of the third month of the ninth year of Zhizheng [April 11, 1349]. He was buried on the eighteenth day of the eighth month [September 30] at Guihuagang by the Liuhua Bridge at Chengbei, Guangzhou [location of the Muslim cemetery]. An epitaph was raised. According to the Chinese text, Ramadan died in April 1349, but was buried in the current location of his grave only in September. The Islamic month Rajab 751 AH, which the Arabic text is dated to, corresponds to September 1350 CE, a full year later. It thus appears that the grave's current location is the result of a reburial, and that the current epitaph was itself written a year after the reburial. Identity Ramadan appears to have been a figure of some prominence. Not only did he serve as a darughachi or provincial governor for the Mongol Yuan dynasty that then ruled China, he had a residence near Dadu (modern Beijing), the Yuan imperial capital. He was also considered sufficiently important by the local Muslim community to be reburied near Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas, the legendary founder of Islam in China, and to be commemorated by a personally signed epitaph including multiple Quranic verses. Whether Ramadan was ethnically Korean is unknown. After the Mongol conquest of Korea in the thirteenth century, many Central Asian Muslims (called semu) entered the country—then ruled by the Goryeo dynasty as Mongol vassals—to serve in the Mongol and Korean administrations or to engage in commerce. These Muslims established a local community in the Korean capital of Kaegyong, where they constructed a mosque and enjoyed significant cultural and religious autonomy until a royal decree ordering forcible assimilation was passed in 1427. As the Mongols frequently appointed semu but rarely ethnic Koreans as local governors, Ramadan may have been a Muslim of Central Asian (perhaps Uyghur) ethnicity who was simply born or had settled in Korea. As Rongzhou was a center of trade with Trần Vietnam, historian Lee Hee-soo speculates that Ramadan may have been an international semu merchant based in Korea who was hired by the Yuan. On the other hand, Ramadan's residence was at Wanping Prefecture, a suburb of Dadu where there was a large ethnic Korean diaspora community in the fourteenth century. The Mongols sometimes classified Koreans as semu as well and occasionally did appoint them as officials and governors. It is thus possible that Ramadan was an ethnic Korean