I am currently reading “The Development and Decline of Beijng’s Hui Muslim Communitty” by Zhou Chuanbin and Ma Xuefeng. It has a some statistical data on the history of the Muslim community in Beijing. I will be posting this info here from time to time. Here is the first post.
According to the 1928 Chinese census there were 36,678 Hui Muslims in Beijing which translates into 2.76% of the total population. Here is the population breakdown by districts.
Inner District % Hui Outer District % Hui Suburb % Hui 1 1.82 1 1.27 Eastern 3.51 2 1.95 2 1.44 Western 1.65 3 2.23 3 3.94 Southern 0.59 4 1.37 4 14.27 Northern 3.44 5 1.27 5 1.76 6 0.96
From the table above it is clear that Muslims were distributed in all the neighborhoods of Beijing but were especially concentrated in Outer District 4. This is where Ox Street is located so this makes sense. Nearly half of the Muslims settled in the Outer district. Another fact which is not appearent from this data is that Muslim in general tended to live close to the Mosques.
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