“Just Like Old Friends”: The Significance of Southeast Asia to Modern Chinese Islam

During China’s Republican era (1911–49), amid increasing contacts with Southeast Asia, Chinese Muslims crafted politically useful narratives of Sino–Islamic maritime exchange and Islam’s contributions to Chinese civilization. Two examples stand out in particular: Bai Shouyi’s scholarship on the Song-era materia medica trade and the government-sponsored Chinese Islamic South Seas Delegation’s wartime mission to Malaya. In both cases, Chinese Muslims asserted their connectedness not only to the Chinese nation-state and the Arab Middle East but also to the Islamic world as a whole. Southeast Asia’s significance for modern Chinese Islam lay in providing an inspiration and a destination for these travelling civilizational narratives.