Jāmī, a Legend in China: A Study of the Transmission and Transformation of Jāmī’s Texts in China

Abstract

As a polymath in fifteenth century Central Asia, Jāmī’s (1414–92) works were widely circulated around the Muslim world. From a global perspective, Jāmī and his prose works achieved outstanding recognition in China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This paper follows the author’s previous research on the introduction of Jami’s works in China, seeking to answer the question of what it was that made Jāmī a legend in China and how this came about. By focusing on the transmission and transformation of Jāmī’s two Persian Sufi prose writings as they moved from Central Asia into China, the article concludes that two groups of people played a role as transcultural agents in this process; these were individual Sufi travelers and the Muslim intellectuals