The Unlikely Audiences of a Muslim King’s Shrine in China

In 1417, a Muslim King of Sulu (today part of the Philippines) died unexpectedly during a diplomatic visit to Ming China (1368-1644). In keeping with Islamic requirements, the Chinese emperor arranged a quick burial and ordered a mausoleum constructed to mark the king’s resting place. The king’s descendants who stayed to maintain the site acculturated into the local Hui (“Chinese Muslim”) community, which survives to the present. The shrine itself was “rediscovered” in the 1970s by the Chinese and Philippine states as the pre-eminent symbol of their “600 years of diplomatic relations.” This paper investigates the shrine’s backstory, which involves a surprising history of community resilience. Pushing against contemporary nationalist narratives, the talk shows that the shrine never was representative of a continuous Sino-Philippine tributary relationship. More significant were the communities within China who found protection in the transnational shrine’s existence.
Tristan G. Brown is Assistant Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is a social and cultural historian of late imperial and modern China. His research focuses on the ways in which law, science, environment, and religion interacted in China from the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries. His first book draws on Qing judicial archives and cartographic materials to investigate the uses of cosmology in imperial Chinese law. He is also preparing a second project that employs Chinese, Arabic, and Manchu sources to reveal how Islam was practiced as a local religion in late imperial China.