Don't beat orphans with idle hands, and don't scold the old people with idle mouths.

—Salar proverb

One day, Ma Lin took Ma Zhanxiang, Ibrahim and others to the southeast township where the Xunhua Salar people lived, and while inspecting the government affairs there, he took the opportunity to purchase a large number of horses for the cavalry to use in battle.

They took time out to visit the beautiful scenery of Mount Munda Mountain.

The ancient trees on Mengda Mountain are towering, the grass is knee-long, the mountain flowers are splendid, the birds are chirping, and the stream is murmuring. There is also a heavenly pond in the mountain known as the eyes of Salur Anguru (Salar language, girl). The water of Tianchi is clear and turquoise, the same color as the blue sky, like a blue sapphire. The reflection of the peaks moves slightly with the waves, as if it is a fairyland on earth.

After descending Mount Mengda, Ma Lin came to Mengda Village to visit his old Salar friend Han Suleiman.

Han Suleiman is a descendant of Hassan, the native country of Khorezm. He had a long beard, a small white round hat with a brimmed white on his head, a white cloth sweat jacket and a red cloth belt around his waist, and although he was close to 70 years old, his body was still very strong.

Han Suleiman warmly cleared Ma Lin and his entourage to his home as guests.

Ibrahim found that the Salar dwellings in Munda were two-story hedged wooden buildings, very different from other residential compounds.

The overall layout of the fence wooden building is almost always sitting north and facing south. A flat-roofed gate was built in the middle of the south side. The fence building is divided into two floors, the upper floor is the bedroom, storage room and bathing room. The rooms on the ground floor have a wide and narrow corridor, and most of them are used as livestock pens, which are very similar to the Qiang dwellings in Gannan in western Sichuan.

The frame of the building is made of good wood pine wood from the Muangda Mountains. The walls are woven from the branches of miscellaneous trees in the mountains. The inside and outside sides are coated with black clay grass mud, and then the top is coated with white clay mud. The middle of the wall is empty, which not only saves building materials, but also reduces the weight of the building, and the hollow wall is warm in winter and cool in summer, and has strong air permeability.

Han Suleiman smiled and said, "Don't dislike the Nao's Zhuang Kuo. The soil slopes here are steep and flat, but there are many woods. Therefore, I had to build a fence wooden building, which occupied less land and was very convenient for obtaining materials. ”

Ibrahim said to Niu Zhanxiang regretfully: "This method is really good. Why didn't we think of it when we were in Dongxiang and Xixiang before? ”

Niu Zhanxiang said with a smile: "Brother, even if we thought about it at the time, we don't have trees there, and we can't build a fence and wooden building." ”

When Ma Lin was chatting with Han Suleiman over tea and chatting, he heard that his youngest daughter Han Sophie was newly widowed, so he glanced at Ibrahim and expressed his willingness to be a matchmaker to marry Han Sophie to Ibrahim.

Although Ibrahim had married a daughter-in-law in Gayindai, Manuri had never been in his eyes and heart. Han Sofei in front of her is slender and spicy, and she likes it very much, but now she sees Master Ma Lin talking about being a matchmaker, so she agrees to this family business.

Xunhua is located in the southwest of Gansu Province at that time, with Nianbo County and Bayon County in the north, Guide County in the west, Xiahe County and Longwu (Tongren County) in the south, and Hezhou across the Yellow River in the east, which is the meeting place of the three major ethnic groups of Han, Hui and Tibet.

Since the Great Yuan Dynasty, Xunhua has been inhabited by Tibetans and Salar people. The Salar make up the majority of the total local population.

Geographically, Xunhua belongs to the eastern section of the Qilian Mountains, a branch of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, with high in the south and low in the north, surrounded by mountains and valleys.

The Yellow River flows through 79 kilometers here, leaving Xunhua with fertile beaches and valuable water resources.

The climate of Xunhua is mild, there is no cool in summer, not very cold in winter, the sunshine hours are long, the solar radiation is strong, and the temperature difference between day and night is huge. The rainfall is low, the evaporation is large, the spring is nine droughts in ten years, the southeast wind is more, the summer thunderstorms, and hail is frequent.

In 1762, the Qing Dynasty established the Xunhua Hall. In 1913, the Republic of China changed the Xunhua Department to Xunhua County, which was under the jurisdiction of Xining Dao, Gansu Province.

The Sassars are close relatives of the Turkmens, Turks, Tatars, and Azerbaijanis of Central Asia. In Chinese historical books, it is generally referred to as Salar, Salar, etc. After the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty, official archives often used discriminatory titles: Sala Hui, Sala Huizi and Sala Pan Hui.

Salar belongs to the West Hungarian branch of the Turkic language family of the Altaic language family, which is similar to Uyghur and Uzbek languages, and many words are loanwords absorbed from Chinese and Tibetan. Historically, the Salar used the Arabic alphabet-based Turkic script, but it has disappeared only in modern times.

The Salar people and their culture are very much alive. However, after hundreds of years of vicissitudes, not only did they not merge with the neighboring Han people, Tubo people, etc., but absorbed the surrounding Semu people, Han people, and Tubo people, forming a new ethnic community with common cultural characteristics.

The Salar people are strong, upright, brave, and warlike, and are willing to live in peace with neighboring peoples to resist foreign invasions.

The culture of the Salar people is made up of three levels of integration. The first layer of culture belonged to the nomadic hunting culture, and still retains a lot of it. The second is the Muslim cultural layer, which was formed after they believed in Islam and dominated for a long time. The third level is that after they settled in Xunhua, they absorbed the culture of foreign ethnic groups such as Tibetans, Hui Hui and Han Chinese, which reflected in their language and behavior, living customs, and even psychology.

The literary art of the Salar people is dominated by folk rap literature.

Stories include stories, myths, legends, fables, proverbs, and jokes, etc., and the language is humorous and subtle.

Folk songs such as salar songs, banquet songs, and flowers are sung.

Salar is a kind of lyrical folk song sung by the common people of Salar in their own language, which is composed of many short poems with independent significance. Popular tunes such as "Brazil Ancient Yoyo", "Retreat Lar Sai Sibuga" and so on.

A banquet song is a traditional song sung at the time of marriage.

Hua'er is a mountain song sung in Chinese. The lyrics are generally four sentences, pay attention to impromptu singing, and make good use of comparisons. Influenced by Tibetan singing, the Salar tones are generally vibrato, high-pitched, and melodious.

The family members of the Salar people generally consist of grandfathers, grandmothers, fathers, mothers, older brothers, sisters-in-law, younger brothers, younger sisters, etc.

When a girl reaches the age of eight or nine, she has to learn to tell stories and cry marriage words from her grandmother, and learn to do various household chores such as embroidery and cooking from her mother.

In childhood, men should go to the mosque to learn and recite scriptures, receive religious education, and cultivate children's religious beliefs and understanding of religious rituals, dogmas and canons from an early age, which lays a solid foundation for the formation of their future behavioral norms and ethics.

As you grow older, both men and women should get married in a timely manner. In turn, men have the responsibility to provide for their families, and women have the obligation to take care of the household.

The Salar people call the surname Han the surname Genzi, which is the root from the Western Regions in ancient times. More than 20 surnames, including Ma, Shen, Lan, He, Liu, and Wang, were all foreign surnames, and later integrated into the Salar ethnic group.

According to the preface to the "Han Family Tree" of the Hui people in the Central Plains, it is recorded: "The surname Han of Semu first originated from Xunhua, Qinghai, and in the early years of the Yuan Dynasty, the surname Han moved eastward. ”

In the spring of 1925, Ibrahim returned to his hometown of Gayindai again.

He took advantage of Manuri to cook in the kitchen and proposed to his parents that he wanted to marry Han Sophie.

'Isa said, "What about Manuri? She gave you a son and a daughter. ”

Ibrahim said bitterly, "I really don't want to live with her. ”

Mai Liyan said worriedly: "The Salar people are half Salta and half Tibetan, so I'm afraid it will be difficult to get along with. ”

Ibrahim smiled and said, "Grandma, this is hearsay. The Salar people and us Sartas look the same and live in the same way, but there are some differences in language, which is not in the way. ”

After about ten days, Ibrahim sent the weeping Manuri back to Benkang's mother's house, and gave them a sum of compensation, which was the end of the unhappy marriage.

Subsequently, Ibrahim entrusted a son and a daughter to 'Isa and Mairiyan, and embarked on a journey to Xunhua.

Ma Lin was very happy that Ibrahim obeyed his approach, and sent more than a dozen of his officers and soldiers to accompany Ibrahim to Mengda to marry Han Sophie.

Han Suleiman warmly hosted a banquet to welcome his new son-in-law and his party.

He arranged for his servants to bring several teas. In addition to the common tea, milk tea, and gaiwan tea, there is also wheat tea that is fried and roasted until it is half-burned, mashed, then boiled in a clay pot to make a coffee-like taste, and dried with fruit tree leaves and fried into a half-charred fruit leaf tea.

The guests drank the special tea of the Han family, and felt that it had a unique flavor.

Take a sip of tea to moisten your throat, and what is brought to the table is boiled beef and sheep's head and hooves.

When the Salar had slaughtered the sheep and oxen, they cut off the horns from their heads, burned the fur from their heads with a red-hot shovel, and washed them with alkaline water. Then, use a sharp knife to cut the corner of the mouth of the cow and sheep along the tooth bone to the root behind the ear, then use the axe to split it in half, put it in a pot to boil, and then add wheat to stew together. Only locally produced peppercorns and green salt are used for seasoning. When it is simmered until the skin of the meat falls off, it can be fished up and eaten. At breakfast, the Sarah housewife took off the meat piece by piece and divided each part into each person's bowl. Eyes are usually only given to the elderly, and it is said to cure the eyes of the elderly. After eating the head meat, each person has to drink a bowl of wheat kernels with soup.

Next, the lads who served the plates brought up the fragrant meat sausages.

The Salar people like to wash the intestines and stomachs of cattle and sheep with alkaline water, and then chop the hearts and livers of cattle and sheep into minced meat or meat puree, mix with flour, chopped green onions, etc., carefully stuff them into the large intestines of cattle and sheep, and tie the mouth with fine cotton thread. In addition, the bean noodles and white noodles are mixed into a batter, which is poured into the small intestine by two people, and the mouth is also tied with a thin cotton thread, and put it in the pot with the large intestine, and at the same time put in a few pieces of breast fork meat to cook together, and at the same time notify relatives and friends to come to visit. After cooking, the housewife takes out the pot and puts it on a plate and brings it to the kang table in the guest room for everyone to share.

The man prepared a knife for each guest. The guests themselves cut off and ate them section by section with a knife. Each of them served a sauce made with garlic, hot sauce and vinegar in a small bowl.

The third round of dishes is the nine bowls and three rows of rice at the traditional wedding banquet. That is, nine large bowls are arranged in a square on the table, and from each direction they appear to be in three rows. The large bowl contains meat dishes such as meatballs, sand, stuffy, and tendon meat.

After the guests had eaten and drunk their fill, they began to dance the four-person camel dance, which was the most popular among the Salar people, in the open space of the courtyard. This is a folklore form that describes the Salar people who followed the white camel to Xunhua in a mixture of rap and dance. The movements of the dance are vigorous and powerful, mixed with questions and answers, lively and very interesting.

The band played the strings of a city made of copper and silver in the shape of a horse's hoof.

The bride Han Sophie wore an emerald green hijab on her head, a colorful corsage dress on her body, a black coat with shoulders, and a long string of earrings, rings, bracelets, beads and other jewelry.

Ibrahim helped Han Sophie into the carriage, then said goodbye to Han Suleiman and Mengda's other relatives, and sped in the direction of Xunhua City.

Ibrahim set up a new home in Xunhua City and continued to run a business for Malin.

Ibrahim is shrewd and capable, and is deeply liked and appreciated by Ma Lin. Usually encountering something that is uncertain, Ma Lin also likes to ask him for advice.

Not long after, Ma Lin decided to ask Ibrahim to take Han Sophie with him to Xining, where he would manage the fur shop.

Xining is located in the valley basin of the middle reaches of the Huangshui River, surrounded by mountains and dangerous terrain. There is Nanshan in the south, Beishan in the north, the east and west are run through by the Huangshui River, it is the eastern gateway of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the southern road of the ancient Silk Road and the ancient road of Tangbo must pass through, it has always been the traffic artery and military important place in the northwest, known as the key of the West Sea, the throat of the sea and Tibet, it was called Xiping County and Qingtang City in ancient times, it is the largest city on the entire Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, and it is also one of the famous high-altitude cities in the world.

During the Shang, Zhou, Qin and Han dynasties, the Hehuang region was the center of the ancient Qiang people. In 121 BC, the Western Han army marched west into the Huangshui River Valley. Huo Quai, a famous general of the Han Dynasty, built a military stronghold here, Xiping Pavilion. This was the beginning of the establishment of Xining. During the Eastern Han Dynasty, Xiping County was set up. In 1104, the Great Song Dynasty changed Xiping County to Xining Prefecture. Since then, the name of Xining has appeared in the history books.

The year after moving to Xining, Han Sophie gave birth to Ibrahim's first child, his daughter Zai Nabai.

In the third year, Han Sophie gave birth to another girl, but she died soon after.

In the fourth year, Han Sophie finally gave birth to a son. Ibrahim happily named the child Niu Yun Shan.