Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages. Sanping Chen

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СКАЧАТЬ by none other than a Tuoba nobleman. According to Song shu (72.1857 and 74.1924) and ZZTJ (126.3979), there was a Tuoba nobleman named Tuoba Pulan. Careful comparison with Wei shu (4.104–5, 24.654, and 97.2140) reveals the nobleman's sinified name to be Zhangsun Lan.

      All these points combined leave little doubt that Mulan and Pulan were the same item in the contemporary “Barbarian” onomasticon, used as both clan names and given names in northern China during the period.

      Another possible transcription of the same root is the popular given name Fulian (b'iuk-liän). This name was widely attested, from Tuoba generals to even a qaghan of the Tuyuhun,²⁰ a nomadic people who had migrated from northeast China to the grassland bordering modern Tibet. In transcription data, the character fu is frequently interchangeable with bu (b'uo), fo (b'iust, primarily for transcribing “Buddha”), and so on, a subject I visit again. According to Louis Bazin,²¹ for transcribing “Barbarian” names the character lian (liän) represents an original län. This is attested by the case of the “Barbarian” name Youlian, which was said to mean “cloud,” or Mongol ä'ülän.22

      This probable form provides us with another interesting name-style correspondence. According to Bei Qi shu (20.283), an important “Barbarian” figure of the Northern Qi, namely Kudi (or Shedi) Fulian, had a style Zhongshan, “amid the mountains.” The relevance of this name will be demonstrated shortly.

       Preliminary Notes on the Meaning of Mulan

      More than half a century ago, Louis Bazin had already tried to identify the original Altaic word for the name Pulan (b'uk-lân or b'uok-lân), which as I have shown was just a variant of Mulan. His solutions ranged from boq, “excrement,” and buq, “bad temper,” to boγ, “bag for clothes”—hardly satisfactory, as Bazin himself acknowledged. Even with much expanded historical data at our disposal, such identification remains a difficult task.

      One has to first narrow the scope of the search. Given the two name-style correspondences cited earlier, and the strong cultural tradition among the Altaic people, many of whom roamed the Steppes with the herds, or hunted animals in the forests, I submit that the name Mulan/Pulan is most likely to have come from the animal kingdom, in sharp contrast to its meaning in Chinese.

      Let us look at the second character lan. Bazin took it as representing the Turkic plural suffix -lar, which, while phonetically not impossible, was unfortunately not substantiated by any Chinese transcription data regarding the Tuoba. In my opinion, a generic animal suffix -lān, to be further examined later, is the most likely interpretation in this case. A less likely possibility is an -n suffix in the Tuoba language with unknown grammatical function suggested by several other cases.²³

      This last possibility leads to a root b ‘uk-lâ of the name Mulan/Pulan in Middle Chinese, suggesting an Old Turkic word buγra, “camel stallion.” But this solution, except for the fact that it meets the “male, mighty” name-style correspondence, has several difficulties, both major and secondary, and is therefore hard to sustain.

      First, if we take the name Fulian as another form of the same root, then Kudi Fulian's style Zhongshan, “amid the mountains,” is difficult to reconcile with fulian, since that is a camel and not a forest animal.

      Second, there are both spatial and temporal problems with the “camel” solution. The early camel name attestations in the Altaic milieu, most prominently that of the Karakhanid Bughra Khan,²⁴ and several persons from the Western Türk Empire,²⁵ were not only of later periods but also from a region much to the west in Central Asia, where the camel was of great importance, whereas the Tuoba originated in forest regions in northeast China.

      However, the principal difficulty with the “camel” solution is cultural. As has been previously stated, after the collapse of the Western Jin, various nomad and former nomad groups dominated the political arena in northern China for many centuries, well into the first half of the Tang. During this long period, the Steppe cultures made enormous inroads into the Central Kingdom. Despite the stubborn sinocentric tradition of Chinese historiography and the heavily biased records, the fact that the descendants of the Tuoba and their northern brethren had dominated the Chinese world until at least the end of the Song, according to the Yuan dynasty historian Hu Sanxing, is bound to betray many of these northern traits, some of which were elaborated in the previous chapter. Chinese onomastics provides another good example, as it contains not only the “Barbarian” elements but also the strong influence of the Iranians and other Western Regions peoples, who had been an almost perpetual ally of the Steppe powers vis-à-vis China, a little studied subject for the Tuoba era. The sudden appearance and popularity of various theophoric personal names as examined in a later chapter is a particular case.

      This is where the primordial problem with a “camel” interpretation of Pulan/Mulan lies. Animal origin proper names, a cultural tradition enormously popular with the Altaic people, were widely attested in Chinese nomenclature during that time, reflecting the political dominance of the nomadic groups in northern China. Even animals abhorred or despised in Hàn Chinese culture but respected by the northern people, such as wolf and dog, were attested in the contemporary Chinese onomasticon, not just in surnames, but more importantly among given names (see cases cited in Chapter 3). To this author's knowledge, the camel, with a neutral or even positive cultural image in China and mentioned in “The Ballad of Mulan” (“She only begs for a camel that can march a thousand leagues a day”), was never attested in personal names in northern China during the entire period. The only suspicious case was the old Chinese surname Luo. The character meant a white horse with black mane but later became part of the word luotuo, “camel.” In Wei shu (113.3308) a “Barbarian” clan name Taluoba (t'â-lâk-b'uât) was sinified to Luo. In addition to the fact that a single character luo was never attested as referring to “camel” during that period, the original name cannot be linked to any Altaic word for “camel” unless one assumes that the middle character (luo) was an erroneous insertion and should be dropped. There is no evidence whatsoever for such a contention. The name conversion here follows the standard sound-based pattern of shortening a multicharacter “Barbarian” name to one of its original characters.

      As for the “camel” names borne by Turkic personalities of later periods, I am of the opinion that they were the result of Iranic influence. Moreover, I submit that camel personal names originated with the ancient Iranic groups, attested by such early cases as Zarathuštra, the presumed founder of Zoroastrianism. Mary boyce, among others, interprets the name as “he who can manage camels,” based on the Indo-Iranian root *uštra for “camel.”²⁶

       A Cervid Alternative

      A more likely Altaic cognate to Pulan/Mulan, in my opinion, is bulān (with phonetic variants like pulan, bolan, bülän, etc.). In various Altaic languages it means “elk,” “stag,” “moose,” “deer,” and so forth.²⁷ The most striking meaning is certainly al-Kašγarī 's definition of “a large wild animal…with one horn.”²⁸ The last interpretation is very important, because, as examined by Denis Sinor, it makes bulān the only “native” Altaic word for “unicorn.”²⁹ But this word's original meaning, as most scholars seem to agree, has to be “elk,” or a large, likely male, member of the Cervidae family.

      Semantically, these meanings would fit the name Pulan/Mulan perfectly regarding the two name-style relations revealed earlier, namely “male, mighty” and “amid the mountains.” No less important, the “unicorn” or “elk,” “deer” interpretation also solves the aforementioned main difficulty with the “camel” solution, namely attestation СКАЧАТЬ