The Great Mosque of Xi'an

The Great Mosque of Xi'an, in the ancient imperial city that was the eastern terminus of the Silk Road, is one of the oldest and largest mosques in China and one of the most striking examples anywhere of the way Islam, carried into a great and confident civilisation, took root by clothing itself in the native architecture rather than by overturning it. Islam had come to China very early, by the Silk Road across Central Asia and by the sea-route to the southern ports, brought by Arab and Persian merchants and envoys from the time of the early caliphs, and over the centuries a settled Chinese Muslim people, later called the Hui, grew up, Chinese in language and much of their culture, Muslim in faith. The Great Mosque of Xi'an, whose present buildings are largely of the Ming dynasty and are often dated to about 1384 though the community and its mosque are older, is built entirely in the Chinese manner: not as a single domed structure but as a sequence of walled garden-courtyards set one behind another along a central axis, entered through ornamental wooden gateways and pavilions, with timber prayer-halls under the great sweeping tiled roofs and upturned eaves of Chinese architecture, and, in place of a minaret, a tower in the form of a pagoda from which the call to prayer is given. Yet within these Chinese forms the building is unmistakably a mosque: its great prayer-hall is turned to face the west, toward Makkah, its wall set with a mihrab, and Arabic inscriptions of the Qur'an and the names of God are woven in among the Chinese ornament. It is a monument to the long presence of Islam in China and to the genius by which the faith made itself at home in a civilisation utterly unlike that of its birth. This scene depicts the courtyards and halls of the Great Mosque of Xi'an. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.