The Utsuls are thought to be descendants of Cham refugees who fled their homeland of Champa in what is now modern central Vietnam to escape the Vietnamese invasion. After the Vietnamese completed the conquest of Cham in 1471, sacking Vijaya, the last capital of the Cham kingdom, a Cham prince and some 1,000 followers moved to Hainan, where the Ming dynasty allowed them to set up a kingdom-in-exile. Several Chinese accounts record Cham arriving on Hainan even earlier, from 986, shortly after the Vietnamese captured the earlier Cham capital of Indrapura in 982, while other Cham refugees settled in Guangzhou. While most of the Chams who fled Champa went to neighbouring Cambodia, a small business class fled northwards. How they came to acquire the name Utsul is unknown. Their population was greatly reduced during WW2 by the Japanese who slaughtered more than 4,000 of them in their massacres of ethnic minorities in western Hainan and Sanya as Chinese armies were hiding among them from the invading japanese.
Identity
Although they are culturally distinct from other Hui people, the Chinese government places them as members of Hui nationality because of their Islam religion. From reports by Hans Stübel, the German ethnographer who made contact with them in the 1930s, however, their language is completely unrelated to any other language spoken in mainland China. About 3,500 of them are speakers of the Tsat language, which is one of the fewMalayo-Polynesian languages that are tonal. Whereas other Hui people are Muslims who do not have a mother tongue or traditional ethnic language distinct from the Sinitic dialects, the Utsuls do have their own language, which is regarded as separate and distinct from Sinitic dialects. As a result, their classification as Hui people is controversial.
Genetics
Dongna Li and Chuan-Chao Wang have typed paternal Y chromosome and maternal mitochondrial DNA markers in 102 Utsat people to gain a better understanding of the genetic history of this population. High frequencies of the Y chromosome haplogroup O1a*-M119 and mtDNA lineages D4, F2a, F1b, F1a1, B5a, M8a, M*, D5, and B4a exhibit a pattern similar to that seen in the neighboring indigenous Li ethnic minority. Cluster analyses of the Utsat, Cham, and other ethnic groups in East Asia indicate that the Utsat are much closer to the Hainan indigenous Li people than to the Cham and other mainland southeast Asian populations. These findings suggest that the origins of the Utsat likely involved massive assimilation of indigenous ethnic groups. During the assimilation process, the language of Utsat has been structurally changed to a tonal language; their Islamic beliefs may have helped to keep their culture and self-identification.
Family names
Some common Utsul family names include Chen, Ha, Hai, Jiang, Li, Liu and Pu.
