Day six in Xinjiang: Xibe

An army instructor trains children in a Xibe ethnic minority school in Yili prefecture, Xinjiang region, as taken on Saturday 23 August, 2009. [Photo:CRIENGLISH.com]

We asked the second son of the house, a man with Chinese features in his forties, if he feared that the Xibe culture would ever die out seeing as though there were only 40,000 of them left in the prefecture. He said no, and one of the main reasons was that the Chinese one-child rule did not apply to the ethnic minorities. He told us he had two children, a boy of 17 who is studying at university, who is expected to help run the family business after graduating. He said it was still unclear whether his daughter, a few years younger, would follow the same path.