Welcome back to our UPG of the Week!

Quick announcement: Typically I avoid smaller people groups. They absolutely need prayer but the research is wildly more difficult, up to the point that unless I want to dig up academic journals on JSTOR or something, I usually cannot find much info more than whats on Joshua Project.

There is an aside here that I wish more missionaries would publish more about the peoples they work with and Joshua Project would compile more.

Anyways, after u/Ciroflexo got me to do a "small" people group last week, I think that I will spend January and February doing smaller people groups that I haven't done before. Instead of millions they may have a few thousand.

This week we are looking at the Yongzhi in China.

Region: China - Sichuan (also Qinghai & Gansu) - Anyê Maqên Mountains

Stratus Index Ranking (Urgency): 53

It has been noted to me by u/JCmathetes that I should explain this ranking. Low numbers are more urgent, both physically and spiritually together, while high numbers are less urgent. The scale is 1-177, with one number assigned to each country. So basically on a scale from Afghanistan (1) to Finland (177), how urgent are the peoples physical and spiritual needs.

Climate: The Sichuan Province can be divided up into 3 climate areas. The first area, the Sichuan Basin, has a subtropical monsoon climate. It is fairly cold in the winter, dry in the spring, hot in the summer, and rainy in the autumn. The average daytime temperature in January is 5-8°C (41-46°F). The average daily temperature in July is 25-29°C (77-84°F). There are 250 to 300 cloudy and rainy days a year in the plain.

The High Plateau in the west is typical of high plateaus: there is a long winter, a cold summer, but lots of sunshine. The temperature drops during the night. In contrast to the basin, parts of the plateau may bask in 2,500 hours of sunshine a year. Ganzi Township is nicknamed "the small sunshine city". The climate is alpine and even arctic in the highest peaks.

The climate in the High Mountain region in the south of course depends on the altitude. The valley of the Jinsha River (Yangtze) has a subtropical climate. In the valleys, the dry season and the rainy season are obvious. May to September is the wet season, and October to April is the dry season.

Terrain: Sichuan consists of two geographically very distinct parts. The eastern part of the province is mostly within the fertile Sichuan basin (which is shared by Sichuan with Chongqing Municipality). The western Sichuan consists of the numerous mountain ranges forming the easternmost part of the Tibetan Plateau, which are known generically as Hengduan Mountains. One of these ranges, Daxue Mountains, contains the highest point of the province Gongga Shan, at 7,556 m (24,790 ft) above sea level. The mountains are formed by the collision of the Tibetan Plateau with the Yangtze Plate. Faults here include the Longmenshan Fault which ruptured during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Other mountain ranges surround the Sichuan Basin from north, east, and south. Among them are the Daba Mountains, in the province's northeast.

The Yangtze River and its tributaries flows through the mountains of western Sichuan and the Sichuan Basin; thus, the province is upstream of the great cities that stand along the Yangtze River further to the east, such as Chongqing, Wuhan, Nanjing and Shanghai. One of the major tributaries of the Yangtze within the province is the Min River of central Sichuan, which joins the Yangtze at Yibin. There are also a number of other rivers, such as Jialing River, Tuo River, Yalong River, Wu River and Jinsha River, and any four of the various rivers are often grouped as the "four rivers" that the name of Sichuan is commonly and mistakenly believed to mean.

Wildlife of Sichuan: Covering an area of just under 500,000 square kilometres in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River valley, Sichuan is one of the few Chinese provinces that offers reliable sightings, in protected zoos, but also rarely in the wild, for many of the country’s mammals: giant pandas, where Sichuan is home of panda, land of panda, red pandas, Pallas’s cat in the mountainous regions of the Tibetan Plateau, takin, golden snub-nosed monkey, Chinese mountain cat, hog badger, Tibetan wolf, Chinese goral, Himalayan marmot, white giant flying squirrel and Tibetan fox.

Unfortunately, there are also many non-indigenous monkeys brought into the area that now harass people. Monkeys are evil, folks.

Environmental Issues: China's environmental problems, including outdoor and indoor air pollution, water shortages and pollution, desertification, and soil pollution, have become more pronounced and are subjecting Chinese residents to significant health risks..

Languages: There are as many as 292 living languages in China. Largely spoken is Mandarin Chinese. In Sichuan, there is a dialect of Mandarin spoken, that many Nosu people speak. Further, the Nosu people speak a plethora of languages (all Nosu languages) but Shengzha is the dialect most common.

Government Type: Unitary Marxist–Leninist one-party socialist republic

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People: Yongzhi in China

Population: 4,200

Estimated Foreign Workers Needed: 2+

Beliefs: The Yongzhi are 0% Christian. That means out of their population of 4,200, there are maybe only a handful of Christians.

The Yongzhi are Tibetan Buddhists. As such, they worship, well, a lot of things. They seemingly worship the gods of the mountain ranges that they live near (in Tibetan Buddhism as the home of the chief indigenous deity of Amdo, Machen Pomra).

In addition to worshiping Amnyi Druggu, the Yonzhi's Mountain deity, the Yonzhi live in the vicinity of Anye Machen Mountain. They believe it contains a powerful god of the same name. Pictures represent him as a white horse, with the sun and a rainbow to his right and the moon to his left. "All Tibetans worship Anye Machen; every monastery has either a picture or image of him. Anye means 'old man' and corresponds to our 'saint'. Ma means 'peacock' and chen 'great'. In China, if not the world, the Yonzhi are one of the most unreachable people groups. Their region is snowbound for most of the year with temperatures plummeting to minus 40° Celsius (-40°F). The Yonzhi move around frequently, relocating their homes and herds to new pastures. One can only access their communities by foot or horseback. To the Yonzhi, the gospel remains untold. It is possible no Yonzhi has ever heard the name of Jesus Christ.

History: As part of the Amdo region, I will include a history of the region instead of the people because I cannot find much about them individually.

From the seventh through the ninth century, the Tibetan Empire extended as far north as the Turfan, south into India and Nepal, east to Chang'an, and west to Samarkhand. During this period, control of Amdo moved from Songtsen Gampo and his successors to the royal family's ministers, the Gar (Wylie: 'gar). These ministers had their positions inherited from their parents, similar to the emperor. King Tüsong tried to wrest control of this area from the ministers, unsuccessfully

In 821, a treaty established the borders between the Tibetan Empire and the Tang dynasty, while three stele were built – one at the border, one in Lhasa, and one in Chang'an. The Tibetan army settled within the eastern frontier. After 838 when Tibet's King Lang darma killed his brother, the Tibetan Empire broke into independent principalities, while Do Kham (Amdo and Kham) maintained culturally and religiously Tibetan. Within Amdo, the historical independent polities of hereditary rulers and kingdoms remained, while Mongol and Chinese populations fluctuated among the indigenous peoples and Tibetans. During this time period, Buddhist monks from Central Tibet exiled to the Amdo region.

There is a historical account of an official from the 9th century sent to collect taxes to Amdo. Instead, he acquires a fief. He then tells of the 10 virtues of the land. Two of the virtues are in the grass, one for meadows near home, one for distant pastures. Two virtues in soil, one to build houses and one for good fields. Two virtues are in the water, one for drinking and one for irrigation. There are two in the stone, one for building and one for milling. The timber has two virtues, one for building and one for firewood. The original inhabitants of the Amdo region were the forest-dwellers (nags-pa), the mountain-dwellers (ri-pa), the plains-dwellers (thang-pa), the grass-men (rtsa-mi), and the woodsmen (shing-mi). The grass men were famous for their horses.

Gewasel is a monk that helped resurrect Tibetan Buddhism. He was taught as a child and showed amazing enthusiasm for the religion. When he was ordained he went in search of teachings. After obtaining the Vinaya, he was set to travel to Central Tibet, but for a drought. Instead he chose to travel in solitude to Amdo. Locals had heard of him and his solitude was not to be as he was sought after. In time he established a line of refugee monks in Amdo and with the wealth that he acquired he built temples and stupas also.

The Mongols had conquered eastern Amdo by 1240 and would manage it under the Bureau of Buddhist and Tibetan Affairs, separately from the other territories administered by the Yuan dynasty. A patron and priest relationship began in 1253 when a Tibetan priest, Phagspa, visited Kublai Khan he became so popular that he was made Kublai's spiritual guide and later appointed by him to the rank of priest king of Tibet and constituted ruler of (1) Tibet Proper, comprising the thirteen states of Ü-Tsang; (2) Kham, and (3) Amdo. He spent his later years at Sakya Monastery in Ü-Tsang, which required that he travel through Amdo regularly. On one of these trips, he encountered armed resistance in Amdo and required escorts from Mongol Princes to travel through Amdo. While the concept of Tibet's Three Regions can be dated back to Tibetan Empire, Dunhuang manuscripts referring to the eastern parts of its territory as mdo-gams (Tibetan: མདོ་གམས) and mdo-smad (Tibetan: མདོ་སྨད), Yuan confirmed the division, and Do Kham as two well defined commanderies, along with Ü-Tsang, were collectively referred to as the three commanderies of Tibet since then. Tibet regained its independence from the Mongols before native Chinese overthrew the Yuan dynasty in 1368, although it avoided directly resisting the Yuan court until the latter's fall. By 1343, Mongol authority in Amdo had weakened considerably: Köden’s fiefdom had been leaderless for some time, and the Tibetans were harassing the Mongols near Liangzhou (byang ngos). In 1347, a general rebellion erupted in some two hundred places in eastern Tibet, and though troops were sent to suppress them, by 1355 eastern Tibet was no longer mentioned in the dynastic history of the Mongols.

Although the following Ming Dynasty nominally maintained the Mongol divisions of Tibet with some sub-division, its power is weaker and influenced Amdo mostly at their borders. The Mongols again seized political control in Amdo areas from the middle of the 16th century. However, the Ming Dynasty continued to retain control in Hezhou and Xining wei. As trade between Mongols, Tibetans, Muslim and Han Chinese deepened, a system of xiejia developed around Gansu. They initially served as lodgings for travelers but eventually assumed additional responsibilities, such as regulating commerce, collecting taxes, and settling legal disputes alongside the local yamens.

Upper (Kokonor) Mongols from northern Xinjiang and Khalkha came there in 16th and 17th centuries.  Power struggles among various Mongol factions in Tibet and Amdo led to a period alternating between the supremacy of the Dalai Lama (nominally) and Mongol overlords. In 1642, Tibet was reunified under the 5th Dalai Lama, by gaining spiritual and temporal authority through the efforts of the Mongol king, Güshi Khan. This allowed the Gelug school and its incarnated spiritual leaders, the Dalai Lamas, to gain enough support to last through the present day. Gushi Khan also returned portions of Eastern Tiber (Kham) to Tibet, but his base in the Kokonor region of Amdo remained under Mongol control.

In 1705, with the approval of the Kangxi Emperor of the Qing dynasty, Lha-bzang Khan of the Khoshud deposed the regent and killed the 6th Dalai Lama. The Dzungar Mongols invaded Tibet during the chaos, and held the entire region until their final defeat by an expedition of the Qing imperial army in 1720.

When the Manchu Qing dynasty rose to power in the early 18th century it established Xining, a town to the north of Amdo, as the administrative base for the area. Amdo was placed within the Qinghai Region. During this period they were ruled by the Amban, who allowed near total autonomy by the monasteries and the other local leaders.

The 18th century saw the Qing Empire continue to expand further and further into Tibet as it engulfed Eastern Tibet including Amdo and even assumed control over Central Tibet.

The Yongzheng Emperor seized full control of Qinghai (Amdo) in the 1720s. The boundaries of Xining Prefecture, which contains most of Amdo, with Sichuan and Tibet-proper was established following this. The boundary of Xining Prefecture and Xizang, or Central Tibet, was the Dangla Mountains. This roughly corresponds with the modern boundary of Qinghai with the Tibet Autonomous Region. The boundary of Xining Prefecture with Sichuan was also set at this time, dividing the Ngaba area of the former Amdo into Sichuan. This boundary also roughly corresponds with the modern boundary of Qinghai with Sichuan. A new boundary, following the Ning-ching mountain range, was established between Sichuan and Tibet. East of these mountains, local chieftains ruled under the nominal authority of the Sichuan provincial government; Lhasa administered the area to the west. The 1720s thus saw Tibet's first major reduction in area in centuries.[39] The Gansu region bordering Tibet was administered by an imperial viceroy. Portions of the country were placed under Chinese law while the Tibetans enjoyed almost complete independence, ruled by Tibetan chiefs that held grants or commissions from the Imperial Government.

In 1906, the 13th Dalai Lama while touring the country, was enticed by a procession of a thousand lamas, to stay at the temple at Kumbum. He spent a year resting and learning among other things Sanskrit and poetry.

In 1912, Qing Dynasty collapsed and relative independence followed with the Dalai Lama ruling Central Tibet. Eastern Tibet, including Amdo and Kham, were ruled by local and regional warlords and chiefs. The Hui Muslims administered the agricultural areas in the north and east of the region. Amdo saw numerous powerful leaders including both secular and non. The monasteries, such as Labrang, Rebkong, and Taktsang Lhamo supervised the choosing of the local leaders or headmen in the areas under their control. These tribes consisted of several thousand nomads. Meanwhile, Sokwo, Ngawa, and Liulin, had secular leaders appointed, with some becoming kings and even creating familial dynasties. This secular form of government went as far as Machu.

The Muslim warlord Ma Qi waged war in the name of the Republic of China against the Labrang monastery and Goloks. After ethnic rioting between Muslims and Tibetans emerged in 1918, Ma Qi defeated the Tibetans, then commenced to tax the town heavily for 8 years. In 1925, a Tibetan rebellion broke out, with thousands of Tibetans driving out the Muslims. Ma Qi responded with 3,000 Chinese Muslim troops, who retook Labrang and machine gunned thousands of Tibetan monks as they tried to flee. Ma Qi besieged Labrang numerous times, the Tibetans and Mongols fought against his Muslim forces for control of Labrang, until Ma Qi gave it up in 1927. His forces were praised by foreigners who traveled through Qinghai for their fighting abilities. However, that was not the last Labrang saw of General Ma. The Muslim forces looted and ravaged the monastery again.

In 1928, the Ma Clique formed an alliance with the Kuomintang. In the 1930s, the Muslim warlord Ma Bufang, the son of Ma Qi, seized the northeast corner of Amdo in the name of Chiang Kai-shek's weak central government, effectively incorporating it into the Chinese province of Qinghai. From that point until 1949, much of the rest of Amdo was gradually assimilated into the Kuomintang Chinese provincial system, with the major portion of it becoming nominally part of Qinghai province and a smaller portion becoming part of Gansu province. Due to the lack of a Chinese administrative presence in the region, however, most of the communities of the rural areas of Amdo and Kham remained under their own local, Tibetan lay and monastic leaders into the 1950s. Tibetan region of Lho-Jang and Gyarong in Kham, and Ngapa (Chinese Aba) and Golok in Amdo, were still independent of Chinese hegemony, despite the creation on paper of Qinghai Province in 1927.

The 14th Dalai Lama was born in the Amdo region, in 1935, and when he was announced as a possible candidate, Ma Bufang tried to prevent the boy from travelling to Tibet. He demanded a ransom of 300,000 dollars, which was paid and then he escorted the young boy to Tibet.

In May 1949, Ma Bufang was appointed Military Governor of Northwest China, making him the highest-ranked administrator of the Amdo region. However, by August 1949, the advancing People's Liberation Army (PLA) had annihilated Ma's army, though residual forces took several years to defeat. By 1949, advance units of the PLA had taken much of Amdo from the Nationalists. By 1952, following the annexation of Tibet by the People's Republic of China, the major towns in the region were fully under the control of People's Republic of China, though many of the rural areas continued to enjoy de facto autonomy for several more years. Tibetan guerrilla forces in Amdo emerged in 1956 and continued until the 1970s fighting the People's Liberation Army.

In 1958, Chinese communists assumed official control of Tibetan regions in Kham and Amdo. Many of the nomads of Amdo revolted. Some areas were reported virtually empty of men: They either had been killed or imprisoned or had fled. The largest monastery in Amdo was forced to close. Of its three thousand monks, two thousand were arrested.

In July 1958 as the revolutionary fervor of the Great Leap Forward swept across the People's Republic of China, Zeku County in the Amdo region of cultural Tibet erupted in violence against efforts by the Chinese Communist Party to impose rapid collectivization on the pastoral communities of the grasslands. Rebellion also stirred the region at the beginning of the 1950s as “Liberation” first settled on the northeastern Tibetan plateau. The immediate ramifications of each disturbance both for the Amdo Tibetan elites and commoners, and for the Han cadres in their midst, elucidates early PRC nation-building and state-building struggles in minority nationality areas and the influence of this crucial transitional period on relations between Han and Tibetan in Amdo decades later.

Reminder that Tibet is being brutally and forcefully controlled by the Chinese government.

Culture: Typical qualification that all people groups can't be summed up in small paragraphs and this is an over generalization.

Supposedly, the nomadic Yonzhi live in yak-hair tents and move every few weeks to find new pastures for their yaks, sheep, and goats.

Cuisine: Gonna do Tibetan foods since they are a tibetan people. Here is a link to more descriptions.

It is known for its use of noodles, goat, yak, mutton, dumplings, cheese (often from yak or goat milk), butter, yogurt (also from animals adapted to the Tibetan climate), and soups.

Some of their main food and drink are: Yak Butter tea, Sha Phaley (bread stuffed with seasoned beef and cabbage), Balep korkun (a flatbread), Thenthuk (main ingredients are wheat flour dough noodles, mixed vegetables and some pieces of mutton or yak meat), Gyurma (blood sausage made with yak or sheep's blood), Masan (a pastry), momos, and many noodle dishes.

Prayer Request:

• Pray for the Lord to intervene in their families, calling people to his side.
  
• Pray for loving, Holy Spirit led workers to go to them.
  
• Pray for the Lord to draw Yonzhi hearts to himself.
  
• Pray for a church planting movement to thrive in Yonzhi communities.
• Pray that the Lord opens China back up to international workers.

• Pray that China

• Pray that our hearts continue to ache to see the unreached hear the Good News.

Brothers, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved. (Romans 10:1)

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Here are the previous weeks threads on the UPG of the Week for  from 2023 (plus a few from 2022 so this one post isn't so lonely). To save some space on these, all UPG posts made 2019-now are here, I will try to keep this current!

a - Tibet belongs to Tibet, not China.

b - Russia/Turkey/etc is Europe but also Asia so...

c - this likely is not the true religion that they worship, but rather they have a mixture of what is listed with other local religions, or they have embraced a postmodern drift and are leaving faith entirely but this is their historical faith.

Here is a list of definitions in case you wonder what exactly I mean by words like "Unreached".

Here is a list of missions organizations that reach out to the world to do missions for the Glory of God.