Guangzhou massacre | |
---|---|
Location | Guangzhou, China |
Date | 878–879 |
Deaths | Tens of thousands |
Perpetrators | Huang Chao's rebel army |
The Guangzhou massacre was a massacre of the inhabitants of the prosperous port city of Guangzhou in 878–879 by the rebel army of Huang Chao. Arab sources indicate that foreign victims, including Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians, numbered in tens of thousands based on Chinese records of prior inhabitants.[1][2][3] Two travellers from the Abbasid Caliphate, Abu Zaid al Hassan from Siraf writing decades afterwards, and al-Masudi writing in the 10th century, estimated that 120,000 or 200,000 foreigners were killed respectively, but according to Morris Rossabi, the numbers were inflated.[4]
An Arab account written by Abu Zaid of Siraf within a couple of decades of Huang's rebellion estimated that Huang's forces massacred 120,000 Muslims, Jews, and other foreigners. Arab historian al-Mas'udi, in a text written in the mid tenth century, put the figure at 200,000. Both numbers are inflated, but they nonetheless indicate that the rebels attributed some of China's problems to the exploitation of foreigners, particularly merchants.