China's Minority Peoples - The Koreans

Most of the Korean people, numbering 1.920.597, live in Jilin, Heilongjiang and Liaoning provinces. Others live scattered in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. The largest Korean community is in Yanbian Autonomous Prefecture.

Three hundred years ago, ancestors of the Korean people moved from the Korean Peninsula to the Northeast of China. They have their own language and writing system. However, their language was variously considered. Most of the Chinese linguists incline that it belongs to the Altaic language family.

The long drum, a Korean percussion instrument, looks like a cylinder with a solid middle part and two hollow ends. On festivals, Korean women dance while beating long drums. This is what they call the Long Drum Dance.

The Koreans are mainly engaged in fanning. They know how to grow rice in a cold climate, and have turned Yanbian Prefecture into a major rice producer in the Northeast of China after years of hard work.