4 Introduction
sheng, after passing the examinations and proving his competency
in a body of knowledge supposedly “foreign” to him, have said
about “being Hua” or “becoming Hua”? Would he have been con-
cerned with locating himself vis-à-vis Chinese culture? After being
immersed in the Chinese classics, how would he have understood
Islam and its relationship to his newly acquired culture? Would he
somehow feel “less Muslim” or “more Chinese”? Must the making
of a “Hua” mean the unmaking of a Muslim?
This book tries to answer some of these questions and to offer a
vista onto the world of a group of people to whom such questions
mattered a great deal. It does so by focusing on a corpus of writings
produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by Muslim
literati who wrestled with many of the questions posed by the an-
ecdote about Li Yansheng. These men of letters were not the first
Muslims to have mastered the Chinese classics, nor were they the
first to become part of the state apparatus. But they were the first
to express themselves specifically as Muslims, to describe their ex-
perience as Muslims living in China, and to document the com-
munal myths that made sense of their place both within Islam and
within Chinese culture.
In many ways, then, this study follows—and is indebted to—the
path recently forged in the historiography of late imperial China by
such scholars as Pamela Crossley, Evelyn Rawski, Mark Elliott, and
others who have made use of texts produced in languages other than
Chinese by non-Chinese peoples. Crossley and Rawski in particular
have long argued for the importance of Manchu-language scholar-
ship. Their studies, along with Elliott’s, provide us with a much
fuller and more nuanced picture of the Qing period than have those
based solely on Chinese-language texts.^6 As Rawski has put it: “All
[such] materials... , regardless of the language in which they were
written, are ‘insider’s views’—produced either for working purposes
or as part of the imperial communication with the bureaucracy....
It is time to change the lenses and reorder the narrative.”^7
—————
- See Crossley, A Translucent Mirror; Rawski, The Last Emperors; and Elliott,
The Manchu Way. - Rawski, The Last Emperors, p. 13.