The Panthay Rebellion: Islam, Ethnicity and the Dali Sultanate in Southwest China, 1856–1873
David G. Atwill
Verso Books: 2023
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When thinking of ethnic conflict in China today, Yunnan may not be the first place that comes to mind. But the Panthay uprising in 1856, after a rampage that left many dead in Kunming, ought to be a textbook case of how a religious minority can be othered and ethnic tension mishandled. Therein lies the significance of this new edition of David G. Atwill’s The Panthay Rebellion: Islam, Ethnicity and the Dali Sultanate in Southwest China, 1856–1873, which was first published under a different title in 2005, a decade before China pushed for “the Sinicisation of religion”.

Sino-centric historical narratives have generally been preoccupied with China’s vulnerabilities when dealing with the West in the nineteenth century, and the unrest in Yunnan was too easily brushed aside as a distraction for the Qing government. The conflict also tends to be simplistically characterised as a Hui rebellion, with little consideration for the socioeconomic context. But as the Pakistani-British writer Tariq Ali points out in his 2022 foreword for this new edition, the Panthay Rebellion, “bracketed as a Muslim revolt and largely ignored, both inside and outside China”, was much more complicated. (The existence of a Muslim sultanate in Yunnan has incidentally served as inspiration for Ali’s novel Night of the Golden Butterfly. In addition to characters nicknamed Plato and Confucius, representing a diversity in culture and ideology, the novel imagines a Yunnanese Punjabi tracing her Chinese roots to the beautiful city of Dali, where rebel leader Du Wenxiu once ruled as Sultan Suleiman.)

• Tags: China, David G. Atwill, Issue 34, Wong Chee Meng