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Editor’s note: I’m quite pleased with this post. As far as I can tell, there is only a single English-language source that mentions, only fleetingly, this former leader of Pyongyang. Governor Min-Bo is essentially an undocumented figure in the West. I had originally intended to write about Islam in Medieval Korea more broadly but this story was simply too surprising to not be the focal point.
China is far from the Islamic heartland. So far, in fact, that in one dubious medieval hadith, China served as shorthand for the ends of the earth: “Seek knowledge even if it be in China.” Yet, Muslims made it farther still to the east than China and reached at least as far as Korea long before the European Age of Exploration. Not only did Muslims make it to Korea (Goryeo), but while the country was a tributary state to the Mongol Empire, they even occasionally served as part of Goryeo’s government. One historical entry in particular is striking. Book 33 of the Goryeosa, an extensive dynastic chronicle of Goryeo Korea, records the appointments of the twenty-fifth day of the tenth lunar month of 1310 in two sentences. The first announces that a man named Min-Bo has been made Prefect of Pyongyang and concurrently Pacification Commissioner. The second is eight syllables long:
민보는 회회인이다.
Min-Bo is a Muslim. Or at least, that’s the most likely translation.
By the time he was made Prefect of Pyongyang, this Min-Bo was no fresh-faced newbie. The Goryeo-sa records his name six times. The first five entries span 1294 to 1305, and they all describe the same kind of assignment: Min-Bo was sent to the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty court bearing a gift of sparrowhawks. In 1303, he brought a falcon alongside, a costlier bird. Delivering these gifts was not some trivial errand boy’s role. Falconry was highly prized by the Mongol court and the honor of presenting hunting birds was prestigious. It required someone who could move easily between the Goryeo royal household and the Yuan emperor’s inner circle.
Across those eleven years Min-Bo was rising through the Goryeo military ranks: General by 1294, Grand General by 1299, Grand Defender by 1301, Upper Defender by 1305. By the time of his 1310 Pyongyang appointment, Min-Bo had spent sixteen years as a trusted intermediary between the two courts. His governorship does not appear to have been some token role. It was a career capstone, the top civil administrator of Goryeo’s second most important city, handed to a man whose Muslim identity the chronicler found worth writing down.
While it is likely Min-Bo was Muslim, it’s difficult to know for sure. The word the chronicler used for "Muslim" is 회회인 (hoehoe-in) and this term does not map cleanly onto the modern English term.
회회 (hoehoe) began life a few centuries earlier as a Chinese transcription of the word “Uyghur,” first recorded in the 11th century. It started as a broad ethnic label for Uyghurs, who at the time followed a variety of faiths. Under Mongol rule, however, the term narrowed. As the cosmopolitan Yuan Dynasty sorted its multi-ethnic bureaucracy into categories, Muslim Central Asians came to be called 회회, while Buddhist and Nestorian Christian Uyghurs were given separate labels. By around 1300, in Yuan bureaucratic usage and in the Korean records, 회회 had mostly stabilized as a Muslim identifier.
But this isn’t quite airtight. A sliver of the older ethnic sense survived, so in principle a 1310 Korean chronicler could have used 회회인 for someone Central Asian but not Muslim. In practice, almost every reference to 회회 by this time has clear religious connotations and refers to Islam. So when the chronicler wrote 민보는 회회인이다, he was almost certainly telling us Min-Bo was a Muslim. But we cannot know with 100% certainty.
Min-Bo was not a freak entry in an otherwise empty record. Muslims had been reaching the Korean peninsula for centuries prior to his 1310 appointment, and the Muslim community of his own day, while relatively small, was a real institutional presence.
The earliest traces of contact come from Arab and Persian geographers of the 9th century. Ibn Khordadbeh, an Abbasid bureaucrat and geographer, described al-Sīlā, the Korean kingdom of Silla, as a gold-rich country beyond China where Muslim travelers had visited and sometimes even settled. Several later Muslim writers echo him. By at least the 11th century, Muslims show up in the Korean record directly. The Goryeo-sa logs an arrival of about one hundred Arab merchants in 1024. Two similar delegations followed, in 1025 and 1040, bearing goods typical of the Indian Ocean trade such as mercury, ivory, sandalwood, myrrh, and sappan.
Contact increased after the Mongol invasions. While the Yuan Mongolians themselves were not Muslim, their religious tolerance meant that their domains often became home to people of diverse faiths. When a Yuan princess was sent to marry a Goryeo king in 1274, her retinue included Central Asian Muslims, and more followed. A resident Hoehoe community formed in the capital, complete with a mosque, imams, and an invitation to recite the Quran at royal ceremonies. One of the princess's men, a Muslim of Central Asian origin named Samga, naturalized as Jang Sun-ryong and founded a Korean clan that still remembers its Muslim origins today. A Korean Muslim named Ramadan ibn Alauddin died in Guangzhou in 1349; his bilingual tombstone, found in 1985, carries a Quranic verse across its main face and his Korean identity in Chinese along the borders. Min-Bo’s story did not spring from nowhere.
A little over a century after Min-Bo's Pyongyang appointment, the community he belonged to was on its way out. In 1427, Sejong the Great, at the urging of his ministers, issued a decree requiring the Korean Muslims to abandon their distinctive dress and barring them from performing their rites at royal assemblies. The community's mosque, stripped of state funding, seems to have fallen out of use in the years that followed. In the same decree King Sejong stated that Koreans were unwilling to intermarry the Hoehoes because of their manner of dress. As such, his goal was likely to assimilate the Muslim population, bringing them in line with the broader trend of Confucian centralization under the new Joseon Kingdom.
This decree was not an expulsion or a full-scale persecution but its effects were ultimately total. Within a generation, the Hoehoe had effectively disappeared from state records, and within 80 years, when Joseon envoys visiting Ming Beijing described Chinese Muslims, they used the word "heard." They had no direct experience left to draw on. The Korean Muslim community had faded and Min-Bo became a footnote of Korean history.
Note: In this post, I have chosen to display Korean in Hangul rather than traditional Hanja for simplicity’s sake.
Journal articles and chapters
Kim, Cheolwoong. “고려후기 색목인(色目人)의 이주(移住)와 삶 [Migration and Life of Semu People in Late Goryeo].” 동양학 [The Oriental Studies] 68 (2017)
Lee, Hee-Soo. “The Spread of Islamic Culture to the East Asia Before The Era of Modern European Hegemony.” İslâm Araştırmaları Dergisi 7 (2002)
Online sources
Kim Han, In-Sung. “Muslims in Medieval Korea: Personal Encounters with Connected World.” SOAS, University of London. https://www.islamawareness.net/Asia/KoreaSouth/ks_article101.pdf
National Institute of Korean History. Goryeo-sa (高麗史) Database. https://db.history.go.kr/goryeo/ (translated with Claude)
Wikipedia. “Deoksu Jang clan.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deoksu_Jang_clan
Wikipedia. “Islam in Korea.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Korea
Wikipedia. “Semu.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semu