The Han Kitab Authors 141
list of greetings, however, remains our most tangible sign of the
great importance accorded to Ma Zhu’s text.
The list and the greetings were appended to the Guide and pub-
lished in its first volume.^62 Together the two provide a remarkably
well documented account of the multiple scholarly contacts that
undergirded Chinese Muslim scholarship of the period. The list of
the greetings was entitled, significantly, Hainei zengyan 海內贈言,
or “Greetings [from] throughout the Country,” or simply “Chi-
nese Greetings.” Hainei literally means “within the seas” and was
used as a designator for China. The author’s choice to publish
them under this heading is one indication of the fact that he con-
sidered the community that produced them to be Chinese. This
point is not as self-evident as it may seem: this marked the first
time that a term referring to all Chinese Muslim scholars as one,
countrywide, and distinct group appears in print. The publication
of the Guide came approximately three years after the composition
of Zhao’s Genealogy, a document that similarly demonstrates the
ways in which the Muslim scholarly community in China was
preoccupied with itself as a specifically Chinese entity. (Seventeen
of the twenty-one persons mentioned in the list of greetings pub-
lished with the Guide are also included in Zhao’s Genealogy as
teachers, the same teachers that Ma called the “country’s famous
teachers.”)
A careful reading of the list of greetings reveals much about the
self-perceptions of Ma Zhu’s immediate circle of readers and the
scope of the Muslim scholarly network at the time. Every person
on the list noted his title or position within the scholarly commu-
nity. The list covers people from a wide geographical area, but the
Jiangnan representation is the most apparent. More than a third of
the individuals on the list come from big cities such as Beijing,
Nanjing, Kaifeng, Xi’an, or Kunming. Eight are from Jiangnan (in-
cluding four from Nanjing and four from other locations in Jiang-
su, who studied in Nanjing); three are from Yunnan; two from
Shaanxi (one from Xi’an); two from Shandong (both from Jining);
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62. The first volume also included his autobiography and letters.