13 a Song of the Red Sea

A Song of the Red Sea: Communities and Networks of Chinese Muslims in the Hijaz Shawwal, 1437/ July, 2016

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 1- From History to Hurdles 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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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 late- nineteenth 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 minoritieshuizu ( ) under the PRC. مكة املكرمة يف السجالت) Haatim al-Tahawi, “Mecca in Chinese Records during the Medieval Age 2- Al-Tafaahim, vol. 45 (2014): 379-398. I am grateful to Dr. Engseng”,(الصينية يف العرص الوسيط 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 post- Opium 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 ofAsian Studies 70, no. 2 (2011): 373–95.

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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 :(al-Diraasaat al-Sharqiiya (1994 ”,(ملحات اجتماعية عن املسلمني الصينيني يف الحجاز) the Hijaz )املقابلةAlso Nur Al-‘AAmudii, “Interview with Saarah Mahii al-Diin ‘Umr al-Siinii .122-129 .Diraasaat Sharqiiya (2008/1): 183-222 ”,مع السيدة سارة محيي الدين عمر الصيني( Waqf and Communal Spaces: Ribat and Hajj Lodge Houses Ribat (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. 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 Y ūsuf ‘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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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.

Ribat 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

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 tworibat 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, Pe- king: 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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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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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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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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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 her- mit 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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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 ma- chines. 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. 该夫)

In the 50s I married an overseas Chinese woman in Burma [Burmese- Chinese 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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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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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). 29 30 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.

King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies (KFCRIS)

Founded in 1983 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and chaired by HRH Prince Turki Al-Faisal bin Abdulaziz, the mission of The King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies is to be a beacon of knowledge for humanity as envisioned by the late King Faisal bin Abdulaziz. The Center aims to accomplish this through conducting research and studies that stimulate cultural and scientific activities in the service of mankind, enriching cultural and intellectual life in Saudi Arabia, and facilitating collaboration between the East and the West. The Center’s activities include lectures, seminars, conferences, and roundtable discussions. It houses the King Faisal Library, a collection of rare manuscripts, an Islamic art museum, and the King Faisal Museum. It also administers a robust Visiting Fellowship Program and collaborates with various research centers around the world.

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