Blinkered Visions: Islamic Identity, Hui Ethnicity, and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwest China, 1856—1873

On 19 may 1856, qing officials in kunming, the capital of the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan, systematically carried out a three-day massacre of the city's Hui (Muslim Yunnanese). Han townspeople, the local militia, and imperial officials methodically slaughtered between four and seven thousand Yunnan Hui—men, women, and children—burned the city's mosques to the ground, and posted orders to exterminate the Hui in every prefecture, department, and district in Yunnan (QPHF 1968, 6:20a, 8:4a; Gui 1953, 73). This massacre and the widespread attacks that followed signaled the beginning of the eighteen-year Hui-led Panthay Rebellion (1856–73).