This dissertation addresses the conflicts between new-teaching Muslims and the Qing in eighteenth-century Qing Gansu frontiers a millennium after the advent of Islam in China. The main force behind the conflicts was Qing territorial expansions into Tibetan and Turkic regions and resultant legal implementation and cultural representations of new-subject populations. The location of the Salars at the hub of Chinese-Tibetan-Turkic frontiers put the Salar Muslims into the forefront of Muslim-state conflicts when the Qing annexed Tibetan regions and populations along southwest Gansu.

Having first identified the Salars as Tibetan, the Qing implemented the Tibetan Statutes (fanli), which were designed for Tibetans in Gansu regions. However, the coming of new Islamic (Sufi) teachings and the subsequent religious lawsuits between Salars quickly revealed the inefficiency of the Tibetan Statutes and open conflict broke out between new-teaching Salars and the state in 1781. The Salar-state conflict revealed problems not only in the Qing's legal practice but also in its cultural representation of the Salars. The Qing re-classified the Salars from Tibetan to Muslim (or from Fan to Hui) during and after the Salar-state conflict. However, this state re-identification of the Salars as Muslim created a new set of misconceptions regarding Islamic leadership institutions in the Salar as well as interior regions, since the Salars were now incorporated into the Gansu interior regions. The Qing identified the Muslim leadership institution of zhangjiao (teaching-holder, imam) as an invention of the new teaching, which conflicted with the state. Thus the Qing prohibited and physically executed zhangjiao as an institution.

The state conflict with new-teaching Salars and extermination of the category of new-teaching zhangjiao alarmed Muslim religious leaders, zhangjiao or ahun (imam, arkund) leading them seeking vengeance, take flight and rebel in 1784, three years after the Salar-state conflict. The Qing's pacification of the new-teaching Muslims, however, led to the discovery that the new teaching the state envisioned as new and heterodox in interior regions was actually old and orthodox in Xinjiang, newly acquired by the Qing. This state interpretation of and policies towards Islam and Muslims on the basis of region re-legalized the new teaching in interior regions.

By linking the Qing's new territories, new subject populations, and new legal practices to new Muslim teachings, this study provides insights into the territorial, administrative, and legal nature of the so-called "cultural conflicts" between Muslims and the Qing. It also sheds light on the larger consequences of the Qing expansion into Tibetan and Turkic regions to China in general and Muslim cultural practices in particular. This study is specifically aimed at describing the contradictions and conflicts between imperial expansion and administrative-legal practices, on the one hand, and frontier religions and ethnicities, on the other.