Three Crises: The Demise of the Muslim Cloth Institution and the Fall of Qing State in Xinjiang

The Muslim Cloth Institution refers to the system of collecting cotton fabrics in Altishahr, transporting them to Northern Xinjiang through the Tianshan Range, and exchanging them with the Kazakhs for horses and livestock. The institution was initiated in the 1760s, and the annual amount collected was 100 thousand bolts. In 1861, a report from Ili General Cangcing requested the court’s permission to discontinue the customary practice of exchanging one bolt of cloth for one sheep in the cross-border trade. By this time, Imperial Russia had seized the Kazakh steppe, and following the signing of the Treaty of Ghulja, it was Russian merchants, rather than Kazakhs, who came to trade in Ili and Tarbagatai. From the Qing officials’ perspective, trading cloth with the Russians was not economically beneficial, as the sheep traded were small and lean, while the cloth they provided was expensive. Conversely, Russian merchants complained about the compulsory requirement to hand in two sheep out of every ten in the trade. Both sides found this barter trade no longer advantageous. Consequently, the Qing court called an end to this official barter trade. This marked the end of using Muslim cloth as a commodity in official cross-border trade in Xinjiang. This paper examines three major events in which the Qing officials encountered significant challenges in managing collecting Muslim cloth, highlighting how warfare, commercialization, and Russian industrialization influenced this institution. More importantly, as this institution involved taxation, transportation, and cross-border trade, studying it also reveals fluctuations in the socio-economic conditions of Xinjiang in the mid-nineteenth century. This chapter argues that the prosperity of Xinjiang depended heavily on its close connections with the Central Asian and Russian market, and that isolation from these regions played a crucial role in undermining Qing governance in Xinjiang.