Prologue: Defining Our Arenas
As the thinker Zhuang Zhou (fl. fourth century bce) observed long ago, the world is a vast ocean of great currents and little eddies, all part of the larger world, but each with a meaning in and of itself. But because of our need to impose order, of a sort, upon chaos, we humans regularly attempt to limit the limitless, and stretch our manufactured labels across the world. And then, of course, we confuse our labels with the world itself.
In this volume we will examine a mid-size eddy that took shape in the early centuries of the Common Era among the disparate peoples and uneven terrains of East Asia. This was a new people—the *Taghbach (Ch. Tuoba)—who emerged in the highlands south of the Yinshan Mountains in modern Inner Mongolia to create a new sort of empire in continental East Asia, the Northern Wei (386–534).1 The underlying aim of this study will be to make an effort at least to see this regime in and of itself, attempting to look past the various sets of labels that have from the beginning been imposed upon it; the cages in which history constructors have attempted to place it.
History, of course, is always incomplete, consisting largely of what the people who write history have chosen—consciously or unconsciously—to write about, usefully supplemented by material remains, to the degree that coffins and drinking cups can describe a world. Since the people who created Northern Wei were an oral culture of Inner Asian derivation, the main textual account of their history composed by writers recruited from among their subjects in the literate Chinese world, we really have only glimpses of the women and men who brought that state into being. The incomplete nature of our knowledge of these people is portrayed—both physically and metaphorically—in this book’s cover photo, a glimpse of such an individual from the damaged wall of a mid-sixth-century tomb.2 Unfortunately, all we get of such people are glimpses. For the most part,
1. Here, and elsewhere, the asterisk indicates a reconstructed term, not taken from actual text.
2. The tomb, located at Xinzhou, just south of the Datong Basin, the fifth-century seat of Northern Wei power, seems to date from the sixth-century successor regimes, Eastern Wei or Northern Qi: see Shanxisheng kao gu yan
at least, their own words are not heard; there is no Secret History of the Mongols we can read alongside the histories that emerged from within Chinese tradition. An effort needs to be made to see something of the complexity of such figures in the particular age under consideration here. And that, to make clear, is the point of this book.
Each form that emerges from the stuff of the world has, of course, its own importance. But Northern Wei is also important in the broader currents of time in that it is the earliest major example of the new sort of East Asian empire that began to emerge in the early centuries ce, in the aftermath of collapse of the Han and Xiongnu empires.3 Formed by armies organized from out of Inner Asian populations, states of this sort would go on over the next 1,000 years or more repeatedly to extend rule over Chinese populations in the highly productive lowlands to the south.4 These were regimes such as those of the Khitans (10th–12th centuries) and the Jurchen (12th–13th centuries), the Mongols (13th–14th centuries) and the Manchus (17th–20th centuries), which though showing evolution and significant difference from one to the next, would as a category dominate much of East Asian history. * * *
Our discussion needs to begin with straightforward (if tentative) definitions of the main geographical labels that will be applied in this study: Inner Asia, Central Asia, and the Chinese world. Various scholars use these in various ways, at times without sufficient explanation. The set of definitions put forth here is created for a particular purpose—the history of Northern Wei. They took shape on the basis of specifics of geography, historical role, and contiguity of cultures and languages
jiu suo 山西省考古研究所 et al., “Shanxi Xinzhoushi Jiuyuangang Bei chao bi hua mu” 山西忻州市九原岗北朝 壁画墓, Kao gu 2015.7: 51–74. This particular photo from the tomb is taken from: http://www.gov.cn/jrzg/2013-12/ 25/content_2554334.htm; 4 October 2022.
3. The distinctive nature of Northern Wei in the history of East Asia, and of the Chinese world, is observed by, among others, Charles Holcombe in his The Genesis of East Asia: 221 B.C.–A.D. 907 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), 131–44. In his important recently published book, The Jiankang Empire in Chinese and World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 7, Andrew Chittick refers to this sort of state as “Sino-steppe empires.”
4. An early but still useful discussion of relationships between Chinese worlds and those of Inner Asia is given in Owen Lattimore, The Inner Asian Frontier of China (Boston: Beacon Press, 1951). More problematic but still frequently cited is Thomas Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989); see the review by Ruth Dunnell in JAS 50.1 (1991): 126–27. A more recent summation and debate with Barfield is given in Nicola Di Cosmo, “China-Steppe Relations in Historical Perspective,” in Complexity of Interaction along the Eurasian Steppe Zone in the First Millennium CE, ed. Jan Bemmann and Michael Schmauder (Bonn: Vor- und Frühgeschichtliche Archäologie, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, 2015), 49–72. Di Cosmo’s main point here is to reject Barfield’s notion that Inner Asian states emerged in reaction to developments in the Chinese world; instead, he insists that they emerged of themselves, far from the frontier, through internal Inner Asian struggles, and only then turned toward the rich products of the Chinese world. This idea will be interesting to follow through our discussion of Northern Wei in the following chapters; it is also interesting to compare it, mutatis mutandis, with the appearance in the 16th and 17th centuries of European states on the world stage, which in the midst of centuries of ongoing internal struggle turned outward to harvest the wealth of more developed parts of the world.
seen through study of that regime. Others, concentrating on different periods, may well define them differently.
Thus, “Inner Asia” refers here to the high, relatively dry grasslands that extend for more than 500 miles north of the Tianshan and Yinshan mountain chains, and stretch from Ukraine, through Kazakhstan into the territories of Mongolia and the Inner Mongolia province of the modern Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo (the “People’s Republic of China,” hereafter PRC). Since the collapse of the Xiongnu empire in the first century ce, these lands of desert and grass have historically been dominated by groups speaking Mongolic and Turkic languages. Though geographically and ecologically quite distinct, the great northeastern river valley of Manchuria might for this period at least be included on an honorary basis, still playing a relatively minor part in the larger East Asian world.
Our “Central Asia” consists of the world of mountains and deserts that lies west of the Gansu Corridor and its northwestern terminus, the modern PRC city of Jiuquan, and includes the Tarim Basin and the Pamirs to the edges of the Persian and South Asian worlds. The populations of these regions have been more diverse than those of Inner Asia, including Turkic groups (parts of this region have come to be called “Turkestan”), but also Iranians and other IndoEuropean groups. Though nomads frequently controlled these regions, and at times physically relocated to inhabit them, they are in nature quite different from the Inner Asian territories to the north, defined by oasis states that were key points on the ancient international trade routes that have come to be called the “Silk Roads.”
The Chinese world emerged more than 3,000 years ago as the “heartland” or “hub” of East Asia. Centered on the densely populated lowlands of East Asia’s two great rivers, the Yellow River and the Yangtze (though certainly extending beyond), these lands formed a productive agricultural economy that became the base of rich forms of material production and cultural influence. Given a unity of a sort by a set of closely related languages, Chinese peoples have also been united by a shared, “literary” Chinese, related to but distinct from the spoken tongues.5 Central to the body of texts enshrined in Literary Chinese was the original Chinese canon, a set of authoritative “classics” believed for the most part to date back to the ancient Zhou dynasty (1045/1040–256 bce), and passed on from generation to generation by the Ru, the “men of the book,” or “text masters,” who in English are often referred to as “Confucians.” Drawing on their canon, the Ru portrayed a vision of the proper order of state and society, along with a distinct set of ethics, centered on the duty of child to parent (see more discussion of this in Chapter 3).
5. See Jerry Norman, Chinese (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Chapter 4.
In using the term “Chinese world,” it must, of course, be acknowledged that one could also refer to an “Inner Asian world,” or “the world of Central Asia.” There is not, however, the same need, since for neither Inner Asia nor Central Asia is there the assumption embedded in the term “China” that there is somehow a rough contiguity of political and cultural boundaries. In his recent study of The Jiankang Empire, Andrew Chittick has properly reminded us of the problematic nature of the terms “China” and “Chinese,” which are “convenient shorthand, a sweeping generalization for many different things.”6 Most pointedly, until perhaps the early modern period, there was not a unified, self-conscious “Chinese” ethnicity. In his study of the formation and nature of the Jiankang empire, Chittick prefers to look at particular groups along the Yangtze, which had their own vernacular languages (in some cases perhaps not even of the Sinitic language family), and their own local interests and loyalties. “China” is thus divided by Chittick into a “Sino-steppe Zone” centered on the Yellow River plains and a “Sino-Southeast Asian Zone” along the Yangtze.
These are good points, and rethinking is needed on these matters. It will be noted, however, that there is a “Sino-” in each of those zones. If a shared “Chinese” ethnicity did not emerge from the Han empire, with common action and a clear sense of the Other, this author does see an evolving “Chinese” cultural field, the “seamless web” described long ago in lecture heard from the author’s teacher, Frederick Mote. Whether or not the rough-and-ready generals who held the throne at Jiankang always listened to them, there were in that city learned gentlemen—Ru—who exercised some level of authority by controlling and reciting texts in a written language that, though different from their own spoken, was clearly related to it. Competitions and debates can be seen with their cousins in the Yellow River region (“cousins” here used both metaphorically and literally). Their situation was simply not the same as that of the broader “Sinosphere,” the world where the Chinese classics had taken root within elites but the native language was not Chinese.
Thus, this author will continue to use the “convenient shorthand” of “Chinese” in this book, perhaps particularly because, as will be seen in discussion below, there was in the Yellow River region at least a clear distinction between those, on the one hand, who spoke a Chinese language, and claimed descent from the vanished Han empire; and, on the other hand, the Northern Wei overlords, whose mother tongue continued for many generations to be Inner Asian.7
6. Chittick, The Jiankang Empire, 10–11; and this author’s review of the book in EMC 26 (2020): 114–19. Chittick is building on concerns raised by others in the last few years, including Hugh Clark, “What’s the Matter with China? A Critique of Teleological History,” JAS 77.2 (2018): 295–314; and Victor Mair, “The North(west)ern Peoples and the Recurrent Origins of the ‘Chinese’ State,” in Teleology of the Modern Nation-State: Japan and China, ed. Joshua Fogel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 46–84.
7. Though these groups grew together over the centuries, clear distinction can still be seen in the sixth century in a famous comment of the military man Gao Huan (496–547), contrasting Xianbei and “people of Han”: Zi zhi tong jian [hereafter ZZTJ] 157.4882. Yang Shaoyun, in his “Becoming Zhongguo, Becoming Han: Tracing and
The term “China,” however, will be put aside. Though it can be argued that seamless cultural webs do exist, those webs never fit precisely into the political limits of states; sometimes not really at all. A “Chinese world” perhaps corresponded most closely with state lines during the empire of Qin and Han, from which in many ways it was birthed (including new forms of administrative and social organization, which through a network of walled government centers allowed for efficient counting and taxation of the Han ren, “people of Han”). Good argument can be made that “China,” the label used in various forms among the Germanic and Romance languages, derives from the great unifying power, “Qin.”8 The real complexity of the situation, however, immediately becomes apparent in the term used by Russians and others to refer to at least part of these same territories: “Kitai”—“Cathay”—which was taken from an empire centered in Inner Asia that controlled and extracted wealth from a part of the Chinese world, but actually quite a small part.
With the Khitan we see the dominant model of the East Asian state that first took shape under Northern Wei. Over many centuries, such empires controlled parts at least of both Inner Asia and the Chinese territories, with different forms of administration used in different parts of the realm, and complex cultural struggles, interactions, and entanglements among the originally distinct populations.
The term “China” (perhaps as opposed to “Chinese”) is thus of abstract and elusive meaning. If used, it needs to be used with care, with clear explanation of its meaning in any particular application. For this author, “Chinese world” is preferable, referring to a field of cultural sway and economic activity, not to any particular political entity. This field would, of course, exert enormous influence over Northern Wei, as did the Inner Asian world from which its founders originally emerged. The modern scholar Luo Xin has summed this up by saying that states such as Northern Wei “are a part of ancient Chinese history,” but at the same time “an integral part” of Inner Asia.9 But in this study our main aim will be to look on Northern Wei in and of itself, to locate its people in the particular
Reconceptualizing Ethnicity in Ancient North China, 770 B.C.–A.D. 581” (MA thesis, National University of Singapore, 2007), 79–83, discusses development in the Yellow River region in the period under discussion of the term “Han ren” as an identity label, even if that term did not yet refer to a fully shaped ethnicity. Chittick (The Jiankang Empire, 35), for his part, constructed a term of his own for people from the Yellow River who fled south with the empire’s collapse: zhong ren 中人, drawing on the concept of the Yellow River plains as containing the “central states” 中國
8. Derk Bodde, “The State and Empire of Ch’in,” in Cambridge History of China, Vol. 1, The Ch’in and Han Empires, 221 B.C.–A.D. 220, ed. Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 20.
9. Luo Xin, “Chinese and Inner Asian Perspectives on the History of the Northern Dynasties (386–589) in Chinese Historiography,” in Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity: Rome, China, Iran, and the Steppe, ca. 250–750, ed. Nicola Di Cosmo and Michael Maas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 168.
Prologue: Defining Our Arenas
places—on the hills, along the slopes—they themselves knew and loved, and to try at least to refer to its people by names they themselves might recognize.
Those names have not survived in their original forms. From a language related to Mongolic, they come down to us only in transcriptions in Chinese characters, scattered through Chinese histories.10 At this early point in the study we will touch on only one: the original name of Northern Wei’s ruling clan. This has come down to us as 拓跋, pronounced in modern Mandarin as “Tuoba” (reconstructed in Middle Chinese as *Thaek-beat),11 but also appears on an eighth-century Orkhon stele in the Turkic version of “Tabgatch.” It has, however, been plausibly suggested on the basis of broader linguistic studies that in Turkic the inner consonants were reversed (a metathesis) and that the original name— as rendered most recently by Andrew Shimunek—was “*Taghbach.”12 This is, of course, hypothetical reconstruction. But for this author, at least, that is preferable to use of the transcription “Tuoba,” the modern Mandarin pronunciation of the Chinese characters that 1,500 years ago were used to transcribe the actual name, and so if anything even further from the original than *Taghbach.13 From this point on, we will use “Taghbach” to refer to our subjects’ name, and having made clear that this is a reconstruction, the asterisk will be put aside (as will also be the case with other frequently seen reconstructions).
There are several interpretations of the meaning of the name Taghbach. The canonical Chinese history of Northern Wei, Wei shu, says it is “ruler of the earth,” or more literally “earth ruler,” tagh (Middle Chinese *thaek) meaning “earth,” and bach (MC *beat) meaning “ruler.” This theory is supported by among others the modern scholar Christopher Beckwith.14 Making a number of suggestions, Peter Boodberg has said his favorite is “mountain-crossers,” which conforms
10. The Northern Wei “national language,” guo yu, has been characterized by Andrew Shimunek, Languages of Ancient Southern Mongolia and North China: A Historical-Comparative Study of the Serbi or Xianbei Branch of the Serbi-Mongolic Language Family (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2017), 13, as of the *Serbi (Xianbei) language family, a sister of the Mongolic languages, both descending from “proto-Serbi-Mongolic.”
11. Reconstruction of the Middle Chinese is taken from Paul Kroll, A Student’s Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015), 605, 6 (and by Kroll from William H. Baxter and Laurent Sagart, Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014]).
12. Shimunek, Languages of Ancient Southern Mongolia and North China, xxvi, 52; borrowing from Christopher Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Asia from the Bronze Age to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 103 note 29, where he renders the name *Taghbač. For more discussion, see also Peter Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples: Ethnogenesis and State-formation in Medieval and Early Modern Eurasia and the Middle East (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1992), 73–74.
13. Tim Robinson put it so well, for a different part of the world, in his Connemara: Listening to the Wind (Dublin and New York: Penguin Ireland, 2006), 81: “Irish placenames dry out when anglicized, like twigs snapped off from a tree. And frequently the places too are degraded, left open to exploitation for lack of a comprehensible name to point out their natures or recall their histories.”
14. Wei shu [hereafter WS] 1.1. Christopher Beckwith, “On the Chinese Names for Tibet, Tabghatch and the Turks,” Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 14 (2005): 10–12, suggests this is a borrowing from Chinese. Discussion of these issues goes back to Uchida Ginpū 内田吟風, Kita Ajia shi kenkyū 北アジア史研究, Vol. 2, Senpi Jūzen Tokketsu hen 鮮卑柔然突厥篇 (Kyōto: Dōhōsha, 1975), 96. While Beckwith in the article cited above suggests bach derives from the Indic word pati, “ruler,” An-king Lim, “On the Etymology of T’o-pa,” Central Asiatic Journal 44.1 (2000): 40, suggests it is transcription of the Turkic term “beg,” “lord,” which we’ll see in Chapter 1.
to Taghbach mythology given in Wei shu’s “Prefatory Annals” (though that is mythology).15 Others have proposed that the name derives from intermarriage of *Serbi (Chinese Xianbei, the language group of which the Taghbach originally formed a part) with Xiongnu, meaning “*Serbi father, Xiongnu mother.”16 Whether or not this is the actual origin of the name, we do know that the Taghbach developed from mixed populations, and for generations had intermarried with groups affiliated with the Xiongnu. Other suggestions are found as well.17 When mulling these over, it is useful to keep in mind Boodberg’s wisdom in saying that “a primary ethnic name has no etymology”;18 and to wonder whether the Northern Wei emperors—who as we shall see below did not quite know where their forebears had lived—actually knew the meaning of the name their ancestors had at some point taken up. How often does an American named “Smith” think of the metal-work of far-off ancestors?
Going beyond this, however, it needs to be acknowledged that the Wei lords were not even simply the “Taghbach.” As is the case with human beings in general, at least some elements of this group were in a never-ending process of transformation, along multiple lines. At a certain point, as we shall see below, a Taghbach monarch abandoned that name and came to style his line with the Chinese name “Yuan.” The dynastic name “Wei” itself was a relatively late addition. We’ll try to keep up with these people in the course of their changes.
But a core did persist through these changes. Across the centuries, our evolving royal line built and led cavalry armies, organized in various ways, to exert control over other peoples and new territories—to build an empire. When they abandoned such activities, the dynasty quickly fell. Power came from the point of an arrow; abandonment of the mounted archer led to its disappearance.19
15. Peter Boodberg, “The Language of the T’o-Pa Wei,” rpt. in Selected Works of Peter A. Boodberg, ed. Alvin P. Cohen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 238–39.
16. Ma Changshou, 馬長壽, Wuhuan yu Xianbei 烏桓與鮮卑 (Shanghai: Shanghai ren min chu ban she, 1962), 30–33. “*Serbi” is, of course, also a reconstruction (see Shimunek, Languages of Ancient Southern Mongolia and North China, 39) from the Chinese transcription鮮卑, pronounced in modern Mandarin as “Xianbei,” in the Middle Chinese reconstruction *Sjen pjie (Kroll, Student’s Dictionary, 493, 11). Hereafter, the asterisk on the name will be dropped. An even more frequently used reconstruction is *Särbi, put forth by E. G. Pulleyblank, “The Chinese and Their Neighbors in Prehistoric and Early Historic Times,” in The Origins of Chinese Civilization, ed. David N. Keightley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 453. The author must make clear that he has adopted the Shimunek version out of a desire for consistency; no claim is made as to which of these is the more reliable.
17. See Boodberg, “Marginalia to the Histories of the Northern Dynasties,” rpt. in Selected Works of Peter A. Boodberg, 280–83; and ZZTJ 77:2459.
18. Boodberg, “Marginalia to the Histories of the Northern Dynasties,” 280.
19. For an example of persistence over time, see the study by Bao Yuzhu 宝玉柱 of a Northern Wei guard unit, the Karqin, that in later centuries evolved into a distinct Inner Asian polity that played a role in the Mongols’ empire: “Kalaqin yuan liu: Bei Wei shi qi de Helazhen 喀喇沁源流：北魏时期的曷剌真,” Man yu yan jiu (2013.1): 96–104. Descendants of the Taghbach royal house also appear to have been the organizers of the later Tangut regime: see the discussion of Ruth Dunnell in her The Great State of High and White: Buddhism and State Formation in Eleventh-Century Xia (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996), 40–45.
On to some practical matters.
In terms of primary (Chinese) textual sources, for the “standard”—in some sense the canonical—dynastic histories and for the great early modern Chinese history, Zi zhi tong jian, I use the Zhonghua shu ju editions, as noted in the list of abbreviations.
Parts of Wei shu—the dynasty’s “standard” history within the Chinese historiographical tradition—have been lost, interestingly, often key chapters on princes and empresses (see discussion in Chapter 2).20 These were reconstructed during the early modern Song dynasty largely on the basis of Bei shi, a seventhcentury overview of the states—including Northern Wei—that ruled the Yellow River region in the fifth and sixth centuries. For passages from Wei shu chapters reconstructed using Bei shi, I will first cite Bei shi, then Wei shu in parentheses. When a Wei shu chapter is older than its equivalent in Bei shi, unless there is a significant discrepancy I will cite only Wei shu, and not include the derivative passage from Bei shi.
Over the last several decades there has emerged a huge and rapidly growing body of secondary study, interpreting and reinterpreting the slender body of primary sources that has come down to us. Some is very good; much is entangled in modern efforts to assert correspondence of early medieval peoples and regimes with the accident of contemporary state lines. For this author, among the best in Chinese has been the work of earlier scholars such as Lü Simian and Tang Zhangru; and more recently, Yan Yaozhong and Luo Xin. In Japanese, perhaps the most important works are those of Maeda Masana, Tamura Jitsuzō, Kawamoto Yoshiaki, and Matsushita Ken’ichi. The textual sources have, of course, also been greatly enriched by increasingly sophisticated interpretation of material remains: among the most important recent such works are those of Albert Dien, Bonnie Cheng and Chin-yin Tseng, and the PhD thesis of Zhang Fan that will no doubt soon become a monograph. This book will not, however, attempt to be a restatement of the contemporary field of study of “early medieval China”; in interest of space, citation of secondary sources has been selective.
The organization of time is a key way in which societies create a distinct identity. In the traditional Chinese world from which the histories we use derive, years were measured by monarchs’ reign periods, and the year itself on the basis of a lunar calendar; this system was then adopted by the Taghbach lords. But compromising with the demands of modernity, this work places events in the “Common Era” calendar. Years of the Common Era—the Gregorian calendar— do not, of course, precisely match those of traditional Chinese calendar that is
20. See discussion of these chapters in two articles by Jennifer Holmgren in Monumenta Serica, Vol. 35 (1981–1983): “Social Mobility in the Northern Dynasties: A Case Study of the Feng of Northern Yen” (19–32) and “Women and Political Power in the Traditional T’o-Pa Elite: A Preliminary Study of the Biographies of Empresses in the Wei-Shu” (33–74).
Prologue: Defining Our Arenas xxv
the basis for our histories; I will use the ordinal assignment given in the modern Zhonghua shu ju edition of Zi zhi tong jian, while making sure to describe the season in which events took place, and for a few key events, place them in the Common Era calendar.
At certain places in the narrative I supply reconstructions of Middle Chinese. This is not so much an attempt to reconstruct the Taghbach guo yu, but to remind the reader that we are using a modern, Mandarin pronunciation of the characters being used for transcription of another people’s language.
For reconstruction of Middle Chinese, I have used Paul Kroll’s Student’s Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese, which draws on Baxter and Sagart’s Old Chinese (as noted in note 10). In these reconstructions of Middle Chinese, I have for the sake of convenience dropped the “-X” for rising and “-H” for departing tones as in the very limited uses being made here of this system, they confuse more than inform: as Baxter and Sagart themselves say, these are not necessarily accurate descriptions of sound, but only an attempt to place the character’s pronunciation on contemporary rhyme tables.21
21. Baxter and Sagart, Old Chinese, 14, 11.
