Guotong Li

Although recent scholarship on Chinese Muslims has begun to shed light on this long-ignored subject, little is known about the lives of Chinese Muslims on the southeast coast between the end of the Mongol dynasty and modern times. This project focuses on Muslim merchants' local community life in the transnational port of Quanzhou in the global context when they adapted to becoming Chinese in the Ming. It investigates Quanzhou's connections to the broader world of global commercial and religious networks and to use this as an analytical window into local community life. It will challenge the generalizations about the post-Mongol Sinification by examining Chinese elites' interactions with their Muslim neighbors, and Muslim marriage networks and their lineage practices in late imperial times.