[2] Saʿd ibn Abī Waḳḳāṣ, the maternal uncle and second cousin of Muhammad, was sent with a delegation to meet the Emperor Gaozong of Tang.
[6] Arab sources state Qutayba ibn Muslim briefly took Kashgar from China and withdrew after an agreement[7] but modern historians entirely dismiss this claim.
The deposed king fled to Kucha (seat of Anxi Protectorate), and sought Chinese intervention.
In 756, a contingent probably consisting of Persians and Iraqis was sent to Gansu to help Emperor Xuanzong in his struggle against the An Lushan Rebellion.
These diplomatic relations were contemporaneous with the maritime expansion of the Islamic world into the Indian Ocean and as far as East Asia after the founding of Baghdad in 762.
After the capital was changed from Damascus to Baghdad, ships begin to sail from Siraf, the port of Basra, to India, the Malaccan Straits and South China.
Canton, or Khanfu in Arabic, a port in South China, counted among its population of 200,000, merchants from Muslims regions.
[18] During the Tang dynasty a steady stream of Arab and Persian traders arrived in China through the silk road and the overseas route through the port of Quanzhou.
[19] Early Muslim settlers, while observing the tenets and practicing the rites of their faith in China, did not undertake any strenuous campaign against either Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, or the State creed, and they constituted a floating rather than a fixed element of the population, coming and going between China and the West by the oversea or the overland routes.
Arab geographer and traveler Abu Zaid Hassan recorded "no less than 120,000 Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Parsees perished".