Muslim Rebellions

The distraction of the Qing military provided an opportunity for two additional uprisings, one in the south-west and one in the north-west. These ethnically diverse regions sat on the frontier of the empire, with many areas under the mediated administration of native chieftains.

Violence in these areas grew out of a confluence of factors that included poverty, dislocation, and grudges against neighbours and local officials, that were energised, organised and ignited by religion and religious identity. The so-called Panthay Rebellion in Yunnan followed a rise in ethnic conflicts, and was sparked by a dispute between Han and Hui Muslims, growing into a desire to annihilate the region's Hui population. A spiral of mutual recri­minations escalated into a massacre of 8,000 Muslims in 1856 by Han militias and garrison troops, and from there into an anti-Qing movement that captured the city of Kunming before being suppressed by arriving forces under the command of defecting fellow Muslim Ma Rulong (1832-91). The first of the north-west rebellions (known to contemporaries as the Dungan, a corruption of the Chinese dong Gan, meaning Eastern Gansu) developed in the 1860s when local militias that formed in the wake of the Taiping Rebellion, along with Hui contingents in the Qing military, began turning on each other in waves of reprisals.

Like the Taiping Rebellion, the Muslim rebellions of the nineteenth century are striking for their sheer brutality. The rise and suppression of the smaller Panthay Rebellion resulted in a million killed, while ten years of warfare in the north-west may have been as deadly as the Taiping Rebellion itself. Equally striking was the scale of violence against civilians, including the recriminatory slaughter of entire villages and towns. The violence itself did not always follow simple ethnic lines. Both the rebel and the suppressing armies were ethnically mixed, and the Hui themselves were internally very diverse, representing different customs, sects of Islam and lineages. Islam itself played a greater role in the north, where Muslims constituted a larger proportion of the population, and kept closer ties to currents and allies in Central Asia, but that role changed over time. The northern rebellion did come to view itself as a ‘holy war', but in addition to violence between Han and Hui, much blood was shed by Muslims who were divided by tribal or ethnic loyalties, or by such ‘ritual minutiae' as beard length or pronunciation of the vocalisation of Sufi devotions. Nevertheless, the largest-scale violence did eventually take the form of what would now be called ethnic cleansing. The slaughter of Muslims that followed the capture of the Panthay capital of Dali left the roads ‘ankle deep in blood'. From the dead, soldiers cut more than 10,000 pairs of ears - enough to fill twenty-four large baskets. The rebellions of the north-west were started by rumours of Qing plans to massacre Muslims. The shifting waves of violence took as their goal first the eradication of Han Chinese, followed by a suppression that sought through exile or murder to remove the Hui from entire regions.^[73]