Ispah rebellion

From the 13th century to the early 14th century in the Yuan dynasty, overseas trade was extremely prosperous in Fujian. As the starting point of the Maritime Silk Road, Quanzhou was China's, possibly the world's, largest port.[2][3] It was also the largest city in Fujian, with a population exceeding that of Fuzhou, Fujian's administrative center.[4] The Arabs called it "Tiger's claw", which has been used by merchants in Europe and elsewhere. At the time, Quanzhou's population exceeded 2 million, with a wall as long as 30 miles. Jinjiang's river and its harbor, with highly developed trade,had 10,000 ships docked.[4][5] Quanzhou exported luxuries such as silk, ceramics, copper, and iron, as well as satin, while imports include pearls, ivory, rhino horns, frankincense, etc. The most important imports were spices and herbs.

Quanzhou had many foreign residents, such as Arabs, Persians, Europeans, Jews, Indians etc. There were around 100 different languages being used. The Quanzhou people labeled these foreigners as Fan ("蕃" or "番"). Due to the massive number of foreigners coming in, authorities didn't want foreigners to stay and interfere with the locals' lifestyles in the beginning. Quanzhou had large ethnic enclaves ("蕃坊", "蕃人巷"), with foreigners and natives often intermarrying and giving birth to mixed children (often labeled Half Southern Fan or "半南蕃").[6] Although foreigners and natives had some cultural intermingling, the foreigners still practiced and spread their own religions, such as Islam, Christianity, Manichaeism, Hinduism, etc. This religious and ethnic diversity made management much harder.[7]

There are multiple theories about the origin of the word "Ispah". Some think that "Ispah" originated from the Persian word "سپاه"(sepâh), which means militia, cavalry, or some derived version. It could also be the Persian equivalent of "mercenaries" or borrowed from the name of a city, Isfahan, given that most of the people came from that city. Others believe that Ispah is used for designating troops, instead of as an actual name.

In the early Yuan dynasty, the Mongols gave the Islamic Sunni Semu Pu Shougeng (蒲寿庚) family public support, since they helped rebel against the Song dynasty and establish the Yuan dynasty. As a result, this family became stronger and had more influence over politics and the economy. The Sunni Muslims in Quanzhou became more dominant in Quanzhou and excluded the Shiites, causing growing resentment among them. In 1282 (the 19th year of the Yuan dynasty), the Yuan dynasty stationed 3000 Shiite forces in Quanzhou, but even then there were still too few Shiites in Quanzhou.[8] Near the end of the Yuan Dynasty, the government struggled to deal with various armed rebellions. The Quanzhou Shiite Persians organized the Ispah army to defend their ethnic group, which already had a large Persian population with growing strength. In March 1357, Sayf ad-Din and Amir ad-Din, the commanders of the Ispah army, seized the opportunity to control Quanzhou,[9] and suppressed the formerly dominant Sunni. The Ispah army became one of the strongest forces in Fujian.

Afterwards Yuan forced slaughtered large numbers of Arab and Persian merchants which in turn led to the massacre of all other foreigners owing to the inability of the Yuan soldiers to tell the difference between the different foreign ethnicities when the uprising was crushed and their graves desecrated, forcing many of them to flee Quanzhou after the killings finally ceased. Mosques and other foreign architecture buildings were almost all destroyed. Some of the massacres and grave desecrations were reprisals against the descendants of Pu Shougeng, who had murdered the Emperor's relatives, defected and surrendered the cities to the Mongols during their invasion of the Song dynasty.

In vengeance for Pu Shougeng's defection to the Yuan dynasty, the military carried out an extermination campaign that killed most of the descendants of Pu Shougeng with their corpses being horrifically mutilated.[10] The few descendants who escaped changed their surnames to 吳 or 卜.

Of the Han Chinese Li family in Quanzhou, Lin Nu, the son of Li Lu, visited Hormuz in Persia in 1376, married a Persian or an Arab girl, and brought her back to Quanzhou. Li Nu was the ancestor of the Ming Dynasty reformer Li Chih, who by that time wasn't Muslim.[11][12] Lin Nu and his descendants were erased from the family genealogy by his relatives who were angry at him for converting to Islam and marrying a Persian girl because xenophobic feeling against foreigners was strong at that time due to Persian Semu atrocities in the Ispah Rebellion in which the Yuan defeated the Ispah and the Semu were massacred. The branch of the family who held to their Chinese customs felt ashamed so they changed their surname from Lin to Li to avoid associating with their relatives, Lin Nu's descendants with his Persian wife who practiced Islam.[13][14][15]

• Semu
• Islam during the Yuan dynasty
• Red Turban Rebellion

• Reid, Anthony (2006): Hybrid Identities in the Fifteenth-Century Straits of Malacca