The Ashab Mosque in Quanzhou:
A Coastal Mosque in South China
Sylvia Wu
Khamseen Graduate Student Presentation Award 2022 Recipient
Synopsis:
This presentation examines the Ashab Mosque in Quanzhou, China. Although it has long been considered an exception among premodern Chinese mosques, the structure is rarely examined beyond formal comparisons against local and global architectural traditions. This talk situates the mosque in the Indian Ocean network while also highlighting Quanzhou’s local building practices that helped craft the structure both structurally and conceptually. It thus aims to explain the mosque’s exceptional features—especially its stonework, design elements, Qur’anic calligraphy, and Chinese cosmic concepts—and to convey the complexity behind the construction of this coastal mosque in South China.
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References:
Bierman, Irene A. Writing Signs: The Fatimid Public Text. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 
Fujian Museum, Quanzhou Administration of Cultural Heritage, and Quanzhou Maritime Museum. “Quanzhou Qingjing Si Fengtiantan Jizhi Fajue Baogao.” Kaogu Xuebao, no. 3 (1991): 353–87.
Hillenbrand, Robert. “Quranic Epigraphy in Medieval Islamic Architecture.” In Studies in Medieval Islamic Architecture. Vol. 1, 308–13. London: Pindar, 2001.
Mukai, Masaki. “‘Muslim Diaspora’ in Yuan China: A Comparative Analysis of Islamic Tombstones from the Southeast Coast.” The Asian Review of World Histories 4, no. 2 (August 23, 2016): 231–56.
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, Caner K. Dagli, Maria Massi Dakake, Joseph E. B. Lumbard, and Mohammed Rustom. The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary. New York, NY: HarperOne, An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2015.
Steinhardt, Nancy Shatzman. China’s Early Mosques. Edinburgh Studies in Islamic Art. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018.
Wu, Wenliang, and Youxiong Wu. Quanzhou Zongjiao Shike (Religious Inscriptions of Quanzhou). Beijing: Kexue Chubanshe, 2005.
Citation:
Sylvia Wu, “The Ashab Mosque in Quanzhou: A Coastal Mosque in South China,” Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, published 8 September 2022.
Sylvia Wu is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. A historian of medieval and early modern Islamic art, she specializes in the architecture and material culture of the Indian Ocean world, with a focus on Muslim communities in coastal China and their multifaceted engagement with the region’s other Muslim societies. Her primary research interests include mosque and shrine architecture, pilgrimage and the idea of sacred geography, and the intersections of narrative building with material and spatial presentation. She is currently developing her first book project, which examines the capacious idea of mosque construction—as imitation, recreation, and a form of history (re)writing—in Quanzhou’s medieval Chinese port city.