Note 36 — Chapter X · THE SPREAD OF ISLAM IN CHINA.
Reading edition
Similarly, in the famine that devastated the province of Kwangtung in 1790, as many as ten thousand children are said to have been purchased by the Muhammadans from parents who, too poor to support them, were willing to part with them to save them from starvation; these were all brought up in the faith of Islam.36 A Chinese Musalman, from Yunnan, named Sayyid Sulaymān, who visited Cairo in 1894 and was there interviewed by the representative of an Arabic journal,37 declared that the number of accessions to Islam gained in this way every year was beyond counting. Similar testimony is given by M. d’Ollone, who reports that this practice of buying children in times of famine prevails among the Muhammadans throughout the whole of China to the present day; in the same way, they purchased the children of Christian parents who were massacred by the Boxers in 1900, and brought them up as Musalmans.38