History of Linxia

In the past, Linxia City was called Hezhou, and the surrounding area was known as Hezhou Prefecture.

The Hui Minorities War
During the Hui Minorities’ War in the 1860s Hezhou Prefecture was a scene of fierce fighting between the Muslim (Hui, Dongxiang, and Salar, in modern terms) rebels on one side and the Han Chinese militias and, later, government troops, on the other side. From 1862 to 1872, Hezhou City (today’s Linxia City) was the stronghold of the Muslim (mostly Hui) rebels led by the Khufiyya imam Ma Zhan’ao and his associates Ma Haiyan and Ma Qianling. The Han Chinese’s resistance to the rebellion throughout the northern and eastern parts of the then Hezhou Prefecture (today’s Yongjing County and Dongxiang County of Linxia Prefecture, and Lintao County of Dingxi City) was headed by the Kong family, one of whose main home villages was Dachuan in today’s Yongjing County (within 6 km or 3.7 mi from the county seat, Liujiaxia Town). The conflict was further complicated by the fact that some members of the Kong clan had, in fact, intermarried with the Hui people.

Large number of people lost their lives on both sides of the conflict, in particular during the rebels’ attacks on Kong clan’s villages around Dachuan 1864.

After the Qing general Zuo Zongtang had finally destroyed the rebels farther east, in Shaanxi and Ningxia, he tried to take Hezhou in the late 1872, but his troops were badly defeated by Ma Zhan’ao’s Muslim fighters at the battle of Taizi Mosque, and he failed to make a foothold west of the Tao River (which today more or less forms the border between Dingxi and Linxia Prefectures). Ma Zhan’ao, however, realized that he could not hold against the Qing armies forever, and made a deal with Zuo Zongtang: he surrendered Hezhou to the government forces, executed those locals who objected to the surrender, and joined the government side himself, to fight against the rebels farther west. In exchange, Zuo Zontang did not disperse the local Muslim community, forcibly relocating the survivors to a remote region, but, in a unique gesture during that war, acted to reduce the inter-communal tension by relocating some of the local Han people away from the Muslims. Nonetheless, in order to ensure the government’s control over the region, since 1873 Muslims were prohibited to live within the city walls of Hezhou.

Linxia (Hezhou) was often wracked by these frequent rebellions. The entire southern suburbs of the city (ba fang) “eight blocks” was ruined in 1928 by savage fighting between the Muslims and Guominjun forces during the Muslim Conflict in Gansu (1927–1930).

Well-known Muslim individuals in Hezhou in the 1940s included La Shih-Chun, who was part of the Gansu Provincial Government Committee, and Ma Chuanyuan, the supermagistrate of five districts.

The hydro dams

The Liujiaxia Dam, in Liujia Gorge
In 1955, just a few years after the creation of the People’s Republic of China, the Communist government announced a large-scale program of hydroelectric dam construction on the Yellow River. Two of them were constructed in Linxia Prefecture’s Yongjing County: the 57-meter high Yanguoxia Dam (1958–1961) and the 147-meter high Liujiaxia Dam (1958–1969). One more – the 33-meter high Bapanxia Dam (1968–1975) – although located in Lanzhou’s Xigu District, had much of its reservoir within Yongjing County as well. The dams contributed greatly to the national economy – Liujiaxia Hydro Power Station remained the country’s largest until the 1980s – but the reservoirs they created in narrow, but fertile valleys of the Yellow River and its tributaries displaced a large number of local farmers. The three reservoirs flooded 118,229 (7,881 hectares) of farmland and displaced 43,829 residents, primarily in Yongjing County. The compensation payments to the farmers affected by the Yanguoxia and Liujiaxia Dams averaged, supposedly, 250 yuan and 364 yuan per person, were grossly insufficient to allow them to reestablish their way of life. It is said that the residents received lower compensation amount than they could otherwise because in 1958, when the Yanguoxia project started, they understated the value of their assets, as they were afraid to be classified as “rich peasants”, i.e. class enemies.

Even the more generous payments (averaging 1,100 per person) to those affected by the Bapanxia Dam were not an adequate substitute for the loss of the farmland.

Source From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linxia_Hui_Autonomous_Prefecture#History_and_culture