Presenting the Tujia

The Tujia are one of the most numerous minorities of China. In fact, according to the census of the year 2000 they are almost seven million persons spread over a wide mountainous region of the center of China that comprises the area where there join the provinces of Hunan, Hubei, Guizhou and the Municipality of Chongqing.

The population tujia has evolved of the following form:

Census of 1990: 5.704.223 Tujia
Census of 1982: 2.836.814 Tujia

This growth of the population has stemmed especially from the fact that persons who earlier were ashamed of his ethnic condition, happened to be recognized as Tujia.

The Tujia are provided with almost a dozen of autonomous administrative entities in four provinces where they live. In them they live, mixed generally with the Miao and the Chinese Han.

The Tujia are called themselves the same Bizika, but for many centuries alienated and cornered by the Chinese majority population, only they support a negligible percentage of persons who still communicate of habitual form in his traditional language. Scarcely 200.000 persons who live in the basin of the river Youshui, an area of difficult access keep on using the language Tujia. This provoked that they were in being one of the last minorities in being recognized officially

His language that belongs to the family tibeto-burmana, and is closely related with that of the Yi, through which a few hundreds of kilometers live only more on the west. The others use the local dialects of the Chinese.

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