“They Serve Heaven Alone”: The Earliest Chinese Eyewitness Account of Muslims

In 751 CE, two empires collided on the banks of the Talas River, in what is today the borderlands of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. On one side stood the armies of the Tang dynasty, commanded by the Korean-born general Gao Xianzhi. On the other stood the forces of the Abbasid Caliphate under Ziyad ibn Salih. When the Karluk Turks fighting in the Tang ranks switched sides mid-battle, the Chinese suffered a crushing defeat. Thousands were killed. Thousands more were taken captive and marched westward into the lands of Islam.

Among those prisoners was a man named Du Huan (杜環).

He would not see China again for eleven years.

A Prisoner Who Became a Witness

Du Huan was not a soldier of obscure origins. He was a man of letters from Chang’an – the cosmopolitan Tang capital, and a relative of Du You (杜佑, 735–812 CE), one of the most distinguished scholar-officials of the age, who would go on to compile the Tongdian (通典), a monumental two-hundred-volume encyclopaedia of Chinese institutions completed in 801 CE.

Carried westward through Central Asia and into the heart of the Abbasid Caliphate, Du Huan passed through Samarkand, Merv, and eventually into Iraq – spending the bulk of his captivity in the lands governed from the newly founded city of Baghdad, under the reign of the Caliph al-Manṣūr (r. 136–158 AH / 754–775 CE), the very ruler who had consolidated Abbasid power and was then constructing one of the greatest cities in the medieval world.

In 762 CE, Du Huan boarded a merchant ship at a port in the Persian Gulf and sailed home by sea, arriving in Guangzhou. He was among the first Chinese subjects ever to have reached the interior of the Arab world and returned to describe it.

Shortly after his return, he wrote down what he had seen. He called his account the Jingxingji (經行記) – the Record of Travels.

What He Wrote About the Muslims

The passage most directly concerned with Islamic belief and practice reads as follows, in the translation of Wan Lei (The First Chinese Travel Record on the Arab World, King Faisal Centre for Research and Islamic Studies, 2016, p. 18):

“The Dashi people have a method to distinguish different degrees of kinship, but this has degenerated and they no longer observe it. They do not eat the meat of pigs, dogs, donkeys, or horses. They do not revere either the king of their country or their parents. They do not believe in the supernatural. They only sacrifice to Heaven and to no other. To kill [animals] is considered an act of merit. Every year, they fast for one month. During the day they do not eat; they begin eating and drinking only after nightfall. The sound of a flute and the beating of drums never cease. Their system of law is most prevalent among all the barbarian peoples.”

Dashi (大食) was the standard Tang-dynasty Chinese term for the Arabs and the Arab-Islamic polity, derived from the Persian Tāzī – itself the Iranian designation for Arabs. When Du Huan writes of the Dashi, he means the Muslims of the Abbasid Caliphate.

Reference

Wan Lei, The First Chinese Travel Record on the Arab World: Commercial and Diplomatic Communications during the Islamic Golden Age (Riyadh: King Faisal Centre for Research and Islamic Studies, 2016), p. 18. Translated from Du Huan 杜環, Jingxingji 經行記 (c. 762 CE), as preserved in Du You 杜佑, Tongdian 通典, juan 192 (completed 801 CE).