Between 1862 and 1877, a catastrophe unfolded in northwestern China that killed, by conservative scholarly estimate, ten million people — one of the deadliest conflicts in human history, fought across the provinces of Shaanxi and Gansu, across the deserts of Xinjiang, and into the mountain passes of Central Asia. The Dungan Revolt began as an inter-communal explosion in the Wei River valley and ended with an extraordinary diplomatic reckoning between the Qing Empire and Tsarist Russia over a valley the size of Ireland.

At its heart are figures of remarkable human complexity: Ma Hualong, the Jahriyya Sufi leader who chose martyrdom over submission in a sixteen-month siege; Bai Yanhu, the commander who refused every offer of amnesty and led thousands across the Tian Shan into Russian exile; Zuo Zongtang, the statesman-soldier whose logistical genius reconquered a continent and whose campaigns helped produce the catastrophe they were designed to end; and Zeng Jize, the diplomat who retrieved from Russian hands what the army had bled to recover.

This is also the story of what survived: the Dungan communities of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, who built from the wreckage of catastrophe a culture — a language, a literature, a cuisine — that the violence had tried to destroy and that exile, paradoxically, preserved.