Dungan[a] is a term used in territories of the former Soviet Union to refer to a group of Muslim people of Hui origin.

[8][9][3] In the Ferghana Valley, the first Dungans to appear in Central Asia originated from Kuldja and Kashgar, as slaves captured by raiders; they mostly served in private wealthy households.

After the Russians conquered Central Asia in the late 19th century and abolished slavery, most female Dungan slaves remained where they had originally been held captive.

Russian ethnographer Vlaidimir Petrovich Nalivkin and his wife said that "women slaves almost all remained in place, because they either were married to workers and servants of their former owners or they were too young to begin an independent life".

[19][20] The Russians record an incident where they rescued these Chinese Muslim merchants who escaped, after they were sold by Jahangir's Army in Central Asia and sent them back to China.

In accordance with the terms of the Treaty of Saint Petersburg (1881), which required the withdrawal of the Russian troops from the Upper Ili basin (the Kulja area), the Dungan (Hui) and Taranchi (Uyghur) people of the region were allowed to opt to move to the Russian side of the border.

One popular theory derives this word from Turkic döñän ("one who turns"), which can be compared to Chinese 回 (huí), which has a similar meaning.

The term "Dungan" ("Tonggan", "Donggan") has been used by Central Asian Turkic-and Tajik-speaking people to refer to Chinese-speaking Muslims for several centuries.

Joseph Fletcher cites Turkic and Persian manuscripts related to the preaching of the 17th century Kashgarian Sufi master Muhammad Yūsuf (or, possibly, his son Afaq Khoja) inside the Ming Empire (in today's Gansu and/or Qinghai), where the Kashgarian preacher is told to have converted 'ulamā-yi Tunganiyyān (i.e., "Dungan ulema") into Sufism.

In English and German, the ethnonym "Dungan", in various spellings, has been attested as early as the 1830s, typically referring to the Hui people of Xinjiang.

[25][26] In 1839, Karl Ernst von Baer in his German-language account of Russian Empire and adjacent Asian lands has a one-page account of Chinese-speaking Muslim "Dungani" or "Tungani", who visited Orenburg in 1827 with a caravan from China; he also mentions "Tugean" as a spelling variant used by other authors.

[31] Broomhall's book also contains a translation of the report on Chinese Muslims by the Ottoman writer named Abd-ul-Aziz.

For example, Owen Lattimore, writing c. 1940, maintains the terminological distinction between these two related groups: "T'ungkan" (i.e. Wade-Giles for "Dungan"), described by him as the descendants of the Gansu Hui people resettled in Xinjiang in 17–18th centuries, vs. e.g. "Gansu Moslems" or generic "Chinese Moslems".

Today the Dungans play a role as cultural "shuttles" and economic mediators between Central Asia and the Chinese world.

[42] Husei Daurov, the president of the Dungan center,[43] has succeeded in transforming cultural exchanges into commercial partnerships.

[42] In February 2020, a conflict broke out between ethnic Kazakhs and Dungans in the Korday area in Kazakhstan on the border to Kyrgyzstan.

[44][45] The Dungan language, which the Dungan people call the "Hui language" (Хуэйзў йүян/回族語言 or Huejzw jyian), is similar to the Zhongyuan dialect of Mandarin Chinese, which is widely spoken in the south of Gansu and the west of Guanzhong in Shaanxi in China.

[46] Nineteenth century explorer Henry Lansdell noted that the Dungan people abstained from spirits and opium, neither smoked nor took snuff and "are of middle height, and inclined to be stout.

They have high and prominent foreheads, thick and arched eyebrows, eyes rather sunken, fairly prominent cheek-bones, face oval, mouth of average size, lips thick, teeth normal, chin round, ears small and compressed, hair black and smooth, beard scanty and rough, skin smooth, neck strong, and extremities of average proportions.

After death, the mullah and the aged assemble to recite prayers; the corpse is wrapped in white linen and then buried, but never burned.

In addition, schools have museums to preserve other parts of their culture, such as embroidery, traditional clothing, silver jewelry, paper cuts of animals and flowers and tools[citation needed].

[56] The Dungan people, descendants of Hui who fled to Central Asia, called themselves Zhongyuanren in addition to the standard labels Lao Huihui and Huizi.