Associate Professor and Cyrus Tang Scholar at the Department of History, Tsinghua University
Yin Cao is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Peking University, having joined the faculty in April 2024 after serving as an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Tsinghua University from 2017 to 2024. He earned his PhD in History from the National University of Singapore and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Global Asia, NYU Shanghai.
His research focuses on global history, South and Southeast Asian studies, and modern Indian history, with particular interest in the movement of people and technologies, infrastructure, multispecies ecological networks, colonialism, and nation-building in the tropical world of the 19th and 20th centuries.
He is the author of Chinese Sojourners in Wartime Raj, 1942â1945 (Oxford University Press, 2022) and From Policemen to Revolutionaries: A Sikh Diaspora in Global Shanghai, 1885â1945 (Brill, 2018; Chinese translation, Peking University Press, 2023).
His articles have appeared in multiple journals, including the Journal of Asian Studies, Modern Asian Studies, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, and Journal of World History.
Panel 2 | Borderlands
Indigenous Knowledge in Motion: The Shaanxi Mules, the Militarization of the Sufis, and the Panthay Exploration of Northern Burma
ABSTRACT
In the 1870s and 1880s, the Yunnanese Muslims, known as the Panthays, established a prosperous stronghold in Panglong, northern Burma, emerging as one of the most powerful forces in the region.
This study contends that the rise of the Panthays in Panglong is intricately linked to the translocal mobilities of religious teachings, military skills, and mule husbandry expertise from northwest China to Yunnan during the nineteenth century.
The success of the Panthays in northern Burma should not be attributed to an oversimplified understanding of traditional Muslim caravan trade but rather to a new form of indigenous knowledge derived from diverse origins. By narrating this story, this study encourages scholars to reevaluate the internal dynamics of indigenous knowledge through translocal perspectives.
