The Qingjing Mosque complex located in the city of Quanzhou in Fujian, China is a site of both cultural heritage and active devotion. The complex comprises two main sections, one being the Aṣḥāb Mosque (also known as Qingjing Si or Shengyou Si in Chinese), first established in 1009 and underwent centuries of development in premodern Quanzhou, and the other being a new prayer hall (commonly referred to as xin libaisi or xin si) inaugurated in 2009. A recent narrative that has emerged alongside the construction of the new prayer hall relates that the mosque site’s two buildings, established one thousand years apart, mirror each other in their architectural forms across time and that the new prayer hall has recreated the medieval Aṣḥāb Mosque in the present era. Lumped together under the so-called Arab-style mosques in China, this pair of structures purportedly presents a visual coherence between the Muslim architecture of Quanzhou’s historical past and its present.

This dissertation is a rebuttal to the romanticized and simplistic characterization of the complex relationship between the Aṣḥāb Mosque and the new prayer hall. It posits that although the two structures stand side by side and appear to present a number of aligning features, they are foremost products of their respective times and cannot be fully understood without being examined within their time-specific contexts. In two parts, the dissertation dissects the distinct temporal and geographic frameworks that gave shape to the two monuments. Part One returns to medieval Quanzhou, particularly the fourteenth century, when the Aṣḥāb Mosque was transformed into a stone monument. The chapters in this part illustrate how features of the masonry mosque likely arose from the southern Chinese mosque being part of a building tradition common among littoral Muslim societies around the premodern Indian Ocean world. In so doing, they interpret the mosque as a monumentalized history of maritime Muslims residing in South China. Part Two of the dissertation shifts attention to the new prayer hall and situates it in the historical moment of the late twentieth century when Quanzhou stood at the juncture of China’s economic reform and the Gulf states’ increasingly bold initiatives in patronizing mosque projects on a global stage. The chapters in this part uncover the shifting strategies involved in designing and designating the new prayer hall in relation to the simultaneous preservation of the medieval Aṣḥāb Mosque. They reveal how the new prayer hall served both as a tool for the Chinese state to appeal to international investors and as a platform for the small group of Muslim residents in Quanzhou to assert their agency and carve out a space for their religious activities.

Through the multi-faceted analysis of the Qingjing Mosque complex and the entanglements between its various components, this study shows the fluidity between history and memory-making. On one hand, the historical past is captured and materialized in monumental architecture; on the other hand, architecture also has the capacity to intervene in and shape historical narratives.