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The Chinese Sultanate

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Maps, Figures, and Tables.............................................................................ixAcknowledgments...............................................................................................xi1. A Mandarin's Tale..........................................................................................12. South of the Clouds: The World of Nineteenth-Century Yunnan................................................113. Shades of Islam: The Muslim Yunnanese......................................................................344. Rebellion's Roots: Hanjianism, Han Newcomers, and Non-Han Violence in Yunnan...............................485. Spiraling Violence: The Rise of Anti-Hui Hostilities.......................................................646. "All the Fish in the Pond": The Kunming Massacre and the Rise of the Panthay Rebellion.....................847. Ambiguous Ambitions: Ma Rulong's Road to Power, 1860-1864..................................................1168. Rebellious Visions: Du Wenxiu and the Creation of the Dali Sultanate.......................................1399. Ethereal Deeds: The Struggle to Reclaim Yunnan, 1867-1873..................................................16110. Epilogue: The Aftermath of Rebellion......................................................................185Chinese Characters............................................................................................191Abbreviated References........................................................................................195Notes.........................................................................................................199Bibliography..................................................................................................243Index.........................................................................................................261

Chapter One

The End of the Beginning

On a warm summer evening in July 1857, Governor-General Hengchun stood on the city wall of Kunming surveying the chaotic scene all around him. Dragon Gate Temple, carved into the steep cliffs of the Western Hills and normally visible across Dianchi Lake, was obscured by thick columns of smoke rising from the city's burning suburbs and adjacent fields. The wealthy caravans aries, the thriving markets, and the innumerable houses outside the massive city walls had all been looted and were now in flames. Thousands of city residents and refugees from other parts of the province of Yunnan had thought their capital would be safe; all had been caught in the sudden offensive of the rebel army.

Hengchun knew the Chinese Empire was staggering from advances being made by the rebel leader Hong Xiuquan and his Taiping army far to the east in the strategic lower Yangtze valley. Thus, the central government was unlikely to send him either military reinforcements or funds to relieve the siege of Kunming. Yunnan was one of the poorest and most distant provinces of the Qing Empire. Its greatest value to the imperial court had been its mineral reserves, especially copper. But early in the 1800s, many of Yunnan's mines had begun to close as the quality of the copper declined, deposits were depleted, and transportation costs rose. The trade in Yunnan's famous tea was still lucrative, but except for that the province rarely drew the court's already strained attention.

As Hengchun stood on the city wall and stared bleakly at the impending destruction of his capital, perhaps the proverb common among residents of Yunnan came to his mind: "The mountains are high and the emperor is far away." It was tragically appropriate to the devastation he saw that evening and partly explained why the multiethnic rebel forces had risked attacking the provincial capital. At the very least, the proverb underscored his despair: he had failed to protect the people of his province from the rebel hordes and the chaos that now engulfed Kunming.

With the rebel forces encircling the city, Hengchun often walked the city walls, inspecting its defenses. In this way he saw the devastation firsthand-the corpses, the ransacked shops-as well as the banners of the Muslim Chinese rebels. Witnesses would recount that the governor-general looked disconsolate. He sighed deeply time and again in remorse over the dreadful consequences of his decisions. As a youth, he had absorbed the precepts of Confucius while preparing for his civil service examinations. He measured his worth as an official by the welfare of his people. The weight of their present suffering was thus a direct indictment of his leadership.

Governor-General Hengchun was the Qing government's ranking official in all of southwestern China. He was responsible for all that happened in Yunnan and in Guizhou Province directly to the east. When the news reached Beijing that a rebel force had besieged the provincial capital, the emperor would react swiftly and without hesitation. The central court might show a modicum of leniency over a skirmish along Yunnan's remote border areas. But Hengchun had allowed a rebel army to reach the very walls of the provincial capital and kill scores of the emperor's subjects. This was grounds for censure and perhaps dismissal, and quite conceivably for charges of official negligence.

At Kunming's broad southern gate, Hengchun paused to study the damage to the wealthiest suburbs of the city and to assess the rebels' movements on the level ground between Kunming and Dianchi Lake. From where he stood he would have seen the Eastern Pagoda a few hundred yards from the wall. It was more than one hundred feet high and had been built during the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms (c. 738-1253), in the tenth century, a time when Yunnan had been free of Chinese central control. The pagoda was a visible reminder ofYunnan's tenuous historical links to the Chinese Empire. Several months earlier Hengchun had received word that Dali, Yunnan's military and commercial center in the west, had fallen to the Yunnan rebels. The top Qing administrators stationed there had been beheaded, and a king appointed. Was he witnessing the beginning of a new era of Yunnan autonomy? Was the rise of a rebel government in Dali, Nanzhao's former capital, an omen? With Kunming now under siege, the end of Qing rule in Yunnan-and his own demise-were all too conceivable. It was little consolation to him that the events that had ignited this violence had taken place the previous year while he was away in Guizhou. Only after his return had he pieced together that sequence of horrifying events.

It had all begun the previous year when the emperor ordered Hengchun to Guizhou to suppress an uprising by members of the Miao ethnic group. He departed from the capital, leaving Yunnan governor Shuxing'a to oversee the provincial bureaucracy in his absence. Shuxing'a, like Hengchun, was of Manchu ethnicity. Unfortunately, he suffered from a debilitating mental condition (zhengchun chong) whose symptoms were melancholia, memory loss, and fatigue. His increasingly unstable health prevented him from carrying out more than a small part of his administrative duties in Hengchun's absence. Furthermore, he detested Muslims (which Hengchun did not). He blamed them for his poor health, which he firmly...