̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄
three
The Han Kitab Authors and the
Chinese Islamic School
In 1877 the Archimandrite Palladii (Palladius, 1817 – 78 ), the head of
the Russian ecclesiastical mission in Beijing, completed a short bib-
liographical study of Chinese Islamic literature available in his time.
Palladii spent most of his life in China studying Chinese culture
and history, particularly Buddhism and Buddhist texts (he is said to
have read the entire Chinese Buddhist canon). He was the first
Christian missionary, and the first Westerner, to read the Han Ki-
tab literature systematically and the first to argue that Muslims—
like Christians—had entered China to proselytize and that Chinese
Muslim communities originated in conversion efforts.^1 This view
was long held by missionary and Western observers of the Han Ki-
tab.^2 Palladii wrote several lengthy works on Buddhism and three
on Chinese Muslims. His comprehensive Chinese Literature of the
Muslims was published posthumously in 1887.^3 In the introduction,
—————
- For a translation of the introduction to this book, including Palladii’s ac-
counts of the authors, see Panskaya and Leslie, Introduction to Palladii’s Chinese
Literature of Muslims, p. 21. - For a detailed bibliography containing almost all nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century missionary publications on Chinese Muslims, see Israeli, Islam
in China. - Palladii’s first work, On the Muslims in China, which was twenty-four pages
long, was published in 1866. His second work, a thirty-nine-page article published
in 1877 that summarizes Liu Zhi’s biography of the Prophet Muhammad, is enti-
tled The Chinese Literature of the Muslims: An Exposition of a Muslim Work in Chi-
nese Entitled “Yu-lan Chih-sheng shih-lu” (i.e., The Story of the Life of the Most Holy