140 The Han Kitab Authors
Obtaining the endorsement of the scholars there was so important
that it was undertaken even though it meant that he had to travel
southward from Beijing to Nanjing and then northward to Jining.
In Jining, Ma Zhu met Li Yanling, a colleague of Chang Yunhua
and one of the figures who appears on the greetings list published
with the book. In Shaanxi, he met with the scholar and teacher She
Qiling舍起靈 ( 1630 – 1710 ), and in Hunan he met Huangfu Jing,
who is listed in the Genealogy as a disciple of Ma Minglong. Most
important, however, the primary result of this tour was a long list
of twenty-four greetings praising the author and his work, written
by the Chinese Muslim scholars with whom he shared it. The list
is a demonstration of the relationship, density, and extent of the
Chinese Muslim scholarly network in the late seventeenth century.
This practice of soliciting and collecting greetings for the book is
apparently without precedent (at least within the Chinese Muslim
scholarly community) and should be taken as indicative of the
huge significance attached to the long-awaited publication of the
Guide.^61 Of course, one cannot overlook the relentless activities of
the work’s author, who enjoyed a great deal of prestige because of
his noble origins, which he made sure were lost on no one—even,
as we shall see, the Kangxi 康熙 emperor.
The publication of the Guide took place more than a hundred
years after what I have identified as the moment of establishment
of an indigenous Islamic education network in China and about
twenty years after the publication of the first Islamic book written
in Chinese, which appeared within the context of that network. It
is clear that at this point in the development and consolidation of
Chinese Islamic knowledge, the Chinese Muslim scholarly com-
munity had achieved a critical mass, such that the production and
publication of such a work would have been eagerly anticipated
and widely publicized. Ma Zhu’s noble origins clearly played a role
in the work’s fame. The fact that Ma Zhu could claim relationship
to the great Shams al-Din, a direct descendant of Muhammad and,
in turn, of Adam himself, certainly enhanced his reputation. The
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61. For a basic examination of the content of the greetings, see Wu Jianwei,
“Qingzhen zhinan hainei zengyanshi kaolue.”