Ramadan ibn Alauddin
Ramadan ibn Alauddin (1312―April 11, 1349, رمضان ابن علاء الدين ) was a Yuan darughachi (governor) of Luchuan Prefecture in Rongzhou, Guangxi Province, of Muslim faith and Korean provenance. He served until his death in 1349. His existence is known only from an epitaph in the cemetery of the Huaisheng Mosque in Guangzhou. Ramadan is notable for being the first named Muslim from Korea, although it is unclear whether he was of Korean ethnicity. Historiography and popularization The first academic publication to discuss Ramadan, a Muslim from fourteenth-century Korea, was a 1989 paper about Islamic epitaphs at Guangzhou by the Chinese historians Yang Tang and Jiang Yongxing. The existence of Ramadan became popularized in South Korea in 2005, when the daily newspaper Hankook Ilbo published a story about Son Sang-ha, then ambassador-at-large of the country, visiting Guangzhou to see a replica of Ramadan's epitaph. In 2006, KBS, South Korea's national public broadcaster, produced a documentary about Islam in medieval Korea centering on Ramadan. Epitaph The life of Ramadan is known only from his epitaph in the cemetery of the Huaisheng Mosque in Guangzhou, China, originally located close to the grave said to be of Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas, a Companion