Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages. Sanping Chen

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       Chapter 1

      The Legacy of the Tuoba

      Xianbei: The Tang Dynasty

       An Old Open Secret

      In late autumn of the thirteenth year of Zhenguan (AD 639), under the reign of the second monarch of the Tang dynasty, Emperor Taizong, a major libel case broke out in the capital: a Taoist priest, Qin Shiying, accused Falin, a leading Buddhist monk in the metropolitan region, of “defaming the royal ancestry” by refuting the official claim that the imperial Li family descended from Laozi, the legendary founder of Taoism.¹ The catalyst of the case was the Tang imperial house's series of actions to promote the “native” Chinese religion allegedly created by their self-claimed sage/sacred forefather at the expense of the “foreign” Buddhism, raising the status of the former above that of the latter and resulting in strong reactions from the Buddhist establishment.

      It should be added that the incident occurred in an era during which family origins and clan membership were of critical importance, not just politically, but often more importantly for commanding cultural prestige. A few dozen old Hàn clans with their roots in northern China had for centuries dominated high society and consequently the officialdoms in both northern and southern China. They formed a quasi-aristocracy extremely difficult for outsiders to penetrate, whether ethnic Hàn or “Barbarian.” While politically trying to suppress the status of these families, the Tang imperial house was simultaneously compelled to play the same game by claiming its more recent pedigree from the prestigious Li clan of the Longxi region in northern China. Falin's “defamation” of the royal ancestry thus threatened not only the religious halo transmitted from the founder of Taoism but also the self-asserted Sinitic Longxi ancestry. The latter was, naturally, part and parcel of the Tang house's claim to legitimacy for ruling the vast Hàn populace.

      Monk Falin was duly arrested and went through several months of court proceedings, defending himself against various incriminating accusations. Finally, on a day in the last month of the Chinese year (January 640 of the Julian calendar), during an inquisition session attended by Emperor Taizong himself, the brave monk plainly declared, “According to my knowledge, the Dashe [clan] of the Tuoba is known in Tang language as the Li. From this descended Your Majesty's family, which did not come from the Longxi (Li) clan going back to Laozi.”² This blasphemous statement was followed by further scandalous declarations about the self-claimed royal Longxi Li lineage, including the accusation that the clan was the offspring of a slave turned impostor. Quoting Buddhist sutras and metaphors, Falin equated the Tang imperial house's forfeiture of its northern lineage from the “god-king” of the Tuoba of the Yin Mountains in Mongolia, and their adoption of the Taoist pedigree, to “replacing gold with chalcopyrite (copper iron sulfide),” “exchanging fine silk for burlap,” and even “abandoning a ‘jewel princess’ in order to liaise with a female slave.”³

      The emperor was naturally outraged, yet befitting his posthumous fame as one of the most tolerant and just monarchs in Chinese history, with a prankish sense of humor, he granted Falin seven days to practice what the hapless monk had previously preached in a Buddhism treatise, namely that reciting the name of the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara (Chinese name Guanyin) would produce a religious miracle, saving the pious caller of the sacred name from the executioner's ax. Evidently not quite ready for immediate martyrdom, Falin beat a humiliating retreat, which incidentally made the Buddhist source on which our story is based all the more believable: By claiming, on the day the miracle was due, that he had in the past seven days merely recited the emperor's name instead of that of Avalokiteśvara, Falin secured an imperial pardon, or rather the commuting of the death penalty to exile in remote Sichuan. More intriguingly, faced with the opposition of imperial court judges who wanted to uphold the mandatory capital punishment, Emperor Taizong explained that Falin's defamation of the royal ancestry “was not without foundation.”

      Emperor Taizong apparently recognized that the imperial clan's genealogical connections to the Tuoba nobles and other “Barbarian” families were open contemporary knowledge. For one thing, his own grandmother née Dugu, his mother née Dou, and his principal consort (and mother of the heir apparent) née Zhangsun were all indisputably of core Tuoba and other Xianbei descent. What monk Falin tried to reveal was that the Li clan's lineage on the paternal side very likely originated from the Tuoba too. The newest proof is the recent archaeological discovery that shows that another prominent Li clan of the period, namely that of Li Xian, a general-in-chief of the Northern Zhou, with the same claim to Longxi ancestry, was in fact of unmistakable Tuoba Xianbei descent.⁴

      Nonetheless, Falin's declaration, albeit an open secret to his contemporaries, finally crossed the line the imperial house had drawn in the sand for establishing and defending its legitimacy, that is, being the son of heaven in the Central Kingdom. In this context, Emperor Taizong's handling of the Falin case was a masterstroke, for in sparing Falin's life it showed the imperial benevolence, but in expelling the famous monk with many high-level political connections to a remote place from the metropolis, it sent a clear message about the high price to pay for defaming the royal ancestry. There is little doubt that measures were taken too to eliminate any compromising evidence such as that cited by the brave monk.

      The simple fact is that, after Falin's death, or one may say deferred martyrdom, on the twenty-third day of the seventh month in the lunar calendar, or August 15, 740, in Sichuan, barely seven months after his banishment from the Tang capital, the “Barbarian” origin of the Tang imperial house was never openly brought up again until more than five centuries later, in the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279), albeit at that time few solid records still remained to allow concrete and detailed examination of the real origin and characteristics of the Tang imperial house.

      A one-time open secret had become a true enigma.

       The Ethnic Identity of the Tang Imperial House

      The Tang went on to become one of the most splendid dynasties in Chinese history, as well as one of the most written about. But as foretold by the above story from Buddhist sources, the Tang royal family's own ethnic origin has been a controversy oft debated as a result of conflicting evidence, the well-documented fact that it had intermarried with various Tuoba Xianbei and other non-Hàn families for generations notwithstanding. The best and most important example is perhaps the noted Tang studies authority Chen Yinke (1890–1969), who wrote no fewer than four articles trying to prove the Li clan's native Hàn origin on the paternal side.⁵

      It may be observed that Chen's studies were written during a period of Japan's growing military threat to China and encroachment on Chinese territories, which led to increasing sensitivity toward alien rule, ancient as well as modern, in China. Despite his extensive experience in studying abroad, Chen Yinke СКАЧАТЬ