ineffective at managing the province's development, Jin further antagonized the populace by reinstituting Sinicization policies, increasing taxes, prohibiting participation in the hajj and bringing in Han Chinese officials to replace local leaders. Rebellion The situation came to a head in March 1930, when the Khan of Kumul Prefecture (Hami) or Kumul Khanate in Eastern Xinjiang, Shah Maqsud, died. In policies carried over from the Qing era, the Khan had been allowed to continue his hereditary rule over the area consistent with the principles of feudalism or satrapy. The importance of Hami territory, strategically located straddling the main road linking the province to Eastern China and rich in undeveloped farmland, together with a desire by the government to consolidate power and eliminate the old practice of indirect rule, led Jin to abolish the Khanate and assert direct rule upon Shah Maqsud's death. Jin Shuren then proceeded to double agricultural taxes upon the local Uyghur population, expropriated choice farmland, and distributed it among Han Chinese refugees from neighboring Gansu province, subsidizing their efforts and resettling displaced Uyghurs on poor-quality land near the desert. The new garrison stationed in Hami proved even more antagonizing, and by 1931, scattered revolts, mobs, and resistance movements were emerging throughout the area. According to British missionaries Mildred Cable and Francesca French, who were resident in the Kumul area during and shortly after Jin's annexation of the Kumul Khanate, a rising against Jin Shuren was being systematically planned by prominent Kumulliks. Camels and mules were requisitioned to transport weapons, ammunition and stocks of food over little-known tracks to two former summer Khan's palaces in Aratam on the foot of Karlik Tagh Mountains and one at the natural fortress of Bardash set high in Karlik Tagh. The final straw was in April 1931 when an ethnic Chinese officer and tax collector named Chang Mu wished to marry a Uyghur girl from a village Hsiao-Pu outside Hami. Uyghur accounts usually claim that the girl was raped or the family coerced, but as Islamic law forbids Muslim girls to marry non-Muslim men it was clearly offensive to the Uyghur community. Rebellion broke out on the night of April 4, 1931, with a massacre of Chang and his 32 soldiers at the wedding ceremony; 100 Han Chinese families of refugees from Gansu also were killed, altogether with Chinese garrisons in outposts at villages Tu-lu-Hu and Lao-mao-hu near Kumul. It was not confined