In the past, Linxia City was called Hezhou, and the surrounding area was sometimes known as Hezhou Prefecture.
Throughout its history, Hezhou often was the crossing of important trade routes: one of the alternative paths of the east-way Silk Route, connecting China's heartland with Central Asia, and the north-south route linking Mongolia and Tibet. During parts of the Song Dynasty period, when the Western Xia took control of the more northerly path of the Silk Route, the more southerly Didao-Hezhou-Xining alternative path of the Silk Route may have become particularly important, making all three cities important commercial centers. Historians think that it was then, during the Song Dynasty, that the Muslims of Hezhou probably built their first mosque.
The Sufi orders
Hezhou already was an important Islamic center in the 1670s, when the Kashgarian Sufi master Āfāq Khoja made his tour of the Muslim communities of Qing Empire's northwestern borderlands. While his preaching in Xining, Didao and Lanzhou is better documented, he most likely preached in Hezhou as well. In any event, both Āfāq Khoja's Chinese disciple Ma Tai Baba and another Chinese Sufi master, Qi Jingyi - the founder of the Chinese branch of the Qadiriyyah school - were buried in Hezhou. The gongbei shrines around their tombs on Linxia City's west side continue to be important centers of Islamic scholarship.
However, it was a Hezhou native and Tai Baba's star student, Ma Laichi who revolutionized the life of northwestern China's Muslims in the mid-18th century by making Hezhou the center of the Hua Si menhuan, the main organization of the Khufiyya Sufi movement. Soon enough, many Hui and Salar community were embroiled in conflicts between the followers of Ma Laichi's Khufiyya and those of another Sufi order - the Jahriyya, founded in the 1760s by Ma Mingxin. No wonder that when in 1781 the conflict came to head in the land of the Salars, in Xunhua County a few
