Shawwal, 1437/ July, 2016
13
A Song of the Red Sea:
Communities and Networks of
Chinese Muslims in the Hijaz
Hyeju Jeong
Duke University History Department
A Song of the Red Sea:
Communities and Networks of
Chinese Muslims in the Hijaz
Hyeju Jeong
Duke University History Department
© King Faisal Center for research and Islamic Studies, 2016
King Fahd National Library Cataloging-In-Publication Data
Jeong, Hyeju
A song of the red sea: communities and networks of chinese
Muslims in Hijaz. / Hyeju Jeong. - Riyadh, 2016
32 p; 16.5x23cm
ISBN: 978-603-8032-96-1
1- Islam - China 2- Hijaz (Saudi Arabia)
1- Title
210.9151 dc
1437/10311
L.D. no. 1437/10311
ISBN: 978-603-8032-96-1
Table of Contents
Acknowledments
7
Introduction
9
An Overview of Chinese Muslim Presence in the Hijaz
10
Waqf and Communal Spaces: Ribat and Hajj Lodge Houses
13
A Song of the Red Sea
21
Conclusion
27
5
6
No. 12 Shawwal, 1437 - July 2016
Acknowledments
I am grateful to the King Faisal Center for Research in Islamic Studies, especially
Dr. Yahya bin Junaid and Dr. Saud al-Sarhan, for sponsoring my stays in the
Kingdom. In conducting this research, I became particularly indebted to
individuals and families in Jeddah, Ta’if, Riyadh, and different parts of China
and Taiwan who gladly devoted their time to a stranger who abruptly knocked
on their doors. Please direct questions and comments to janice.jeong@duke.
edu.
7
s
Introduction
It was a hot yet pleasant midsummer day in 2014 when I first met Mr. ‘Abdul
Majid Ma Jingwu in his apartment in Jeddah. Hanging on the walls of the
reception room were several pieces of Chinese Islamic calligraphy, and on
the bookshelf lay Ma Jian’s Chinese translation of the Quran. In 1949, at the
age of sixteen, Mr. Ma Jingwu had undertaken pilgrimage to Mecca from
Xining, the capital of northwestern Qinghai Province, along with his parents
and around 200 kinsmen. His mother passed away that year, two days before
performing the pilgrimage, and was buried in Mecca. Before settling in
Jeddah in the early 1980s, Ma had sojourned in Mecca, Cairo, Ta’if, and
Taipei; during the 1980s, he served as the representative of overseas Chinese
in the Middle East to Taipei. Fifteen years prior he had visited his original
hometown in Linxia, often referred to as China’s “little Mecca,” with his wife,
Ms. Ma Yujing. After several hours of conversation, he handed me a couple
of large dates from Gansu, which his relatives had sent him that summer.
While the Chinese Muslim diaspora population in Saudi Arabia is smaller
than the diaspora populations of South Asia, Central Asia or Southeast Asia,
whose historical ties with the coasts of the Red Sea are known to have left
enduring vestiges in and around Mecca, Chinese Muslim communities have
forged their own enclaves in the Hijaz and beyond for the past century or so,
making permanent homes in different parts of the Kingdom. Journeying from
various parts of China, they arrived in Mecca, Ta’if and Jeddah as pilgrims,
students, merchants, and exiles at different times and became residents and
citizens of Saudi Arabia. The dispersed communities and networks that they
have forged in past and present urge a redefinition of belonging that does not
depend on ethnocentric nationalism. These communities also present a picture
of Sino-Arabian exchanges that is deeper, less structured, and more enduring
than the one represented by the official diplomatic relations between China
and Saudi Arabia that came into force with the 1946 Treaty of Amity with the
Republic of China and the 1990 treaty with the People’s Republic of China.
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No. 12 Shawwal, 1437 - July 2016
An Overview of Chinese Muslim Presence in the Hijaz
Throughout history, the coasts of the Red Sea represented both a real and
imagined destination for Muslim populations dispersed across China. 1
Recent research by Hatim al-Tahawi has illustrated the historical ties
between Mecca and different parts of China between the ninth and
fifteenth centuries: the routes by which sailors, traders and diplomats
traveled and transferred goods and goodwill. 2 Zheng He’s voyages
across the oceans, accounts of which were recorded by fellow sailor Ma
Huan, are well known. 3 While direct physical ties between Arabia and
China may have waned after Zheng He’s missions in the mid-fifteenth
century, in northwest China, travel to Mecca and southern Arabia
continued to serve as the basis for religious rectification movements
throughout the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, culminating in latenineteenth century Salafi-oriented socio-religious projects that gradually
underwent ideational transformation. 4 For those farther in the east,
Mecca and Medina were continuously inscribed and memorialized as
1- By “Chinese Muslims,” I mean the Muslim populations dispersed through China who trace
their origins to settlers from Central Asia and the Middle East who intermarried with local
populations, now narrowly classified as one of fifty-five ethnic minorities (huizu) under the PRC.
2- Haatim al-Tahawi, “Mecca in Chinese Records during the Medieval Age (‫مكة املكرمة يف السجالت‬
‫)الصينية يف العرص الوسيط‬,”Al-Tafaahim, vol. 45 (2014): 379-398. I am grateful to Dr. Engseng
Ho for referring me to this article.
3- Ma Huan, Ying Yai Shêng Lan Chiao Chu. CUP Archive, 1970, trans. J.V.G. Mills.
4- Jonathan Lipman, Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997). Joseph Fletcher and Beatrice Forbes Manz,
Studies on Chinese and Islamic Inner Asia (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995). Dru Gladney,
“The Salafiyya Movement in Northwest China: Islamic Fundamentalism among the Muslim
Chinese?” in Muslim Diversity: Local Islam in Global Contexts, ed. Leif Manger.
(Richmond: Curzon Press, 1999). For an in-depth study of contemporary manifestations
of Salafi movement in northwest China and the impact of overseas (Saudi) connections:
Mohammed Turki A. Al-Sudairi, “Adhering to the Ways of Our Western Brothers.” Sociology
of Islam 4, no. 1–2 (April 15, 2016): 27–58.
points of origin and return, where Islam was born and spread to the
lands of the east.
From the mid-nineteenth century onward, as China experienced postOpium War infrastructural developments, travel from China to Arabia
increased. The first known Chinese-language pilgrimage account of
this period was written by Ma Dexin of Dali, Yunnan Province after his
travels from 1841 to 1848. 5 Pilgrimages and diplomatic missions to the
Islamic world increased steadily throughout the interwar period and
World War II, aided by trans-Islamic internationalism and Sino-Japanese
competitions that sought to win the minds of Muslims within and outside
China’s tenuous borderlines. 6
Yet the largest community of Chinese Muslims in the Hijaz is known to
have formed in the mid-twentieth century, when a number of Chinese
emigrants undertook the pilgrimage to escape from their country’s incessant
warfare. The greatest number of migrants came with the final Communist
victory, when the former militarist governor of Qinghai Province, Hussein
Ma Bufang, fled to Canton, Hong Kong, and Mecca with between 200 and
300 of his close familial and political affiliates. A prominent general and
politician working with the Nationalist Party, Hussein Ma Bufang and
his extended family had maintained amiable relations with Saudi King
‘Abdul ‘Aziz even before their migration in 1949. Shortly after their arrival
in Mecca, the group migrated to Cairo and sojourned there for a few
5- Ma, Dexin, Anli Ma, and Guochang Na. Chao jin tu ji (Yinchuan Shi: Ningxia ren
min chu ban she, 1988). The pilgrimage account is discussed in some detail in Kristian
Petersen, “The Great Transformation: Contours of the Sino-Islamic Intellectual Tradition.”
Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Washington, 2012.
6- This particular episode is explored in Yufeng Mao, “A Muslim Vision for the Chinese
Nation: Chinese Pilgrimage Missions to Mecca during World War II.” The Journal of Asian
Studies 70, no. 2 (2011): 373–95.
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No. 12 Shawwal, 1437 - July 2016
years, until the 1956 Egyptian socialist revolution and its recognition of
the People’s Republic of China threatened their status. They undertook the
pilgrimage again and permanently settled in Ta’if, where the mountainous
climate is said to have offered more suitable living conditions. Besides the
Ma clan, certain individuals from northeastern Shandong, southwestern
Yunnan, Sichuan, and Tibet took isolated pilgrimages to permanently
settle in places such as Ta’if and Jeddah. By then, Turkic-speaking migrants
from Xinjiang had already become a part of Hijazi society and are said to
have helped the Chinese Muslims settle down. 7
As new immigrants, with no direct access to mainland China or the relatives
they left behind, the amalgamated Chinese Muslim community adapted
to their new society while maintaining external religious, political and
commercial ties throughout Hong Kong and Taipei. They memorialized
now-distant homelands in mainland China, which they would not be able
to return for the next three decades. While constructing their community
in the western coasts of Arabia, many traveled to destinations far outside
the Kingdom -- sometimes physically, and sometimes by crossing space
and time in imagination. These are the stories that this paper seeks to tell,
based on textual sources and interviews conducted in the summer of 2014
and winter of 2016 with a number of Saudi-Chinese residents. It focuses
on places of communal gathering and the stories of individuals who both
shaped and were shaped by conduits of Sino-Arabian exchanges.
7- Abu Bakr baa-Qaader provides a brief overview of settlers in the Hijaz from Central Asia
(western and eastern Turkistan) and China Proper: “A Social Survey on Chinese Muslims in
the Hijaz (‫)ملحات اجتماعية عن املسلمني الصينيني يف الحجاز‬,” al-Diraasaat al-Sharqiiya (1994):
122-129. Also Nur Al-‘AAmudii, “Interview with Saarah Mahii al-Diin ‘Umr al-Siinii‫(املقابلة‬
)‫مع السيدة سارة محيي الدين عمر الصيني‬,” Diraasaat Sharqiiya (2008/1): 183-222.
Waqf and Communal Spaces: Ribat and Hajj Lodge Houses
(plural arbita), or housing complexes built through charitable
endowments (waqf) for the purpose of serving those in need, were central
features of the Hijazi landscape throughout history. 8 Chinese Muslims also
left their imprints through collective donations, first in Mecca from the early
twentieth century on, then in Ta’if with the eventual settlement of the diaspora
community. If ribat in Ta’if offered Chinese Muslims a space to strengthen
internal cohesion and the capacity to adapt to their new host societies, the
hajj lodge houses of Mecca provided a platform for maintaining external
relations with families and coreligionists coming from remote places.
Ribat
There were two ribat in Ta’if used by migrants from China. During
the day, the first immigrant community in Ta’if would embroider
white hats that became popular in the markets: each evening, males
would gather in the ribat between the maghrib and isha prayer times
to have religious lessons, taught in a mix of Arabic and northwestern
Chinese dialects. Leading the sessions were the sheikhs Yūsuf ‘Abdul
Rahman (Ma Ziliang 马子良) who had studied in the Haram, and
Hasan Qasim (Ma Zishan 马子山) originally from Dongxiang in
Linxia. The Chinese Muslim district in Ta’if neighbored that of the
“Bukharis,” a term used as a catch-all for settlers from eastern and
western Turkistan, who already possessed many more awqaf in
8- Hussein ‘Abdul ‘Aziiz Hussein Shaafi’ii, Arbita in Mecca in the Ottoman Age
(‫)األربطة بمكة املكرمة يف العهد العثماني‬
(London: Mu’sisa al-Farqaan lil-Turaath al-Islaami, 2005). Erosion of such legacy is becoming a
matter of public concern in the Kingdom: www.aleqt.com/2010/10/03/article_450002.html. For an
examination of almsgiving practices amongst contemporary Chinese Muslim communities and
their legal implications: Matthew S. Erie, “Sharia, Charity, and Minjian Autonomy in Muslim
China: Gift Giving in a Plural World.” American Ethnologist 43, no. 2 (May 2016): 311–24.
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No. 12 Shawwal, 1437 - July 2016
14
Mecca, Medina and Ta’if than did the Chinese community. 9 Sheikh
Yūsuf ‘Abdul Rahman used to pray in a mosque together with the Bukharis. 10
Figure 1 Mosque where Sheikh Yusuf Abdul Rahman used to pray in a Bukhari
neighborhood (Ta’if). Photo by author.
also had other functions for the Chinese Muslim community,
providing space for events such as weddings and banquets. As one of
my interviewees pointed out, they served a function similar to that of
Ribat
9- According to a recent article by Justin Jacobs, in the early 1950s, Yolbars Khan, who was heading
the office of the Chairman of the Xinjiang Provincial Government in Taipei, estimated the number of
Uyghur and Kazakh refugees from Xinjiang in Saudi Arabia to be about 8,000 (Turkey, in comparison,
hosted about 2,000). The Xinjiang diaspora in Saudi Arabia had already integrated into the local
society by then and contributed a great amount of money to Isa Alptekin in exile (6,000 USD in 1951
alone). Justin M. Jacobs, “Exile Island: Xinjiang Refugees and the ‘One China’ Policy in Nationalist
Taiwan, 1949–1971.” Journal of Cold War Studies 18, no. 1 (January 1, 2016): 188–218.
10- Interviews in Jeddah and Ta’if, January 6- February 6, 2016.
“huiguan” in China. 11 The owner of one of Ta’if’s two ribat was Sa’id Nuh
from Urumqi in Xinjiang, who had undertaken the pilgrimage to Mecca
following the victory of the Communist Party. According to his descendants,
Sa’id Nuh’s family had migrated from China Proper to Xinjiang along with the
Qing territorial conquest of the mid-eighteenth century. When Communist
rule came to China, Sa’id Nuh rode a horse to India and boarded a ship to
the coasts of Arabia. Upon arrival in Mecca, Sa’id Nuh and his father Nuh
purchased a small house in the district of Masfalah and acquired about ten
tents, which provided assistance to incoming pilgrims and to the Taiwanese
Consulate. He married a Chinese Muslim from Medina who had migrated
before him. The family eventually relocated to Ta’if, where they bought land
and built two houses -- one for their own use, and another for use as a ribat.
11- A combination of the characters “hui (会),” to assemble, and “guan (馆),” or a kind of
building, huiguan proliferated starting from the early Ming and especially during the Qing
dynasties, alongside commercialization and urbanization. They served as gathering places
and lodge houses for long-term sojourners (merchants and officials) who came from the
same native locale. Often associated with guilds, huiguan provided quasi-public spaces and
“ascribed solidarities,” while drawing exclusive boundaries around those who met the criteria
to belong. For a discussion on the socio-religious aspects of huiguan, see Susan Naquin, Peking: Temples and City Life, 1400-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000),
598-622. Shaodan Zhang’s recent thesis has conceptualized mosques in Qing China Proper
as central arenas for Chinese Muslim public cultures, where Chinese Muslims with divergent
statuses and interests came together and undertook organizational activities, sometimes in
confrontation with one another: Shaodan Zhang, Chinese Muslims in the Qing Empire:
Public Culture, Identities, and Law, 1644—1911. Masters Thesis, University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign, 2015.
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No. 12 Shawwal, 1437 - July 2016
Figure 2 Sa’id Nuh (left) and his father Nuh (right). Courtesy of the Nuh family.
The hajj lodge houses in Mecca, on the other hand, preceded the establishment
of ribat in Ta’if and were closely linked to the mobility of Sino-Muslims
between Mecca and their dispersed places of residence. The first of the two
hajj accommodations for Chinese pilgrims was built in the 1920s through
the endowments of Ma Fuxiang and Ma Hongkui, the militarist governors
of the Gansu Province in pre-People’s Republic of China. This building was
eventually demolished with the expansion of the Grand Mosque. The second
hajj lodge house, which is still in use, was constructed thanks to the endowment
of Hussein Ma Bufang at some point after his migration, presumably around
the year 1950. It remains in use and can host about 100 to 200 guests. 12
The hajj lodge house endowed by Ma Fuxiang was the first of its kind to
be built specifically for pilgrims from China. When its ownership came
12- Interview in Linxia, July 10-16, 2016.
into dispute in the 1950s, Ma Fuxiang’s son Ma Hongkui (who had gone
into exile in Los Angeles) sent a letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of
Saudi Arabia in Mecca in 1955. In order to discredit a competing claim to
the property, he narrated the history of the house:
The land for building the Camp was bought by my father Mr Ma
Fu Hsiang about thirty years ago. After the death of my father,
I continued his wish and contributed a great sum of money
to build the present premises of the Camp. At that time I sent
two agents by the names of Ma Kwang Tien and Fa Han Chih
respectively to handle the work of construction. After more than
one year’s work, the construction was completed in about the
23rd or 24th year of the Chinese Republic (1934).
The original purpose of building this camp was to accommodate
the increasing number of Chinese Mohammedan disciples coming
on their pilgrimage to Mecca each year. Before this Camp was
built the Chinese coming to Mecca could not easily find housing
facilities. In view of this situation, my father and I both determined
to build this Camp to accommodate our fellow disciples.
At the time when the construction was completed there were no
permanent Chinese residents in Mecca to take care of the building,
so a local inhabitant by the name of Abu Shelaf was temporarily
employed to take care of the janitor service. But he had no property
relation with the Camp... a According to the report of 64 Chinese
residents in Mecca, recently there came a person by the name of Sardi
to Mecca claiming that he was the cousin and heir of Abu Shelaf
thereby intriguing to take the possession of Camp Property... 13
13- Academia Historica Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives (Taipei), 11-WAA-00823.
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No. 12 Shawwal, 1437 - July 2016
Ma Hong Kui’s statement indicates that in the 1920s and 30s, endowments
reached from China’s northwest Gansu Province to Mecca through the work
of Chinese Muslim militarist governors. Furthermore, though the initial
hostel was installed thanks to funding from a prominent Chinese Muslim
warlord with political leverage, when ties with mainland China were cut
off physically and socially due to revolutions and warfare, the new diaspora
population in Ta’if mobilized themselves and overseas Chinese Muslim
communities elsewhere to carry on the function of the endowments.
A 2003 issue of Kaituo magazine, published in Xining, ran a short memoir
piece by Shams al-Din Gao Wenyuan; the article has a section on Chinese
hajj lodge houses (ha-zhi-guan 哈知馆) built through “waqf (wai-ga-fu 外该
夫),” and details their maintenance. 14 Originally from Xining, the capital of
Qinghai, and a former member of Ma Bufang’s cabinet, Shams al-Din Gao
Wenyuan undertook the pilgrimage from Hong Kong in the early 1950s.
He settled in Ta’if alongside colleagues who had arrived earlier. Later, he
would sojourn in Jakarta and Taipei and publish a rigorous text on anti-Qing
Muslim rebellions in northwest China, as well as a number of religious and
historiographical texts and translations. The unedited version of his memoir
describes in greater detail how the the hajj lodge house was organized after
its initial establishment.
Gao Wenyuan writes that this first hajj lodge house was located near the Ka’ba,
about fifty steps from the Grand Mosque. The building was three stories
high, and an Indian person was entrusted with managing the purchase of the
property. This person, when registering at the Mecca Supreme Court, wrote:
14- “Thinking of Home (native soil) in a Foreign Land; Fifty Years in an Instant Passing
– Memoir of Living Abroad in Saudi Arabia (Yixiang si guyuan, tanzhi wushinian –
qiaoju shate alabode huiy 异乡思固原，弹指五十年 – 侨居沙特阿拉伯回忆),” Kaituo, no.
42, vol.1 (January, 2003): 26-32. Gao family archives.
“Ma Hongkui gave me alms, which I used to build a pilgrimage lodge house
for Chinese people.” As the Grand Mosque underwent expansion, this man
tried to rely on legal procedures to retrieve reparation money provided by
the government, and thus began a long litigation. Gao Wenyuan also notes
the hard work of Na Huidong (also known as Na Hazhi), who made a strong,
convincing argument at the court, won the case and directed the money to Ma
Hongkui. Gao recounts that the reparation money totaled about 200,000 Saudi
riyal or 60,000 USD, which was a substantial amount at the time.
After the Mecca Supreme Court’s ruling that the hajj lodge house was a charity
and that the money given to it could not be taken back, the whole sum had to
be used to build another lodge house for Chinese people, under the Court’s
supervision. The situation remained at a standstill until Ma Hongkui passed
away, his wife Zhao Lanxiang intended to comply with the Court’s ruling. But
because times had changed, and the price of housing in Mecca had skyrocketed,
200,000 Saudi riyal was no longer enough to buy a house in Mecca, and “the
Chinese hajj house in Mecca was about to disappear!” writes Gao Wenyuan.
\
Figure 3 Gau Wenyuan (Shams al-Din al-‘Ali) reunites with relatives who undertook the
pilgrimage in 1983. Kaituo Magazine (2003).
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No. 12 Shawwal, 1437 - July 2016
Overseas Chinese Muslims needed another hajj house. Gao took the
initiative and solicited contributions from coreligionists in Thailand and
Hong Kong, collecting around 15,000 USD, or about 67,500 Saudi riyal.
The community used about 43,000 USD to purchase a house in Mecca.
At the time of purchase, the house had one basement and two floors;
they added another two floors, giving the building four stories in total.
The reconstruction cost about 130,000 Saudi riyal, or about 28,000 USD.
The hajj house could accommodate about 130 people, and was convenient
for pilgrims: Gao Wenyuan explains that each year hajjis from Hong
Kong came to stay there, alongside a very small number from Thailand.
Three years later, the Grand Mosque underwent another round of
reconstruction, and the hajj house again fell within the boundaries of the
renovation and had to be demolished. The government compensated the
owners with about 1,300,000 Saudi riyal, which Gao Wenyuan remarks
was quite profitable.
The case of the hajj lodge house demonstrates that while nation states were
yet to fully centralize in Saudi Arabia and China in the uncertain interwar
period, it was a group of transnational religious sojourners who preceded
interstate relations and directed flows of persons and capital between the
two regions, leaving a relatively small yet concrete physical structure in
Mecca. The building’s continued use and expansion suggest the durability
of endowment and pilgrimage networks among the dispersed Chinese
Muslim diasporas, the channels of which adapted to changing political
circumstances. Through the several arbita built in Mecca and Tai’f, the
community maintained solidarity while blending into their local societies
and continuing to facilitate and mobilize external networks outside the
Kingdom’s physical boundaries.
A Song of the Red Sea
As the stories of the figures above demonstrate, permanent settlers in
Saudi Arabia were a mix of people from different areas of China. In
1961, Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs recorded that of the overseas
Chinese population in Saudi Arabia that it could count, 243 originated
from Gansu; 77 from Qinghai; 35 from Tibet; 12 from Ningxia; 9 from
Yunnan; 5 from Sichuan; 2 from Xinjiang; and 1 from Hong Kong. The
survey included 10 women from “Arabia,” suggesting a few instances of
intermarriages. Among those counted, 109 had already acquired Saudi
citizenship; 173 had permanent resident status; and 110 had neither (most
of those people were from Tibet, Sichuan and Gansu). 15 While he was not
recorded in the survey, personal interviews attest that Imam Sui Chengli
from Shandong Province took an individual hajj passage in the late 1950s
and settled in Jeddah.
One of the several settlers from Yunnan, ‘Uthman Lin Xingzhi, left a
trail of writings that let us glimpse the thoughts and sentiments of those
immigrants who belonged to both and to neither of the societies where
they dwelled for extended periods of time. A native of Shadian in Yunnan
Province, ‘Uthman Lin graduated from Shanghai’s Islamic Teachers School.
Afterwards, he studied at Cairo’s al-Azhar University between 1934 and
1943, and spent the latter half of his life in Jeddah as an employee of
the Taiwanese Embassy and the World Muslim League in Mecca. In his
1934 travel account, which recounts his journeys from his hometown
Shadian to Cairo, ‘Uthman Lin reminisces about his passage across the
Indian Ocean and about his aunt who had passed away years before, after
performing the pilgrimage. Between Colombo (where he was not allowed
to land due to lack of papers) and the Red Sea, he ponders:
15 Academia Historica Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives, 11-WAA-00382, November 1961.
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No. 12 Shawwal, 1437 - July 2016
Looking at the vast sea from afar, I recollect what happened five years
ago. On the way home after completing her pilgrimage, my (paternal)
aunt fell sick on the ship and was buried in the middle of the sea. The
day before undertaking the voyage she had visited our house to bid
farewell…[and] I had also shed a few drops of tears...Alas, her voice
and smiles are still with me. Indeed, the one who leaves never comes
back; a single parting has turned out to be an eternal separation. Five
years have already passed, and the body is still buried in this sea...In
these unbounded oceans, what direction would I turn to find her
smallest traces? Where am I to turn to grieve? My aunt, you have truly
left completely clean, without a remnant. When people shed tears
for you, have you ever known? The saltiness from tears of grief and
condolences has already seeped through the waters of the entire sea. 16
Figure 4 Yufeng Elementary School in Shadian attended by ‘Uthman Lin.
The complex now houses an exhibition on him and other notable local figures. Photo by Author
16- Lin Xingzhi, Dao Aiji Qu (Going to Egypt), (Shanghai: Zhongguo Huijiao Shuju, 1937),
Entry for May 7th. For a survey of Chinese Azharite students in Egypt during this period,
see Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, “‘Nine Years in Egypt’: Al-Azhar University and the Arabization
of Chinese Islam.” Hagar 8, no. 1 (Summer 2008): 1–21. John T. Chen, “Re-Orientation:
The Chinese Azharites between Umma and Third World, 1938–55.” Comparative Studies of
South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34, no. 1 (2014): 24–51.
In the latter half of his life, ‘Uthman Lin himself would become a resident
of the Red Sea coast. After his studies in Cairo and a return to China,
he served as the magistrate of Aksu prefecture in Xinjiang until 1949.
Following a few years in Chiangmai, he settled in Jeddah in the mid-1950s
with his elder brother, Ibrahim Lin Xiangdong. ‘Uthman Lin married
“Ruzi,” a woman of South Asian descent (who later relocated to Hong
Kong), while his brother married a Chinese Muslim pilgrim from Yunnan
by way of Burma. In the early 1980s, as ties between mainland China and
Saudi Arabia began to rekindle following the institution of PRC’s “open
up and reform” policies, separated families reunited, through letters and
travel, after three decades apart. During this time, ‘Uthman Lin sent a
poem entitled “A Song of the Red Sea” in a letter to his youngest sister in
Shadian, who tearfully recited it to me line by line as I interviewed her. 17
My heart brightens after a small talk [with friends], as if I have become a hermit with miraculous powers. We are originally from farming families (nongjia, 农家) – talking about the village (nongcun, 农村) raises our spirit up.
The family had lived in the northwest village of Mengzi, growing sugarcane.
Leaning over the fences at the margins of the green field, the scent of rice
would blow with the wind, letting my heart be free from worries. With the
meals [sent from home] going between the field ridges, laughter would fill
all around the mountain hills.
Grabbing long ladles to water the plants, [people] would talk about the young
sugar canes growing long and strong. Eyes would fill with waves of rice seedling;
the taste of taro soup would be sweet, and the vegetable roots fragrant.
In the village under the south mountains [we would] talk about pleasure,
about the farming families’ (nongjia农家) happiness lasting generation
17- Interview in Kunming, November 28-30, 2015.
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No. 12 Shawwal, 1437 - July 2016
after generation. Don’t say that farewell in the early years was painful – the
old man returning home is meaningful.
But I hope that the time for return is not too far, that people of my
next generation will welcome me on the streets as I enter the town. The
happiness of farming families is endless – the fall harvest makes the whole
society joyous. [But] the happiest moment by far is the gathering of the
family, and the biggest blessing is health.
I have come a long distance to live on the coast of the Red Sea; all I see
is yellow sand, sky, and cloud. If somebody asked where I lived (where I
am from), [I would say where there are] two to three jujube trees and a
crowd of camels. The sun is so close to people that it feels as if it is the
size of dou; 18 when the sun sets, the whole sky fills. The call to prayer
reaches all around and shakes the mountains; heaven and humans are
always connected to one another.
There are electric trains, and people with white hats sit in front of machines. Chinese workers’ (huagong, 华工) embroidered hats are the top
good in the market; they are exchanged for rice noodles, oil and salt.
Camels, cows, and sheep can be bought on the streets, [but] green onion
and ginger are nowhere to be found. No one wants cow stomach and fish
head; black people sell them to the poor.
Rice is cooked, just when I worry about having no dish to eat: cow liver
and fish head that I bought taste good. All my life, I have solidly believed
that if I stand firm in front of God [have strong faith in God,] I have no
need to worry about peace of mind or bodily health. [I am so busy that]
I fall asleep even before my head reaches the pillow, and don’t know the
date or the year.
18- A measurement unit, equivalent to about 7 kilograms in volume.
In the 50s I married an overseas Chinese woman in Burma [BurmeseChinese woman; miandian qiaonu, 缅甸侨女.] I worked, and she worked
amidst the sound of the [embroidery] machine; from then on I had a wife
to cook meals.
We had three sons and one daughter; all use Arab habits and language. The boys
wear white robes and white turbans, and the girl wears a white veil and black
skirt. Although I married in Fengwu and Mecca, I still miss love in Tianshan.
[I hope that] siblings, children, and grandchildren will all get together
and all live together without ever separating. In dreams my spirit often
runs to my hometown; I miss it so much that I feel as if my intestines
are breaking, and hot tears pour down. I wonder when God will give me
grace, and send me to return to my hometown, to talk about stories of
separations and emotions. 19
In 1984, at the invitation of the World Muslim League, family and
relatives of ‘Uthman Lin Xingzhi were able to perform the pilgrimage
and reunite with their two eldest brothers in Jeddah. Two years later,
‘Uthman himself would visit his longed-for homeland in Shadian to meet
his extended family, before passing away in 1991. Of the two children
that he had left behind in Aksu when he traveled to Chiangmai in 1949,
the younger son became a part of the Xinjiang pilgrimage delegation
in 1987, meeting his father for the first time in almost forty years. The
elder daughter, however, ran into passport and visa issues; when they
were finally resolved, her father was no longer of this world.
19- Lin family archives. The stories of his elder brother and himself are mixed in the poem.
The poem and other materials were recently published in a collection meant to commemorate
the achievements of well-known figures in the Lin family, Lin Xingzhi, Lin Xinghua, and Lin
Song, the latter two of whom played critical roles in developing post-1949 Arabic Studies at
Peking University. Publication details are not available at present.
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No. 12 Shawwal, 1437 - July 2016
Figure 5 Uthman Lin Xingzhi, his two sisters Lin Huirong and Lin Huiran, and their
husbands in front of the World Muslim League (1984). Courtesy of the Lin family.
Conclusion
Sino-Arabian relations, which are the topic of heated attention today, have
a long history, deeply rooted in transnational religious communities. Due
to the scope of this paper and the nature of ongoing research, I have
concentrated only on some features of the pre-1990s Chinese Muslim
diaspora. Rather than employing a clearly defined scheme of religious,
political or sociological classification, the paper has laid out the material
and imaginary mechanisms through which sojourners, travelers and
settlers between China and the western coasts of Arabia strived to become
parts of multiple, dispersed homes, thereby constituting the very fabric of
societies of their identification. At the same time, the challenges that the
community faced in integrating into the Hijaz and the Kingdom at large
need to be examined further: in certain instances, for example, surnames
suggesting Chinese origin were dropped or changed either by choice or
due to naming regulations.
A recent article in a Chinese journal on the Middle East, after providing an
overview of overseas Hui, Uighurs, and Kazakhs in the Middle East who
migrated from mainland China’s contemporary borderlands, concludes by
stressing the need to statistically survey these communities and to actively
seek to gain their friendship towards mainland China. Considering the
formidable cultural and linguistic capital possessed by the mostly Muslim
population of overseas Chinese in the Middle East, the article claims that
cultivating these relationships will attract overseas investments in China
and contribute to facilitating Sino-Middle Eastern relations. 20 While this
20- Ji Kaiyun, “Studies on the Overseas Chinese in the Middle East (Zhongdong Huiaqiao
Huaren Ruogan Wenti Yanjiu) 中东华侨华人若干问题研究,” Zhongdong Wenti Yanjiu,
vol. 1 (2015): 139173-. The article warns against potential “terrorist” networks related to
Xinjiang and suggests publicly broadcasting China’s praiseworthy policies in Xinjiang to
Islamic countries, in order to counter the western media narratives that heavily influence
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No. 12 Shawwal, 1437 - July 2016
paper makes a point and provides very informative data, its utilitarian
approach misses the value and impact of the individual and collective
sociopolitical investments, narrations on the past, and partings and
reunions sketched out in this paper.
Delving into histories and historiographies of Chinese Muslim diasporas
shows us conceptions of space and time that are much wider, deeper and
more expansive than what definitions of “ethnic minorities” or narratives
of official Sino-Saudi state relations reveal. They challenge the framing
of Chinese Muslims as a perpetual (model) ethnic minority in China,
and simultaneously question the criteria that are traditionally understood
as enhancing social status in Saudi Arabia – namely, membership in a
settled Arab tribe with verifiable genealogies. 21 The strand of the diaspora
discussed in this paper shows that both Saudi and Chinese societies, and
the relationships between the two, were shaped by supposed foreigners
from distant places.
their perceptions of Xinjiang affairs.
21- Nadav Samin, Of Sand or Soil: Genealogy and Tribal Belonging in Saudi Arabia
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).
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No. 12 Shawwal, 1437 - July 2016
About the Author
Hyeju J. Jeong is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department
at Duke University, where she focuses on Islam in China
since the 19th century and transnational interactions
between Chinese Muslims and the Islamic world. In 2016,
Jeong joined the Visiting Fellow Research Program at
KFCRIS, Her research focused on Chinese Muslim diasporic
Communities in the Hijaz. Prior to her Fellowship at KFCRIS,
Hyeju was a teaching assistant in the History Department
at Duke University. She obtained both her Bachelor’s and
Master’s Degree in History from Duke University in 2014.
Since 2011, Hayeju Jeong, has received six research awards
from different institutions, including the Asian and Pacific
Studies Institution and the Duke University Center for
European Studies.
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