Tongxin County - History

History

In his Red Star Over China, Edgar Snow mentions visiting the small towns of Yuwang Bao and Yuwang (予旺, 36°49′N 100°23′E / 36.817°N 100.383°E / 36.817; 100.383) located in today's Tongxin County. At the moment (summer/fall 1936), Yuwang Bao was the location of the headquarters of the First Front Red Army, where Edgar Snow met with the army's commander, Peng Dehuai there. Edgar Snow described Yuwang Bao as follows:

On the high, stout walls of Yu Wang Pao a squad of Red buglers was practicing, and from a corner of this fortlike city flew a big scarlet flag, its yellow hammer and ciskle cracking out in the breeze... We could look down on one side to a clean courtyard, where Muslim women were hulling rice and baking. Washing hung from a line on another side. In a distant square some Red soldiers were practicing wall scaling, broad jumping, and grenade throwing.

Yuwang (40 li north-west of Yuwang Bao), recently captured by the Reds from the troops of Ma Hongkui after a ten-day siege, was described as

an ancient Muslim city of four or five hundred families, with a magnificent wall of stone and brick. Outside of the wall was a Muslim mosque, with its own wall of beautiful glazed brick unscarred. But other buildings showed signs of the siege this city had undergone before it was taken by the Reds.

In October 1936, a public meeting was held in the Great Mosque of Tongxin, establishing the Yuwang Hui Autonomous Government - the first autonomous county in Communist China. Although this autonomous unit was short-lived, the mosque building was protected as a revolutionary historical site, and became the only major Islamic building in Ningxia to survive destruction during the Cultural Revolution.