The Han Kitab Authors 145
was well read in the Islamic texts available in China at the time as
well as in the Chinese classics.
Liu Zhi was born in Shangyuan 上元 (Nanjing) and, upon the
urging of his father, decided on a life of scholarship. Liu’s father
was a teacher in the Yuan school in Nanjing, where Liu himself
studied for many years under his guidance and that of Yuan Ruqi.
His father, evidently a major influence in his intellectual develop-
ment, often lamented the lack of Islamic literature in Chinese. It is
probably as a direct result of this that Liu went on to become the
most prolific of Chinese Muslim authors.
Liu can be considered the quintessential Chinese Muslim scholar
in that he existed at the center—chronological, dynastic, and geo-
graphic—of the Chinese Muslim educational system. As a scholar
working in the later decades of the seventeenth century and the
first decades of the eighteenth, his career coincided with what my
research suggests was the moment of consolidation of the educa-
tional network, just as it began clearly to act as a school, as that
term has been used by others as a framework for analysis. As the
son of a teacher and the disciple of a major teacher, Liu’s networks
of filiations brought him into contact with all the major teachers
and scholarly figures of his time. Finally, his location in Nanjing
put him at the hub of scholarly activity in the late seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries.
This constellation of circumstances shaped Liu from his early
childhood, and he was able to decide on his scholarly course at an
extraordinarily early age. Liu was to become a prolific scholar not
just by the standards of Chinese Muslim scholarship but by those
of Chinese scholarship in general as well. He knew Chinese, Ara-
bic and Persian; was well versed in the Confucian classics and Chi-
nese dynastic histories; and read Jesuit Christian literature as well
as the Buddhist and Daoist classics. All told, it is likely that Liu
was one of the best educated, most versatile, and most widely read
scholars—Muslim or otherwise—to work in China during the sev-
enteenth and eighteenth centuries.
Liu’s thirst for knowledge was apparently unquenchable, and he
complained that his friends often mocked him for being a book-
worm who studied day and night. In pursuit of knowledge, he