CHAPTER 3 Shades of Islam: The Muslim Yunnanese
Introduction: Islamic Roots
Yunnan’s first contact with the Islamic world can be traced to the Tang and Song dynasties (618-1276). In those eras, Muslim traders were plying the prosperous Southwestern Silk Road, which traversed Yunnan and linked central China with the prospering Indian Ocean trading networks.1 Islam became firmly established in Yunnan during the Yuan dynasty in the thirteenth century, when Khubilai Khan’s armies conquered the region and fully integrated it into the Chinese Empire. This subjugation occurred after Yunnan had experienced several centuries of independent rule under the Nanzhao (738-902) and Dali (937-1253) kingdoms.2 The “first tide"3 of Muslims to enter Yunnan arrived from Central Asia. They served as soldiers and administrators for the Mongol rulers of the Yuan dynasty, who viewed them as more trustworthy than the indigenous Yunnanese or the Chinese. In particular, these early groups of Muslims benefited from Khubilai’s appointment of Sayyid ‘Ajall Shams al-Din (Ch. Saidianchi Shansiding Wuma’er), a Muslim from Bukhara (in present-day Uzbekistan), as governor of the province in 1274. He held this post until his death five years later.4 Traditional imperial histories largely ignore Sayyid ‘Ajall’s Muslim identity and the role he played in establishing Islam in Yunnan. Armijo-Hussein notes that court historians lauded him for “introducing the most important of the traditional Han Chinese customs, values and rituals” during his sixyear reign. According to Rossabi and others, although Sayyid ‘Ajall promoted Chinese culture in the region and never set out to convert the multiethnic populace to Islam, Yunnan remained “the one area in early Yüan China in which Muslim jurisdiction was virtually unchecked” by the Mongol court. As a consequence, the region had one of the largest Muslim populations outside the “Quran Belt” of northwestern China.
In contrast to what is recorded in imperial histories, later generations of The Muslim Yunnanese 35 Yunnan Hui would remember Sayyid ‘Ajall’s rule as one that provided them with a useful model for balancing one’s obligations as a Muslim with those as a subject of the imperial throne. Sayyid ‘Ajall strengthened the growing Muslim community by supporting the construction of at least two mosques, by permitting Islamic education, and by sanctioning the open practice of the Islamic faith. Not all Muslims elsewhere in the empire had it this good.8 Early in Yunnan’s reintegration with the empire, ‘Ajall was able to show the central government that the Yunnanese Hui were loyal. Just as important, he served as an essential legitimizing force for Islam in the region for all of Yunnan’s population-Muslims and non-Muslims alike.”
After Sayyid ‘Ajall died, Muslim Yunnanese continued to hold high positions in the imperial bureaucracies of the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. None of those officials rose higher than Zheng He (1371-1433). Zheng He was born in Yunnan and lived there until he was twenty, when he was captured by an invading Ming army. He came to the attention of a general, Zhu Di, who later ascended the throne as the Yongle emperor. One of Zhu Di’s first acts as emperor was to appoint Zheng He an admiral.
Between 1405 and 1432, Zheng He led seven naval expeditions that made contact and established trade with kingdoms throughout India, Southeast Asia, and even the east coast of Africa.10 Yet despite examples like this of sustained loyalty and illustrious service to the imperial government, and despite the many achievements of Yunnan Hui like Zheng He, the Muslim Yunnanese were perceived even into the nineteenth century as different from both the multiethnic non-Han and the increasingly numerous Han Chinese.
The Yunnan Hui’s prominent and well-documented role in the Mongol Conquest and the settlement of Yunnan made it quite clear they were not Han Chinese (many Hui families traced their origins to Central Asia). Yet at the same time, neither the imperial court nor the immigrant Han Chinese perceived the Hui as one of the large, indigenous non-Han groups who inhabited Yunnan. The Hui were often treated as separate and unique in part because the Qing court and many of nineteenth-century Yunnan’s newly arriving Han Chinese simply were unaware of the Hui’s historical place in Yunnan; that or they tended to view Yunnan’s ethnic make-up in dualistic terms (that is, there were HanYi or Han-Hui). Such depictions of Yunnan’s ethnic make-up established a false sense that the Han were dominant; at the same time, it distiguished the Hui from both the Han and the yi.
As noted in chapter 2, the non-Han category of yi was highly oppositional and referred to any group that was neither Han nor Hui. The Yi classification was all-encompassing, yet the Hui were never included in it. Although the Hui were not considered Yi, they did not escape many of the derogatory characterizations employed by the Han when describing the [[36]] non-Han. The clearest indication of this is that many chroniclers appended a dog radical (quanzi pang) to the Hui character-a practice reserved almost exclusively for ethnonyms of the yi peoples, who were viewed as culturally inferior by the Han.11 The Muslim Yunnanese were thus denied both the “us” status and the “them” status, both of which were central to sinocentric perspectives of the borderlands-perspectives predominant both in the imperial court and in other parts of China. Yet in Yunnanese society itself, the Hui were easy to distinguish. This chapter focuses on how the Muslim Yunnanese created a space for themselves as a discrete third category within Yunnan’s multiethnic framework.
Dangerous Dualism: Chinese Muslims or Muslim Chinese Western scholarly accounts of Islam in China began appearing in the late nineteenth century. Ever since, the standard rendering in English for Hui has been simply “Chinese Muslims” or “Chinese-speaking Muslims.” These terms reflect and reinforce the idea that the Hui were and still are “Muslims residing in China.” Yet Hui identity has a variety of dimensions besides the religious one. To understand Yunnan Hui identity and the roots of the Panthay Rebellion, it is vital to understand precisely how this Hui identity has been expressed with reference to Chinese cultural symbols and state policies in both modern and imperial China.
A common assumption among Chinese and Western scholars alike is that to be Hui has always been incompatible with the “Chinese Order.” Perhaps the strongest proponent of this view is Raphael Israeli, who contends that the Islamic and Chinese cultures are irreconcilable. He asserts that the Hui are more likely to conform to the Chinese culture and abandon their Islamic identity “in isolated places where maintaining one’s distinctiveness could become a matter of daily embarrassment and a constant nuisance rather than a source of pride and superiority.” 12 Chinese scholar Wang Jianping in a recent historical study of Yunnan Hui adopts a similar reasoning. He suggests that being Hui “was distressing for the Hui [who] lived on the edge of two societies and were forced to have one foot in their Islamic culture and one foot in the ‘host’ Chinese culture.“13 From these two perspectives, then, the Yunnan Hui, isolated and outnumbered, should have long ago been assimilated. Yet the Yunnan Hui have persisted over the centuries and into the present day as an independent and highly important group.
American scholar Jonathan Lipman in his history of the Hui in northwestern China voices another common supposition. He coined the term “Sino-Muslim” to describe the Hui prior to the emergence of the People’sThe Muslim Yunnanese 37 Republic of China in 1949, and he proposes that until then “the word Hui meant Muslim… but they would not have used that name themselves.“14 Few people contend that the highly reified system of ethnic identification employed today in the PRC accurately reflects the myriad permutations in which ethnic identity manifests itself. That said, the historical record makes it clear that both Han and Hui used the Hui ethnonym when referring to the Muslim Chinese. The manner in which it was employed suggests some sense of ethnicity, even if different from the criteria employed in the PRC today. Suggestions that the Hui identity was purely religious reflect a modern interpretation of religion as something completely separate from ethnic and cultural identity.15 Israeli, Lipman, and Wang Jianping all deny the existence of any overarching Hui identity beyond a religious one. Implicit in the literature on the Hui is the assumption that Han and Hui have always been separated by their religious beliefs and by nothing else. Yet a study of nineteenth-century Yunnan offers evidence to repudiate all this. There is no evidence that the Hui’s “distinctiveness” ever caused the Yunnan Hui to relinquish their Huiness; furthermore, there are plenty of indications that the Hui were amazingly resistant to assimilation. 16 They seem to have avoided many of the cultural, moral, and intellectual biases of the Han toward the Yi, and they selectively adopted many cultural practices of the Dai, Tibetans, and Bai. Hui communities living near or among these non-Han groups learned their languages and adopted many of their customs even while retaining their Hui identity and remaining part of broader Hui networks.17 In contrast to those who de-emphasize the nonreligious identities of the Hui, two anthropologists, Dru Gladney and Elisabeth Allès, offer much less reductionist frameworks for understanding Hui identity. Instead of falling into a binary classification of the Hui as either Muslims or Chinese, Gladney focuses on “the wide ethnographic and religious variety found among the Hui who, despite this diversity, continue to regard themselves as one group.
.”18 In this way he redefines Hui identity so that Islam is no longer the single defining characteristic of Hui-ness in China; rather, it is “only one marker of that identity.“19 He suggests that Hui identity be approached as “ethno-religious”; when it is, the religious dimension of Hui identity can be seen to vary widely among Hui communities even while retaining its overarching Hui-ness. Taking a somewhat different approach, Allès refutes the assumptions made by Wang and Israeli that Hui are disposed to assimilation. She suggests that Hui identity is “not as much a mixture than it is a juxtaposition” of Chinese and Hui cultures.20 Gladney and Allès treat Hui identity as multifaceted, not simply religious. Moreover, they do not see it as the result of China’s rise as a nationstate; rather, it is the end product of centuries of acculturation. In this, they [[38]] concur with the renowned Hui scholar Bai Shouyi. More than forty years ago, Bai offered a characterization of the differences between Hui and Muslim identity that laid bare the problem of thinking about Hui identity in exclusively religious or ethnic terms: “A Muslim may be a Hui, but may also belong to another ethnic group. A Hui is likely a Muslim, but being a Hui does not [inexorably] mean one is a Muslim.“21 In other words, the elements that defined one as Hui and those that defined one as Muslim were not necessarily coextensive, although they were clearly interrelated. In fact, the Hui’s sense of Hui-ness depended on a variety of factors that often fell outside their identity as Muslims. The Hui themselves had a clear understanding of their identity, yet both official and popular perceptions of the Yunnan Hui during the Qing dynasty were often inaccurate and uninformed.
HUI ETHNORELIGIOUS IDENTITY IN NINETEENTHCENTURY YUNNAN Rebellion-era documents written by Han chroniclers apply a number of different terms to the Hui. The ethnic labels employed by the Han for the Muslim Yunnanese were very different from those the Hui employed when referring to themselves. Throughout the nineteenth century, government documents consistently employed four terms when referring to the Yunnan Hui: Huimin, Huiren, Huizhong, and Huizi. Each of these terms contains the Hui ideogram combined with a second ideogram indicating people or group of people. The four resulting compound characters are subtly different, although they were used interchangeably by Qing officials and the Han elite when referring to the Hui.
It is significant that in the nineteenth century, the term “Hui” differed considerably from the terms employed for other religious groups such as the Buddhists (fojiao tu), the Confucianists (rujia tu), and the Daoists (daojiao tu). In these three cases the emphasis was on being a disciple (tu) or on the religion (jiao) itself. Important for this discussion, the Chinese characters designating these religions (fo, ru, and dao) were often employed to refer to a category or class of people (Daoists, Confucianists, and so on), based on their beliefs or adherence to those teachings. In late imperial Yunnan, these characters or terms were never used as single-character designations to describe a people in the same way the terms Han, Yi, and Hui-perceived as permanent and fixed-were employed. Specifically, the character “Hui” often appeared either alone or in ways that distinguished the Hui as a group. One example is Huimin-literally, “Hui-people.” Another is Huizi, which, as Wellington Chan has pointed out, is remarkably analogous to the derogaThe Muslim Yunnanese 39 tory label for the far less assimilated Miao ethnic group, Miaozi.22 As becomes evident in a study of the Panthay Rebellion, the boundaries of religion, ethnicity, and other salient categories that today are often perceived as mutually exclusive were at that time considerably more blurred.
In documents written by Yunnan Hui for other Yunnan Hui in the nineteenth century, two other terms consistently appear—mumin and Huijiao, meaning “Muslim” and “Hui culture,” respectively. These terms are not synonymous with the four terms mentioned earlier, and the differences between the two sets shed light on the ethnoreligious aspects of Hui identity. Although being Hui meant also being Muslim, the shifting relationship between that Muslim-ness and other identities (such as local, regional, and occupational) allowed for the formation and reformation of what it meant to be Hui.
The Chinese word mumin almost certainly comes directly from the Arabic mu’minin, or Muslim, and has the strong religious connotation of “believer. “23 The term Hui has its roots in the Chinese ethnonym for the Uyghur people of Central Asia, Huihu or Huihe; in both meaning and pronunciation, this was transmuted into Huihui, meaning Muslim, at some point after the twelfth century.24 By the nineteenth century the use of Hui-at least in the multiethnic context of Yunnan-had taken on a broad ethnoreligious meaning whereas mumin retained its narrower religious connotation.
The Hui today generally contend that one should not say Huijiao to mean Islam. Clearly, they differentiate between between religious identity (Muslim) and ethnic identity (Hui). Although ethnicity has only fully emerged as a discursive category of the state in the twentieth century, a clear distinction between ethnic and religious identity does seem to have existed in midnineteenth-century Yunnan during the Panthay Rebellion. In other words, when the Muslim Yunnanese distinguished themselves as Hui, they were not simply declaring their religious identity as Muslims. These clashing identities, which will be examined in more detail in chapter 7, became a major point of contention among rival Hui leaders during the rebellion and reveal how the Muslim Yunnanese distinguished between being Hui and being Muslim.
The difference between mumin and Huimin enables us to cast light on an important dimension of late imperial Yunnan Hui identity, yet the term “Huijiao” remains ambiguous. Most Western commentators have suggested that Huijiao, which contains the character for “Hui” and the character for “religion” (jiao), should be understood as “Hui-religion” or more literally “teachings of the Hui.“25 Yet understanding jiao strictly as “religion” in the context of the later empire is somewhat problematic, since the term is also used in the expression Hanjiao to refer to the agglomeration of beliefs ascribed to Han Chinese. The eminent seventeenth-century Yunnan Hui [[40]] scholar Ma Zhu rather disparagingly noted as a warning to Hui: “Those who do not have religion will become Hanjiao.“26 Ma was concerned here that Hui youth growing up in a Han-dominated culture tended to lack proper training in Islamic teachings. It is significant, though, that Ma was not indicating that without an Islamic upbringing they would become Han. Similarly, in neighboring Guizhou we find references to “Miaojiao” which are indicative not of any specific corpus of religious teachings, but rather of the traits or beliefs of the Miao peoples.27 There remains one final and highly suggestive clue to the Hui’s ethnic self-awareness. Besides mumin and san jiao, a third term, Huizu (Hui lineage or group), appears fleetingly in both Hui and Qing documents.28 From a modern perspective, this is the most tantalizing of the three terms, since it mirrors the modern Hui PRC ethnonym-an ethnonym that designates the Hui as one of fifty-six state-recognized nationalities (minzu). Du Wenxiu in his “Proclamation from the Headquarters of the Generalissimo” (shuaifu bugao), issued during his final offensive in 1867, used the phrase in a generalized fashion, which suggests he meant all the Hui: “This army expedition was caused by the Manchu’s taking China from us and staying in power for more than 200 years, treating people as oxen and horses, having no regard for the value of life, hurting my compatriots, and wiping out my fellow Hui [wo Huizu].“29 The appearance of the term Huizu during the rebellion seems to have reflected something more than the idea of lineages (its traditional meaning); the meaning was something closer to an ethnic consciousness, but without any connotations of a state-imposed politicized framework.
Redefining the Hui: More Than Muslims In current scholarly discussions, the concept of ethnicity is highly controversial. In a recent critique of Benedict Anderson’s claim that conceptions of ethnicity only came about after colonial conquest, Frank Proschan asserts that “indigenous local peoples had already themselves imagined ethnicity well before the colonial era. “30 Through a nuanced examination of the flood myth of the Kmhmu highlanders of northern Laos, Proschan demonstrates that conceptions of ethnicity—and perhaps even more significantly, interethnic consciousness-were beginning to take shape before colonial contact. The Kmhmu’s strong sense of a multiethnic society offers evidence to counter those in Chinese studies who resist the notion of ethnicity in the early modern era, an era free of the trappings of a nation-state. The Kmhmu’s participation in the broader Yunnan world of the Hui also provides further historical evidence that the Muslim Yunnanese were active in a “stubbornly ethnoeccentric” society that placed a premium on one’s ethnicity.31 The Muslim Yunnanese 4I Just as pertinent is Harrell’s examination of the civilizing process in southwestern China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He proposes that we distinguish between an ethnic consciousness-which he defines as “the awareness of belonging to a group”-and an ethnic group, defined as a group that perceives itself as sharing common descent and common customs and as in opposition to other such groups. 32 He contends that a group can come to perceive itself as an ethnic group “in situations where a group is confronted in some way by an outside power with whom it is in competition for resources of some kind whether they be material . . . or symbolic.“33 Such a situation seems rather similar to the one the Hui faced in nineteenthcentury Yunnan.
Both Harrell and Proschan raise issues that are critical to our efforts to understand the ethnic identity of the Yunnan Hui in the nineteenth century. Both scholars build from ideas about how a given ethnic group perceives itself, how others perceive it, and how it demonstrates its identity-sometimes forcefully-in the face of conflicting notions of ethnicity and culture. The Yunnan Hui offer a unique historical example of such models in that they sought to participate in the culturally and politically sinocentric world of the Qing as well as in the far more fluid world of Yunnan. This latter world viewed allegiances to multiple sovereign powers as the norm; in Yunnan, a multiethnic landscape was typical and cross-boundary trade was indispensable.
MUSLIM YUNNANESE COMMUNITIES During the Ming dynasty, the descendents of Sayyid ‘Ajall continued to play important roles in administering Yunnan. Many of them received noble titles from the court. Military requirements dictated that most of the earliest Muslim settlements were clustered in western Yunnan. By the middle of the Ming dynasty, however, there were Muslim communities throughout the province in almost every prefecture, from Zhaotong to Baoshan, from Chuxiong to Lin’an.34 Although widely distributed geographically, Muslim Yunnanese retained highly concentrated settlement patterns. They usually lived in predominantly Hui villages; in large urban centers, they tended to cluster in specific streets or districts.35 Because villages were segregated along ethnoreligious lines, it was not uncommon to find towns with names like Hui-hui Village (Huibui cun), Huihui Barracks (Huihui ying), and Huihui Encampment (Huizi zhai)— names which highlighted that the inhabitants were Muslim Yunnanese.36 But the Hui did not restrict themselves to villages; Shadian, Weishan, and Ludian were among the larger Hui centers. Also, many Yunnanese Hui lived in larger urban centers where they were not the dominant group. In these centers, Hui businesses and homes tended to cluster in distinctive and iden [[42]] tifiable Muslim districts. Here the Hui preserved their religious beliefs, practices, and lifestyles with minimal interference.
Large-scale violence was rising in frequency by the mid-nineteenth century, but the Hui were facing underlying tensions and daily discrimination decades and even centuries before that. Han Chinese conceptions of the Hui tended to focus on what to them was the most obvious and perverse fact about the Hui-their religion forbade them to eat pork. Records of HanHui interactions in late imperial Yunnan recount a number of disparaging sayings, stories, and epithets that center on the Hui’s aversion to pigs. Most often, these jokes insinuated that the Hui refused to eat pork because they either worshipped pigs or believed they were descended from them. Taunts such as “son of a pig” and worse were an inescapable fact of Hui life.37 A shocking demonstration of this bias in nineteenth-century Yunnan is that the street running past one of Kunming’s oldest mosques was called Zhuji Jie (Pig-gathering Road).3 38 Besides openly insulting the Hui in the streets and markets, the Han often disparaged them in their writings. Rebellion-era gazetteers and reports, even when they did not openly insult the Hui, often depicted them as vaguely threatening beings-for example, as “full of strength and able to endure hardship, full of vitality, fierce and brave.“39 Typically, the terms applied to the Hui expressed disapproval: “fierce” (han), “combative” (xidou), and “assertive” (qiang). Inevitably, the Hui came to be characterized as having “a propensity to stir up trouble.“40 Among the non-Han population, the Yunnan Hui seemed to fare much better. By the eighteenth century, there were Muslim Yunnanese communities throughout the more settled areas of Yunnan and also in the more distant non-Han regions. There were Hui villages in southern Yunnan in the Xishuangbanna region, in the northwest near the Tibetan town of Zhongdian, and in the northeast in the Xiaoliang Shan region-in areas that were heavily populated by the Dai, Tibetans, and Yi respectively, and that were generally shunned by the Han Chinese. The Hui of these remote areas continued to embrace their Muslim beliefs, building mosques and refusing to eat pork. But they also-unlike their Han counterparts-adopted local cultural traditions relating to clothing, language, and so on.41 This sort of acculturation was not in and of itself uncommon. Hui were living in almost every border region of the Qing Empire: there were the Mongolian Hui (Meng Hui) in Inner Mongolia, the Tibetan Hui (Zang Hui) in Lhasa, and the Dungan of Soviet Central Asia. All of these groups made similar adjustments: “These Muslims are culturally indistinguishable from the minority group with whom they live, but they identify themselves as Hui and are recognized by the state as members of the Hui nationality.“42 What is significant is that these nineteenth-century Hui straddled multiple comThe Muslim Yunnanese 43 munities. Thus they functioned as intermediaries between non-Han and Hui communities within Yunnan and as key nodes along Muslim Yunnanese caravan routes that linked these areas to regions beyond Yunnan.
Equally conspicuous is the absence of Han Chinese communities that functioned in a similar manner. As will be discussed in chapter 4, those Han who did assimilate or who interacted closely with the non-Han were viewed as suspect by the imperial court. By the nineteenth century it was the Yunnan Hui who had established close and enduring relations with many of Yunnan’s non-Han regions. Hui communities extended down into highland Southeast Asia and up into Tibet. In this way the world of the Yunnan Hui extended far beyond the ethnocultural and political boundaries of the Qing Empire.
MUSLIM YUNNANESE NETWORKS The success the Muslim Yunnanese had in maintaining a strong community identity had its roots in their religion and was sustained by their skill in adapting themselves to the province’s ethnic, political, and commercial realities. In particular, the Muslim Yunnanese excelled in occupations that allowed them to work in teams. Through such teams they were able to preserve their religious beliefs while meeting the demands of their work. By the nineteenth century, their success in occupations that called for group cohesion-especially mining and the caravan trade-was often deeply resented by less successful Han teams.
It is difficult to ascertain precisely how dominant a role the Muslims played in early Yunnanese trade. We do know that by the nineteenth century, Muslim Yunnanese controlled a large portion of the caravan trade. Many European travelers described Muslim caravaneers in detail. Gervais Courtellemont noted: “The mafou [muleteers] . . . are almost all Muslim. One of my soldier escorts was also, and it was by him that I obtained much of my information about commerce in the province. His parents were mafous and I was able to make their acquaintance as well.“43 Another account, although written in the early part of the twentieth century, highlights the Muslim caravaneers’ reputation as hard workers, as well as their dominance of the province’s trade routes: “The Panthays [Muslim Yunnanese] are a virile, sturdy and aggressive race, even more so than the true Chinese. Caravaneers and muleteers on the Yunnan trade routes are very likely to be Panthays. The men who guide the long trains of mules and ponies through the wild mountain passes of Yunnan and the Burmese frontier must be rugged in constitution and resolute in spirit to endure this rough life, filled with hardships and dangers.“44 The reputation of the Muslim Yunnanese as successful traders gave rise [[44]] to one of the few positive Han stereotypes of Muslim Yunnanese.45 Their success as traders allowed them to expand into other occupations that revolved around caravaneering-many became leather workers, furriers, and harness makers. Town-dwelling Hui often carved out occupational niches. There were Hui tanners in Zhaotang and Hui jewelers in Tengyue, across the border from the Burmese jade mines.46 The Hui also became expert miners. One source goes so far as to say that “there was no mine [in Yunnan] where there were no Hui.“47 They dominated the lucrative jade trade to the point that that stone came to be known locally as “Huihui gem.” There are clear indications that prior to the rebellion, the Hui were often involved in opening and operating mines.48 Some Hui communities became known for their expertise in mining. Hui from Lin’an-especially those from the village of Huilong-were famously skilled miners and traveled long distances to work mines throughout the province.4 49 Finally, the Hui were successful in obtaining military degrees (wu juren). A Yunnan-born official offered a typical Han explanation for why this was so: “Hui do not like to study and rarely own property. They often practice husbandry and are butchers. If they are poorer then they usually become miners, but if they have money typically they are caravaneers traveling back and forth between Burma [and China]-making three times their original investment. They also enjoy archery and riding horses. Because of these skills, two-thirds of Yunnan’s military degree holders and military officials are Hui.” 50 The estimate of two-thirds is likely too high. But during the Daoguang reign (1821-1850) more than 12 percent of those who received a military degree did have a typically Hui surname.51 In the three exams given in the five years just before the rebellion, Muslim Yunnanese constituted almost 19 percent of all graduates. 52 The Hui also excelled as overland long-distance traders. Their strong commercial and political links with the Southeast Asian highlands and Tibet-through their dominance of the caravan trade-spread their influence far beyond the borders of imperial China. Some Han plied these same routes, but in general they tended not to be as numerous in these areas as in other parts of Yunnan. They were fearful of catching diseases and of passing through non-Han controlled areas.
By the 1800s the Hui had been working the transregional trade routes for centuries. In doing so they had established strong cultural ties with Tibet, Burma, Thailand, and Sichuan.53 Dali, for example, was the commercial hub for an area far larger than western Yunnan. Through its annual Third Month Fair (Sanyuejie), Dali maintained strong trade relationships with Tibet, Sichuan, and Burma.54 Southeastern Yunnan’s trade was generally limited to Laos, Thailand, and to a lesser extent Burma. In contrast, The Muslim Yunnanese 45 northeastern Yunnan had its strongest commercial ties (and at times administrative ones) with central China during the rebellion, only rarely interacting with the Muslim Yunnanese of these other areas.55 The degree to which these transnational links were dominated by the Muslim Yunnanese communities is open to debate. What is clear, according to nineteenth-century documents, is that the Hui were a prominent part of those links. Throughout much of upland Southeast Asia the Yunnanese Chinese were known simply as Haw, with no distinction drawn between Han and Hui. Although the term Haw is somewhat ambiguous, firsthand accounts from late-nineteenth-century travelers in the region suggest that a large proportion of the Haw were Hui.56 Haw caravans, which typically numbered between fifty and one hundred mules, carried salt and tea south. to the Southeast Asian lowlands and returned with cotton. These caravans were vital to Yunnan’s commerce in that they brought needed goods into the province and carried Yunnanese goods to outside markets. 57 Every year in the dry winter season, Haw caravans passed through and traded with the many diverse Tai, Karen, and other ethnic groups that populated the region separating lowland Southeast Asia from the Yunnan Plateau. Most of the ethnic groups with which the Haw caravans traded lived in communities and loosely bound states (such as Lanna and Sipsongpanna) that enjoyed semiautonomy from their overlords far to the south and north.58 Forced to negotiate a complex series of tolls and transit permits imposed on the caravans by non-Chinese ethnic groups, the Haw became extremely familiar with the region’s networks, allegiances, and political entities.59 This resulted in a “Yunnan world” comprising the Hui and those ethnic groups affected by or involved in trade with them. This world, which extended far beyond the formal borders of the imperial frontier, had considerable economic, political, and ethnic integrity well into highland Southeast Asia.
Many scholars have suggested that the peoples of the Southeast Asian uplands looked on the Hui and Han Yunnanese as a single undifferentiated group. If they did, it raises the strong possibility that a non-Islamic dimension of the Hui identity emerged as a result of the Haw label. Conversely, the ambiguity of the Haw label, in concert with the Hui’s interactions with the ethnically diverse and sensitive ethnoscape of highland Southeast Asia, likely encouraged the Hui to perceive themselves in similar “ethnic” terms. The importance of the Hui ethnic self-identity outside of their self-identity as Muslims is especially significant when we consider what Thongchai, following the observations of Leach and other ethnographers of upland Southeast Asia, calls “negative identification”—that is, the tendency for groups to define themselves by differences rather than through static sets of shared characteristics.60 In other words, as an apparent consequence of the Hui’s role as caravaneers, middlemen, and cultural mediators throughout the [[46]] unnan world, Islam had by the nineteenth century become only one part of a broader Hui identity.
Furthermore, the Hui’s strong trade-based contacts in Burma, Laos, and Thailand accentuated the fact that the boundaries of the Yunnan world and Qing China were not coextensive. There is no doubt that economic tensions resulting from the influx of new Han settlers generated rivalries that led to violence in Yunnan; that said, the differences between the Beijing-centric Qing regime and the multicultural world of Yunnan also led to a certain amount of friction. This friction was especially apparent between the groups most active in these non-Chinese regions and the newly arrived Han settlerssettlers whose ties were to central China. The extent of the Hui religious, commercial, and occupational networks also underscores the degree to which even the remotest Hui villager could be plugged into an array of influences from a variety of non-Chinese sources (such as Southeast Asia, Tibet, and the Muslim world)-sources that distinguished them from the Han and at the same time reinforced their Hui-ness.
Conclusion If Governor-General Zhang Liangji and other long-serving officials estimated accurately, in the mid-nineteenth century the Yunnan Hui were roughly 10 percent of the province’s population-around one million people.61 Yet their small demographic presence does little to suggest the strength and organization of the Muslim Yunnanese. Through their intricate web of identities and relationships, the Muslim Yunnanese were able to participate in a wide array of political, commercial, and ethnic arenas. It may be that the highly ethnicized context of the Yunnan world is what enabled the Yunnan Hui to express a more fully developed ethnic identity.
The experience of the Hui in Yunnan seems quite similar to that of Muslims around the world. As Dale Eickelman has suggested so eloquently, throughout the Islamic world Muslims seem able to “juggle local and multiple identities-villager, tribesman, woman, citizen-with the broader identity of believer and to legitimize them all by reference to the idiom of the cosmopolitan community of believers [umma].“62 The experiences of the Muslim Yunnanese in the events leading up to and including the Panthay Rebellion offer clear evidence that the Hui were aware of their own ethnicity and were able to articulate the difference between being a Hui and being a Muslim.
The role played by Hui ethnicity in the early modern period, as something discrete from their religious identity as Muslims, has gone practically unacknowledged by Western scholars. This chapter has demonstrated that by the nineteenth century Hui identity was based on belief in a shared history,The Muslim Yunnanese 47 on collective cultural markers, and on common occupations; furthermore, that identity was constructed in much the same manner that ethnicity is understood in the modern era. At the same time, the events of the Panthay Rebellion would make it clear that this Hui identity was often fraught with regional, cultural, and perhaps religious discord.
As we shall see in the following chapters, the Hui conception of themselves as an ethnic group was defined oppositionally from within-by their occupations, by their non-Yunnan and non-Han origins, and by their Islamic faith. But it was also proscribed from without, often violently by the Han and peacefully by the Yi. Only by understanding the multiplicity of ethnic, religious, and political attitudes and actions that formed the Muslim Yunnanese identity can we begin to see that the actions of the Hui during the rebellion were much more than simply a religious reaction against their Han or Qing oppressors.