The Qingjing Mosque on Tumen Street is one of the most extraordinary buildings in China: an 11th-century mosque built by Arab merchants at the height of Quanzhou's cosmopolitan medieval period. The stone gateway, with its arched entrance and arabesque carvings in a style directly derived from Central Asian and Middle Eastern mosque architecture, stands incongruously among the Chinese commercial buildings around it. The prayer hall is a ruin open to the sky, its stone walls intact but its roof and timber interior long gone — the openness makes the Arabic inscriptions on the walls easier to read.
The mosque is still used by the small Muslim community in Quanzhou for Friday prayers. On non-prayer days it operates as a UNESCO heritage site with admission. The surrounding streets retain some character from the old Muslim quarter, and an adjacent building houses a small museum about the Arab presence in Song-dynasty Quanzhou. The mosque is a 10-minute walk from Kaiyuan Temple along Tumen Street.