The Dungan Revolt

I. The Northwest in Revolt

The Dungan Revolt was a series of risings by the Muslims of northwest China against the Qing dynasty between 1862 and 1878. The risings began in the province of Shaanxi in 1862, spread to Gansu, Ningxia and Qinghai, and in 1864 to Xinjiang, where a ruler from Central Asia, Yaqub Beg, established an independent state. The Qing reconquered the northwest under the command of Zuo Zongtang between 1867 and 1878. The war caused enormous loss of life and the depopulation of large areas of Shaanxi and Gansu.

The name Dungan, used by the Turkic peoples of Central Asia and by Russian and Western writers for the Chinese-speaking Muslims of the northwest, the Hui, gave the rising its name in Western historiography. In Chinese the rising is known as the Tongzhi Hui rising, after the reign of the Tongzhi emperor in which it took place. It was contemporaneous with the Panthay Rebellion in Yunnan, described in The Panthay Rebellion, and with the last years of the Taiping war, described in The Taiping Rebellion and its Bible.

This page examines the Muslim communities of the northwest, the causes and course of the risings, the role of the Sufi orders, the state of Yaqub Beg, the Qing reconquest and the flight of the Dungans to the Russian empire. It also examines the earlier Christian history of the region, including the stele of Xi'an, which records the arrival of Christianity in China in the seventh century, and the missionaries and Bible translators of the later nineteenth century.

II. The Muslims of the Northwest

Muslims had lived in northwest China since the Tang dynasty, when merchants from Persia and Central Asia came along the Silk Road to the capital Chang'an, the modern Xi'an. Under the Mongols many more Muslims came to China as soldiers, administrators and artisans, and their descendants, intermarrying with the Chinese population, became the Hui. By the nineteenth century the Hui formed a large part of the population of Shaanxi, Gansu and Ningxia, and they lived in their own villages and city quarters around their mosques.

The northwest was also home to Muslim peoples who spoke Turkic or Mongolic languages, such as the Salar of Xunhua in Qinghai, the Dongxiang and the Bonan, and further west in Xinjiang the Uyghurs, then usually called Turki or Taranchi, and the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz. The region thus formed a frontier between the Chinese world and the Islamic world of Central Asia, and its Muslim communities were connected with both.

III. The Sufi Orders

From the seventeenth century, Sufi orders from Central Asia and Arabia spread among the Muslims of northwest China. The Naqshbandi order, in particular, established branches called menhuan in Chinese, which were led by hereditary masters, shaykhs, whose tombs became centres of pilgrimage. The most important were the Khufiyya, founded by Ma Laichi in the early eighteenth century, and the Jahriyya, founded by Ma Mingxin, who had studied in Arabia and Yemen and returned to China in 1761.

The two orders differed in their practices. The Khufiyya practised the silent remembrance of God, while the Jahriyya practised the vocal remembrance, dhikr, and called for a reform of Muslim practice according to the Quran and the law. The rivalry between the orders led to violence, and the Qing officials, who regarded the Jahriyya as a New Teaching, xinjiao, and a threat to order, intervened against it. In 1781 Ma Mingxin was arrested and executed in Lanzhou, and his followers rose in revolt. A second rising of the Jahriyya took place in 1784. Both were suppressed with great severity, and the Jahriyya was banned.

The Jahriyya survived the persecution and became the most dynamic of the Sufi orders in the northwest. In the nineteenth century its leadership was based at Jinjipu, near Lingzhou in Ningxia, where its master Ma Hualong controlled the trade between Ningxia and Mongolia and commanded the loyalty of many thousands of followers. The order's history of martyrdom shaped its response to the Qing in the 1860s. Its own chronicle, the Rashh, written by Guan Li Ye, recounts the sufferings of its masters in terms that recall the accounts of the prophets and martyrs of the Biblical tradition, such as the persecution of the prophets described in Hebrews 11:36-38.

IV. The Christian Stele of Xi'an

The northwest of China had also been the place where Christianity first entered China. In 1625 workers digging near Xi'an discovered a stone stele, erected in 781, which recorded the arrival of the Christian missionary Alopen in Chang'an in 635 and the history of the Church of the East, called the Luminous Religion, Jingjiao, in China over the following century and a half. The stele was inscribed in Chinese and Syriac, and it bore a cross rising from a lotus and clouds.

The stele describes the creation of the world by God, the fall of humanity, the birth of the Messiah from a virgin, the star announcing his birth, the visit of the Persian magi, and the twenty-seven books of the Greek Scriptures left by the Messiah. Its reference to the magi recalls Matthew 2:1-2. It records that the Tang emperor Taizong received Alopen and ordered the translation of his scriptures in the imperial library, and that a monastery was built for the Christians in the capital.

The discovery of the stele was celebrated by the Jesuits as evidence of the ancient Christian presence in China, and it became one of the most famous inscriptions in the world. Christianity of the Church of the East had disappeared from China after the persecution of foreign religions under the emperor Wuzong in 845, and again after the fall of the Mongol dynasty in 1368. The history of the Syriac versions of the Scriptures, which the missionaries of the Church of the East brought to China, is discussed in Ancient Versions of the Greek Scriptures. The stele remains in the Forest of Steles museum in Xi'an, where it stands among the inscriptions of the Tang dynasty, and copies of it are held in museums and libraries in Europe and America.

V. Han and Hui in Shaanxi

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the relations between Han and Hui in Shaanxi and Gansu deteriorated. The Hui were concentrated in the valley of the Wei river around Xi'an, where they farmed, traded and served in the army, and they competed with the Han for land and water. Disputes between Han and Hui villages were frequent, and the local officials often favoured the Han. The Hui, for their part, had a reputation for martial skill and solidarity, and they organised militias to defend their villages.

In 1862 Taiping and Nian forces invaded Shaanxi from the south and east. The Qing authorities ordered the formation of local militias, tuanlian, to resist the invaders, and both Han and Hui villages formed militias. The arming of the population increased the tension between the two communities, and the Han gentry feared that the Hui would join the Taiping.

According to the traditional account, the fighting began in the spring of 1862 at Huazhou, east of Xi'an, with a quarrel over the price of bamboo poles, which the Hui had bought for their militia's spears. The quarrel led to fighting between Han and Hui, in which several Hui were killed. The Hui retaliated, and the fighting spread rapidly through the Wei valley. Han militias massacred Hui villages, and Hui forces attacked Han villages and besieged Xi'an. Whatever the exact cause, the violence became a general war between the two communities.

VI. The Spread of the Revolt

From Shaanxi the revolt spread to Gansu in 1862 and 1863. In Ningxia the Hui of Jinjipu, under the leadership of Ma Hualong, rose and took control of the region. In Hezhou, in southwestern Gansu, the Hui rose under the leadership of Ma Zhan'ao, a religious leader of the Khufiyya order. In Xining, in Qinghai, the Hui and Salar rose under Ma Guiyuan. In Suzhou, the modern Jiuquan, in western Gansu, the Hui rose under Ma Wenlu.

The rebels did not form a unified movement. Each region had its own leaders, who sometimes cooperated and sometimes fought each other, and many of them negotiated with the Qing officials while continuing to fight. Ma Hualong, the most powerful of the leaders, accepted a Qing title in 1866 while maintaining his control of Ningxia. The Hui refugees from Shaanxi, who had been driven from their homes by the Han militias and the Qing armies, fled to Gansu and formed armies that fought for years against the Qing.

The war was marked by massacres on both sides. Han and Hui villages and towns were destroyed, and their inhabitants killed or driven out. Contemporary accounts describe cities whose populations were entirely killed, and regions where no living person remained. The population of Shaanxi and Gansu fell by millions, though the figures are uncertain. Modern estimates of the total number of deaths range from several million to more than ten million. The words of the Hebrew Scriptures on a desolate city, How she sits alone, the city once full of people, in Lamentations 1:1, were quoted by missionaries who later travelled through the region.

VII. The Qing in Crisis

The Qing government in the 1860s was unable to respond effectively to the risings in the northwest. Its armies were engaged against the Taiping in the Yangzi valley and against the Nian in the north China plain, and its finances had been exhausted by the wars and by the indemnities imposed by the Western powers after the Second Opium War. The commanders sent to Shaanxi, such as Shengbao and Duolonga, achieved some successes, but Duolonga was killed in 1864 at the siege of Zhouzhi, and the Qing forces were unable to end the revolt.

The court was also divided over the policy to be followed. Some officials favoured the extermination of the rebels, while others argued that the Hui should be distinguished according to whether they were loyal or rebellious, and that loyal Hui should be protected. The principle that the Qing should distinguish only between the good and the bad, not between Han and Hui, was repeatedly stated in imperial edicts, though it was often ignored in practice by commanders and militias.

VIII. The Hui Militias and the Gentry

The role of the local militias in the outbreak of the war has been emphasised by modern historians. The tuanlian militias were organised by the gentry of each locality, and they were intended to defend the villages against bandits and rebels. In the Wei valley in 1862, however, the Han militias and the Hui militias regarded each other as the enemy, and the fighting between them quickly escaped the control of the officials. The Qing official Zhang Fang, sent to negotiate with the Hui of the Wei valley, was killed by them in 1862, and the officials were unable to prevent the violence; and some officials encouraged the Han militias to attack the Hui.

The Hui leaders of Shaanxi included military officers, merchants and religious leaders, such as Ren Wu, Bai Yanhu and Ma Zhenghe, who commanded the forces of the different districts. They did not proclaim a new state or a new dynasty, as the Taiping had done, and their aims were above all the defence of their communities and revenge for the massacres. Their forces besieged Xi'an for more than a year but did not take it.

The Han gentry and the officials, in turn, accused the Hui of having planned the rising in alliance with the Taiping, and this accusation was used to justify the massacres of Hui civilians. The fear of a rebellious minority, and the violence it produced, recalls the account in the Hebrew Scriptures of the plot of Haman against the Jews of the Persian empire, who were accused of following laws different from those of all other peoples, in Esther 3:8.

IX. The Road to the West

The campaigns of the war were shaped by the geography of the northwest. The Gansu corridor, a narrow strip of oases between the mountains of Qinghai and the deserts of Mongolia, formed the only road between China proper and Xinjiang, and control of its cities, Lanzhou, Liangzhou, Ganzhou and Suzhou, determined control of the routes to the west. The loess plateau of eastern Gansu and Ningxia, cut by deep ravines, favoured the defence, and the fortified villages of the Hui could resist long sieges.

The shortage of food and water in the region made the supply of armies extremely difficult. Zuo Zongtang's army depended on grain brought from Shaanxi, Hubei and Sichuan, and on the military farms established along the routes. His motto, according to tradition, was to advance slowly and fight quickly, and his campaigns were preceded by months of preparation in which supplies were accumulated and roads repaired. The same methods were used in the reconquest of Xinjiang, in which the army crossed the deserts between Hami and Urumqi.

X. Zuo Zongtang

In 1866 the court appointed Zuo Zongtang, who had distinguished himself in the war against the Taiping in Zhejiang and Fujian, as governor general of Shaanxi and Gansu, and in 1867 he took command of the campaign against the rebels. Zuo was one of the leading officials of the Self-Strengthening movement, and he had founded the Fuzhou Navy Yard. He was also a careful planner, who believed that the northwest could only be pacified by a methodical campaign supported by secure supplies.

Before beginning the campaign in the northwest, Zuo first helped to defeat the Western Nian in 1868. He then organised supply lines through the barren regions of Shaanxi and Gansu, established military farms, and raised loans from foreign banks in Shanghai to pay his troops. His army, built on the model of the Hunan army, included regiments equipped with modern Western rifles and artillery, some of which were manufactured in the arsenal he established at Lanzhou.

Zuo's policy towards the Hui combined military force with resettlement. He distinguished between those who surrendered and those who resisted, and he resettled the surrendered Hui in designated areas, often far from their original homes, in isolated places where they could not threaten the cities and roads. The Shaanxi Hui who surrendered were resettled in places such as Pingliang and Huating in eastern Gansu. Zuo also forbade the practice of the New Teaching, which he regarded as the source of the revolt.

XI. The Siege of Jinjipu

The central campaign of Zuo's war was the siege of Jinjipu, the stronghold of Ma Hualong in Ningxia. Jinjipu was a complex of fortified villages and forts protected by walls and canals, and it was defended by many thousands of Hui under the leadership of the Jahriyya master. Zuo's general Liu Songshan began the attack in 1869 but was killed in battle in 1870, and his nephew Liu Jintang took command.

The siege lasted for more than a year. The Qing forces surrounded the stronghold, cut its supply routes, and gradually reduced the forts around it. The defenders and the civilian population suffered from famine, and many died of hunger. In January 1871 Ma Hualong surrendered, in the hope of saving his people. He and many members of his family and his followers were executed in March 1871. Thousands of the inhabitants of Jinjipu were killed, and others were resettled elsewhere.

The death of Ma Hualong was remembered by the Jahriyya as a martyrdom, like that of Ma Mingxin in 1781. His tomb and the tombs of the other masters became centres of pilgrimage, and the order survived the destruction of Jinjipu. The account of the siege in the Jahriyya chronicles describes the defenders' endurance in the language of trial and faith, a theme found in many religious traditions, such as the counsel to endurance in James 1:12.

XII. Hezhou and Ma Zhan'ao

After the fall of Jinjipu, Zuo turned against Hezhou, the stronghold of Ma Zhan'ao in southwestern Gansu. In early 1872 Ma Zhan'ao's forces inflicted a heavy defeat on the Qing army at the battle of Taizisi. Instead of pressing his advantage, however, Ma Zhan'ao surrendered to Zuo, sending his son as a hostage. Zuo accepted the surrender, and Ma Zhan'ao and his followers joined the Qing army and fought against the remaining rebels.

The surrender of Ma Zhan'ao was one of the most important events in the history of the Hui of the northwest. It established a relationship between the Qing state and a group of Hui military families who would dominate the region in the following decades. Ma Zhan'ao's son Ma Anliang, and the families of Ma Qianling and Ma Haiyan, became military commanders in the Qing army, and their descendants, the so-called Ma clique, ruled Gansu, Qinghai and Ningxia in the first half of the twentieth century.

XIII. Xining and Suzhou

In 1872 and 1873 Zuo's armies captured Xining, where the Hui leader Ma Guiyuan was defeated, and Suzhou, the last rebel stronghold in Gansu. The Shaanxi Hui under Bai Yanhu, who had fought the Qing for a decade, had retreated to the west. At Suzhou, the Hui under Ma Wenlu resisted a long siege. When the city fell in November 1873, Ma Wenlu was executed and a large part of the Hui population was killed. With the fall of Suzhou the revolt in Gansu came to an end.

XIV. The Rising in Xinjiang

In 1864 the revolt spread to Xinjiang, where the Hui garrison soldiers and the Turkic Muslims rose against the Qing in Kucha, Urumqi, Yarkand, Kashgar, Khotan and the Ili valley. The Qing garrisons were destroyed, and the Manchu and Han population of the region suffered heavy losses. In the Ili valley the Taranchi Muslims established a sultanate at Kulja, while in Urumqi a Hui leader, Tuo Ming, also known as Daud Khalifa, established his own state.

In Kashgar, the Kyrgyz leader Siddiq Beg called on the Khanate of Kokand for help, and in 1865 Kokand sent Buzurg Khan, a descendant of the Afaqi khojas who had ruled Kashgaria before the Qing conquest, accompanied by a military commander, Yaqub Beg. Yaqub Beg soon set aside Buzurg Khan and made himself ruler of Kashgaria. By 1870 he had conquered the other Muslim states of the Tarim basin and Urumqi, creating a state that covered most of Xinjiang.

XV. The State of Yaqub Beg

Yaqub Beg ruled his state, known as Kashgaria or Yettishar, the land of the seven cities, as a Muslim ruler. He enforced Islamic law, supported the religious scholars and built mosques and madrasas, and he sought recognition from the Ottoman sultan, who granted him the title of emir in 1873 and sent him weapons and military instructors. He also negotiated with the British in India, who sent missions to Kashgar under Douglas Forsyth in 1870 and 1873, and with the Russians, who concluded a commercial treaty with him in 1872.

The state of Yaqub Beg was caught between the rival empires of Britain and Russia in Central Asia, in the rivalry known as the Great Game. In 1871 Russia occupied the Ili valley, claiming that it was acting to restore order in the region until the Qing could return, and it held the region for a decade. The British hoped that the state of Yaqub Beg would serve as a buffer against Russian expansion, while the Russians regarded it with suspicion.

The rule of Yaqub Beg was harsh, and his heavy taxes and strict enforcement of the law caused resentment among the population of the oases. His army, though large, was not able to resist the Qing army of Zuo Zongtang, which was better equipped and supplied.

XVI. The Reconquest of Xinjiang

In the Qing court in 1874 and 1875 a debate took place over whether to reconquer Xinjiang. Li Hongzhang argued that China could not afford a campaign in the far west at a time when it was threatened by Japan and the Western powers at sea, and that the defence of the coast should have priority. Zuo Zongtang argued that the loss of Xinjiang would expose Mongolia and the capital to attack from Russia, and that the frontier in the northwest was as important as the coast. The court accepted Zuo's argument and authorised the campaign.

Zuo's army, under the command of Liu Jintang, began the campaign in 1876. It took Urumqi in August 1876 and advanced into the Tarim basin in 1877. Yaqub Beg died at Korla in May 1877, possibly by natural causes or by poison, and his state collapsed. Kashgar fell in December 1877, and Khotan in January 1878. The reconquest was completed with great speed, owing largely to Zuo's careful preparation of supplies.

The Ili valley was returned to the Qing by the Russians under the Treaty of Saint Petersburg in 1881, after a crisis in which war between China and Russia had been feared. In 1884 the Qing made Xinjiang a province of the empire, with Liu Jintang as its first governor.

XVII. The Flight of the Dungans

In 1877 and 1878 the remaining Hui forces under Bai Yanhu, together with their families, fled across the Tianshan mountains into the Russian empire. They crossed the mountains in the winter, and many died of cold and hunger on the way. The survivors settled in the Russian territories of Semirechye, in the modern Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, where they were given land by the Russian authorities. Further groups of Hui followed in the 1880s after the return of the Ili valley to China.

The descendants of these refugees, known as the Dungans, still live in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, in villages such as Masanchi and Yrdyk. They preserve the Shaanxi and Gansu dialects of Chinese, which they write in the Cyrillic alphabet, and the customs of the Hui of the nineteenth century. Their history, and the memory of the long march across the mountains, has been preserved in their songs and stories. Bai Yanhu died in Tokmak in 1882. The Dungan communities later produced writers, scholars and public figures in the Soviet Union, and the Dungan language was given a written form in the Latin alphabet in the 1920s and in the Cyrillic alphabet from the 1950s. Dungan scholars have collected the oral traditions of the exodus and the songs that recall the lost villages of Shaanxi and Gansu.

The Dungans of Central Asia are an example of the survival of a community driven from its homeland by religious war, like the Moriscos expelled from Spain in 1609, whose history is described in The Morisco Revolt and Expulsion. The Biblical image of the exile who remembers his homeland, as in Psalm 137:1, has often been applied to such communities by historians.

XVIII. Missions and the Scriptures in the Northwest

Christian missions returned to the northwest of China in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Belgian Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, known as the Scheut missionaries after their house near Brussels, took over the Catholic missions in Mongolia and Gansu from 1865, and their missionaries witnessed the aftermath of the revolt in the region. The Protestant China Inland Mission, founded by James Hudson Taylor in 1865, sent its first missionaries to Gansu in 1876, and in the following years it established stations in Lanzhou and other cities.

The China Inland Mission and the British and Foreign Bible Society distributed copies of the Scriptures in Chinese in Gansu and among the Hui, and some missionaries learned Arabic and studied Islam in order to communicate with the Muslim population. In the early twentieth century missionaries such as George Findlay Andrew and Mildred Cable worked in Gansu and on the road to Xinjiang. Andrew wrote a study of the Muslims of northwest China, and Cable and her colleagues Evangeline and Francesca French travelled throughout the region distributing the Scriptures.

In Xinjiang, the Mission Covenant Church of Sweden began work in Kashgar in 1892. Its missionaries, among them Gustaf Raquette, translated the Scriptures into the Turki language of the oases, the language now called Uyghur. The Gospel of Mark in Kashgar Turki was published in 1898, and the whole of the Greek Scriptures was later published. These translations are discussed in the history of the Bible in the languages of Central Asia, which forms part of the wider history of Bible translation described in Modern Translations of the Greek Scriptures.

XIX. Women, Children and Refugees

The war fell with particular severity on the civilian population. The Hui refugees from Shaanxi, numbering perhaps several hundred thousand, moved with their families through eastern Gansu, and many of them died of hunger and disease in the camps around Dongzhi plain and in the mountains. The Han population of the regions controlled by the rebels also fled, and many Han villages were destroyed. Contemporary accounts describe women who killed themselves to avoid capture, and children sold or abandoned in the famines.

After the war, Zuo Zongtang's administration organised the resettlement of refugees, both Han and Hui, and the distribution of seed and tools to restore agriculture. Orphanages were founded in some cities, and the Catholic missionaries of the Scheut congregation established orphanages and Christian villages in Gansu and Inner Mongolia for children and families left destitute by the war and by the famines that followed it.

The care of widows and orphans is commanded in many passages of the Scriptures, such as Deuteronomy 10:18 and James 1:27, and the missionary orphanages of the period described their work in these terms. Their records are among the sources for the social history of the northwest after the war.

XX. The Great Famine of 1876–1879

The end of the Dungan Revolt coincided with the great North China famine of 1876 to 1879, caused by drought, which struck Shanxi, Henan, Shaanxi, Zhili and Shandong and killed between nine and thirteen million people. Shaanxi, already devastated by the war, suffered severely. The famine relief organised by the Qing government, by Chinese philanthropists and by Western missionaries, including Timothy Richard of the Baptist Missionary Society, was one of the largest relief efforts of the nineteenth century.

The famine further reduced the population of the northwest, and it delayed the recovery of the regions devastated by the war. In the memory of the people of Shaanxi and Gansu, the war and the famine formed a single period of catastrophe in the later years of the Tongzhi and the early years of the Guangxu reigns.

XXI. The Cost of the War

The Dungan Revolt was one of the most destructive wars of the nineteenth century. According to the reconstruction of the historical demographer Cao Shuji, the population of Gansu, then including Ningxia and part of Qinghai, fell from about nineteen and a half million in 1861 to about five million in 1880, though such figures depend on incomplete registers and have been questioned, and the population of Shaanxi fell by several million. Much of the Hui population of the Wei valley in Shaanxi was killed or driven out, and the Hui never returned to many of the places where they had lived. Population registers of the late Qing were incomplete, and historians who have re-examined them, comparing the tax records with local gazetteers, have argued that the scale of the decline cannot be measured with any precision. The figures are disputed, however, and the losses were caused by famine, disease and flight as well as by fighting and massacre.

The war also changed the political order of the northwest. The Qing restored their rule over the region and over Xinjiang, which became a province of China, while the Hui military families who had surrendered to Zuo Zongtang became the dominant power in Gansu and Qinghai. The Sufi orders survived, and the Jahriyya, despite the death of its masters, remained an important force among the Hui.

XXII. Memory and Historiography

The revolt has been interpreted in different ways. Qing officials and historians described it as a rebellion of fanatical Muslims against the dynasty, while modern Chinese historians have sometimes described it as an uprising of the people against Qing oppression, or as a conflict between communities caused by the Qing policy of dividing them. Hui historians have emphasised the sufferings of the Hui and the injustice of the Qing officials, and the Jahriyya chronicles have preserved the memory of the martyrdom of their masters.

Western historians, such as Jonathan Lipman, have examined the role of local conflicts and of the Sufi orders, and have argued against the view of the revolt as a single movement with a common religious aim. Hodong Kim has written the standard study of the state of Yaqub Beg. Studies of the Dungans of Central Asia have preserved the history of the refugees and their descendants.

The words of the prophet on the end of war, They will beat their swords into plowshares, in Isaiah 2:4, have often been quoted in reflections on the wars of religion in China. The Hui, the Han and the other peoples of the northwest have lived together since the end of the war, and the history of the revolt remains a part of the memory of all of them.

XXIII. Bibliography

The following studies, editions and reference works underlie this account.