Ma Hualong

Ma Hualong (c. 1810 – 2 March 1871) was the fifth shaykh of the Jahriyya, a Naqshbandi Sufi order (menhuan) in northwest China, and one of the main leaders of the Muslim rebellion against the Qing dynasty from 1862 until his surrender and execution in 1871. He succeeded his father and teacher Ma Yide about 1849, ruled the order from its headquarters at Jinjipu in Ningxia, and grew wealthy with it through the caravan trade across Inner Mongolia. Besieged at Jinjipu by Zuo Zongtang's armies, he surrendered in January 1871 hoping to spare his people; a massacre followed, and he was executed with his son Ma Yaobang and over eighty officials on 2 March 1871. ^{1 2}

The Jahriyya had been founded in central Gansu by Ma Mingxin; by the time Ma Hualong succeeded, as the order's fifth leader, its centre had shifted north to Jinjipu, a few kilometres south of today's Wuzhong in Ningxia — in the nineteenth century still part of Gansu province. He bore the Sufi path-name Tabirat Allah and was known as the "Thirteenth Master" (Shisan Taiye), a rank in the order's line of transmission; in his early years he had been an ahong, a mosque teacher. Under him Jinjipu became an important religious and commercial centre, its leaders enriched by the order's camel caravans between Baotou, Huhhot and Beijing. At one point he surrendered and took the name Ma Chaoqing, "one who attends on the Qing", without disbanding his militias. ^{1 2}

From the outbreak of the Muslim rebellion in 1862 Ma Hualong was based at Jinjipu, and Jahriyya members owing him allegiance fought across the region, while the rebel leaders elsewhere in Gansu — Ma Zhan'ao at Hezhou among them — acted essentially independently of him. Qing forces under Zuo Zongtang besieged Jinjipu from 1869; as the outer fortifications fell and starvation began inside the walls, Ma surrendered in January 1871. Once Zuo's troops entered, over a thousand people were killed and the town destroyed. Existing accounts of his death differ: it is likely he was executed on Zuo's orders on 2 March 1871, by slow slicing according to the Chinese article, although some said he was murdered by a traitor within his own ranks. ^{1 2}

Few of his family survived the massacre. Two grandsons, Ma Jincheng and Ma Jinxi, were sentenced to castration at the age of twelve; Ma Jincheng died a eunuch slave at Kaifeng in 1890, while Ma Jinxi was rescued from confinement at Xi'an by the new Jahriyya leader Ma Yuanzhang and hidden with a Hui family in Hangzhou. A later pardon let Ma Jinxi return to Ningxia, and the order split between his followers and Ma Yuanzhang's. According to Jahriyya adherents in Ningxia, Ma Hualong's grave is at Dongta, now a suburb of Wuzhong, where a tomb shrine (gongbei) called Siqiliangzi stands and more than 10,000 people attended a commemoration there in 1985; a rival tradition within the order places his true tomb at Xuanhuagang in Zhangjiachuan County, his successor Ma Yuanzhang's base, and some reconcile the two by saying the body is at Dongta and the head at Zhangjiachuan. ¹

His faith is recorded as sufi, documented. Two independent texts name his personal standing in the order: the English article, resting on Dillon and Lipman, makes him the fifth shaykh of the Jahriyya who succeeded his father Ma Yide — named as both his father and his teacher — and gives his occupation as Sufi shaykh; the Chinese article, an independent tradition, calls him grand jiaozhu of the Jahriyya and records his path-name Tabirat Allah and his rank-name "Thirteenth Master" in the order's transmission. The English article's infobox also gives Sunni, Hanafi and Maturidi values, but those rest on a single encyclopaedia entry cited for them — one infobox, one source family — so no Hanafi segment is recorded for him. ^{1 2 3}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.