Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages. Sanping Chen

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СКАЧАТЬ 1149–61) also went through an extensive process of sinicization prior to his disastrous military expedition to unify China.⁷⁷

      However, since the collapse of the Western Jin, the political and cultural “legitimacy” had always been regarded, by people in both the south and north, as residing with the Southern dynasties (Bei Qi shu [The History of the Northern Qi Dynasty] 24.347–48). The Sui/Tang regime spared no effort in overcoming this politico-cultural obstacle. One of the crucial endeavors was to present themselves as having been Hàn Chinese all along. Various post-Islamic-conquest Iranian dynasties of native and Turkic origins did exactly the same to achieve political legitimacy.⁷⁸ The appearance of the sinicization bandwagon in the blood tanistry struggles of the Tuoba's Sui and Tang successors is thus a natural extension of this conscious effort.

      Few authors have paid attention to the acute ethnic strife, especially in the Northern Zhou domain, just prior to the Sui/Tang unification of the country. An important reason was the cover-up and fence-mending efforts by these two regimes. A good example was the sack by the Northern Zhou forces of the city of Jiangling in 554, the temporary capital of the southern Liang house and an established cultural centre. The brutality, horror, and in particular the large-scale and indiscriminate enslavement of ethnic Southern Hàns, all social strata included, would certainly have paled the atrocities allegedly committed by the Manchus in conquering southern China. But for obvious political reasons, not the least of which was the fact that the fathers and grandfathers of the Sui/Tang ruling clique were active participants in this most savage feat, only sporadic pieces of evidence of the actual atrocity were preserved, while deeds hard to gloss over like the burning of the Liang royal library were conveniently blamed on the victims' own acts (ZZTJ 165.5121). Today one can only present very brief discussions of the savageries of the Northern Zhou army based on some sporadic data.⁷⁹

      It is simply unbelievable that memories of such atrocities would be forgotten in a matter of a few decades when the Sui, followed by the Tang, came to power. In this context we can understand the obsession these two regimes had with their “politically correct” ethnic images, as well as the utility of the bandwagon of sinicization in succession struggles. For instance, the famed aversion to the character hu, “foreign,” by the Emperor Yangdi or his father, Emperor Wendi, was therefore in my view not caused by some arrogant sinocentricism as most authors have alleged, but was dictated by the need for political legitimacy as perceived by the Sui rulers and the ethnic skeletons in the Yang family's closet.

      It is also interesting to examine the role of religion in this context. Many authors including Arthur Wright have noted that Emperor Yangdi's patronage of the southern Buddhist schools was politically motivated. But few seemed to have recognized the ethnic factor here: the Sui was evidently using Buddhism to help bridge the ethnic divide, a feeling that must have been very strong after the Jiangling atrocity, whose major perpetrators included Emperor Yangdi's very grandfather Yang Zhong. The latter actually bore a “Barbarian” surname, Puliuru, during the Northern Zhou's bloody conquest of the southern state.

      The utility of religion became even more evident in the house of Tang. After the short-lived Sui, the early Tang emperors were no great patrons of the “foreign” religion, namely Buddhism, that had failed to prolong their predecessor's mandate of heaven. For the urgent need of political legitimacy, the Tang imperial house found an even better solution than the southern Buddhism schools to mask the clan's non-Hàn origin: to identify themselves as the descendants of Li Er (Laozi), the alleged founder of Taoism.

      A striking parallel can be found among the Safavids, the founder of the most splendid post-Turkmen dynasty in Iran that was largely responsible for the now entrenched Shi'a heritage in that country. With a questionable claim of native Iranian (or rather Kurdish) origin,⁸⁰ the clan's family language was nevertheless Turkic Azeri.⁸¹ For obvious politico-religious considerations, particularly an authentic Shi'a origin, the family falsified a genealogy from one of the Twelver Imams and “systematically destroyed any evidence” that would imply otherwise.⁸² In this regard the Mongols certainly had the fewest worldly obstacles in portraying Genghis Khan as the incarnation of a Buddhist universal emperor to legitimize their rule of a world empire.⁸³

      This political dimension of religion has important bearings on the issue of blood tanistry struggles, the case between Li Shimin and Crown Prince Jian-cheng in particular. Failure to recognize this political and, as we shall see, ethnic aspect led Arthur Wright⁸⁴ to question the insightful observation by Tang Yongtong⁸⁵ that, in this struggle, the Buddhists were on the side of the elder brother (Wright's erroneous notion has been all but refuted, albeit implicitly, by Stanley Weinstein).⁸⁶

      As a “foreign” religion, the Buddhism establishment in China had a vested interest in the imperial house's acknowledgment of its non-Hàn origin and heritage. The church must have actively countered any opposite move. As described before, the famous monk Falin openly slandered the imperial family's ethnic origin claiming its descent from the Tuoba. Proceeding from my examination of the role of sinicization in succession struggles, it was very natural that the Buddhist church was behind the crown prince, as Tang Yongtong has observed. Meanwhile the Taoists rallied to the challenger Li Shimin, as shown by the cases of two Taoist priests (Jiu Tang shu 191.5089, 192.5125; Xin Tang shu 204.5804–5.). It is telling that when Fang Xuanling and Du Ruhui, the two most trusted followers of Li Shimin, sneaked back to the capital to participate in the Xuanwu Gate coup d'état, they reportedly disguised themselves as Taoists (ZZTJ 191.6009). Emperor Taizong's edict of 637 elevating Taoism to a higher status than Buddhism⁸⁷ was a most natural reward for this support. Similarly, this could also explain Empress Wu Zetian's patronage of the “foreign” Buddhism in her bid to succeed her husband and become an unprecedented woman emperor against every Hàn Chinese custom and principle.

       A Fox Dies with Its Head Pointing to Home Hill

      In addition to the incessant succession struggles of the early Tang examined earlier, I add a brief section here on another angle from which to examine the ethnic identity of the Tang royal house.⁸⁸

      The Chinese idiom used as the title of this section conveys the general phenomenon that one goes back to one's roots in one's last days. It can also be used to indicate the belief that one's truest feelings are revealed while in death throes. The latter can apply to both people and institutions.

      Another heavily studied subject regarding the early Tang emperors hardly touched upon so far in this chapter is the imperial title tiankehan, or heavenly Qaghan,⁸⁹ first assumed by Emperor Taizong. This imperial title was primarily for symbolizing and embodying a Tang emperor's sovereignty over the tribal groups on the Steppe. It is astonishingly similar to a Qing emperor's epithet of great khan used with the latter's Manchu, Mongol, and other ethnic subjects.

      Most historians have represented Emperor Taizong's adoption of the title heavenly Qaghan as a cynical political ploy to neutralize the threat of Türk power in the late 620s. But as Denis Twitchett astutely remarked, it was the emperor's “Turkic identity” that was essential in his accepting this new title. Emperor's Taizong's true feelings in this regard are revealed by what transpired near the end of his life. After his return from the abortive campaign against Koguryo in the autumn of 645, Emperor Taizong was chronically and seriously ill, so much so that when he arrived back in the Tang capital in the third month of 646 he withdrew from his court duties and appointed his heir apparent (future emperor Gaozong) as acting regent for long periods and avoided making decisions himself. Yet he clearly felt that maintaining his standing among the Steppe peoples was of such overriding importance that in the sixth month of 646 he decided to make an exhausting journey to the frontier prefect of Lingzhou for a meeting with the leadership of the Steppe peoples to enable them to reassert their allegiance and proclaim him once more as their heavenly Qaghan, again leaving the heir apparent to act as regent at the capital. The journey took more than two months, and his exertions led to a recurrence and aggravation of СКАЧАТЬ