This article considers the ways in which Chinese Muslims depicted themselves as central both to Chinese society and to the Muslim world in Chinese Muslim texts of the early modern period. Through the creation of origin myths attributing the Muslim presence in China to the direct interventions of the Prophet Muḥammad and the Chinese imperium, Chinese Muslims used their condition of displacement—that is, their separation from the heart-Lands of Islam—as the pivot for an identity linking them simultaneously to China and to the Muslim world. The article suggests that this use of displacement is a direct inversion of the position of early Arab travellers in China. In the writings of al-Sīrāfī and Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, for example, China is depicted as exotic and wholly foreign, a place where Muslims necessarily long for their distant home. In later Chinese Muslim writings, however, the Muslims of China emerge as vital both to the origins of Islam and to the integrity of the Chinese state. Displacement, a lamentable condition for al- Sīrāfī and Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, becomes the basis for a unique identity in Chinese Mushm myths of origin.