In the past, Linxia City was called
Hezhou (), and the surrounding area was sometimes known as Hezhou Prefecture. Throughout its history, Hezhou often was the crossing of important trade routes: one of the alternative paths of the east-way
Silk Route, connecting China's heartland with
Central Asia, and the north–south route linking
Mongolia and
Tibet. During parts of the
Song dynasty period, when the
Western Xia took control of the more northerly path of the Silk Route, the more southerly
Didao-Hezhou-
Xining alternative path of the Silk Route may have become particularly important, making all three cities important commercial centers. Historians think that it was then, during the
Song dynasty, that the Muslims of Hezhou probably built their first mosque.
The Sufi orders Gongbei (
Ma Laichi's mausoleum) Hezhou was already an important Islamic center in the 1670s, when the
Kashgarian
Sufi master
Āfāq Khoja made his tour of the Muslim communities of
Qing Empire's northwestern borderlands. While his preaching in Xining,
Didao and
Lanzhou is better documented, he most likely preached in Hezhou as well. In any event, both Āfāq Khoja's Chinese
disciple Ma Tai Baba and another Chinese Sufi master,
Qi Jingyi-the founder of the Chinese branch of the
Qadiriyyah school-were buried in Hezhou. Soon enough, many people from the
Hui and
Salar communities were embroiled in conflicts between the followers of Ma Laichi's Khufiyya and those of another Sufi order - the
Jahriyya, founded in the 1760s by
Ma Mingxin. The conflict came to a head in 1781 when Salar land in
Xunhua County a few score kilometers to the west of the city was briefly besieged by the Salar rebels who passed by on the way to
Lanzhou, in an unsuccessful bid to save the imprisoned Ma Mingxin.
The Muslim Minorities Rebellion and War Soon after the beginning of the
Massive Muslim Armed Rebellion in Northwestern China in 1862, Hezhou became one of the main strongholds of the Muslim rebels who fought against the
Qing dynasty and killed many non-Muslim Han and Manchu people in Northwestern China. The leader of the rebellion in the Hezhou region was
Ma Zhan'ao, the leader of the Hezhou-based
Huasi menhuan, a Khufiyya Sufi order founded over a century before by
Ma Laichi. His top lieutenants were
Ma Haiyan and
Ma Qianling. Ma Zhan'ao himself went to fight along with Zuo Zongtang against the Muslim rebels farther west. For his efforts (and on Zuo's request), Ma was later rewarded by the "feathered cap of the fifth rank" (); his and his lieutenants' descendants went to play an important role in the region's history for decades to come. Ma Anliang was regarded by westerners as the leader of Muslims in Gansu. Ma Anliang's son held the title of garrison commissioner in Hezhou (Linxia) in 1922. ==The mosques and mausoleums of Linxia City==