Muslims in China: from the Tang to Zheng He (7th-15th centuries)

Part oneBy sea: the merchants of the south

The Chinese annals of the Tang dynasty record an embassy from the Arabs in 651, in the time of the caliph Uthman. Muslim tradition in China says the Companion Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas came to China and founded the first mosque at Guangzhou. The story cannot be proven, but the Huaisheng Mosque in Guangzhou, with its tall minaret, is linked to it and is one of the oldest mosques in China.

Merchants from Arabia and Persia settled in Guangzhou and later in Quanzhou, further up the coast. They lived in their own quarters with their own judges and mosques. In 879 rebels attacked Guangzhou and killed many foreigners, Muslims among them, and many survivors moved south to the ports of South-East Asia. Under the Song dynasty, from 960, Muslims again played a leading part in China's sea trade, and Quanzhou, which Arab writers called Zaytun, became one of the largest ports in the world. Muslim gravestones in Arabic still survive there.

Part twoBy land: the Silk Road and Xinjiang

Muslims also came overland, along the Silk Road through Central Asia to Chang'an, the Tang capital, now Xi'an. After the battle of Talas in 751 between the Abbasids and the Tang, Chinese power withdrew from Central Asia, and Islam slowly moved east.

In the tenth century Satuq Bughra Khan, a ruler of the Karakhanid Turks at Kashgar, became a Muslim, and the Karakhanids carried Islam into the western part of what is now Xinjiang. The Uyghurs of the Tarim Basin kept their Buddhist and other faiths for several centuries more. Under the Mongol khans of the Chagatai line, who became Muslim in the fourteenth century, and through the work of Sufi teachers, the region became mostly Muslim by the fifteenth century, and almost entirely Muslim by the seventeenth.

When the Mongols ruled China as the Yuan dynasty, from 1271 to 1368, they brought many Muslims from Central Asia and Persia to serve as officials, engineers and astronomers. One of them, Sayyid Ajall Shams al-Din, a descendant of the Prophet's ﷺ family from Bukhara, governed the province of Yunnan in the south-west, built mosques and schools there, and is remembered as a just governor. Yunnan has had a large Muslim community ever since.

Part threeZheng He

The Ming dynasty replaced the Mongols in 1368. Many Muslims who had served the Yuan lost their posts, but others served the Ming, and Muslims slowly became part of Chinese society, marrying Chinese and speaking Chinese, while keeping their faith.

One of them rose very high. Zheng He was born around 1371 into a Muslim family in Yunnan. His father and grandfather had made the Hajj, and the family name was Ma, a common Chinese form of Muhammad. As a boy he was captured by Ming soldiers and brought into the service of a prince, who later became the Yongle emperor. He became one of the emperor's most trusted men.

In 1405 the emperor sent him at the head of a vast fleet into the Indian Ocean. Over seven voyages, until 1433, his fleets visited Champa, Java, Sumatra, Melaka, Sri Lanka, Calicut, Hormuz, Aden and the East African coast. Some of his ships carried tens of thousands of men. On the last voyage some of his men went on to Makkah. The voyages showed Chinese power and brought back envoys, goods and even a giraffe from Africa. In the Muslim ports of South-East Asia, the visits of a Muslim admiral helped the new sultanates.

After 1433 the Ming stopped the voyages, and China turned inward. But the Muslims of China, the Hui in the cities and the Uyghurs and other peoples of the north-west, remained, a community of faith with roots more than a thousand years deep.

A boy from a Muslim family in Yunnan grew up to command the greatest fleets of his age.

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The mapWhere it happened

• Guangzhou
• Quanzhou
• Xi'an
• Kashgar
• Yunnan
• Nanjing
• Melaka
• Calicut
• Hormuz
• Aden
• Malindi

This map is a simple sketch to help you picture where events took place. Positions, distances and borders are approximate, so please use it for reference only, not as an accurate map.

SourcesSources for this chapter