Dali?

The Bai were indeed one of the major forces that established the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms. I would say throughout history they formed one of the 4 major groups of the Southern Chinese peoples. Being the Yue, Zhuang, Miao and Bai. The assimilation into Han culture has occured and its partly because the timescales this has occured and there has not been the amount of incompatible problems amongst assimilation with the more notable groups so that they don't get as much mentioned.

But all these groups are very within us I think.

The Bai and Nanzhao kingdom bring to mind Jin Yong's Tian Long Ba Bu and Duan Yu. Isn't that Nanzhao's Duan family royal family orginally actually ethnic Han from Sichuan..??

My good friend and co-worker is a Bai (Dad from Sichuan, Mom is Baizu) does not speak Bai language or observe their custom anymore. When I visited her family in Kunming, there is no distinguishable difference from any Han family at all. And the Bai girls (in Dali) are beautiful in their costumes. But this is for tourist purpose only because the Bai mostly uses Han language, speaks Mandarin. As a minority group, they are known to be very talented and excel in Mathematics, Astronomy, Architiecture (own style) and Arts, and really high culture people already from 9th Century. My friend and her sister both have multiple Master degrees from US and both work as IT Intn'l consultants for IBM.

Anyway, Yue is not a major group of the southern Chinese, Yue is an integral part of Southern Han Chinese, of which there are major minorities groups such as Zhuang, Miao, Bai, Yi, Dai, etc...There are no official minority designation today of "Yue", just like there are no designation of "Hua Xia" or "Dongyi" in Central or Eastern China.

The history of Nanzhao and Dali is very poorly known outside East Asia. There is only one English book about Nanzhao, and it was written in 1981 (Charles Backus' The Nan-chao Kingdom and T'ang China's China's Southwestern Frontier), and there is not a single English book about Dali. Compare that to the English-speaking world's interest in the Manchus and especially the Mongols!






The ethnicity of the Nanzhao kings is still debated. Some historians think they should be classified as Yi. But nearly all historians believe the majority of the Nanzhao and Dali populations was linguistically and culturally (if not ethnicallly) Bai.



The Duan were kings of Dali, not Nanzhao, and they claimed to be from the prominent Duan family of Wuwei (in present-day Gansu) 武威段氏. But there is no way to verify this claim, since many royal or imperial families in Chinese history have falsely claimed prestigious ancestors.



It is almost certain that a large part of the Zhuang of today are descended from tribes that were called Yue in Qin-Han to Sui-Tang times.