In July 2009, violence erupted among Uyghurs, Chinese state police, and Han residents of Ürümqi, the capital city of Xinjiang, in northwest China, making international headlines, and introducing many to tensions in the area. But conflict in the region has deep roots. Now available in paperback, Holy War in China remains the first comprehensive and balanced history of a late nineteenth-century Muslim rebellion in Xinjiang, which led to the establishment of an independent Islamic state under Ya'qub Beg. That independence was lost in 1877, when the Qing army recaptured the region and incorporated it into the Chinese state, known today as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

Hodong Kim offers readers the first English-language history of the rebellion since 1878 to be based on primary sources in Islamic languages as well as Chinese, complemented by British and Ottoman archival documents and secondary sources in Russian, English, Japanese, Chinese, French, German, and Turkish. His pioneering account of past events offers much insight into current relations.