An article in the China Daily (6 February 1998) highlighted the tiny Tuwa tribe. Numbering less than 2,000 people, they live in two remote villages on the blue Hanas River in Altai in northern Xinjiang, surrounded by woods of birch, pine and cypress.
These isolated people used to live in neighbouring Russia, but in 1918 moved into China to the villages of Hanas and Hemu. They look like Mongolians but speak their own Tuwa dialect, which belongs to the Ural-Altaic language family. Some say they are Mongols, others Kazakhs, but they are known as Tuwas.
Like Mongols, the Tuwas live by hunting and animal husbandry, raising cows, horses and deer-but not sheep, as the snow is often too thick for the sheep to get to the grass! The Tuwas are nature worshippers as well as Buddhists. Each year they offer sacrifices to the mountains, sky, trees and fish. There are lamas and Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in their villages, and some Tuwas hang Buddhist pictures and photographs of the Panchen Lama in their homes.
Dwelling deep in the Altai Mountains, 95% of the Tuwas have never been outside their villages in their lives. Their traditions forbid them to marry outsiders. As a result of close inter-marriage, many are born slow-witted or die young, so their number has fallen sharply in the last fifty years. Pray that the Gospel of God’s grace in Christ will reach this remote people!