The Han Kitab Authors 159
city and the teacher of Liu Zhi, one of the authors whose works
Yuan Guozuo was editing and publishing. Moreover, Liu’s father
was a teacher in the Yuan school and a maternal cousin of Yuan
Ruqi. The Yuan school was a center where other Chinese Islamic
scholars met and visited, and it was a place where new texts were
introduced and manuscripts preserved.^106 Some of its teachers and
members authored books or wrote prefaces or greetings to other
scholars’ works. Thus, Yuan Guozuo could view not only the
books he listed as a whole but also their authors as a collectivity.
Yuan himself stood at an intersection where communal, family, and
institutional ties joined scholarship and scholarly cooperation.
For Yuan Guozuo, his list of books provided consummate tes-
timony to the existence of the specific school of scholarship to
which he himself subscribed. A genealogy establishing the starting
point of this school and marking its prominent figures had already
been written in the last decade of the seventeenth century. A cen-
tury later—in Yuan’s time—the time had come to establish this
school’s canon and to list its creators.
In 1852 Lan Zixi, a Muslim scholar from Wuchang, an important
center of the Islamic educational network, published a book enti-
tled Tianfang zhengxue 天方正學 (Orthodox [correct] learning of
Islam). This long work reprinted portions of the Qur’an in Arabic
and contained a lengthy introduction to Islam. As its title suggests,
it was an attempt to establish an “orthodoxy” of knowledge, or a
specific Dao of learning, associated with major scholarly figures
from antiquity to the present. The several introductions and the
lieyan列言 (“instructions” or “explication of contents”) in the first
volume repeated a similar theme: Islam originated in Arabia and
arrived in China (天方至教來中華)^107 during the Sui and the Tang
periods; it then took root and developed into a scholarly tradition,
which the author presented as the “Han Qitabu” 漢启他補.^108 This
—————
106. For example, one of the four copies of Zhao Can’s Genealogy was given
by Zhao to Yuan Ruqi in 1697 and has been kept in Yuan school since; see Yang
Yongchang, “Jingxue xi zhuanpu ji She Qiling jianjie,” p. 431.
107. Lan, “Xu” (Introduction), to idem, Tianfang zhengxue, p. 6.
108. Lan, “Zixu” (Author’s introduction), to idem, Tianfang zhengxue, p. 4. In
some places in the book, the term Han Kitab appears as Han Qituobu 漢啟佗補.