 Thanks so much, Nathan for introducing me and thank you for this invitation. The title of my talk, The Unlikely Audiences of a Muslim King's Shrine in China, I broke today's lecture down into two major questions. The first is at the most broadest level, right? How did people in late Imperial China conceive of Islam and engage with Muslims? Relatedly, how did Muslims present their history to broader Chinese audiences? I think this is like the core question that I've been really interested in for many years. But specifically, in sort of the case study that I'll be dealing with today, is how does the case of the East King of Sulu, Paduka Pahala, who died during a diplomatic mission to China in 1417, help us answer those questions? So we'll have the broad sort of big picture question and then the kind of narrow question. Okay, and then this is what I'll do. I'll just get right into it. All right, so I'm gonna start, I'll give you a little bit on the state of the field of Islam in China, sort of where this intervention, I situated, and then I'll tell you the story of the King of Sulu and the community in Shandong province for the rest of the talk, okay? So let's just start with some really big picture stuff. Islam in China, Muslims in China, how many Muslims live in China? The really accurate answer to that question is we don't know because religious groups aren't counted. It's like asking how many Christians are in China? How many Catholics are in China? It's not something that's on a census. It's not something that you can count. What we can count is ethnic groups that are officially recognized by the state that are majority or tend to be Muslim, okay? Out of the 55 recognized people, minority groups in China, 10 of them are majority Muslim, okay? So I've listed them up here, you get a sense. The two biggest ones, which are probably the ones that are most familiar to you are the Uyghurs, okay, in Xinjiang and then the Hui. They're roughly commensurate populations. These are the numbers from the 2000 census. I wanna say I think the numbers of Hui are now over 12 million, maybe close to 15 million with Uyghur similar growth over that time. Now, one thing that I think you should know is you say what is the Hui? What makes them unique on that list is that the Hui don't have a particular language that's unique to their group or history. They don't have a particular region that's unique to their group or history. Basically, these are Muslims, Muslim peoples who over the course of the last thousand years give or take in China, move to China as it acculturated into various different parts of China. And today, largely speak by Putonghua, Mandarin. One thing that makes the Hui unique on that whole list of Muslims that I just showed you is, is that technically they live in every province of China today, right? I think it's one of the only groups that that applies to. And the very first censuses in PRC, between Muslims, Chinese Muslims, basically lived across the country. Now today, I'm mainly gonna be focusing on this province just south of Beijing, Shandong, this peninsula over here. And I'm gonna focus on Dojo. Okay, but I'll get into that a little bit later. Dojo is kind of funny because it's Chinese, Texas, literally. But so we'll talk more about that in just a bit, okay? There's Shandong province. Okay, the Hui in their historical records in China, which are long and pretty rich, are an amazing control population. For understanding what are the contours, for instance, of Confucian practice, what could you accept, what could you reject? What did you have to do? What did you not have to do? So one thing that really stood out to me in the sources when I first approached this question was that I had heard, because I had lived in China for some time, that Muslims, Hui Muslims, of course, don't eat pork. It's like this thing. There are special cafeterias at all the universities that are Qingzhen, that are Halal. They don't eat pork. In three 20th century sources, pork really didn't factor that much at all. And I think there was a very obvious reason for this, is that most people in China were vegetarian, basically. Maybe once or twice a year, the average family might consume pork or something like that. Most oils in the late imperial period were vegetable oils. So what really stood out about Chinese Muslims was not what they didn't eat. Again, many people did not consume meat products. And in fact, it's what they did is that they ate beef. They slaughtered cows and they ate beef. And that's significant because there was many legal prohibitions on the slaughter of cattle because of their importance for agriculture. So this is a really interesting Chinese dynasty source looking at the Lujo Garrison commander, Mayang. He's a Muslim. It just says he's a Hui Hui. His family's work is in butchering cattle and he has a liking for beef. It's a non-Muslim writer. It's a local Chinese gazetteer. But that's the detail they capture. Okay, that's what is surprising or interesting to the writer there. Another example that you might not think of if you mainly are working on modern sources is the question of rainmaking. It doesn't like ring a bell when you think of Islam or Islamic history. In fact, actually in the Middle East, there were many rainmakers. Rainmaking is quite known across Islamic cultures. In China, there's no exception to this. Many Muslims communities became noted by their ability to make it rain. Basically by performing prayers or certain rituals. And again, you can see here, this is a Chinese gazetteer, local gazetteer, talking about this particular place in this ahong, this Muslim religious figure who's quite talented at rainmaking. That's a non-Muslim source. Here's a Islamic text from the 19th century written in Chinese, in Arabic, that's for rainmaking, okay? Rainmaking prayers and rituals. So this is all stuff that, again, if you're mainly going as an anthropologist out to the field, it wouldn't hit you because rainmaking is not like mainstream in China today. Okay, but in the late imperial period, these are things that definitely matter. Let me say something about the state of the field as it exists today in historiography. So many of you might have heard of these sort of very big Muslim rebellions of the 19th century. And this really goes back to Marshall Broomhall's Islam in China. I think the full title of that, if I'm not mistaken, is Islam in China a neglected problem? It's quite a tated title, because the book was written in about 1910. But if you look, Broomhall was connected with missionaries, many, many Western missionaries in the late 19th, early 20th century, got interested in Muslim populations of China because of the Christianity and the ties, Muslims in China knew some of the key players like Jesus and such. So he writes really one of the first books devoted to the history. And right, it's not surprising if you look at this sort of timeline here that Broomhall provides, that rebellions factor very, very big in his history. It's not surprising because they had just occurred. Okay, literally, Gonsu was still in ruins, major parts of Qinghai, parts of Yunnan province. These all had seen major ethnic and religious unrest during the 19th century. So then we've had a series of very, very good books by very good historians, sort of lay this out, flesh this out. But again, mainly talking about the rebellions of the 19th century, right? So Atwell's very good book on Yunnan, Jonathan, Litman, Holy War in China, all really on these conflicts. So this is kind of like, if you were to go into a library and say, Islam in China and look up what books are available, you'd see a lot of books about these rebellions. Okay, then there's another kind of strand, okay? And this strand has really come into being in probably the last 20 years. And this is a focus on the Han Kitab literature. In a way, this body of scholarship is kind of a response. Implicitly, it's kind of a response to the rebellion folks. And what it is, is really, this is the quote unquote, Confucian Islam, the Huiru movement, okay? These are basically, by the 17th century, you have a sinophone Islamic elite emerging in China. And they're gonna write some really, really interesting texts that basically are projected or are directed at a few audiences. For instance, Leo Zhu, one of the great sort of scholars of the 17th, 18th century, is early 18th century, writes the norms and rights of Islam in 1710. This is something that I think he intends for Muslim readers and non-Muslim readers. Ma Zhu, another great, he's a, I believe, Jew-ren degree holder from Yunnan province in the late 17th century, writes the guide for Islam. And there were even some texts published that were not directed to Muslim audiences, that were directed towards non-Muslim Chinese to try to explain Islam, right? So Jing Tian Zhu's right there, Qin Zhen Shui, the explaining doubts about Islam, okay? Now this is all very well and good. Much of the scholarship, I'd say, you know, almost all of it, right? About these texts in particular are intriguing, are important, have made major contributions. But if you look at the sort of state of the field, you can't help but feel that on one side, you got these like really, really weighty rebellions of the 19th century, and then you have this really sort of like intellectual movement among the elite of the Han Qitans. And I think you can point out that, you know, while it's understandable that the state of the field is developed in this way, both of these things are quite exceptional, right? Muslims have been in China for very, very long time, and it just so happens that the 19th century, it happened to see a lot of rebellions when there were a lot of rebellions across all of China. Okay, it's not particularly, you know, just Muslim rebellions happening at that time. Likewise, the Han Qitab literature is very important. It's interesting when and where it developed, but at the same time, it's not ethnographic. It's not giving you insight into how Muslims were actually practicing their religion. It was idealistic or it was apologetic, okay? So, you know, in other words, I think when we take a look at this, either they're anti-state rebels or they're elite Confucian scholars. And I think that it's kind of time to break that deadlock. And there's a way that I think we can do that and we can do that by looking to the history of Christianity, specifically Catholicism in China with some really, really great books by Henrietta Harrison, Eugenio Menagon, that are looking at Catholicism as a local religion in China, right? Enough of the big picture stuff with the Jesuits. What was really going on in the villages? And I think that this is really where the field of Islam in China is right now, right? We're ready for this kind of local term and really, you know, flesh out what, how do people understand this? How do Muslims practice their religion every day? So let me just bring you now into the sort of second part of the talk where I talk about this case study, okay? I'm gonna get you this case study. It's gonna happen in the early Ming dynasty, but to get to the early Ming, I need to give you just a little bit of background, okay? Cause I know I didn't wanna overwhelm you with information, but hopefully this will be helpful. If you were to pick up a source written by a Muslim in China from prior to the 20th century, chances are his genealogy or the mosque inscription will claim that the community originates in the Tang dynasty. Sometimes you even get people who claim the Sui dynasty, which is just totally incredible considering the life of the Prophet Muhammad and when he died, it would be that Islam got to China with the speed of light. But, you know, Tang dynasty, there's like a kernel of truth in this. There certainly were Muslims living in the Tang dynasty as there were many, many people living in the Tang dynasty. You then of course have the Song, there are some mosques and I believe there might even be a few inscriptions in Arabic that are thought to date from the Song in Southern China. But the reality is that most, or let's say really, the biggest portion of this population that will be known as the Hui entered China during the Mongol Empire, okay? Most of these communities realistically, historically date to the Mongol Empire. As I'll show you briefly, there are reasons why nobody where people would not wanna play up that fact, right? Considering sort of like where the Mongols were kind of controversial, but many of them date from this era, the Muslim population of China city swells during the Mongol era where Muslims were brought in as tax collectors, as soldiers and sort of all different roles under the Mongols. So this brings us now until the Ming, this really, really fascinating dynasty. Here you have Zhu Yanjiang, the first emperor of the Ming dynasty overthrowing the Mongols, kicking the Mongols out and then finding themselves with a very large Muslim population living in their borders, okay? Zhu Yanjiang is, we don't exactly know what this guy believed. I know Zhiba and Dor Benit wrote a really wonderful article about how Muslims, some Muslims in China claim that he was a Muslim. Some Muslims in China claim that some of his descendants are Muslims. There's a whole sort of folklore behind that. But, you know, he writes, we do know he writes a sort of an elegy to an elegy to the Prophet Muhammad. He seems to really kind of make peace with this community. They're gonna be part of our fabric. And so this creates a really interesting moment in the early Ming dynasty where the Mongols are kind of gone but these Mongol legacies are very much, very much present. And one way that you can see that is in the foreign relations of the dynasty. What we have is there was a whole sort of office of foreign affairs that was staffed by Muslims set up in the early Ming. We even have a surviving dictionary of Persian and Chinese dating from around this time, early Ming dynasty. And I'll just say there's so many cool stuff. I put that up there for Nathan, the Sifan, the Tibet in Persian, that's there. Some really interesting also stuff. I draw your attention to Yunnan and Shanxi and draw your attention to the fact that these at that time have Persian names. That's how big the Muslim communities were there. That's like how sort of prominent this was what the imperial state actually knew. These are part of the empire. It's not like they're foreign places, okay? But they're in this dictionary with those other groups. I'll just say also pretty interesting here. All these kind of fun words that they translate in that dictionary. These are the dates of the Ming in total. These are the dates of the early Ming, this reign of the first emperor and then his son, the Yola emperor, the second emperor. Okay, this Muslim community is still there in the Ming and the early Ming after the Mongols had left. They're Muslims who are staffing in the diplomatic offices of the imperial government. A number of these Muslims are Persian speakers, meaning like, you know, they're gonna be bilingual. Some of them might also know Arabic and all of that. So they're gonna play really important roles in Ming statecraft. I have here, for instance, the Zhenghe voyages. I know many of you probably know about Zhenghe. This is the big sort of voyages that occur during the Yola emperor, the second emperor of the Ming dynasty in the voyages between 1405 and 1433. And Zhenghe was Muslim. Okay, we have that on good authority during one of his voyages. He goes to Mecca, makes Hajj pilgrimage. And it's not surprising that the Muslims played these roles in the early Ming because they knew languages, they had geographic knowledge, they were playing important roles. So I'd point out many Muslims hold high positions of power. They're staffing on the board of astronomy, translation bureau, the military. And another interesting point that I just wanna draw your attention to, and it's something that is sometimes missed by historians. The way that people refer to these communities differs between the Ming and the Qing dynasties. In the Ming, most of the times that you see these Muslim communities referenced, even those living in China, they're hui hui. By the Qing dynasty, by around the 17th century, the term hui ming has come into use. And there is a subtle political difference there with Ming referring to imperial subjects, okay? So in other words, hui hui can refer to a foreign Muslim or a Muslim who lives in China during the Ming dynasty. That's not a clear distinction made in the sources. On the other hand, in the Qing dynasty, the last dynasty, that distinction is clear. There are Muslims from abroad and there are Muslims from within the empire who are imperial subjects. I flag that to you, we might talk about it later. So just realize to a degree that's often overlooked, the political and legal status of Muslims in the Ming was not equivalent to that of the Qing. This is something that we really have to talk about because the unique geopolitical circumstances of the Ming dynasty, really the history of Muslims, the history of Islam during that dynasty needs to be taken on its own terms. Now, right during this whole history with Zhengbo, right in the middle of that, there's other stuff going on with the early Ming state. And this is where this story comes in. Here it is, I'll just give you this story in brief. In 1417, Paducah Pahala, the Eastern King of Sulu, dies while on a tribute mission to Ming China. So in other words, he's coming from Sulu. I'll have a map show you where that is. It's now part of the Philippines. He goes to Beijing, which is basically the newly relocated capital of the Yongle Emperor. Remember, he moves from Nanjing to Beijing. And then he's on his way back home and he tragically dies in the middle of Shandong Okay, not a good scene. Due to Islamic burial requirements, he needs to be buried quite quickly. And the emperor gives him permission for an imperial burial site at the rank of equivalent of a Ming prince. So just realize there's the emperor and then he's got all these sons and they have royal burial tombs under the title Wang. This is given to this Sulu king. He's given one of these official burial sites. Some of the king's family stay behind in Dojo. That's Chinese Texas, right? In Shandong province, right in North China. I have a map of the next slide. And by the end of the dynasty, we know by the end of the Ming dynasty, his descendants have assimilated into the local Hui community. Okay, so a Hui Muslim community is gonna basically be growing around this shrine. Okay, finally, here's my map. You can see where Shandong province is there. And you can see Dojo there. It's along the Grand Canal. The Sulu Sultanate, okay, has a very, very long and fascinating history. The Eastern King of Sulu lived at sort of the beginning of the Sultanate. The Sultanate existed for hundreds of years, but was eventually annexed by the Spanish and the Philippines. Okay, that's why Sulu today is part of the Philippines. The Muslim majority part of the Philippines today. You can see where it is, right? And they came up kind of from Southeast Asia. This is a photo of the outside of the Mausoleum. This is Dojo government seat, the Grand Canal. And I give this to you just to show you how central this shrine really was in the administrative seat of Dojo. It's right there. So it's like, this is not like, oh, out of the boondocks, you gotta take like a 20 minute drive to get to it. It's like right there. And then this is an imperial mission mosque for the descendants of the king. And that's put up when we think, I believe in the 16th century, also Ming dynasty. So there's the shrine. There's a mosque right next to it. And you can see his descendants are sort of integrating into the Hui community. If you do pay attention to China, Filipino news, you will hear about this shrine. This shrine has had a really, really big publicity starting in the 1980s, basically. Starting from the time of the establishment of PRC, Philippine relations, the king of Sulu's mausoleum in Shandong province has come to kind of represent 600 years of diplomatic relations between the two countries. And so there's sort of like diplomatic envoys have been like sent to Dojo to go check up the shrine. There's been a movie that's been made about the king. It's a Chinese-Philippine cooperative film made in the 1980s, Harah Sahari, Lahisa Lahi. Okay, if you wanna go see that, I think it's on YouTube. It's quite interesting. The king is like visiting Yongle. They have Yongle there. It's all very, very dramatic. There's also been a documentary just a couple of years ago on this. If you were to like pay attention to this kind of contemporary moment, you would think that, well, maybe there were 600 years of continuous relations between China and the Philippines. But the truth of the matter is, aside from the fact that Sulu really wasn't part of the Philippines until the modern era, it really isn't the case. What happens after the king of Sulu dies in 1417? Not much. Okay, not much. There are no more diplomatic missions from Sulu to the Ming over the 1500s or 1600s. Into the 1700s, let me see, I have it on here. Yep, there are no more tribute missions. In the 18th century, the 1700s, representatives from Sulu returned to Beijing to ask the then Qing emperor for help resisting Spanish colonial encroachment. And that help is denied. Qianlong basically is aware of what's going on with the sort of Sulu's under threat, but turns it down, but they do repair the shrine in Dujia. They do, money is offered. So I just want to let you know, during the 18th century, official diplomatic relations sort of restarts for a few decades. And you get this. And I just threw this out of the archive this morning. This is from Taiwan, Qianlong reign, official letter from the Sulu Sultan to the Qianlong emperor. And these sources, I have to say, are really, really exciting because very few of them have actually been used in historical research. So I think that we're gonna be able to really tell you some new things about this stuff before long. In terms of an official history, a diplomatic history, there's not all that much here, but yet what's really interesting about this shrine, why am I telling it to you today? Why are we even talking about it? It's because it did matter. Who cared about this shrine? Who wanted it to be there? First, I think the Muslims of Qianlong province, right? Certainly the Muslims of Dujia and also the Muslims of the province, they wanted it to be there. It's not just Muslims who come to appreciate the King of Sulu's burial shrine. Also, some really famous Chinese literati find reasons to appreciate this site. And then Chinese merchants along the southeastern coast, I probably won't have that much time to talk about this group today, but I'll mainly focus on the Muslims and they'll give you a little bit about the literati, okay? Because I think they sort of reinforce each other those points. Right around the time that we see the emergence of that sinophone, quote unquote, Confucian literature, the political tides start to change in China generally and for Muslims living in China. This is of course the era of the Ming Qing transition. And during the era of the Ming Qing transition, you got rise and tensions. And all of a sudden you get literati, we'll encounter one of them not too long from now who start to say, I don't trust these Muslims. There's something fishy about this community. They don't practice our rights, our rituals. They have a religion that's sort of inscrutable to us. Actually, Shandong becomes a site of kind of officials who call for even Islam to be banned in the early 1700s. There's definitely some officials who are not into this community. Around this time, you get the publication of Muslim genealogies, okay? These are family genealogies that any Chinese family might compose. Some might even print if they're really big families. And this is one, I believe it's from Dojo. It's from Shandong for sure, the Zhao family. And they're really, really fascinating because of course these genealogies are a way for families to tell their history. For Muslim families to say, where did we come from? How did we get to China? Who are we related to? You can see this one is really fascinating because it goes back to the first ancestor of Muhammad. You'll find actually that many, many Muslims in China claim the scent from the Prophet Muhammad. Probably if that's not historically accurate, but it's pervasive in the genealogical literature. You'll also see these genealogies, as I previously mentioned, emphasize not a Mongol-error arrival. If you can avoid that, it'd be probably best to avoid it. And instead, talk about the Tong, how we arrived in the Tong dynasty. The reason I bring this up to you is because as I started to read these genealogies, I started to realize how important the theme of tribute was. It's so important that the great Muslim scholar of the late 17th, early 18th century, Neil, I mentioned him before, he's one of the Islamic Confucian guys, really devotes a whole section of his biography of the Prophet Muhammad to this topic. This book, the Tangfeng Zhuxiang Shilu, that sort of veritable records of the great sage of the West, of Muhammad basically, this is the first, I believe, Chinese language biography of Muhammad. Oftentimes, when you see this mentioned in scholarship, that's all that people say, oh, it's about Muhammad and where he was born and Mecca Medina, all of that. But there's a whole section that he devotes to the kind of Muslim countries that have tributary relations with China, including, for instance, Brunei. Now, it will be really interesting for you to know that he goes in, this is Buonigua, and Liu Jie talks about how in the early Ming dynasty, Brunei also sent ambassadors to China. And just like the Sulu Wang, believe it or not, if I'm not mistaken, one of them passed away as well and was buried in Nanjing. The Sulu King is not the only foreign king who died on Chinese soil during a tribute mission. There were at least two Muslim kings, both of them were buried. Sulu is the only one that really survived into the early 20th century. But the point is, I raise this to your attention because why is Liu Jie, this great Islamic scholar of early modern China, making such a big deal out of this? Because he wants to make the point, beyond the life of the Prophet Muhammad, there's a next chapter, there's a next chapter in the history of Islam. Islam spread to the countries around China, and then those countries around China have diplomatic relations with China, and they came to China, and that's where we came from. So we can be here. Our ancestors came with good intention, with good reason. And so the key points for now that I'd like you to think about is, Liu Jie was trying to unite Islamic historical sources with Chinese imperial documents of tribute missions to explain why Muslims lived in China and practiced their minority faith. The early Ming tribute missions or even earlier time era ones were ubiquitously cited in Muslim writings of the late empire, Ming Qing transition in the Qing dynasty. So the Sulu King Shrine, one thing that makes it such a powerful site, it makes it worth paying attention to for this community is it's living evidence of the idea that Muslims had arrived in China bringing tribute to the emperor. It's not just something that we say. It's not just something that appears in a few history books. There it is. There's the evidence. That's where we came from. We can be here, right? And I think we should not underestimate how important such a message is, okay, for a community like this. Now I mentioned that there were some literati who were not Muslim who had something to say about the shrine. Now, Gu Yanwu is one of the great, probably the great philologist scholar official, like the name, the big name that everybody knows of the 17th century, right? Ming Qing transition. He's born in the Ming dynasty and he's famous because he remains loyal to the Ming dynasty throughout his life. He lives through the Manchu conquest, but he never serves the Manchus. He kind of refuses. And of course he doesn't say that directly. He does it in sort of the way that literati is supposed to do it. One way that he does it is that he goes on like this trip around China. And he wants to visit all these great sites associated with Ming rule. He is attracted to Dojo and he's attracted to the Sultan's tomb. Now, just a quick note about Gu Yanwu. He, in this very writings, he is one of the people of the late imperial era who starts to say, I don't particularly care for these Muslim peoples. I don't trust them. They practice religion that's absolutely foreign to our ways of life. He's got very, very harsh things to say about Muslims, but he loves this shrine. And he totally ignores the mosque that's right next to it. He totally seems to totally ignore the stewards of the shrine. Instead, what does he say? He says, if I may, from a distance I can see the imperial seal and the autographs, the famous signatures on this great monument and recall that the splendor and favor of the previous dynasty, the Ming, has now dimmed. But the people of our country still sweep and attend the tomb and many literati stop here to leave words of praise. So Gu Yanwu is gonna be like one of the first big names among the literati to visit this shrine, but he won't be the last. In fact, over the coming decades and centuries, many, many, many, many, many people visit this shrine and write about it in part because it's not because they're Muslim necessarily, it because Gu Yanwu had written about it. He had visited it. And so I wanna go and I wanna add my own poem to it. That's what shows that everybody that I mean business, okay? So just to kind of tell you, just to give you a little sense here, this is like all of the primary sources that I've collected that mention the king of Sulu in his burial shrine. And I think I've collected over about 30, but there are probably more that exist. And you'll see that the earliest sources, the Ming sources, tend to be empire-wide imperial sources. But by the time you get to the Qing sources, you get these local sources. You get really local stuff, even like Taiwan's Gazetteer. Taiwan is not close to Shandong province, but Taiwan's Gazetteer mentions the king of Sulu, mentions this whole story. Why? Because of course people in Taiwan were most likely trading with Sulu and they wanted to be able to sort of justify that in their writings, right? So there's a whole audience for this mausoleum and for the story among many, many people. So now let me just give you this key points to the second section of the talk. The king of Sulu shrine became important not because of a continuous diplomatic relationship between China and Sulu, but rather because there wasn't one. That's the irony of this whole history, right? There wasn't a continuous relationship between the two, but that's in a way why the shrine could take on a larger than life significance for many people. Most literati, I don't think we're even aware of the Islamic connections to the site. They don't mention it at least. Even people who spoke out against Islam or Muslims found reasons to associate themselves with the site. This is that kind of real complexity, that granular complexity that I think we really need to get into if we wanna understand the position of Muslims and Islam in the late imperial period. I think this final point is something I'd like to say a little bit more about. So keep these key points in mind. And now, if I may, I'd like to just kind of get you into my concluding remarks. I started with two questions. One really broad question about how did Muslims tell their stories? How did people in China understand Islam and Muslims in the late empire? And then a more specific question about the King of Sulu. So, of course, I am of the opinion that Islam in China can't be defined by the rebel scholar binary that I mentioned in historiography earlier. And we need to focus on how spaces of Islamic practice and community were negotiated locally. There are and will be, I think, a lot of surprises when we do that. It'll be really rewarding. And this is, I hope, a case study that gives you a little insight into what that can look like. There's a source paradox that as historians of Chinese history, we need to deal with. Which is that, you know, one thing that I think historians have grappled with is you go into the official histories. You go into the veritable records. And when is Islam mentioned? When it's a problem? You know what I'm saying? It's not mentioned when it's not a problem, right? You see what I mean? So in other words, the sources in a sense may be lying to us. Because if we look for them and we look for them by these key words, we only hone in on those moments where it's like an official thought they had to say, oh, there's an issue with the Muslim community here. There's an issue with Islam. But most of the time, that absence of such records does not imply that there was not communication or engagement going on. So this is a source issue that I have to deal with. I think other historians have to deal with, but it's important we deal with it to really get into the bottom line of this history. I think also, although I didn't say so much about this, I'd like you to kind of keep this in the back of your mind. Is that the Ming dynasty and the Qing dynasty as historians of China, we often lump them together and say the late imperial era. We often, if we make a distinction between them, we often think the Ming is some Han dynasty, right? The Han Chinese dynasty and the Manchus were sophisticated cosmopolitans. But if we look at the history of Islam in China and we look at the roles that Muslim played in Chinese society and how their status in Chinese society changed across the centuries, I don't think that actually the Ming comes out looking that bad, quite the contrary, quite the contrary. So there's something that I think to really revise here about the history of the Ming in particular and its relationship to Islam. And then I think finally, this is kind of the point that I think is the core point of this Sulu, King of Sulu case study, which is that a lot of people in Chinese society, whether they were Muslims, whether they were famous literati, they were invested in government records, imperial institutions like the tribute system and official histories. Those things offered protection to people in Chinese society. We need to take them seriously. What I mean by that is that it's all well fine to say Fairbank was wrong. I understand why people say that. There are many legitimate critiques to make a Fairbank's thesis. And it's also, I think at this point, everybody would agree that this idea of China as the center of the world and that there was this tribute system, nobody really buys that anymore. But there's a nuance that we really need to make here, which is to say a lot of people in China wanted there to be a tribute system. Muslims in China wanted there to be a tribute system. It's not the state imposing it on the people. It's there's a lot of pressure from bottom up. So in order to, again, approach that history with this in mind, I think we'll see the history of Islam in China and the history of late imperial China in a different way. So thank you so much. I really appreciate it.