Ma Anliang

Ma Anliang (1855 – 24 November 1918) was a Chinese Muslim general, the eldest son of Ma Zhan'ao, born with the name Ma Qiwu. As a youth he went to Zuo Zongtang's camp to negotiate his father's defection to the Qing in 1872, and Zuo renamed him Anliang, "pacified and good". He served the Qing and then the Republic of China, campaigned against Yaqub Beg in Turkestan and in both Dungan revolts, attacked Shaanxi for the Qing in 1911, and from 1912 until his death was the de facto senior leader of all Muslims in northwest China. He died at Hezhou on 24 November 1918. ^{1 2}

He defected to the Qing in 1872 with his father and the other Hezhou leaders, and assisted Zuo Zongtang against the Turkic Muslim rebels of Yaqub Beg, leading an army of Chinese Muslim troops in the reconquest of Turkestan. In 1894 he was summoned toward Peking during the First Sino-Japanese War, but the Dungan revolt of 1895 intervened: his Muslim cavalry defeated the rebels at Oxheart Mountain and relieved the siege of Hezhou on 4 December, and he received the rank of General of Xinjiang and Colonel of Hezhou. In 1898, during the Hundred Days' Reform, he was again called to Peking with Dong Fuxiang and helped end the reform movement; in 1900, as Tongling of Hezhou, he joined Dong in fighting the foreigners during the Boxer Rebellion. In 1905 he cooperated with the magistrate Yang Zengxin in an attempt to arrest the Yihewani leader Ma Wanfu, whom his subordinate Ma Qi rescued. ¹

When the Xinhai Revolution erupted in 1911 he led over twenty battalions of Hui troops to defend the Qing in Shaanxi, drawing men through his family's menhuan network — the Chinese article says he "used the menhuan to levy menhuan troops" at Hezhou, Didao and Xunhua. After the abdication he joined the Republic, and became commander-in-chief of Gansu in April 1912. He fought the Bai Lang rebellion, and attacked the Xidaotang Muslim organisation, whose founder Ma Qixi he had shot with his family in 1914, suspecting its republicanism; he was a conservative monarchist and a supporter of Yuan Shikai, who made him a baron of the first rank. In 1917 he ordered his brother Ma Guoliang to suppress a Tibetan rebellion in Xunhua provoked by his own taxes, without reporting it to Peking, and was reprimanded. He took part in the intrigues around a planned rising at Lintao in 1918, then withdrew; he died of illness at Hezhou on 24 November 1918. Ma Fuxiang took his place as de facto leader of the northwest's Muslims. ^{1 2}

Contemporaries divided over him. The China Year Book tradition records that he kept the peace in Gansu by his willingness to fight his fellow Muslims, and the American vice-consul Rodney Gilbert praised him for it; he was also praised for protecting his people from sectarian strife and opium. Against that stand the massacres his troops committed, in 1895 and after, and the story that Muslim blood stained his red cap. The sources describe him as "reactionary" where Ma Fuxiang was "progressive". ¹

His faith is recorded as unknown, and the case is flagged. One text family names his membership of an order: the English article, citing Dillon (1999), states that the Hezhou leaders who defected in 1872 — Ma Anliang named among them, with his father — "belonged to the Huasi menhuan, of the Khafiya Naqshbandi Sufi order", and the Arabic article, a translation of the English, repeats it with an infobox calling him a Sufi Muslim. The Chinese article, an independent tradition, does not state his membership: it records his use of the menhuan network to raise troops, and his tomb at Dahejia is a gongbei, a Sufi tomb shrine. His father's membership, documented in two texts, does not transfer to the son. One text family short of the two-source bar, the Huasi reading stands in the record's note, unresolved. ^{1 2 3}

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