Kinmen or Quemoy (/kɪˈmɔɪ/; see also "Names" section below) is a small archipelago of several islands administered by the Republic of China (Taiwan): Greater Kinmen, Lesser Kinmen, and some islets. Administratively, it is Kinmen County of Fujian Province, ROC. The county is claimed by the People's Republic of China (PRC) as part of its own Fujian Province's Quanzhou Prefecture. It is geographically very near Xiamen, no more than 2 kilometers. Some islands of other counties, such as Wuchiu, were transferred to the jurisdiction of Kinmen County by the ROC government following its civil war defeat and retreat to Taiwan. Matsu is the other set of islands on the Fujian coast controlled by the Republic of China.

Kinmen was first named Jīnmén (金門; lit, "golden gate") in Chinese 1387 when the Hongwu Emperor of China's Ming Dynasty appointed a military officer to administer the island and protect it from wokou (pirate) attacks. The name, pronounced Jīnmén in the official Mandarin Chinese and Kim-mûi in the native Zhangzhou dialect of Hokkien Minnan. The various names used in English for the islands derive from these name.

Michael A. Szonyi (Chinese: 宋怡明; pinyin: Sòng Yímíng; born May 18, 1967) is Professor of Chinese History at Harvard University. His research focuses on the local history of southeast China, especially in the Ming dynasty, the history of Chinese popular religion, and Overseas Chinese history. He is currently studying the social history of the Ming Dynasty military. Szonyi has traced local cults from the Ming Dynasty and has found that some of these cults continue to exist. He hopes that his research on these traditions can help historians better understand the role of religion in establishing local social orders.

Szonyi received his BA from the University of Toronto and his D.Phil from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. After completing his doctorate, he worked at McGill University, but soon returned to his hometown to get married and teach at the University of Toronto, where he received tenure in 2002. Szonyi came to Harvard in 2005, and was named John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities in 2007 and Professor of Chinese History in 2009. Today he splits his time between Cambridge and London, Ontario, where his wife, Francine McKenzie, is a professor of international relations at the University of Western Ontario.