A deeply learned reassessment of the history of Chinese Muslims, who since the fourteenth century have been subject to a constant program of minoritization. For more than a millennium, Islam has been a Chinese religion, and native-born Chinese Muslims have played important roles in their homeland—as butchers, merchants, and farmers; diplomats, scholar-officials, and royal astronomers. Yet the Muslims of China have often been understood as inherently foreign, incompatible with Chinese culture. In this reappraisal, Rian Thum recaptures the ordinariness of Chinese Muslims. In doing so, he suggests that these communities, whose classification has so often been seen as problematic, can teach us about the ways social categories are made and maintained in the first place. Firmly rooted in Chinese and long-neglected Perso-Arabic sources, Islamic China traces the interlinked histories of twenty Chinese Muslims, some famous and some obscure, spread across multiple ethnicities, sects, and