Grey brick, three arches, a carved screen
Tongxin Great Mosque stands in Tongxin county town, on the drier southern side of Wuzhong. Qingtongxia and the irrigated plain lie to the west. Here the public building is a Hui mosque, a place of Muslim worship raised in Chinese brick and timber: a high platform, a carved gate, a screen wall, a wooden prayer hall, and a minaret over the passage in.
Grey brick carries the prayer hall, the minaret, and the north and south halls. At the southwest corner a gate of three arches is carved with brick lotuses and with Arabic script. A screen wall carries the moon, pine, and cypress. The prayer hall faces east. Elsewhere the gate is described as north-facing, with a different platform height and a different area; those measurements are left unresolved. On the ground it is grey brick underfoot, three arches, and the carved screen.
A timber hall, and a pavilion for the call
The prayer hall is a wooden building of a front hall, a rear hall, and an open porch. South of the hall, a two-storey square minaret with a pyramidal roof stands over the entrance passage. The mosque is a centre of worship for local Muslims. The same hall is also described as five bays by nine, with a wooden floor and more than twenty columns, and the minaret as a double-eaved pavilion. The bay system, and the number of worshippers, differ between those descriptions.
What they still share is the carpentry. The hall is timber set on brick, a Chinese frame with Arabic script already cut at the gate. The minaret remains a pavilion over the passage, the tower from which the call to prayer is given, built at the scale of the platform. The screen, the three arches, and the east-facing hall lead to the call tower, all of it one brick mass.
Qing on the register, and 1936
On 13 January 1988 the State Council recorded 同心清真大寺 in the third batch of national priority protected sites, with the period Qing and the address Tongxin County, in Ningxia. Tradition holds that a Ming rebuilding stood on a Yuan Tibetan Buddhist site; that story is not carved on the building, and the register’s period remains Qing. Dated building evidence comes from repair inscriptions: major work in the fifty-sixth year of the Qianlong reign, 1791, and in the thirty-third year of the Guangxu reign, 1907.
In 1936 an assembly in this hall established a Hui county government under the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia province of that time. The brick platform, the timber prayer hall, and the repairs of 1791 and 1907 are the mosque’s own building record.