Fanhui or Huifan? Hanhui or Huimin?: Salar Ethnic Identification and Qing Administrative Transformation in Eighteenth-Century Gansu

Introduction

The late spring of 1781 seemed to portend a fruitful harvest for the Qing Empire. Memorials sent to the Qianlong emperor at Chengde reported the abundance of snow and rain in the first three months of the year. This was a rare phenomenon in that decade and a great blessing for the planting season. In a poem written in early April, Qianlong attributed this heavenly blessing to his faithful prayers and visits to temples during his Southern Tour in the previous year. If Qianlong’s Southern Tour could bring such good fortune to his subjects, then Qianlong comforted himself that the blessing would not only bring about a bountiful harvest but also reveal the love of the emperor to his people.¹

The good news about rain and the promise of an abundant harvest greatly pleased Qianlong and he was now in a good mood to vacation at the Chengde resort, which he had been too busy to enjoy the previous year. It was here at Chengde that Qianlong could temporarily relax by engaging in literary creation. Political symbols and natural settings there such as An Yuan temple inspired Qianlong to compose poems and commemorate his imperial ancestors and their great enterprise in Xinjiang. However, Qianlong’s pleasure was interrupted when he received a memorial from the governor-general of Gansu on the outbreak of a “Fanhui” rebellion over new religious teachings in the Gansu frontier region. The Qianlong emperor and his officials, were well aware of the complexity of subject populations along the northwest frontiers which included groups such as Han, Hui, Mongol, and Fan. However, they had never encountered the strange, evidently hybrid or hyphenated category of Fanhui. The problem was compounded by the fact that the Qing soon had to undertake a military as well as ethnic identification campaign.

Scholars today commonly identify these so-called Fanhui as the Salars, a Turkic Muslim group in Gansu, and refer to their conflict with the Qing as an (Islamic, Sufi) “new-teaching” rebellion, highlighting Islamic religious factors as the primary cause of discord between this frontier group and the government.² By placing religion at the center, scholars have in some cases even posited a “clash of civilizations” between the Confucian state and its Muslim subjects.³ Thus, to some extent, conventional scholarship on the (Fanhui) “Muslims” of Qing China, has stressed their religious identity, while ignoring their political, administrative, and legal status, which mattered more to the Qing state.

This article studies conflict between the new-teaching Fanhui and the Qing state in Gansu in 1781.⁴ In this article, I will put administrative considerations at the center in order to investigate how the (non-Muslim) Qing state envisioned “Muslims” and “Islam” during the eighteenth century before and after the occurrence of violence. To do so, I will focus on the political history of the Tibetan regions of southwest Gansu which the Salars inhabited, drawing attention to the state’s efforts to categorize and administer the Salars, who were adherents of Sufi new teachings. In the process, I will argue that violence between the Salars and the Qing state had its primary origins not in Islamic teachings,⁵ but rather in Qing legal inconsistencies and state misconceptions regarding the classification of the peoples who inhabited this former Ming frontier. The westward expansion of the Qing empire in the eighteenth century led to the radical redefinition of these regions as administratively part of “China proper,” and thus the empire’s interior territory, rather than part of the differently administered frontier.

In this article, I do not start with the preconception that the Salar people involved in conflict with the state at the time were necessarily understood by the state as “Muslim” in their historical context. From the perspective of the Qing state, the Salars were considered Fan (or culturally “Tibetan”),⁶ at least before and even during the conflict at the end of the eighteenth century. I will show that the occurrence of armed conflicts with the Salars led the Qing state...