Focusing on the local printing and publishing activities revolving around Chinese Muslims’ travels to the Middle East in the early twentieth century, with a case study, this paper analyzes the relations between the travellers and Chinese Muslim’s local publications, Muslim intellectuals’ publishing practice, and the dissemination and readership of knowledge about the Middle East in China. It argues that the travelling to the Middle East provided resources for the Chinese Muslim publishing, and the knowledge produced during the travelling was spread among the local people through the publications and religious and non-religious assemblies, creating a local “social imagination” about the Islamic world. The early twentieth century witnessed a burst of encounters of Chinese Muslims and the Middle East. In the 1920s and 1930s, several Chinese Muslim intellectuals went to the Middle East for Hajj, education and cultural exchange. The travellers to the Middle East interacted with the Muslim press at the time, and the experience of different space-time provided them with writing inspirations and subjects. They formed a writing and translating group, who took advantage of their experience in the Middle East and expanded the international perspective of Chinese Muslim publishing. The publication and dissemination of the travelogues and news made it possible for the experience to reach wider Chinese audiences. With the help of the press and other means of publicity, the general public was also involved in the sharing of information about the Middle East. The travelogues and news, as a kind of Islamic culture spread in the Chinese language, played a role in the formation of collective identity among Chinese Muslims who were at the margins of the Islamic world. The experience of Zhao Zhenwu (1895-1938), a famous Chinese Muslim scholar, represented the trajectory of the travellers’ activities to the Middle East. They realized their own cultural accomplishment during the travel and constructed the active cultural communication network. With the case study of Zhao Zhenwu, this paper also shows the formation and significance of the cultural communication network of Chinese Muslim intellectuals.