The Panthay Rebellion

I. A Muslim State in Southwest China

The Panthay Rebellion was a rising of the Muslims of Yunnan, in southwest China, against the Qing dynasty between 1856 and 1873. During the rising a Muslim leader, Du Wenxiu, established a state at the city of Dali in western Yunnan, which he ruled with the title of Sultan Suleiman for sixteen years. The state, which the Chinese called the Pingnan Guo, the Kingdom of the Pacified South, controlled much of western Yunnan and sought recognition from the British Empire. It was destroyed by the Qing in 1873, and the Muslim population of Yunnan suffered massacres and expulsions.

The name Panthay is the Burmese name for the Chinese Muslims of Yunnan, who traded with Burma across the mountain frontier, and it was adopted by British writers in Burma who reported on the rebellion. In Chinese the rising is known as the Du Wenxiu rising or the Yunnan Hui rising. It took place at the same time as the Taiping Rebellion described in The Taiping Rebellion and its Bible and the Muslim rising in the northwest described in The Dungan Revolt, and together these risings brought the Qing dynasty close to collapse.

This page examines the history of the Muslims of Yunnan, the causes and course of the rising, the religious and scholarly life of the Muslim community, and the Qing reconquest. It also considers the place of the Scriptures held in common by Jews, Christians and Muslims, in the scholarship of the Chinese Muslims, and the relations of the Muslims with the Christian missionaries in the region.

II. The Hui of Yunnan

Muslims first came to Yunnan in large numbers in the thirteenth century, when the Mongols conquered the kingdom of Dali in 1253 and incorporated the region into their empire. The first Mongol governor of Yunnan, Sayyid Ajall Shams al-Din Omar, a Muslim from Bukhara, governed the province from 1274 until his death in 1279. He built mosques and Confucian temples, encouraged agriculture and irrigation, and settled Muslim soldiers and administrators in the province. He is remembered by both Muslims and Chinese as a wise and just governor, and his tomb in Kunming remained a place of honour for the Hui of the province.

The descendants of these settlers, and of other Muslims who came later, intermarried with the local population and adopted the Chinese language and many Chinese customs, while preserving their Islamic faith. They became known as the Hui, the name used for the Chinese-speaking Muslims of China. The Hui of Yunnan were concentrated in the cities and along the trade routes, and they were active as merchants, caravan traders, miners and soldiers. They carried on the trade between Yunnan and Burma, Tibet and Sichuan, and their caravans of mules carried tea, cotton, silk and metals.

The famous admiral Zheng He, who led the Ming fleets to the Indian Ocean and East Africa between 1405 and 1433, was a Hui from Kunyang in Yunnan. His father and grandfather had both made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and he himself was a descendant of Sayyid Ajall. The Hui of Yunnan were proud of this history and of their contribution to the life of the province.

III. Han and Hui in the Eighteenth Century

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the population of Yunnan grew rapidly, as Han Chinese migrants came from other provinces to work in the mines and to settle the land. The mines of Yunnan produced copper, which was used for the coinage of the empire, and silver, tin and other metals. The Hui and the Han competed for control of the mines, and the competition often led to violence.

The conflicts between Han and Hui were also fuelled by differences of religion and custom. The Hui did not eat pork or worship the gods of Chinese popular religion, and they lived in separate communities around their mosques. Han secret societies and local militias attacked Hui communities, and the Hui organised their own militias in self-defence. The Qing officials, many of whom were hostile to the Hui, often sided with the Han.

In 1839 and again in 1845 there were massacres of Hui in western Yunnan. In 1845 the Han militia of Baoshan, near the Burmese frontier, killed several thousand Hui in the city, with the complicity of the local officials. The Hui leaders sent a delegation to Beijing to petition the emperor for justice. The Daoguang emperor sent the official Lin Zexu, famous for his campaign against opium in Canton, to investigate. Lin punished some of the Han leaders, but he also punished Hui who had taken revenge, and the tension continued.

IV. Qing Law and the Hui

The violence of the 1850s was shaped by the way in which the Qing state had come to treat the Hui. In the eighteenth century the Qing government had generally regarded the Hui as loyal subjects, and the Yongzheng emperor had rejected proposals to restrict Islam, declaring in 1729 that the Hui were the children of the state like all other subjects. Yet after the risings of Muslims in Gansu in 1781 and 1784, associated with the New Teaching of the Sufi leader Ma Mingxin, the Qing introduced laws that punished crimes committed by Hui more severely than those committed by Han, particularly crimes committed by groups of Hui carrying weapons.

These laws, and the attitudes behind them, encouraged officials to regard the Hui as a dangerous people, and they made it more difficult for the Hui to obtain justice in disputes with their Han neighbours. In Yunnan, many officials sided with the Han in conflicts over land and mines, and the Han militias that attacked the Hui could act with little fear of punishment. The Hui petitions of the 1840s complained that the officials did not protect them and that the courts did not punish those who had killed their families.

The complaint of a minority that the laws are not applied equally to it is an ancient one. The Mosaic law required that the same judgement should apply to the foreign resident as to the native, in Leviticus 24:22, and that the stranger was not to be mistreated, in Exodus 22:21. The prophets condemned the rulers who denied justice to the weak, as in Isaiah 10:1-2. The Christian missionaries in Yunnan who reported on the war sometimes cited such passages in describing the treatment of the Hui by the Qing officials.

V. The Massacre of Kunming

In 1855 a dispute over a silver mine at Shiyang in central Yunnan led to fighting between Han and Hui miners, which spread to other parts of the province. In 1856 the Qing officials in Kunming, the provincial capital, fearing a Hui rising, authorised or permitted the local Han militias to kill the Hui. In May 1856 the Han militias and the population of Kunming massacred the Hui of the city, killing several thousand people over three days. Massacres of Hui followed in other towns and villages throughout the province.

The massacre provoked a general rising of the Hui. In the east of the province the Hui gathered under the leadership of Ma Rulong, a military officer, and the religious scholar Ma Dexin, and in 1857 and again in 1861 they besieged Kunming. In the west the Hui seized the city of Dali under the leadership of Du Wenxiu. The rising was joined by some non-Muslim peoples of Yunnan, such as the Yi and the Bai, who also had grievances against the Qing officials, and by some Han.

VI. Du Wenxiu

Du Wenxiu was born in 1823 at Yongchang, the modern Baoshan, in western Yunnan, to a Hui family. He received a Confucian education and passed the first level of the civil service examinations, and he also studied the Quran and the Islamic sciences. In 1845 he was one of the delegates who went to Beijing to petition the emperor after the Baoshan massacre, in which members of his family had been killed.

In 1856 Du Wenxiu led the Hui of western Yunnan in the capture of Dali, the ancient capital of the kingdoms of Nanzhao and Dali, situated between the Cangshan mountains and the Erhai lake. He proclaimed himself the commander-in-chief of the army of the Muslims and the ruler of a new state, and he took the title of Sultan Suleiman, Sultan Sulayman, in Arabic. His state was called in Chinese the Pingnan Guo, the Kingdom of the Pacified South.

Du Wenxiu's state was not exclusively Muslim. Its government included Han and Bai officials, as well as Hui, and it proclaimed its intention to unite all the peoples of Yunnan against the Manchus. Du's proclamations called for the expulsion of the Manchus and the restoration of Chinese rule, in terms similar to those used by the Taiping and the Ming loyalists, and they promised equality to all peoples and religions. The state used the Ming style of dress and abolished the queue.

At the same time the state was organised on Islamic principles. Du Wenxiu used the title of sultan, the state's seals bore inscriptions in Arabic, and its laws included provisions of Islamic law. The government supported the mosques and the religious schools, and it sought to establish relations with the Muslim world and with the Ottoman Empire, the seat of the caliphate. The mixture of Chinese and Islamic forms reflected the identity of the Hui as Chinese Muslims.

VII. Ma Dexin and Islamic Scholarship

The most learned of the leaders of the rising was Ma Dexin, also known as Ma Fuchu, a religious scholar from Dali who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca between 1841 and 1848, travelling overland through Burma to the Bay of Bengal and by sea to Arabia, and returning through Egypt, Jerusalem and the Ottoman Empire. He spent several years studying in Cairo and Istanbul, and he wrote an account of his journey, the Record of the Pilgrimage, Chaojin tuji, which describes the places he visited and the customs of the Muslim world.

Ma Dexin wrote many works in Arabic and Chinese on Islamic theology, law and Arabic grammar. He was one of the first to translate parts of the Quran into Chinese, and his translation, the Precious Mirror of the Quran, Baoming zhenjing zhijie, was one of the earliest attempts to render the Muslim scripture in the Chinese language. He belonged to a tradition of Chinese Muslim scholarship, the Han Kitab, which had sought since the seventeenth century to explain Islam in the terms of Confucian philosophy. The most important writers of this tradition, Wang Daiyu and Liu Zhi, wrote in classical Chinese and presented Islam as a teaching compatible with the Confucian virtues.

The Han Kitab scholars wrote about the prophets whom Islam shares with the Jewish and Christian traditions, such as Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David and Jesus. Liu Zhi's Life of the Prophet, Tianfang zhisheng shilu, of 1724, includes accounts of the earlier prophets, drawn from the Islamic traditions. These accounts recall the narratives of the Hebrew Scriptures, such as the call of Abraham in Genesis 12:1-3 and the promise concerning Ishmael, whom Muslims regard as their ancestor, in Genesis 17:20, though they differ in many details.

After the surrender of Ma Rulong to the Qing in 1862, Ma Dexin also accepted the authority of the Qing and was given an official title. He continued to teach and write until 1874, when he was executed by the Qing governor Cen Yuying, who suspected him of plotting a new rising. His works continued to be read by the Muslims of China, and he is remembered as one of the greatest Chinese Muslim scholars.

VIII. Ma Rulong and the Eastern Hui

The Hui of eastern Yunnan, under Ma Rulong and Ma Dexin, besieged Kunming in 1857 and again in 1861 and 1862. Unlike Du Wenxiu, Ma Rulong did not seek to establish an independent state, and in 1862 he negotiated a surrender to the Qing. He was given the rank of a Qing military officer, and his troops were incorporated into the provincial army. Ma Dexin, who had been proclaimed governor-general of Yunnan by the rebels, accepted the title of a Qing official.

The surrender of Ma Rulong divided the Muslims of Yunnan. Ma Rulong became the most important ally of the Qing in the province, and he fought against Du Wenxiu and the other rebels who refused to surrender. Du Wenxiu regarded him as a traitor. Ma Rulong's decision has been explained by his belief that the rising could not succeed and by his wish to protect the Hui of eastern Yunnan from further massacres. In 1863 a rival Hui commander, Ma Rong, briefly seized Kunming and killed the Qing governor-general, but Ma Rulong recaptured the city and suppressed the revolt.

The divisions among the Hui of Yunnan echo the divisions among the Muslims of the northwest during the Dungan Revolt, described in The Dungan Revolt, where some Hui leaders surrendered to the Qing and fought for them against their fellow Muslims. In both regions the Qing commanders exploited these divisions to defeat the rebels.

IX. The Government of the Sultanate

From his capital at Dali, Du Wenxiu ruled most of western Yunnan for sixteen years. His state controlled the trade routes to Burma and Tibet and the rich agricultural lands around the Erhai lake. It collected taxes, minted coins, issued edicts and maintained an army of tens of thousands of soldiers. The government was organised in a manner similar to that of the Chinese dynasties, with ministers, generals and provincial governors, but its rulers were mostly Hui, and Islamic law was applied to the Muslim population.

The state at first prospered. Contemporary observers reported that the trade with Burma flourished, and that the government maintained order and treated the non-Muslim population with tolerance. Du Wenxiu was known for his modest way of life and his piety. Yet the state was constantly at war with the Qing and with Ma Rulong, and the burden of taxation and military service grew heavier as the war continued.

The sultanate faced the same question that had confronted many earlier states built on a religious identity, the relation between its religious foundations and the religiously mixed population it governed. Du Wenxiu's proclamations emphasised the unity of all the peoples of Yunnan against the Manchus, and they spoke of justice and peace in terms that Muslims, Confucians and Buddhists could all understand. The ideal of a ruler who judges with righteousness and defends the afflicted is expressed in the Hebrew Scriptures in Psalm 72:1-4, a text that the Christian missionaries of the period sometimes cited in their reports on the government of Yunnan.

X. Mosques and Schools under the Sultanate

The Panthay state supported the religious institutions of the Hui. Du Wenxiu built and restored mosques in Dali and the other cities under his rule, and he appointed religious scholars, ahong, to lead them and to teach in the mosque schools. The schools taught the Arabic and Persian languages, the Quran, Islamic law and theology, using the curriculum of the scripture hall education, jingtang jiaoyu, that had been developed by Chinese Muslim scholars since the sixteenth century.

The scholars of Dali and the other centres of Islamic learning in Yunnan produced manuscripts of the Quran, which were copied in a distinctive Chinese style of Arabic calligraphy, and works on Islamic law and devotion. Some of these manuscripts survived the destruction of 1873 and are preserved in mosques and libraries in Yunnan today. The state also sought to send students and pilgrims to Mecca and to the centres of learning in the Ottoman Empire, following the example of Ma Dexin, though the war made such journeys difficult.

The religious life of the Panthay state shows the integration of the Hui into the wider Islamic world as well as their roots in Chinese culture. The Hui of Yunnan, like the Sephardi Jews of the Ottoman Empire described in Sephardi Jews in the Ottoman Empire, maintained their scriptures and traditions of learning through centuries of life as a minority, and they adapted them to the language and customs of the society around them.

XI. Sladen at Tengyue

The British in Burma took an interest in the Panthay state, which controlled the trade route between Yunnan and Burma. In 1868 an expedition led by Major Edward Sladen, the British political agent at Mandalay, travelled from Bhamo on the Irrawaddy river to Tengyue, also called Momein, in western Yunnan, a town held by the Panthay. The expedition was received by the Panthay governor of Tengyue, and Sladen sent a report on the Panthay state and the prospects of trade to the British government.

Sladen's report described the Panthay as a well-governed people who were eager to trade with the British, and it recommended British support for the state. The expedition was accompanied by the naturalist John Anderson, who wrote an account of it in his Mandalay to Momien of 1876. The British government, however, was unwilling to offend the Qing government, with which it had concluded the treaties of 1858 and 1860, and it did not recognise the Panthay state.

At the same time a French expedition, the Mekong Exploration Commission under Ernest Doudart de Lagrée and Francis Garnier, travelled up the Mekong from Saigon and reached Yunnan in 1867 and 1868. The French were received by Ma Rulong in Kunming, and some members of the expedition travelled to Dali, where they were refused an audience by the sultan and ordered to leave. Garnier's account of the expedition, published in 1873, described the devastation of the province by the war.

XII. Prince Hassan in London

In 1871, as the Qing forces advanced on Dali, Du Wenxiu sent his adopted son, Liu Daoheng, known to the British as Prince Hassan, on an embassy to Britain to seek recognition and help. Hassan travelled through Burma to Rangoon and Calcutta, and from there to London, where he arrived in 1872. He carried a letter from Du Wenxiu to Queen Victoria and offered to place the Panthay state under British protection.

The British government received Hassan politely but refused to recognise the Panthay state or to give it any help. The Foreign Office was concerned to maintain good relations with the Qing government, and it doubted that the Panthay state could survive. Hassan also visited Istanbul, where he sought the support of the Ottoman sultan Abdülaziz, but without result. By the time he returned to Burma, Dali had fallen.

The embassy of Prince Hassan was one of several attempts by Muslim rulers in Asia in the nineteenth century to obtain the support of the Ottoman caliph or the European powers against their enemies. In the same period the ruler of Kashgaria, Yaqub Beg, who had established a state in Xinjiang during the Dungan Revolt, sent envoys to Istanbul and London and received some support from the Ottomans and the British.

XIII. Cen Yuying and the Qing Reconquest

The Qing reconquest of Yunnan was led by Cen Yuying, a Zhuang official from Guangxi who became governor of Yunnan in 1868 and governor-general in 1873. Cen relied on the troops of Ma Rulong and on the local militias, and he received money and arms from other provinces after the suppression of the Taiping in 1864. He also purchased modern weapons from the Western powers through the arsenals established by the Self-Strengthening Movement.

From 1868 Cen's forces drove the Panthay out of eastern and central Yunnan and advanced on Dali. In 1871 and 1872 they captured the towns around the Erhai lake and besieged the capital. The Panthay forces were weakened by defections, by the loss of their territory and by famine. In December 1872 the Qing forces breached the walls of Dali.

On 26 December 1872, according to most accounts, Du Wenxiu, hoping to save the people of the city, took poison and was carried in a litter to the Qing camp to surrender. He died before or soon after reaching the camp, and his head was cut off and sent to Beijing. Despite his surrender, the Qing forces entered Dali in January 1873 and massacred a large part of the Muslim population of the city. The number of victims is uncertain, but the Qing reports and later accounts suggest that several thousand were killed.

The last Panthay strongholds, including Tengyue, were taken in 1873 and 1874. The Qing government rewarded Cen Yuying and Ma Rulong, but Cen also had Ma Dexin executed in 1874 on suspicion of plotting a new rising. Ma Rulong himself was later transferred to Hunan, away from his base in Yunnan.

XIV. Peace and Surrender

The decision of Du Wenxiu to surrender in order to save the people of Dali was remembered by the Hui as an act of self-sacrifice. The accounts of his last days, preserved in Hui tradition, describe him as accepting death so that his people might live. The Qing commanders, however, did not keep their promise to spare the city, and the massacre that followed became a central event in the memory of the Hui of Yunnan.

Ma Rulong's surrender in 1862 and Du Wenxiu's in 1872 raised the question, debated among the Hui, of when it was right to make peace with an enemy and when it was right to resist. The same question had been debated in other religious traditions. The Hebrew Scriptures record the counsel of Jeremiah to the exiles in Babylon to seek the peace of the city where they lived, in Jeremiah 29:7, and the prophet's advice to the king of Judah to surrender to the Babylonians to save the city, in Jeremiah 38:17-18. The Hui scholars, who knew the stories of the prophets from the Islamic tradition, drew on their own law and history in thinking about these questions.

XV. The Cost of the War

The war devastated the province of Yunnan. The population of the province, which had been about ten million before the war, fell sharply, though the figures are uncertain. Some estimates suggest that the population fell by several million, as a result of the fighting, the massacres, famine and an epidemic of plague that spread through the province during and after the war. The mines, which had been the basis of the province's economy, were abandoned, and many towns and villages were destroyed.

The Muslim population of Yunnan suffered especially severely. Many Hui were killed in the massacres of 1856 and 1873, and many others fled to Burma, where they formed the Panthay communities of Mandalay and the Shan states, or to Thailand and Laos. Those who remained in Yunnan were forbidden to live in the cities, and their mosques were destroyed or confiscated. The Hui community of Yunnan recovered only slowly in the following decades.

XVI. Plague and Famine

The war was accompanied by an epidemic of bubonic plague, which had been endemic in parts of Yunnan since the late eighteenth century and spread widely during the war, as armies and refugees moved through the province. The plague killed large numbers of soldiers and civilians in the 1860s and 1870s, and contemporary observers, including the French missionaries and the members of Garnier's expedition, described towns emptied by the disease. The epidemic later spread from Yunnan to the coast of southern China, reaching Canton and Hong Kong in 1894, where the plague bacillus was identified by Alexandre Yersin.

Famine followed the destruction of crops and the abandonment of fields. In the sieges of Kunming and Dali the defenders and the civilian population suffered from hunger, and in the countryside the movements of the armies left the villages without food. The combination of war, plague and famine accounts for the very large fall in the population of the province during the rebellion.

XVII. The Christians in Yunnan

The Catholic mission in Yunnan, served by the priests of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, was small at the time of the rebellion, with a few thousand Chinese Christians in scattered communities. The missionaries reported on the war in their letters to Paris, which were published in the Annals of the Propagation of the Faith and provide an important source for the history of the rising. They described the massacres on both sides and the sufferings of the population.

The Christians were sometimes caught between the two sides. Some Christian communities were attacked by the Panthay, who regarded them as allies of the Qing and the French, while others were attacked by the Han militias, who regarded them as followers of a foreign religion. The missionaries sought to protect their communities by negotiating with the commanders of both sides, and they sometimes appealed to the French consuls, who had acquired the right to protect Catholic missionaries under the treaties of 1858 and 1860.

The Protestant missions arrived in Yunnan only after the rebellion. The China Inland Mission, founded by James Hudson Taylor, sent missionaries to the province in the 1870s and 1880s. In the early twentieth century the missionary Samuel Pollard of the Bible Christian Mission developed a script for the language of the A-Hmao, the Pollard script, and translated parts of the Bible into it. The Greek Scriptures in A-Hmao were published in 1917, and they became the basis of a large Christian community among the Miao and Yi peoples of northeastern Yunnan and western Guizhou.

XVIII. Muslims, Christians and the Scriptures

The Hui scholars of the nineteenth century were aware of the Christian missionaries and their Scriptures. Some of them read the Chinese translations of the Bible, and they discussed the differences between the Islamic and Christian accounts of the prophets and of Jesus. In the Islamic tradition Jesus, called Isa, is a prophet and the Messiah, born of the virgin Mary, but not the son of God, and the Quran refers to the Torah, the Psalms and the Gospel as earlier scriptures revealed by God.

The missionaries, for their part, sought to preach to the Muslims of China, and they produced tracts and translations of the Gospels in a style intended to appeal to Muslim readers, using Islamic terms where possible. The missionary Marshall Broomhall of the China Inland Mission wrote a history of Islam in China, Islam in China. A Neglected Problem, published in 1910, which drew on the reports of missionaries and the records of the Panthay and Dungan risings. Broomhall noted the knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures among the Hui scholars, who were familiar with the stories of the patriarchs and of Moses.

The Hui and the Jews of China, whose community at Kaifeng is described in The Jews of Kaifeng, were sometimes confused by Chinese observers, who called the Jews the Blue-Capped Hui, lanmao Huihui, and noted that both communities refrained from eating pork. The Jews of Kaifeng, like the Hui, had adapted their religion to the Chinese environment and explained their scriptures in Confucian terms, and their stelae of 1489 and 1512 present the Torah as a teaching in harmony with the Confucian classics.

XIX. The Panthay in Historical Memory

The Panthay Rebellion has been interpreted in different ways. The Qing officials regarded it as a revolt of rebellious Muslims, and the official histories emphasised the crimes of the rebels. Chinese historians of the twentieth century, both nationalist and communist, interpreted it as a rising against the oppression of the Manchu government, in which Hui, Han and other peoples took part. They emphasised the multi-ethnic character of Du Wenxiu's state and its opposition to the Manchus.

Western historians, such as David Atwill in The Chinese Sultanate of 2005, have argued that the rising was not primarily a religious war, but a response to the violence of the Han militias and the failure of the Qing officials to protect the Hui. Atwill emphasises that the Panthay state combined Islamic and Chinese forms of government and sought to include non-Muslims. Other historians have emphasised the importance of Islam in the identity of the rebels and in their relations with the wider Muslim world.

The Hui of Yunnan today remember Du Wenxiu as a hero, and his tomb near Dali has become a place of commemoration. The memory of the massacres of 1856 and 1873 remains an important part of their history. Local historians in Yunnan have collected oral traditions, genealogies and inscriptions from the Hui villages that record the names of those who died and the families that fled, and these sources have added to the evidence of the official Qing records and the accounts of foreign observers. Atwill, The Chinese Sultanate, remains the fullest modern study of the Dali state and its sources, and it has been followed by further work on the Hui communities of Yunnan.

XX. Bibliography

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