by John Keay
In essence the Shanyuan treaty of 1005 amounted to a damaging acknowledgement that empire was divisible and that non-Han rulers like the Khitan might also enjoy some pedigree of legitimacy – a Mandate, as it were, for ‘All-not-under-Heaven’. Though never dignified with formal recognition by China’s historians, this non-Han Mandate would also pass from ruler to ruler and might be transferred from dynasty to dynasty. Its holders, well versed in Han sovereignty, fully understood its implications; and had their history been written by their own historians rather than by Han scholars, it would surely have mapped the sometimes contested progress of this non-Han Mandate from Khitan to Jurchen, from Jurchen to Mongol, and from Mongol to Manchu (Qing) – by when, it might reasonably be claimed, the clash of the Mandates had been resolved in favour of the non-Han pedigree.
If the Khitan and the Jurchen had been exclusively nomadic herdsmen from Mongolia rather than substantially settled peoples from Manchuria, it would be tempting to call it ‘a steppe Mandate’. One might even trace it back through the Uighurs and the other Turkic peoples to the Xianbei and Xiongnu. But that would be to ignore another cardinal feature of these hybrid new empires of the north. Though enjoying the mobility, the consensual traditions of succession and the militant ethic of the tribal confederations of old, they now boasted institutions, accomplishments and ideologies that made for states as strong and stable as that of the Song. All, for instance, possessed or developed their own written scripts, recorded their own laws and minted their own coins. And most promoted the devotional practices of Buddhism, a universal faith rich in concepts of sovereignty and sources of prestige untainted by Han Confucianism.
It may, then, be helpful to think of China’s history post-950 as following a two-track narrative. The tracks diverge and converge with much interchange between them. China’s historians traditionally present the crossover as essentially one sided, with the non-Han northern rulers gradually adopting the superior cultural norms of the indigenous Han southerners. But evidence that Khitan, Jurchen, Mongol and Manchu were fully alert to what they saw as the dangers of creeping sinification might suggest otherwise. Certainly, non-Han regimes whose subjects were overwhelmingly Han had perforce to compromise, even conform. But so too, if careers were to prosper, did their Han adjutants and subordinates. While qaghans embraced imperial protocol, emperors adopted the more dictatorial attitudes of the qaghans. Bureaucrats took one step sideways, military men one step forwards. Empire itself would undergo a sea-change.
11
CAVING IN
1005–1235
THE GREAT STATE OF WHITE AND HIGH
UNTIL COMPARATIVELY RECENTLY, international excitement over the discoveries made along the Silk Road by foreign archaeological explorers – Japanese as well as Europeans such as Aurel Stein and the brilliant French scholar Paul Pelliot – somewhat obscured China’s own archaeological tradition. In such a historically conscious culture, the physical reclamation of the past had almost miraculous properties. Deciphering an ancient script or recovering some antique artefact linked present rulers to the illustrious dynasties of the past and enhanced their credibility. A Shang bronze unearthed by a mudslide turned the ill omen of flooding into a manifestation of heavenly approval; and the find of a Buddha statue conferred numinous prestige while emphasising that faith’s Chinese credentials. In similar vein the discovery of the First Emperor’s terracotta army so soon after the Cultural Revolution would be seen by some as sanctioning the reassertion of Party control by that professed admirer of the First Emperor’s authoritarianism, Mao Zedong. Throughout China’s history reverence for the antique has also inspired the imitation of ancient styles in verse, prose and painting, the concern with textual authenticity, the frequent readoption of archaic design elements, and not a little counterfeiting.
A less partisan approach to archaeology first emerged during the Song period. Ouyang Xiu, a noted reformer and cultural impresario as well as the author of the Five Dynasties History, encouraged archaeological study in the eleventh century; and in the early twelfth the husband-and-wife team of Zhao Mingcheng and Li Qingzhao collected and classified a vast range of antiquities that they then catalogued in a work on inscriptions in stone and bronze published in the 1120s. Until their intellectual idyll was brought to an abrupt end by the Jurchen capture of Kaifeng in 1127, scholar-bureaucrat Zhao provided the funds and scholarship, with Li, an outstanding poet and critic, acting as his muse and collaborator. Working 300 years before the Renaissance lent impetus to such pursuits in Europe, this devoted couple have been ‘credited with anticipating modern standards in the handling of archaeologically recovered objects’.1
Since discoveries forwarded to court were an excellent way of advancing one’s career, officials in the provinces made a point of tracking down antiquities; and so did local antiquarians, both lay and clerical. The philistine ignorance attributed, for instance, by Aurel Stein to Wang Yuanlu, the Daoist monk who had first discovered the great hoard at Dunhuang and was endeavouring to conserve it when Stein appeared, was probably disingenuous. Wang knew what he was parting with when he finally agreed to sell some of Dunhuang’s treasures; and he did so only because he needed cash for his restoration programme and perhaps believed Stein’s story about returning the archive to India, the supposed land of its provenance. Despite many instances of both casual and wilful destruction, indifference to the antique has seldom been a Chinese failing.
A century before Stein, in 1804 a carefree young official called Zhang Shu heard tell of an ancient stele in his native town of Wuwei. Then known as Liangzhou, Wuwei had been a Han, and subsequently Tang, garrison-town-cum-caravanserai on the Silk Road; it lies, in what was then good pastureland, about 250 kilometres (155 miles) north of Gansu’s now capital of Lanzhou. Home on sick leave at the time, Zhang Shu was ‘enjoying my leisure with a group of friends’ when it occurred to him that they might investigate the stele. It stood within the precincts of one of the town’s Buddhist monasteries and had been bricked up for as long as anyone could remember. According to the monk in charge, unbricking it would trigger a catastrophic hailstorm. Zhang and his friends promised to take full responsibility for any such mishap, and the monk at last agreed to the stele’s exposure. Some nearby labourers were summoned to demolish the brick casing. The grey stone slab emerged covered in more than an inch of dust.
We wiped it away and suddenly characters appeared and could all be recognised. Looking closer, however, we could not read a single character . . . I said that the back side must certainly have the translation, and so ordered that [the bricks at] the back side be cracked open, revealing its substance to be indeed a [Chinese] translation . . . My discovery of this stele has now made it available to the world for the first time.2
Yet the world paid scant attention to Zhang Shu’s discovery. Not until a century later did the same stele attract the notice of Baron Carl Gustav Mannerheim. A Finn who in old age would famously lead his country’s futile resistance to Stalin’s 1940 invasion, Mannerheim was in 1908 a colonel in the imperial Russian army with a choice assignment combining archaeology and espionage on the fringes of what was still, just, the Qing (Manchu) empire. The Russians were latecomers in the exploration of the Silk Road sites. ‘The Liangzhou steles’ (there were others with purely Chinese inscriptions) had in fact already been studied by French orientalists, who had concluded that the strange script, which to Zhang Shu had looked so much like Chinese yet wasn’t, was in fact ‘in the Sisia [Xi Xia] language’. But the only Frenchman actually to visit Liangzhou had failed to obtain a facsimile of it. Mannerheim planned to rectify this using wetted muslin to take an impression.
Again the attempt was a failure. Being January, ‘it was so cold that everything froze before we could get the cloth into the hollows’, he explains. Instead, he had the lettering painted white and then photographed it. The work for some reason had to be done by candlelight and Mannerheim thought it ‘possible that mistakes may have occurred’.3 Nevertheless, using his pho
tos and other materials, scholars would eventually unravel some of the mystery surrounding the stele’s not-quite-Chinese and decidedly code-like script, then tease meaning from it. Of the many revelations that have resulted, perhaps the most surprising has come from the characters forming the inscription’s first column, which had been partially obliterated in the Chinese ‘translation’ on the back. For from them it emerged that, although the people thought to have been responsible for the stele were called Tangut in the Turkic languages, and although the Tangut state was known in the Chinese histories as Xi Xia (‘West Xia’), this was not what the people themselves called it. They had a much grander name for their dominion. As per what was in effect the inscription’s heading, the stele belonged to the Gantong temple in Liangzhou ‘in the Great State of White and High’.
Later in 1908 another Russian expedition under Major Pyotr Kuzmich Koslov made an even more dramatic discovery – no less than a lost city. It stood on the edge of the Gobi desert, about 500 kilometres (310 miles) north-east of Wuwei/Liangzhou in what is now the province of Ningxia (meaning ‘Pacified Xia’). Sand had drifted up against its crumbling walls, but within the gateways Koslov found ‘a quadrangular space whereon were scattered high and low, broad and narrow, ruins of buildings with rubbish of all kinds at their feet’.4 The place was known as Karakhoto and is now thought to have been the Etsina or Edsina ‘in the [Mongol] province of Tangut’ noted by Marco Polo; according to Polo, it was where you laid in ‘stores for forty days’ if you were heading across the Gobi. Koslov thought a nearby stupa worth excavating. He returned for further digging in 1909 and eventually left for Russia with mainly Buddhist paintings, statuary and texts to rival the hauls made by Stein at Dunhuang. Housed in St Petersburg as the Koslov Collection, these materials gave Russian scholars a head start, not to mention a proprietary interest, in the study of this ‘forgotten empire’ which, according to the Chinese histories, had lasted for two centuries and had challenged the Khitan Liao and the Song for control of northern China. Many of the texts Koslov had garnered proved to be in the same challenging script as the Liangzhou stele; and from them Karakhoto was identified as indeed an outpost, and later capital, of this same empire, otherwise the ‘Great State of White and High’.
Much about this enigmatic polity still remains uncertain. No Standard History in Chinese was devoted exclusively to Xi Xia, as it was to the empires of Liao and Song, and extant texts in the Tangut language have yet to yield anything so helpful. The ethnic origins of the Tangut remain a mystery. They are thought to have been descended from the Qiang or Chiang of earlier centuries and to be related to the Tibetans. Yet they themselves claimed descent from the Tabgach or Tuoba people of the Northern Wei dynasty (386–534), which had reunited the north towards the end of the ‘Period of Disunion’. Certainly their language had affinities to Tibetan. Yet their script was quite unconnected to the alphabetic script used in Tibet. Developed in the eleventh century, it was indeed derived from the Chinese as Zhang Shu had supposed, though more complex if not wilfully obscure.
The people often called themselves Mi and their country Minia. Turks and Mongols preferred ‘Tangut’ or some such; and the Chinese used ‘Xia’, ‘Xiaguo’, ‘Xi Xia’ or more generic terms for non-Han peoples such as fan, rong and hu. No satisfactory explanation has been found for the grandiloquent title of ‘White and High’. ‘White’ could refer to salt, one of the state’s main exports, or to the winter snows; and ‘high’ to Xia’s location on the upper Yellow River as opposed to Song’s on its lower reaches. Alternatively the phrase could refer back to some earlier Tangut sojourn among mountains. Combining arable skills with stock-rearing, the Tangut, like the Tuyuhun, had spread from Qinghai in Tang times and been settled within the empire on land south of the Ordos in northern Shaanxi, a traditional dumping ground for incoming pastoralists. There, in the ninth century, one of their leaders had been appointed as the Tang military governor of a local prefecture called Xia and then given the title ‘duke of Xia’. In the post-An Lushan period (after 755) and on into that of the Five Dynasties/Ten Kingdoms (907–60), the duke, and then prince, of Xia garnered more honours, disposed of rivals both Tangut and non-Tangut, and cultivated autonomy like other military governors of the period.
Early in the eleventh century, when the Khitan Liao and the Song were resolving their differences by the treaty of Shanyuan, the Tangut ruler Li Deming (r. 1004–32) obtained recognition from both these powerful neighbours – from the Song as an autonomous tributary and from the Liao as ‘king’ of Xia. In effect he was playing one off against the other, a tactic that would amount to a guiding principle for Tangut Xia. Meanwhile Li Deming’s son, Yuanhao Weiming, began expanding the kingdom westwards into Gansu at the expense of that region’s Uighur and Tibetan occupants. The capital of the Tangut’s Xia state (‘Xia’ being used here for ‘the Great State of White and High’ simply for brevity) was moved to the Yellow River in Ningxia; Wuwei/Liangzhou, where the stele was erected, was first captured in 1032. Twenty years later Tangut Xia forces reached Dunhuang, so adding the whole of Gansu to Ningxia and northern Shaanxi to form the Xia empire. Stretching over 1,200 kilometres (745 miles) from east to west, it was of near-imperial proportions; and that it was indeed an empire was signified when in 1034 Yuanhao Weiming ‘assumed the title of wu tsu, the Tangut equivalent of emperor or qaghan’.5
Yuanhao Weiming (r. 1032–48) introduced all the usual trappings of an imperial newcomer – new dynastic name, new reign title, new calendar, new dress code – and he added another, new hairstyle. According to Song sources, the Tangut emperor himself was the first under the scissors, quickly followed by a stampede of his countrymen; for by decree, anyone whose hair was uncut three days later might have his throat cut. The new look helped to distinguish the Tangut from their Song and Tibetan neighbours and may have owed something to Tabgach traditions of hairstyling. ‘The top part of the skull was shaved, leaving a fringe across the forehead and down the sides, framing the face.’6 It was not quite a tonsure but, as shown in Tangut paintings such as those discovered by Koslov, it did tend towards the monkish. This was appropriate in that what distinguished the Tangut’s Xia empire, especially from the reign of Yuanhao Weiming onwards, was that it employed almost exclusively Buddhist terminology and Buddhist devotional patronage to validate its authority. In effect Tangut Buddhism was a state religion and Xia a Buddhist state.
Athough the Liangzhou stele dates from somewhat later (1094), a comparison of its Tangut and Chinese texts made by Ruth Dunnell, the leading expert on early Xia, may serve to illustrate the point. Each of the two inscriptions offers much the same information but does so in terms carefully tailored to its particular readership. The Chinese text, designed to appeal to the substantial Han component in Tangut Xia society, is strong on history, extolls ‘the Southern Court’ (i.e. the Song), and regards Liangzhou as one of its prefectures, and its ruler as one of its subjects. On the other side, the Tangut text glosses over the history to digress at length on the origins and redeeming qualities of Buddhism and the miraculous powers of the state-supported temple complex at Liangzhou. It stresses the legitimacy of Xia and the imperial status of its rulers, and it treats what it calls ‘the eastern Han’ (a demeaning term for the Song) as little more than an interested party. The inscriptions are not in fact translations of one another but opposed versions, though of a similar import.
Under Yuanhao Weiming, the composition of the Tangut script was finalised, and it was officially adopted for all administrative, educational and religious purposes. Translations of the tripitaka (the Buddhist scriptures) into Tangut were made from printed Chinese versions obtained from the Song, who rather hopefully threw in copies of the Confucian classics as well. Other translations were made from Tibetan texts. A legal code like that used by the Song, itself based on that of the Tang, was also promulgated in Tangut, and a hybrid administration, less formalised than that in Liao, established. Xia now fielded a loosely organised army of around 200,000 and
controlled not only the overland trade through the Gansu corridor but also the vital supply of horses from the steppe to the Song empire via Shaanxi. It was not therefore in Song interests to provoke a direct confrontation with its upstart neighbour. Instead the Song encouraged others, especially the Tibetans, to harry Xia.
In 1038 Yuanhao Weiming felt strong enough to throw down the gauntlet. After staging a formal enthronement of himself as emperor, he dispatched an embassy to the Song capital of Kaifeng bearing a letter designed to elicit recognition of his sovereign status. It was ‘something for which its author clearly expected to have to do battle’.7 Song Renzong (r. 1022–63, grandson of Song Taizong) rejected both the embassy and its gift of horses and camels. Yuanhao Weiming did the same to a reciprocal Song embassy. The Song then revoked all Yuanhao’s titles, closed the frontier and shut down the border markets on which Xia depended quite as much as Song. The expected battle was now inevitable.
There ensued five years of intermittent war (1039–44), punctuated by negotiation and sabotage and greatly complicated by the interventions of the Khitan Liao, sometimes as go-betweens, more often as adroit opportunists. Xia scored notable victories but was incapable of making inroads into Song territory. The Song remained adamant that Xia accept their suzerainty, although as with Khitan Liao, they were prepared to sweeten the pill; they offered generous annual subsidies and would turn a blind eye to whatever airs and honorifics the Xia ruler arrogated to himself among his subjects. Eventually the compromise evident in the bilingualism of the Liangzhou stele emerged. To the Song, the Xia ruler remained a subject, in kinship terms ‘a son’ not ‘a brother’, but he was also accepted as a quasi-emperor whose use of imperial regalia and protocol within his own domain would not be contested. Like Liao, Xia became the recipient of an annual subsidy from the Song; it included several tonnes of brick tea as well as copious quantities of silver and silk. And the all-important border markets were reopened, so giving the Song access to Tangut bloodstock and the Tangut somewhere to spend their tribute.