Ma Bufang

Ma Bufang (1903 – 31 July 1975) was a Hui Muslim warlord of the Ma clique who ruled Qinghai from 1938 to 1949, fought Tibetan armies, the Japanese and the Communists, and after the Communist victory fled to the Muslim world, serving as the Republic of China's first ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1957 to 1961 and dying at Jeddah as a Saudi citizen. He was called the King of Qinghai. ^{1 2}

There is no Urdu article on him; this page rests on the English, Chinese and Arabic articles, as stated in its sources. The Chinese article gives his courtesy name as Zixiang and his Islamic name as Husaini.

He was born in 1903 at Monigou Township in Linxia County, Gansu — Wikidata gives a day, 14 October 1903, that neither article carries — the second son of Ma Qi, who had formed the Ninghai Army in Qinghai in 1915, and the younger brother of Ma Buqing. While Ma Buqing received a classical Chinese education, Ma Bufang was educated in Islam: his father first intended him for an imam's career and he studied until he was nineteen before turning to the army. He graduated from the Officers' Training Corps of Qinghai and rose through his father's and then his uncle Ma Lin's command. ^{1 2}

After Ma Qi's death in 1931 his brother Ma Lin held Qinghai, with Ma Bufang as military governor; the two feuded, and in 1936–1937 Ma Bufang, backed by the Kuomintang, manoeuvred his uncle out — Ma Lin resigned and left on the Hajj — and in March 1938 became governor with civil and military power. In the interval his forces, with Ma Hongkui's and Ma Hongbin's, had helped destroy Zhang Guotao's Red Army column west of the Yellow River. As governor he fought the long war against the Golok Tibetans, defeating the 13th Dalai Lama's armies in the Qinghai–Tibet war of 1932 and launching repeated expeditions into Golog; his troops destroyed monasteries at Rebgong in 1939 and Tsanggar in 1941, a record Tibetan accounts remember bitterly. In the war against Japan his 82nd Army fought in Henan and his cavalry, with Ma Hongkui's, helped keep the Japanese from Lanzhou; he obstructed Japanese approaches to himself and to the Tibetans, repaired Yushu airport on Chiang Kai-shek's orders, and in 1949 relocated Genghis Khan's shrine to Xining. His government ran state-directed development — schools (including a school for Muslim girls at Linxia built with his wife), roads, reforestation enforced by quotas, a piped water system bought from the United States — under stern authoritarian control, and was praised by A. Doak Barnett as one of China's most efficient and energetic. ^{1 2}

In 1949 Peng Dehuai's armies took Lanzhou and Xining; Ma Bufang flew out, reached Hong Kong, and in October, declining Chiang's call to return, flew to Mecca in the name of the Hajj with more than 200 relatives and subordinates. From Cairo, where he lived until 1956, he announced in January 1950 that Chinese Muslims would never surrender to Communism. When Egypt recognised the People's Republic, Taipei posted him in 1957 as the Republic of China's first ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Dismissed in 1961 over a scandal and summoned to Taiwan to face charges, he refused to return, took Saudi citizenship, and remained in the kingdom until his death at Jeddah on 31 July 1975. As ambassador he had written to a former Uyghur mufti rejecting the term "East Turkestan" and upholding Xinjiang as part of China. ^{1 2 3}

His faith is recorded as unknown. The sources present a Muslim ruler — educated in Islam, first trained for an imamate, patron of mosques and of the Yihewani imam Hu Songshan — but no source read names a school or a Sufi order as his own affiliation, and Wikidata carries no religion value for him. Patronage and education are not attestation. ^{1 2 4}

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