The Chinese Sultanate: Islam, Ethnicity, and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwest China, 1856-1873 (review)

David G. Atwill has written a new history of the Panthay Rebellion in nineteenth-century Yunnan that substantially clarifies our view of that province in the late Qing period. The fact that Professor Atwill has undertaken this important study of an event-sometimes called the "Du Wenxiu Rebellion" or the "Southwest Muslim Rebellion" in the historical scholarship-that played such a prominent role in the history of late imperial Yunnan suggests that he has also gone some way toward writing a new history of Yunnan itself.

But first things first. The book is a reworking of the author's dissertation (Atwill 1999),¹ and its message is timely in its topicality, concerning as it does many issues in the social science scholarship on China. Considering that the trend in scholarly work is to pay special attention to Chinese regional histories, "cultural" histories, revisionist histories, and downright alternative histories, Atwill's new reading of the data on the Panthay Rebellion manages to chart a course through what appears to be several of these kinds of histories. He ends up achieving something that one can justifiably call an excellent historical narrative of a key event that took place on China's nineteenth-century frontier. It is a subtle, Yunnan-focused understanding of the "productive misunderstanding" between imperial center and frontier locale that troubled late Qing China, and the author's portrayal of this many-voiced, politically multiple, and viscerally-felt "trouble" for the empire succeeds where other authors have tended to be either silent or unjustifiably parsimonious.

Since I do research on Yunnan and its Muslim population, I found this book to be extremely interesting and informative, as well as very useful for my own purposes. The scope of the research material that Atwill draws upon does not seem to be larger than that of previous treatments of the subject, but the depth of the investigation of the sources seems to be greater, and it demonstrates a more meticulous attention to source perspective and a subtlety of consideration than has perhaps been the case with previous academic analyses of these events. This is to say that rather than relying either predominantly on the bulk of commentary from the official reports of the Qing empire or primarily on the substantial accounts by European travelers in that region-all of which are available to the historian-Atwill does a fine job of making both bodies of source material work for his history. In this commendable example of the historian's method of quellenkritik,² he is able to triangulate in on events from multiple perspectives to uncover a fuller substance for each occurrence than is often the case. For example, it is the tacking back and forth from what Chinese officials were reporting to what Europeans were observing and how events and behaviors were documented to have unfolded that allows the author to begin each component investigation from a point of departure that is justifiably suspicious of inherited interpretations. It is this fundamental suspicion that has enabled the author to present an overarching theme for his book: that Yunnan's Muslim population came to be oppressed to the point where it was driven to rebelling against a Qing state so hopelessly out of touch that local anti-Muslim elements were able to set aggressive policy based almost entirely on their own prejudices.

As an ethnographer of this historically afflicted population, I can say that this new interpretation is, in effect, a suggestion that the Hui of Yunnan have been something like right all along, and that the state (and nearly everyone else except a few academics) has been something like mostly wrong. That the author has shown this to be the case in admirable detail is a most commendable accomplishment, and the giving of voice to a silenced history of oppression and agency alone makes this book worth reading...