Islam in China and East Asia: A Documented History

Tang · 7th–9th centuries唐

1. Origins and Entry (7th–9th centuries)

Islam's presence in China dates back roughly 1,300 years.^[1] Islam entered China by two main routes: from the southeast by sea to Canton, and from the northwest over the Pamirs and through the Tarim Basin to Kansu and Shensi — the ancient Silk Road.^[3] Arab traders called Guangzhou Khanfu and maintained trading posts on the southeastern coast at Quanzhou and Guangzhou; some Arabs had already settled in China by the time the first Muslim deputation arrived.^[19]

The founding tradition holds that the Prophet's companion Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas led a delegation to the Tang court — a story preserved in Muslim tradition and repeated in popular histories.^[18] The evidentiary status of this story is weak: the same tradition's anchor building, the Huaisheng Mosque in Guangzhou, carries a disputed construction date of c. 627 CE or the Tang or Song dynasties, with recorded rebuilds in 1350 and 1695.^[4] The mosque's name, Huaisheng ("Remember the Sage"), marks it as a memorial to the Prophet, and its Chinese nickname Guangta ("Beacon Tower") refers to its minaret.^[19]

Song · 960–1279宋

2. Song Dynasty: The Merchant Centuries (960–1279)

Under the Song, foreign trade became a pillar of the state. Chinese ships sailed from coastal cities such as Quanzhou to markets from Japan to east Africa, and Quanzhou dominated Song maritime commerce.^[17] The state formalized Muslim merchant life through the Bureau for Foreign Shipping (shi-bo-si) and the Foreigners' Lane (fan-fang) — institutions recorded in Song administrative compendia.^[5] Wealthy merchant families from Srivijaya and the Persian Gulf settled in Quanzhou, and figures like Pu Shougeng — a Muslim superintendant of shipping whose defection helped the Yuan take the city — became subjects of major scholarship.^[5] The physical record survives: Quanzhou holds by far the richest trove of Islamic inscriptions in maritime Asia, and Muslim gravestones there are studied as an "integral cultural product" of a diaspora community.^[36][37]

Yuan · 1271–1368元

3. Yuan Dynasty: Muslims in Government (1271–1368)

The Mongol Yuan classified the population into four groups; the se-mu (Semu) class of non-Chinese westerners held high administrative positions, and a large proportion were Persians serving as government officials.^[7] Muslim technical expertise entered the state: the Persian astronomer Jamal-al-Din Bukhari, who had already visited China under Mongke, returned in 1267 carrying astronomical instruments as gifts and presenting a new calendar, the Wan nian li, to the Yuan court.^[7]

Contested A genuine historiographical debate runs through this period: David Morgan has argued that Persian served as an important lingua franca of the Yuan empire; Stephen Haw's reappraisal concludes that Persian was never a genuine lingua franca in China and Mongolia — its use was confined to a section of the Muslim community and limited commercial and official circles.^[6] Both readings are cited here; the evidence for Persian administrative documents is real (the term Huihui script, with its 21 letters, appears in a 1237 Chinese source), but its societal reach was narrow.^[6]

Ming · 1368–1644明

4. Ming Dynasty: Localization and Zheng He (1368–1644)

The Ming represents the great localization: Muslim merchants and soldiers who had settled and married Chinese wives became the Chinese-speaking Hui population.^[3] The century's most famous Muslim was Zheng He — born Ma He in 1371 in Kunming, Yunnan — the Ming admiral and diplomat whose seven expeditions are the imperial history's best-documented naval achievement: from 1405 to 1433 the fleet sailed the Indian Ocean; one modern summary counts 317 ships and more than 27,000 men, over 31,000 miles traveled, and at least thirty-seven countries visited.^[28][30] The voyages ran from 1405 to 1433.^[29]

Ming–Qing · c. 1630–1800明清

5. The Han Kitab: Islam in Chinese Intellectual Dress (c. 1630–1800)

The signal intellectual achievement of Sino-Islamic history is the Han Kitab tradition — a body of Chinese-language Islamic scholarship that blends Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Islam, testimony to how Muslims in China contributed to the wider Islamic heritage.^[2] Its most influential writer was Liu Zhi (1670–1724) of Nanjing, versed in Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, who had also read works brought by Jesuit missionaries and could write in both Chinese and Arabic.^[24] This movement is the strongest evidence against the claim that Chinese Islam was isolated: it was a systematic, internally-directed translation of Islamic thought into the Neo-Confucian idiom.

Qing · 1856–1878清

6. Qing Crisis: Rebellion and Catastrophe (1856–1878)

Mid-19th-century Muslim rebellions in China emerged largely in response to Qing attempts to impose mainstream Chinese religious practices on the Hui population.^[23] Two conflicts define the era:

• - The Panthay Rebellion in Yunnan (1856–1873), the southwestern uprising of Hui communities.
• - The Dungan Revolt (1862–1877) in the northwest, which produced a population loss of 21 million people from massacres, migration, famine, and plague; Gansu lost 74.5% of its population (14.55 million) and Shaanxi lost 44.6% (6.2 million). The fighting also drew in Yaqub Beg, the Kokandi commander who ruled Kashgaria with British and Ottoman support until the Qing reconquest.^[38]

The revolt's endgame drew in the Kokandi commander Yaqub Beg, who ruled Kashgaria with British and Ottoman support until Qing reconquest.^[38]

Republican China · 1912–1949民国

7. Republican Era and the Ma Warlords (1912–1949)

After the Qing collapsed in 1912, northwestern China came under the Ma clique — a collective name for Hui (Muslim Chinese) warlords who ruled Qinghai, Gansu, and Ningxia.^[11] This period also produced the modern ethnonym: before 1921/1934, Western writers called the Turkic-speaking Muslims of the oases "Turki"; the Xinjiang governor Sheng Shicai adopted the Soviet ethnographic classification and in 1934 became the first to promulgate the official use of the term "Uyghur" for the Turkic Muslims of Xinjiang.^[9]

Contemporary · 1949–present当代

8. The PRC Period: Two Communities, Two Fates (1949–present)

Islam's presence in China dates to the 7th century, and its modern Muslim population is dominated by two communities with sharply different histories.^[21] Contemporary China has an estimated 23.3 million Muslims as of 2010, projected toward 30 million by 2030, with most living in Gansu, Qinghai, Ningxia, and Xinjiang.^[3][20] Of China's 55 recognized minorities, ten are predominantly Sunni Muslim.^[1] All Chinese Muslims are Sunni Hanafi except the Tajiks, who are Nizari Ismaili.^[3] Related smaller groups include the Salar — a Turkic minority of Oghuz speech numbering 165,159 in the 2020 census.^[34] Chinese official accounts trace the Salar ancestors to the Samarkand region, arriving during the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368).^[35] China is home to over 35,000 mosques, half of them in Xinjiang, and some 45,000 imams.^[12]

The two largest communities have followed divergent paths:

Hui

Chinese-speaking, culturally assimilated descendants of Arab and Persian traders, distributed across the country: approximately 11.3 million (2020 census).^[8] The Hui path ran through deep indigenization (Han Kitab, Chinese-style mosque architecture) and, in the reform era, relative accommodation.

Uyghurs

a Turkic ethnic group of Central Asia speaking a Karluk language; the historically Muslim population of the Tarim oases, Islamized through the Karakhanid khanate, founded in the 10th century by the Karluks, Yagmas, and Chigils.^[9] The Chagatai khanate's Mongol rulers, whose lands framed the region, converted gradually and unevenly.^[31] Khotan's Islamic history remains poorly studied for lack of sources.^[32]

The present crisis: since 2017 state policy has moved from Uyghur-specific repression to a broader "Xinjiang model" extending toward Hui religious life — official rhetoric has become less tolerant toward Islamic practice and expression among Hui communities.^[13] Human Rights Watch reports as many as a million people arbitrarily detained in 300 to 400 facilities including "political education" camps, with Turkic Muslims sentenced for ordinary religious practice.^[22]

Korea and Japan · 1877–present

9. Islam Beyond China: Korea and Japan

Korea

The Middle East Institute's account dates the modern reintroduction to war:^[14] during the Korean War (1950–53), Turkey sent troops under UN command — the Turkish Brigade — whose chaplains and humanitarian work seeded Korean interest in Islam.^[15][16] Korean Muslims organized formally (the Korea Muslim Federation, 1967), and the Seoul Central Mosque opened in Itaewon in 1976 — the first mosque on the peninsula.^[15] North Korea's Muslim population is estimated in the low thousands, mostly Indonesians, with a single mosque at the Iranian embassy in Pyongyang.^[15]

Japan

Islam first reached the Japanese public in 1877 as part of Western religious thought, with Japanese translations of the Prophet's biography appearing around the same time; before 1868 there are no clear records of contact.^[26] The community took shape with displacement: after the October Revolution, several hundred Tatar Muslim refugees from Central Asia and Russia were given asylum in Japan and formed small communities, and some Japanese converted through contact with them.^[25] Japan's first mosque, the Kobe Mosque, was built in 1935 with Turko-Tatar community support (designed by Czech architect Jan Josef Svagr) and survived both American bombing and the 1995 Kobe earthquake;^[25] a Tokyo mosque followed in May 1938, built through the active efforts of Kurban Ali with support mainly from Japanese political and business circles, as well as government leaders, all of them non-Muslims.^[27] As of 2025, Japan holds an estimated 420,000 Muslims (about 0.3% of the population), grown mainly through immigration.^[25]

11. Open Debates and Confidence Levels

12. Source-Quality Notes

• Strongest tiers: academic publishers (Brill ^[5][36], Iranica ^[7][32], East Asian History ^[6]), government commissions (CECC ^[13]), Columbia teaching resources ^[17][29], Pew data ^[20], human-rights reporting ^[22].
• Mid-tier: established encyclopedias and journalism (Wikipedia ^{[1][4][8][9][38][11][15][25][28][31]}, New Lines ^[2], Freedom House ^[12], MEI ^[14], KEIA ^[16], JSTOR Daily ^[30], Aramco World ^[33], China Heritage Quarterly ^[37]).
• Devotional/popular tier: use only for tradition claims, flagged as such (Qarawiyyin Project ^[18], Muslim Heritage ^[19], IslamAwareness, Fountain Magazine).
• The full evidence ledger (ledger.json) holds a verbatim quote for every source; the Sources block below is generated mechanically from it.