China

Abstract

Although the study of the archaeology of China is a well-developed field, the study of the archaeology of Islam in China, as a field, is virtually unknown. There are no books covering the topic and no articles providing an overview of the state of the field across China. There are however, a handful of scholars who have focused on specific examples of Islamic archaeology in China. The majority of this work is on the archaeological finds found in the coastal city of Quanzhou. China’s Muslim population today is conservatively estimated to be more than 23 million, and is made up of ten different ethnic minority groups. This chapter focuses on the largest group, the Hui. The study of the archaeology of Islam in China is made especially challenging for several reasons. Between the 7th and 15th centuries there were two major waves of Muslim immigrants to different regions of China, and between the 18th and 19th centuries there were several periods of violent uprisings that resulted in major Muslim communities being decimated and their mosques and monuments destroyed. In the 20th century, during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) mosques, together with all places of religious worship in China, came under systematic attack throughout the country. Given the dearth of surviving examples of early Chinese Islamic material culture, this chapter also discusses some of small Chinese Islamic art collections found within museums around the world, as well as early 20th-century photographic collections that document mosques and tombs that have not survived.