1 · POSITION
The Maritime Silk Road is the sea route that brought Arab and Persian merchants to the ports of southern China, and Guangzhou — Khanfu to the Arab geographers — was its great Tang terminus. The register enters it for what the port did with its strangers: it gave them a quarter of their own on the south bank of the river, with their own mosques and their own authority to settle disputes. [1, 2]
2 · A CITY WITH A FOREIGN QUARTER
Canton’s population of some 200,000 included merchants from the Muslim world. In 851 the Persian merchant Sulaiman al-Tajir recorded that the community was large enough to have a governing body of its own. Arab traders settled around the Huaisheng mosque and formed what the city still calls its foreigners’ quarter; some married locally, and their descendants were counted to the fifth generation. [1, 2]
3 · THE MOSQUE
The Huaisheng mosque is traditionally attributed to Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas and is counted among the earliest mosques in China, its call to prayer said by the city to have sounded for more than thirteen hundred years. It burned in 1314 and was rebuilt between 1349 and 1351; only the ruins of a tower remain from the first building. [1, 2]
4 · A FRAGILE WELCOME
The welcome was not constant. In 758 the Muslim settlement erupted in unrest and fled, the same year that pirates disrupted the trade. In 878 the rebel Huang Chao took the city and killed its foreign merchants — Muslims, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians; Arab writers put the dead at between 120,000 and 200,000. [1]
5 · ⚑ CANDOUR
⚑ Checked on 22 October 2026. Guest houses as such were not found. Guangzhou kept a foreign quarter, the fanfang, and called its foreign merchants guests, fanke, with some autonomy in their own affairs; the note now says so, and the prototype of the international hotel stays the register’s reading. Abu Zayd gives 120,000 traders killed in 878; the figure is not verified. [1–3]
Sources & Further Reading
Sources checked 22 October 2026.