Sylvia Wu

This book offers the first interpretive study of the Ashab Mosque in Quanzhou, the only surviving mosque in one of the most vibrant ports of premodern China. Founded in the eleventh century and rebuilt in the fourteenth, its reconfigured form reveals deliberate choices of material, plan, orientation, and decoration. Situating Quanzhou within local, regional, and transoceanic networks, the study challenges views of the site as peripheral and isolated. It shows how rebuilding the mosque involved acts of imitation, innovation, and history-making that linked South China to maritime Islam from Southeast Asia to East Africa, reframing Islamic architecture and religious life in the global medieval world through a littoral perspective that foregrounds the sea as a site of sacred connection.