China earthquake threatens future of the Qiang

A young Qiang man with a sweating brow carries his 82-year-old grandmother on a wooden contraption strapped to his back. Another elderly woman climbs painfully with a hand-carved walking stick. A little girl in pink sneakers lags behind the rest.

"At this point, we don't know how many we've lost," Deng said as he tapped on one of the few items he'd salvaged, a traditional sheepskin drum. "We need to protect our culture. There are very few Qiang people left."

One of the many indiscriminate acts of last week's massive earthquake was the destruction of the ancestral homeland of the Qiang, one of the more mysterious of China's minorities. Described variously as descendants of a legendary 21st century BC Chinese emperor or a lost tribe of Israelites, the Qiang number only about 300,000. As their singular misfortune would have it, almost all lived within 100 miles of the earthquake's epicenter, mainly in Sichuan province's hardest-hit counties.

Qiang people fleeing through the mountains Saturday said they walked for 12 hours from a village in Beichuan County called Dengbao, where only two elderly people refused to leave.

"Houses, roads, our pigs, everything, absolutely everything, was destroyed," said farmer Deng Kaijian, 33, as he hiked up the steep grade out of Beichuan with the others.

Some were seeing the outside world for the first time.

"We've never been out of our village before," said Deng Jiachang, 68, who sat Tuesday beside his 65-year-old wife, Wu Guangfen, in a Mianyang aid camp, clutching coupons for instant noodles as though they were gold.

"I don't know what we'll do next," added Deng, dressed in a blue jacket and traditional brown hat somewhat reminiscent of an oversized beret.

Ethnic maps of China show Qiang villages scattered roughly along the fault line of the magnitude 7.9 earthquake. Beichuan, a county where 80% of the buildings were destroyed, was home to as many as 90,000 Qiang. Wenchuan County, the epicenter, was home to an additional 30,000. A few minutes away is Taoping, a 2,000-year-old Qiang village of 3,000 people renowned for its ancient stone towers and block houses. The village reportedly sustained heavy damage.

Nobody will hazard a guess at this stage how many of the 40,000 confirmed earthquake victims were Qiang. Many of their mountain villages are so remote that more than a week later, rescue workers have yet to reach them.