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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 came from a late Qing aristocratic family with strong nationalistic inclinations. Chen's aged father died in 1937 after refusing food and medicine as a principled protest against the full-fledged Japanese military invasion of China. These events and sentiments certainly colored Chen's studies. Chen's position as a highly respected educator during his lifetime and his near-cult posthumous status as an unsurpassed modern historian certainly impeded any questioning of his results. For example, one of Chen's students, Liu Pansui, hastily concluded a pioneering and stimulating study of the Tang royal family's many “Barbarian” traits by endorsing, without the slightest reservation, his teacher's conclusion of the family's paternal Hàn origin.⁶

Nonetheless, the opposite proposition, namely that the Li descended from the Tuoba Xianbei, had equally solid if not stronger evidence, as acknowledged by, for example, a relatively recent biography by Hu Rulei of Li Shimin, otherwise known as Emperor Taizong, the extremely powerful second emperor of the Tang Dynasty.⁷ Moreover, despite Chen Yinke's admittedly politically influenced objective of demonstrating the Li clan's alleged Hàn Chinese origin, the studies by him and others have also shown that the official histories compiled during the Tang had been subjected to much political doctoring in order to conceal the imperial house's “Barbarian” background.

A related and equally portentous issue is the convenient but somewhat arbitrary categorization by which various Chinese dynasties were classified as either a “native” or a “conquest” regime. This dichotomy is largely based on the standard historiography but now appears quite well entrenched. In this scheme the Sui and Tang, though with undoubted strong “Northern influences,” were invariably regarded as native regimes. This conclusion is based on the observation that the process of sinicization or sinification, yet another popular but nebulous notion, of the “Barbarian” Xiongnu and Xianbei groups in northern China was considered completed by then.

In his study of “nomadic sinification” in China, David Honey seems to be the only exception, by trying to include the Tang in the “conquest dynasties.”⁸ Yet in addition to his very curious exclusion of the preceding Sui, he still considers the Tang house “basically sinified.” Therefore in his otherwise colorful essay on nomadic sinicization covering the entire Chinese history from the late Shang to the Qing, not a single item or case pertaining to the Tang is included.

From the point of view of sinification, ethnic origin, an issue for which the monk Falin paid a heavy personal price, is not of real significance here. Some persistent or occasional “atavistic” appearances of Northern influences notwithstanding, one could argue that little is found in the standard (i.e., official) histories to suggest that the Li regime was culturally anything but a “native” Chinese dynasty.

To address this issue, one might first ask a different question: Despite the fact that various Xiongnu and Xianbei groups dominated the political arena in northern China for almost three hundred years between the collapse of the Western Jin and the founding of the Sui, and the usually unacknowledged fact that their descendants continued to do so for several hundred more years, as the comments by the Yuan dynasty historian Hu Sanxing quoted in the Introduction clearly stated, why is it that one can learn so little about their cultural heritage in traditional historiography? Even the linguistic affinity of the Tuoba Xianbei remains to this day a matter of controversy, a subject I shall further elaborate in an appendix.

In his narration of the Turco-Persian Ghaznavid sultanate in the eastern Iranian world, David Morgan made this interesting observation: “Although the Ghaznawids were of Turkish origin, there seems to have been little that was identifiably Turkish about the way in which their empire was run, or indeed about the culture they patronized. We should, however, remember that our sources were written by Persian contemporaries, who might have been unlikely to lay much stress on the non-Persian…elements that may have been present.”⁹ Similarly, Herbert Franke, while discussing the legitimation of the most conspicuous “conquest” dynasty in Chinese history, commented, “A Chinese official history like the Yüan-shi is not very explicit about the Buddhist and Lamaist elements inherent in Yüan statehood, and one has to turn to the Tibetan and Mongol sources, even though the latter ones are mostly relatively late and sometimes unreliable and fanciful.”¹⁰

As one will see, Morgan's and Franke's observations are also pertinent to the Tang records. However, unlike the case of the Ghaznavids, which was contested by Fuad Köprülü, a modern Turkish historian,¹¹ there is not a single Xianbei soul left today to question the “all-Chinese” Tang history; and unlike the Yuan world, there were few alternative sources on the Tang, which totally dominated, not only politically, but also culturally, the vast land from Samarkand to the Sea of Japan.

In her study of early modern China, Pamela Crossley contends that the term “sinicization” or “sinification” is an obsolete concept.¹² “Ethnicity,” or ethnic study, would appear to be, at least morphologically (and politically), a more correct substitute. However, even she seems to admit that an abstract notion of ethnicity is no more self-evident or more clearly defined than the obsolete concept of sinicization.

The question of appropriate nomenclature notwithstanding, I shall try to demonstrate in the remainder of this chapter the marked contrast between the Tang and other native imperial houses regarding succession and other politico-cultural attributes of a dynasty, as well as the conspicuous cultural gap between the Tang imperial house and the contemporary Confucian gentry class. Finally, I raise serious doubts about the correctness of characterizing the Tang as a “native” or “basically sinified” imperial house. Borrowing the etymology Xianbei < *Särbi first suggested by Edwin Pulleyblank and adopted by Peter Golden, I contend that the first half of the Tang might be more aptly called a Särbo-Chinese (or Xianbeo-Chinese) regime.¹³

The Cultural Gap

The conventional view that the Tang represented a native Chinese dynasty very much depends on the premise that the Lis were either of Hàn origin or had “basically sinified” by the time of the founding of the dynasty. I shall contend that neither was true.

The earlier quotations regarding the Ghaznavids and on the Yuan clearly demonstrate how one-sided sources created biased or even false politico-cultural images of an ethnic regime. Careful examination of the historical sources of the era reveals many cases of the Li clan's non-Hàn cultural traits and identity. What may be more important is the marked distance between the imperial house and the traditional Chinese gentry regarding these issues as well as the contemporary awareness of this difference. Following is a brief summary of some of the most notable examples.

1. Language. In a later chapter I show that the Tuoba Xianbei tongue continued to be used by the Li clan as their first or family language. Moreover, even the term Guoyu, “national language,” was kept for a while during the Tang. Liu Pansui, Chen Yinke's student, first made this important discovery based on an entry in Xin Tang shu (The New History of the Tang Dynasty, 44.1160). The contemporary Chinese gentry's attitude toward this was best reflected in a noted passage in Yanshi jiaxun (Family Instructions for the Yan Clan):

There was a court official who once said to me, “I have a son who is seventeen and has quite a good epistolary style. I shall teach him the Xianbei language and to play the pipa (a favored foreign instrument), in the hope that he will gain a certain degree of proficiency in these. With such accomplishments he is sure to gain favour with men in high places. This is a matter of some urgency.” At that time I hung my head and made no reply. Strange indeed is the way this fellow teaches his son. Even if, by such means, you could become a minister, I would not wish you to do so.¹⁴

2. Affinity. The Tang was the last Chinese dynasty before the Manchus to marry off royal princesses to the Steppe khans and chieftains. This practice was clearly documented in the official compilation of Tang officialdom and institutions (Tang huiyao [Institutional History of the Tang]). There are also more detailed modern studies.¹⁵ The practice was so prevalent that the word konchuy, transcribing the Chinese term gongzhu, “princess,” was simply regarded by Ziya Gökalp, an early twentieth-century proponent of Pan-Turkism, as an ancient Turkic word for “wife.”¹⁶ In the meantime, the leading Chinese gentry families steadfastly refused to establish matrimonial relations with the imperial house. More strikingly, their rejection of the honor of an imperial marriage persisted for more than two centuries, lasting well into the late Tang era, despite the royal family's repeated initiatives (Xin Tangshu 119.4306, 172.5205–6; ZZTJ248.8036.¹⁷

3. Clan relationship. The Tang represented a unique case in Chinese history in which the imperial house bestowed its own clan name, Li, not only on a few Hàn Chinese persons but more frequently on ethnic leaders and chieftains, be they Turk, Tangut, Uighur, Kitan, or Iranian/Persian. In the same study of the marriage practice of Tang royal princesses, Wang Tongling compiled a rather extensive table on this issue.¹⁸ As the Yuan dynasty historian Hu Sanxing particularly noted (ZZTJ 172.8879), the Zhuxie Shatuo Turkic tribe founded the Later Tang dynasty based largely on having received this imperial honor. I also add a rather revealing case missing in Wang Tongling's exhaustive table: As late as the Huichang period (841–46), the main business for a Kirghiz embassy, per an imperial edict by Emperor Wuzong (reign 840–46), was to register themselves with the imperial clan office (Xin Tang shu 217b.6150), highlighting the alleged common ancestry of the Kirghiz qaghan and the Tang house. In his detailed treatise on the collapse of the Uighur Empire, Michael Drompp has documented this interesting relationship.¹⁹ On the other hand, it is well documented and studied that the Tang imperial house made repeated efforts to suppress the leading gentry clans' social prestige and privilege (ZZTJ 195.6135–36, 200.6318.). I may even ascribe the emergence of the Chinese civil services examinations under the Sui and Tang to this distrust in old Hàn aristocratic clans.

4. Clothing. It is well known that Tang fashions were under heavy foreign influence. Xiang Da's pioneering study on this subject has been followed up by many other authors.²⁰ As the famous Tang poet Yuan Zhen's social jeremiad Faqu (Quan Tang shi [Complete Anthology of Tang Poetry] 419.1025) described, the love of exotic style, custom, and makeup became feverish during the reign of Emperor Xuanzong. While most modern authors emphasize the Iranian and Iranic connections and the influence coming from the Western Regions, I take note of the fact that much of this represented the Steppe heritage, including the nomadic groups' long history of playing the Western Regions card. As a particular example and in sharp contrast to the Tuoba emperor Xiaowen's wholesale sinicization drive, in which the emperor took personal responsibility for abolishing even the leisure dress of the Xianbei women (Wei shu 19.469 and 21.536), official records clearly state that most of the so-called regular dresses during the Tang were of the Tuoba military tradition (Jiu Tang shu [The Old History of the Tang Dynasty] 45.1938, 45.1951; Xin Tang shu 24.527–28; and Tang huiyao 31.577–78). However, as to how this was viewed by the traditional gentry, I note that the felt hat personally popularized by Zhangsun Wuji, Emperor Taizong's brother-in-law, was later labeled by the Confucian historians as “devilish” (Xin Tang shu 34.878). Another telltale case, according to an early Song dynasty source Tang yulin (Anecdotes of the Tang, 4.101) and corroborated by Xin Tang shu (125.4407), was Emperor Xuanzong's feeling of alienation merely because of his chief minister Zhang Yue's “Confucian dress.” These incidents again point to a gap between the Tang ruling class and the Confucian gentry in this regard.

5. Social mores. Several notable customs practiced by the Li clansmen, such as breast-sucking and foot-kissing, betrayed the clan's non-Hàn cultural heritage. Again we owe these two important observations to Liu Pansui's already cited pioneering study, albeit Liu's citations are far from complete. The customs' origins are certainly worthy of further exploration, especially a possible relationship between foot-kissing and the well-known ancient Iranian custom of proskynesis documented by Greek authors from Herodotus on down, and particularly with respect to Alexander the Great. But to me the most famous (or notorious) custom was the Li clan's record on levirate and other scandalous matrimonial relations. The practice, as I point out in a later chapter, reflected a key northern legacy in the Tang house, namely the lack of clearly defined and recognized generational boundaries on the Steppe. In addition to the many well-known cases, I note the tomb inscription of the wife of the Türk general Ashina Zhong unearthed in the 1970s, which reveals yet another marriage of Emperor Taizong's with his former in-laws.²¹ The case was not reported anywhere in existing records, suggesting even more such incidents that were similarly suppressed in the official histories. As to how this would have been looked upon by the Confucian gentry, suffice it to say that when the Tang house's ethnicity finally became an open issue in the Southern Song, “violations of the Confucian standard governing a women's proper behaviour” was the first question raised.²²

6. Another interesting cultural trait was the “Barbarian” childhood names fashionable among the Northern aristocracy, the Sui and Tang houses included. Both Sui emperors Wendi and Yangdi had such names: the father's childhood name was Nanluoyan (Taisho No. 2060, 667c) and the son's Ame (ZZTJ 179.5577). So did Yang Yong and Li Jiancheng, the two one-time crown princes, under the founding emperors of the Sui and Tang dynasties, respectively. The former's childhood name was Gandifa (ZZTJ 179.5575), which can be identified with a similar childhood name, Qizhifa, the “Xian-bei-ized” warlord Feng Ba of the Tuoba Wei period (Wei shu 97.2126). Li Jiancheng's childhood name was Pishamen (Xin Tang shu 79.3540). As shall be discussed later, these two princes shared more than having a “Barbarian” childhood name and being an unsuccessful heir apparent. There is good evidence that many of these names were of Buddhist origin, but the real point is their nonsinicized forms. For example, Sui Wendi's name Naluoyan was also the name of a Central Asian Türk chief (ZZTJ 212.6735). An intriguing story is that a passage in Jiu Tang shu (64.2415) indicated unmistakably that Emperor Taizong also had such a childhood name. But nowhere could this name be found in any records. One can only conclude that the emperor made sure his “Barbarian” name became an absolute imperial taboo. Another case is the childhood name Zhinu of Li Zhi the future emperor Gaozong (Jiu Tang shu 64.2415) His father's use of a proverb “Having borne a wolf…” to describe Li Zhi's character (ZZTJ 197.6208) leads me to submit that this seemingly Hàn name was but a corrupted or masked proto-Mongolian term for “wolf.” This term was well attested as the clan name Chinu, which became Lang, “wolf,” in Tuoba emperor Xiaowen's sinicization drive (Wei shu, 113.3013). As Peter Boodberg pointed out in “The Language of the T'o-pa Wei,” another likely attestation was the popular personal name Chounu.

7. Yet another issue showing the marked contrast between the Tang imperial house and the Confucian gentry was the monarchs' extravagant patronage of the performing arts—music, dance, drama, and other entertainment—much to the horror of the Confucian moralists. Worse still, the Turco-Xianbei emperors often showed little reservation in bestowing on these artists, considered of the same social class as house slaves and prostitutes by the traditional Chinese gentry, prominent and prestigious titles. One such artist was even enfeoffed with a princedom by the Northern Qi (550–57), a precedent the Sui emperor Yangdi once wanted to follow to benefit his favorite and talented Kuchaean musician Bai Mingda, who would continue to serve the Tang with distinction (Sui shu [The History of the Sui Dynasty] 15.397). The first two Tang emperors were both criticized by Confucian ministers for giving similar appointments to these artists (Jiu Tang shu 62.2375–76, 74.2614–15; Xin Tang shu 98.3897, 99.3907–8; and ZZTJ 186.5834, 194.6095). The third, Emperor Gaozong, received similar criticism for according the artists undue privileges (Xin Tang shu 201.5728.). I further remark that Emperor Xuanzong was the last Tang emperor to show this passion for the performing arts. The emperor's biography by Xu Daoxun and Zhao Keyao, for instance, provides extensive details on this subject.²³ Interestingly and by no means coincidentally, the same royal fervor was not to be observed until the coming of the Shatuo Turkic regimes (ZZTJ 272.8904.).

These items illustrate the Li clan's cultural identity in the eyes of the contemporary Chinese gentry class. In addition, I find the views on this subject of two other parties, namely the Türks and the Li clanspeople themselves, suggestive also.

First, the Türks in the Orkhon inscriptions, probably the only independent history source of the era, consistently called the Tang power Tabgach, or Tuoba, fully two centuries after the collapse of the last Tuoba regime.²⁴ Because of the paucity of data, it is difficult to ascertain the Türks' exact geographic perception of contemporary East Asia. But Sui shu (52.1341) clearly showed that the Türks were well aware of the existence of the southern state of Chen. Then, even after several hundred years, al-Kasšari stated unmistakably that Tawγac/Tabgach was only part of Sin or China. Moreover, and against the inevitable analogy of the modern Russian word for China, al-Kasšari also gave an etymology of the name Tawγac: It was “[t]he name of a tribe of the Turks who settled in those regions”!²⁵

Second, the attitude of the early Tang regime toward the traditional Chinese gentry can be taken as a most useful indicator of its own self-identity. In addition to the regime's persistent efforts to suppress the prestige of the traditional gentry class as mentioned earlier, Li Yuan, the founding emperor, had this explanation for his son Li Shimin's growing political independence and aspiration (ZZTJ 190.5959): “This boy has long been commanding troops in the provinces. Taught by educated men, he is no longer my son of the old days.” Though the passage has been cited by a great many authors, few have noted the critically important fact that the phrase “educated men” was literally dushu Hàn, “educated Hàn,” in Jiu Tang shu (64.2415–16). Sima Guang, most likely based on a later (Song dynasty) understanding, changed it to the more elegant word shusheng, “educated men,” editing out the crucial implication. Perhaps wholeheartedly corrupted by the “educated Hàn” as the father had charged, the son, according to a Tang author,²⁶ would also call the famous courtier Wei Zheng a tianshe Hàn, “house-owning Hàn peasant,” in the privy imperial quarters and in the presence of his consort Empress Zhangsun, who was of Tuoba descent. Again Sima Guang edited it to a mere tianshe weng, “old house-owning peasant” (ZZTJ 194.6096).

In my view, the two quotations cited earlier are the best reflection of the Li clan's ethnic self-identity, for in the period immediately preceding the Sui and Tang, the term Hàn when occurring in such phrases was always a derogatory appellation used by the Xianbei and related Northerners for the Hàn or otherwise sinicized people. In fact, the very etymology of the character hàn as a vocative, going back all the way to the era of Tuoba domination, is the reason for the term's persistent derogatory connotation today, more than a millennium after the Tuoba's subjugation of the Hàn people to second-class status. As far as I am aware, the Yuan-Ming scholar Tao Zongyi,²⁷ apparently prompted by the similarly low status of the Hàn people under the Mongol rule, was the first to observe this connection, followed by many modern authors.²⁸

Although the Hàn slur was gradually picked up by other courtiers during Empress Wu Zetian's reign, an episode recorded in a Tang period source, Chaoye qianzai (Popular Records of the Court and Commonalty 4.89), clearly showed that the traditional meaning and target were not lost on the gentry class. Besides, no better classical usage of the term could be found than the father/son's application to “educated men” and “house-owning peasant,” typical of a sedentary, agricultural Central Kingdom but foreign to nomadic tribespeople. These cases are also good examples of how “elegant” editing by historians actually corrupted the original stories.

If one finds the above arguments and evidence fragmentary or argues that the cases represented just the occasional and transient remnants of the imperial house's previous Northern exposure, a far clearer and better focused picture of the imperial clan's ethnic identity can be established by a systematic analysis of the succession struggles in the early Tang, as I show in the following sections.

The Case of Crown Prince Chengqian

First I examine the case of Emperor Taizong's original heir apparent in some detail, because it epitomizes not only some crucial political and cultural issues of the era but also the problems with both standard historiography and modern scholarship in studying these issues. In addition, this episode also sheds light on the so-called process of sinicization.

The case is succinctly described (or one may say glossed over) in The Cambridge History of China, which has this to say about Taizong's first heir apparent: “The prince apparently was intelligent and capable…As he grew older, however, the heir apparent began to behave in ways which seemed both abnormal and scandalous to the Chinese courtiers, and he may well be mentally unbalanced. He began to reject his Chinese identity and heritage, used the Turkish language, and dressed himself and his entourage in Turkish costume.”²⁹ This is indeed an accurate narration according to the standard Tang records. But can we take the official lines, especially the alleged “mental problems,” at their face value?

Arthur Wright also calls the whole affair a “scandal” caused by Prince Chengqian's “strange neurosis,” but he does point out its connections with the Li clan's family history.³⁰ Edwin Pulleyblank gives what I think is the most relevant observation on this case: he calls Prince Chengqian's “strange neurosis” “atavistic predilections for the Turkish life-style.”³¹

I demonstrate here that the whole affair was hardly a “scandal,” that Prince Chengqian did not have a “strange neurosis,” and that the predilections were not “atavistic.” On the contrary, one may find that Prince Chengqian's many acts were not much different from those of other Li boys of the time, just as the young Li Shimin, the future Emperor Taizong, once behaved, and the so-called scandal would seem no more than the norm of the Lis' family life.

Let us look at Li Shimin, the father himself. By many stories, including his own admission, Li Shimin was as “wild” in his youth as Prince Chengqian was reported to have behaved: a passion for archery and horsemanship (which continued throughout his life and were exercised with his largely ethnic, Turkic in particular, imperial guards) but little knowledge of the classics.³² In fact, Li Shimin continued some of his old habit as an emperor (ZZTJ 192.6021–22, 192.6042). Yet the same acts of his son Chengqian were depicted, very likely seasoned with exaggerated or made-up “deviate” details, as scandalous offences.

As for rejecting the “Chinese identity” and taking on “Turkish” things, it can be demonstrated with evidence provided here and in a later chapter that Emperor Taizong himself had a well-established Turkic or tribal identity and was conversant in Turkic. In particular, Li Shimin, while still a prince, became a “sworn brother” of several prominent Türk persons. They include Tuli (Tölis) Qaghan of the Eastern Türk (ZZTJ 191.5992); the loyal Türk general Ashina Simo (Cefu yuangui [Prime Tortoise of the Record Bureau] 980.11516), who was given the imperial clan name Li (Jiu Tang shu 194.5156; Xin Tang shu 215.6037), and the Western Türk prince, later Duolu Qaghan (Jiu Tang shu 194.5183).

If anything, Prince Chengqian could only be accused of being too filial a son of the many aspects of the clan's life his father found best absent from the official history. The suppression of Li Shimin's childhood name in all records is a good example. Chengqian's “scandalous relationship” with an actor-entertainer (ZZTJ 196.6191), while hardly exceptional among the long list of imperial homosexual liaisons from the Hàn dynasties on down, also fits the Turco-Xianbei patronage of the performing arts as examined earlier.

This is a typical case of how modern authors tend to go to great lengths to explain things that would have seemed quite natural after the Lis' Turco-Xianbei identity is recognized. Another example is Emperor Taizong's six famous horses whose reliefs were carved at the imperial mausoleum (another Turco-Mongol trait). Edward Schafer in his famous study of the Tang exotica concludes that the six horses “came to T'ai Tsung from the Turks” partly because one of them had the name Teqin biao, “prince's roan.”³³ This subjective interpretation for the Turkic word tegin is hardly necessary after realizing, first, that the term was also a well-recognized Tuoba Xianbei title,³⁴ and, second, when the horse was being ridden, the future Emperor Taizong was none other than a prince (Quan Tang wen [Complete Anthology of Tang Prose], 10.124).

Regarding the convenient allegation that Prince Chengqian had “mental problems,” it is interesting to notice that the original heir apparent by the Chinese dizhang (the eldest son of the principal consort) primogeniture principle of the Qing emperor Shengzu (Kangxi) supposedly had the same disorder.³⁵ One cannot help thinking of the use or abuse of psychiatry to punish cultural or political dissidents in a more modern context.

Let me further remark that the incoming emperor Gaozong turned out no less “scandalous” than his hapless elder brother Prince Chengqian in “imitating” the Steppe life-style by marrying his father's concubine. Not as well-known but probably more revealing was Gaozong's order that his own sons have Türk companions in their inner palace (Xin Tang shu 199.5661; ZZTJ 201.6363.). At the very least, we now know that the “mentally unbalanced” Prince Chengqian was certainly not the only Li clan member who liked to speak the Turkic language.

Finally, it is no accident that Prince Chengqian was eventually “rehabilitated” under the reign of Emperor Xuanzong (Xin Tang shu 80.3565), the last Turco-Xianbei monarch of the Tang in my view, who, incidentally and despite his ministers' opposition, also liked to have Türk companions during his outings. However, the presence of a Turkic language interpreter in Emperor Xuanzong's entourage (Tang huiyao 27.521) was a sure sign that the Turco-Xianbei period was gradually coming to an end.

To summarize, though his many traits were shared by other “normal” Li boys, Prince Chengqian fell victim to not only the vicious succession struggle but also the joint propaganda efforts by the Confucian historians and the imperial court, prompted by the former's sinocentric views and tendencies and the latter's overt concern, sometimes even obsession, with the historical image and legacy it would leave behind, not to mention the commanding issue of political legitimacy in the Central Kingdom at the time. Moreover, I extract several general observations about the succession struggles and the process of sinicization from this case and many of its precedents, to be elaborated in the following sections.

But before that, let me point to a case bearing a striking resemblance to Prince Chengqian's alleged plots of revolt: the case of the Northern Wei's Crown Prince Tuoba Xun (Wei shu, 22.558.). There is, however, a key difference: at that time the Northern Wei was not the only and all-dominating regime in China. It was thus unable to gloss the incident over as perhaps another “family scandal” caused by a “mentally unbalanced” crown prince. In short, it did not enjoy, as its Sui and Tang successors did, a monopoly on historiography: the incident was clearly recorded in Nan Qi shu (The History of the Southern Qi Dynasty 57.996), the official history of the rival Southern Qi state, as a backlash against the Tuoba emperor Xiaowen's wholesale sinification drive. That effort, according to many people, was motivated by the latter's ambition to end the North-South partition,³⁶ a deed that was eventually accomplished by the Sui and Tang. In addition to preparing us to address the common threads in these cases, it may also help explain why the two Tuoba political as well as biological heirs were so anxious to claim their alleged Chinese ancestry.

The Succession to the Throne in the Early Tang

The case of Prince Chengqian was hardly an aberration in the imperial family as the official records would have us believe. As I demonstrate, one of many characteristics that set the Tang apart from other native Chinese dynasties was the persistent political struggle concerning the succession of the throne. During a period that covered nearly the first century and a half of the dynasty, not once did the succession follow the time-honored Hàn dizhang primogeniture principle. Nor was there a single time that the process ran smoothly, without strife (and indeed bloodshed). Even after that, as observed by Chen Yinke,³⁷ the position of the official heir apparent (by the dizhang rule or not) was anything but firmly established.

It should be pointed out that exactly on this point the supposedly native Tang dynasty was strikingly akin to the Qing regime, a typical conquest dynasty in the conventional categorization. The latter, unburdened by the need to maintain a Hàn Chinese façade, simply (after a period of failed experimentation) abolished the institution of an heir apparent altogether.

This similarity points to the root of the incessant succession struggles of the Tang: the imperial house's Turco-Xianbei Steppe origin and heritage. The magnitude and duration of this entirely unique (among the so-called native dynasties) characteristic are far too great to be ascribed simply to some lingering Northern influences. It is the reflection of the true ethnic/cultural identity of an imperial house that had spared no efforts to present itself as a bona fide Hàn regime in all historical records.

One cannot help noticing the numerous succession struggles in the Western Jin and the Southern dynasties. However, in addition to the Northern influence³⁸ and often direct involvement, exemplified by the case of Liu Yuan, the founding emperor of the Xiongnu Former Zhao dynasty (Jin shu 101.2648 and passim), these incidents all fall into the general feature of every new native dynasty that, largely as the ripple effect of the preceding military campaigns and difficulties in establishing a new imperial order, the first and sometimes the second succession were invariably problematic. In essence, none of the native dynasties mentioned here survived much beyond this bottleneck, whereas the only long-lived native house during the period, namely the Eastern Jin (317–420), was remarkably free of similar trouble. Furthermore, the struggles during the Southern dynasties all had extensive external involvement, while the Tang cases (and many of their precedents in the Northern Turco-Xianbei courts), as observed by Chen Yinke, were all confined to the capital area within the imperial clan.

The disruptive and often bloody succession process of the Turco-Mongol regimes on the Steppe characterized by fratricide and other forms of bloodshed within the ruling house has long been noted. However, the most methodical treatment of the subject appears to be that of the late Joseph Fletcher. He used the term “blood tanistry” for the general principle on the Steppe that the leadership of a tribe or other polity should be passed on to the best qualified member of the chiefly or ruling house.³⁹ And the eventual choice of a new leader was usually the result of some form of contention. Fletcher discussed in detail how this Turco-Mongol tradition manifested itself in the Ottoman Empire.⁴⁰

Peter Boodberg was among the first to ascribe this characteristic to Turco-Mongol traditions, including the not-unusual father-son enmity in particular, in discussing the Sui imperial succession.⁴¹ In an unpublished presentation on blood tanistry in Ottoman, Indian, and later Chinese (Jin, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties) regimes, Fletcher also mentioned briefly the Sui case and the case of Li Shimin.⁴² Nonetheless, as I demonstrate, this tradition was in fact much more than what Fletcher called “traces” in the history of the Tang, which would also reveal some interesting phenomena in what had been traditionally called the process of sinicization.

Let me briefly review the long history of succession struggles in the first two centuries of the Tang.

This uninterrupted stretch started with Li Shimin. The future Emperor Taizong's meticulously planned and impeccably executed maneuver to replace his elder brother Jiancheng as the heir apparent culminated in the famous Xuanwu Gate coup d'état in 626. Later I discuss other aspects reflected in this blatant challenge to the time-honored dizhang principle. But not as well known was the observation by the Qing historian Zhao Yi that this murderous fratricide extending to the execution of all male offspring of the two slain brothers almost developed into a case of patricide as well,⁴³ as is generally believed regarding the Sui emperor Yangdi's accession to the throne.

A very similar drama would be staged under the reign of Taizong by his sons, though with somewhat different endings due to changed circumstances and personalities, whose implications will be discussed later. It is worth noting that in the aftermath of the alleged patricide/fratricide scheme of 643 plotted by Taizong's original heir apparent, Prince Chengqian, the choice of the new crown prince was partially prompted by the need to avoid future fratricide (ZZTJ 197.6197, 199.6280–81), which of course did not at all prevent it from happening after the death of Emperor Taizong. Another episode was the promise by one of the players, Li Tai (Prince Wei), to kill off his son if he was appointed heir apparent, so that after his death the throne would go laterally to another son of Taizong (ZZTJ 197.6195). This promise did not sound so unnatural to Taizong's ears (and indeed, as we shall see, would be redeemed en masse by a great-grandson of his).

Into the reign of the next emperor, and with the emergence of a strong woman, Wu Zetian, the focus of the succession struggle shifted somewhat from brotherly contest to acute parent-child enmity. Empress Wu showed little hesitation in having two heirs apparent, both her own sons, killed in 675 and 684 respectively (ZZTJ 202.6377, 203.6419.). A few modern authors,⁴⁴ who contrast her apparent lack of qualms with a mother's natural feelings and argue that one of the princes was perhaps not born of Empress Wu, do not seem to recognize the entrenched tradition of filicide in the Sui and Tang houses and Empress Wu's merciless killing of her own baby daughter and several grandchildren later in her life (ZZTJ 199.6286–87, 204.6467, 207.6557).

What is more interesting is that, after having deposed two puppet emperors, both her own sons, and enthroned herself, Empress Wu had put both under house arrest with strict court supervision that effectively cut off all communication with the outside (ZZTJ 204.6473, 205.6490). The empress recognized that she would still have to pass on the throne to no one else but her blood offspring in the end (ZZTJ 204.6474–75, 206.6526–27). This awkward situation bears a striking resemblance to the Ottoman court's Kafes (cage) system.⁴⁵ This measure, perhaps in a less draconian form but nonetheless “violating fundamental human relations by incarcerating one's flesh and blood,” would be institutionized by Emperor Xuanzong and enforced at least beyond the year 833 (ZZTJ 244.7886).

One may also note that the Ottoman Kafes was hardly unique to the Turkic political sphere: the later Ghaznavids in Afghanistan and Northern India also developed a similar policy after incessant succession struggles among the sultan's family members.⁴⁶ Corresponding to the birth control measures in the Kafes, a remarkable circumstance was the repeated attempts by Emperor Xuan-zong (then the crown prince) to abort his consort's pregnancy for fear of further antagonizing Princess Taiping (Jiu Tang shu 52.2184). One notes that the incident was recorded due largely to the fact that the pregnancy the future Emperor Xuanzong tried to terminate produced in the end none other than the future Emperor Suzong (reign 756–62).

After the restoration (705) of the Tang dynasty under Empress Wu's son Emperor Zhongzong, we soon see another case of filicide in a succession struggle: the killing of Emperor Zhongzong's heir apparent, Prince Chongjun, after the latter's failed coup attempt against his father (ZZTJ 208.6611–12). But not long afterward the emperor in 710 fell victim of viricide/patricide as his empress and his daughter Princess Anle conspired to grab the imperial power for themselves (ZZTJ 209.6641–42).

In a typical Turco-Mongol maneuver after the death of the khan, and against the age-old tradition of lineal succession in the Central Kingdom, Princess Taiping, sister of the deceased emperor, and her nephew Prince Longji, the future Emperor Xuanzong (and as some have claimed, the latter's seemingly unambitious father too), together plotted a successful coup to send Longji's father back to the throne. At this time, the principle of blood tanistry, namely letting the ablest heir of all succeed, was so entrenched in the Tang house, prevailing over the dizhang principle stipulating instead that the successor be the eldest heir born of the chief consort, that Longji's elder brother Chengqi steadfastly refused to be appointed the heir apparent to avoid an almost certain repetition of the Xuanwu Gate incident (ZZTJ 209.6650).

Thus was created a most interesting triangular power structure between the emperor, his full sister Princess Taiping, and the young but capable Crown Prince Longji. The triumvirate showed deep rifts from the very beginning (ZZTJ 210.6656–57). Although Prince Longji, later Emperor Xuanzong, apparently made sure that not much was left in the history records that would cast doubt upon his filial relationship with his emperor father, there was ample evidence, for example, the story in ZZTJ (210.6673–74), showing that Emperor Ruizong did feel daunted by this intellectually and militarily gifted son, and the menace of patricide, which the Li boys (and girls) often showed little reluctance in plotting and executing, would seem a major factor in Emperor Ruizong's heavy dependence on his sister Princess Taiping against and as a way of balancing his son's power. No sooner had the son forced the aunt to commit suicide by a preemptive military move than the father decided to go into genuine retirement for good.

In many aspects Emperor Xuanzong could be called the last Turco-Mongol or Turco-Xianbei monarch of the Tang ruling house. The military and political expansion continued and reached its zenith during his reign. The emperor also showed remarkable openness and reception to foreign cultures, music and dance in particular, which was eagerly and wholeheartedly imitated by an equally receptive populace, with various Hu (foreign) fashions and styles soon becoming the dominating vogue of the time (Jiu Tang shu 45.1957–58). Xuanzong's dependence on and trust in his non-Hàn ethnic generals were also unprecedented (which would eventually cause his fall from grace). It is indeed very tempting to compare the first half of his reign with that of the brilliant Manchu emperor Shengzu (Kangxi), the best emperor the Central Kingdom ever had, according to many. But this would be a little beyond the scope of this chapter.

At issue here is that, just like Emperor Kangxi,⁴⁷ Emperor Xuanzong was dogged by the problem of succession and the choice of an heir apparent. What is most remarkable and revealing of his Turco-Xianbei heritage is that, in the spring of 737, the emperor had three of his sons, including his first heir apparent, killed in a single day (ZZTJ 214.6829). Such a resolute act of filicide, later indignantly denounced as a “breach of heavenly principles” by the Song dynasty historian Fan Zuyu,⁴⁸ would put Xuanzong on an equal footing with, say, the Ottoman sultan Selim I (Selim the Grim), who was believed to have, on November 20, 1514, killed three of his four sons,⁴⁹ leaving but one (Süleyman the Magnificent) to succeed him. It can be added that filicide also figured in the succession struggle during the Qing dynasty, in particular that carried out by the eventual successor to Emperor Kangxi, despite some modern authors' effort to whitewash or deny its occurrence.⁵⁰

Emperor Xuanzong's radical measure, plus further act of filicide (ZZTJ 216.6916–17), did not relieve him in the end from the by now almost trademark Tang succession trouble. In the wake of the An Lushan Rebellion, another heir apparent son would part ways with Emperor Xuanzong and declare himself the new emperor (Emperor Suzong), handing his father a coup de grace (ZZTJ 218.6975–76, 218.6982.). Furthermore, after both had returned to the recovered Tang capital, the now retired Emperor Xuanzong would find himself nearly assassinated in a kidnap plot devised and executed by his son's most trusted courtier (ZZTJ 221.7094–95). With all his loyal ministers, attendants, and eunuchs dead or exiled, this retired emperor would eventually die a bitter, lonely, and helpless old man under virtual house arrest.

Such an unceremonious exit of, in my view, the last Turco-Xianbei monarch of the Tang by no means spelled the end of the imperial house's Turco-Mongol-style succession problems. Indeed, even prior to that, Emperor Suzong had to overcome and kill another royal brother, Prince Yong (Li Lin), who, apparently at the encouragement of Emperor Xuanzong (ZZTJ 218.6983, 219.7007), began to harbor imperial ambitions too. A side note is that this episode of fratricide had profound effects on the life and career of the two greatest Tang poets, Li Bai (Li Po 701-ca. 762) and Du Fu (712–70): Li Bai signed on with the losing side of this fratricidal struggle for the throne, for which he almost received a death sentence. He was eventually exiled to Yelang, which was by far the most serious crisis in the poet's life (Xin Tang shu 202.5763). This in turn led Du Fu to write several immortal poems over his deep concern for his dear friend's fate.

Despite further act of filicide, which saw one of his able sons, Prince Jianning, killed and the eldest, the future emperor Daizong gravely endangered (ZZTJ 219.7013.), Emperor Suzong would die, of natural cause or otherwise, amid the chaos of yet another fratricide coup d'état in 762 (ZZTJ 222.7123–24).

The Tang's succession troubles and the “unstable institution” of the heir apparent were far from over after this. What is more, there would emerge much more frequent lateral successions than the almost unbroken lineal tradition of the early Tang. However, there were many gradual but important changes in the aspects and circumstances of succession struggles, some of which will be covered in later sections. For my major contention that the early Tang was a Särbo-Chinese regime with strong Turco-Mongol characteristics, the documentation of blood tanistry cases can stop at this point. The following sections will be devoted to various aspects and implications of the Tang succession struggles.

The Oedipus Complex

Arthur Wright first proposed that the Sui emperor Yangdi represented an instance of the Oedipus complex.⁵¹ Victor Xiong later repeated and in fact reinforced the case.⁵² In my view, the Oedipus complex depiction here has overstretched the sphere of psychoanalysis. It is obvious from my narration that acute father-son enmity and rivalry were characteristic of the first two centuries of the Tang. In addition to the Sui, one can easily trace the phenomenon back to the Tuoba Wei state and other earlier dynasties established by various tribal groups, as well as in the An Lushan-Shi Siming rebel regime (both leaders were murdered by their respective sons). Boodberg is more to the point: it was a much more general and wider phenomenon on the Steppe.

Wright's Oedipus complex diagnosis would make this father-son adversary a rather personal trait of Emperor Yangdi. Even if the label stuck, it would have to be extended to so many other political figures of Steppe origin or background, both in China and elsewhere, that any utility of the term would appear lost. This father-son enmity was so typical of the Turco-Mongol culture that the vendetta against a dead father or the rush to reverse his policies can be clearly shown in a wide variety of cases, ranging from the Ghaznavid sultan Mas'ud in the Turco-Iranian world,⁵³ to the late Manchu monarchs such as Emperor Gaozong (Qian-long) of the Qing.⁵⁴ But if one invokes the Oedipal drive in the pretext of universal human traits, then in addition to losing the specificity, and hence the very reason for introducing the term, one would face the daunting task of explaining the relative scarcity of similar cases in the two Hàn dynasties as well as in other stable and prolonged native dynasties.

It is my view that the so-called Oedipus complex is in effect a convenient way to bypass the real socioeconomic and politico-cultural issues. I note that even the Shakespearean play Hamlet, which has often been cited as a quintessential case of such a complex, may in fact have actual historical succession struggles in the background.⁵⁵

As many modern researchers have concluded, contrary to conventional misconception, pastoral nomadism was a very complex way of life that required sophisticated planning and great effort. In contrast to agriculture, it in fact allowed a much smaller margin of error in decision making and very low tolerance of natural and man-made disasters, as a severe spring storm could easily wipe out one's entire stock in a matter of days. The highly mobile way of life, the relative low economic return on a per-acre basis, and the constant threat of tribal and other warfare meant that tribe and other polity leadership must be very personal and militaristic, without the luxury of a large, permanent, civil bureaucratic establishment. All these factors demanded that the leadership remained with young, industrious, and energetic figures who could respond quickly and forcefully to a change of or emergency in the environment and who would be able to lead the tribes into successful military campaigns.

This leads to the notion that the socio-political life on the Steppe required a faster pace or metabolism in replenishing its leadership than in a sedentary agricultural society, which, with a large civil administration machine feeding on immense and reliable revenues from intensive farming, could afford to have unresponsive and politically uninterested elderly monarchs continue to occupy the throne (incidentally, this was exactly what became of Emperor Xuanzong, the last Turco-Xianbei monarch of the Tang). In my view this was the real root of the semilegendary Steppe tradition of regicide, ritualistic or real, found as far as the Khazar Empire, that a khan had a preordained time limit on his reign, after which he would be murdered.⁵⁶

On this account we see also how Turco-Mongol traditions adapted, or shall we say mellowed, in their transition to the Central Kingdom. Unlike the harsh political realities on the Steppe where a khan normally would have to hang on until his natural or not so infrequently violent death, a sedentary society opened up a less draconian option: the position of a retired emperor, albeit as our examples have shown, life as such would seem not greatly more enviable than the Steppe alternative. Following the Turco-Xianbei traditions of its Northern dynasty predecessors, the Tang, especially in its first century and a half, had numerous such retired emperors, whereas none were found in more than four centuries of the two Hàn dynasties. This is one more reason why the early Tang should be more aptly called a Särbo-Chinese regime.

I further observe that in subsequent major native dynasties, namely the Song and the Ming, only a handful more such cases were found, almost invariably the consequence of catastrophic military invasions from the north.⁵⁷ Only in the Qing dynasty did we find another case of a purely domestic nature, which curiously enough was allegedly prompted by the “filial wish” of Emperor Gaozong that his reign not exceed a preset limit, namely the length of the reign of his grandfather Emperor Shengzu.⁵⁸

Having examined the father-son feature, the maternal aspect in the alleged Oedipus complex should also be reviewed to do it full justice. First, once the mother changed herself into a “surrogate father” in the sense that she became a contender for the throne, as in the case of Empress Wu Zetian, the mother-son relation would turn out much less romantic than the complex prescribes, one more indication of the phenomenon's politico-cultural rather than alleged psychosexual root. Also the supposed affection was evidently not always reciprocal, as political filicide by the mother was noted from the late Tuoba Wei period onward.

Nevertheless, in comparison with the fate of the fathers, royal matriarchs did seem to fare a lot better, even in extreme cases such as Empress Wu Zetian and the grandmother of Emperor Xiaowen of the Tuoba Wei (ZZTJ 134.4187, 137.4302.). However, instead of the either too individual or too universal trait of Oedipal drive, I think a more plausible explanation lies elsewhere. In this regard classical historians would seem more down-to-earth than psychoanalysis-leaning modern authors when Hou Hàn shu (The History of the Late Hàn, 90.2979) provides the following hint in describing the Wuhuan's unmistakable Steppe traits of patricide and fratricide: “[They] kill their father and elder brothers when angry, but would never hurt their mother, for mothers have a clan whereas fathers and elder brothers do not [have someone to take] revenge for themselves.” Here we clearly see remnants of matriarchy at work, which in my view is a more realistic factor on the Steppe than a man's subconscious Oedipal desire for his mother, for this can also explain the Northern women's traditionally strong role, attested by their prominent social status in the Northern dynasties,⁵⁹ and culminating in Empress Wu becoming the first and only woman emperor in Chinese history, the latter of which could only happen in a Särbo-Chinese dynasty with deeply entrenched Turco-Mongol traditions. A Steppe mother's near-sacred status and complete dominance of her son in my view also provide a most natural explanation for the unprecedented Tuoba Wei custom of killing an heir apparent's birth mother before crowning the prince son. The case of Lady Gouyi of the Former Hàn dynasty (ZZTJ 22.744–45), from which the Tuoba custom had allegedly taken its cue, was evidently an exceptional, ad hoc measure. The case of Empress-dowager Hu, the first birth mother of a future Tuoba emperor to escape this fate, demonstrates that the draconian rule was not an unwarranted and overcautious precaution: by her complete domination of her emperor son and her final act of filicide (ZZTJ 152.4739), Empress-dowager Hu was blamed for the eventual collapse of the once powerful Tuoba regime in northern China.

Other Aspects of the Tang Blood Tanistry

The established Hàn tradition of having, at least formally, an heir apparent means that the succession struggles in the Central Kingdom usually happened prior to the death of the current ruler and around the institution of heir apparent. This may be the most important departure from the Steppe, where the hell of succession wars normally broke loose with the death of the khan. But as Joseph Fletcher has detailed in his “Turco-Mongol Monarchic Tradition in the Ottoman Empire,” such a feature or adaptation to the sedentary society was not unique in China, as it was also attested in other “conquest regimes.”

In his pioneering treatise on the political history of the Tang, which provided the first systematic examination of the phenomenon of the unstable Tang institution of heir apparent (to which I owe much of the inspiration for the current chapter), Chen Yinke has analyzed the importance of controlling the Xuanwu Gate in the capital in numerous coups d'état during the early Tang.⁶⁰ However, I depart from his theory by considering the discussion of the key factions of people instead of geography in these incidents a more consequential topic. Not only does one see the reason for the notoriety of the Xuanwu Gate in the period, but it also sheds light on the process of how this Särbo-Chinese regime slowly evolved into something more in line with a native dynasty.

For the era under examination, namely the first 150 years of the Tang, one of the key elements in the succession struggle was various imperial guard units. This in my view was the cause for the Xuanwu Gate's prominence in these coups during the period. For blood tanistry struggles in an agrarian society, Fletcher has introduced the term “surrogate nomads” for the equivalent of tribes and tribal military elites who would fight out the succession wars on the Steppe. For the early Tang, the “surrogate” qualifier would seem almost superfluous, because the ranks of imperial guards were filled with people not just of nomadic origin but literally fresh from the Steppe. A good example was the three hundred Türk troops Prince Jiancheng planned to use to attack Li Shimin's residence (Xin Tang shu 79.3542).⁶¹ In fact at times these figures were said to be so numerous that they filled half of the positions at court (ZZTJ 193.6098), which were apparently mostly military. Many were actually mentioned or even named in succession struggles. Li Duozuo, a prominent imperial guard of Mojie ethnicity (widely regarded as the predecessor of the Manchu), on whom was bestowed the royal family name (Jiu Tang shu 109.3296–97), was a typical case. This was hardly the best indication of a “native” dynasty, though the standard records have almost certainly suppressed or played down as much as possible the role of these “Barbarian” figures in setting the course of Chinese history.

Another important dimension of the unmistakable Turco-Mongol trait of the early Tang was its continued military and political expansion in almost all directions. Again a great number of non-Hàn ethnic generals and naturally an even greater number of such troops were used in this endeavor. In fact, the Tang ethnic generals have became a fecund study subject for modern historians.⁶² These studies demonstrate that the phenomenon was a rather unusual case in Chinese history. That is, if we exclude the Mongol forces in the Qing's march into Central Asia, an exact repetition of the Tang's advances one millennium earlier. As the imperial guards actively participated in these campaigns, their prestige at the court and their role in the succession struggle continued. The ancient Orkhon inscriptions mentioned explicitly that the Türk troops had fought the wars for the Tabgach/Tuoba emperors.⁶³ But this complaint masked the other side of the coin: the important role of these Türk generals and soldiers in choosing the very emperors they would serve under as well as the grossly out of proportion positions they filled at the Tang court.

The expansion of the Tang was gradually checked by the advent of two new powers: the Arabs and the Tibetans. A new Uighur power was also emerging on the Steppe. In the meantime, the unstoppable process of sinicization was slowly but steadily taking its toll. One of the signs was the role of personal slaves and eunuchs in the succession struggle. For example, in Emperor Xuanzong's military move to eliminate Princess Taiping's supporters, which culminated in the princess's suicide and Emperor Ruizong's final “retirement,” two important players were Wang Maozhong, a family slave of Korean descent, and Gao Lishi, a eunuch (ZZTJ 210.6683; Jiu Tang shu 106.3252). Emperor Xuanzong, who started as a strong Turco-Xianbei monarch, would gradually turn into an uninterested and disengaged emperor, of the kind of which the later native Ming dynasty would see many. The appearance of the second Eastern Türk Empire was invariably hailed as a conquered people casting off the Tang yoke. Few realize that the development might be more appropriately viewed as the consequence of the growing alienation felt by a (junior) partner in a Särbo-Turco-Chinese joint venture that was tilting more and more toward agrarian traditions. Pulleyblank seems to be the only author to have noted this Turco-Chinese partnership,⁶⁴ albeit failing to recognize the crucial Xianbei factor that, like the Manchus, was the key element binding the Steppe and the agrarian communities into a true empire. In my view, the reappearance of an Eastern Türk empire was not unlike the case of Outer Mongolia gaining independence after the end of the Qing, a Manchu-Mongol-Chinese dynasty.

With the onset of the An Lushan Rebellion in 755, the outward expansion of the Tang came to a sudden stop. Yet the stubborn Steppe heritage of succession struggles did not go right out of the political arena with our last Turco-Xianbei monarch, though its fundamental aspects underwent a sea change.

The key transformation was that the court eunuchs replaced the regular imperial guards in deciding the outcome of the succession struggle,⁶⁵ a natural development with the end of the glories of the expansion wars. The new power brokers would continue this role until almost the very end of the Tang. Fletcher's term “surrogate nomads” would now do full justice to them. Not by accident, the coming of eunuchal power at the Tang court closely resembled, for example, a similar development in the declining years of the Safavid dynasty of Iran, after the latter's practice of appointing the royal princes to provincial governorship (also an early Tang policy) was replaced by their confinement to the harem (similar measures were adopted by the Tang too, as discussed earlier) in order to avoid succession contentions.⁶⁶ With the control of imperial guards gradually falling into the hands of the court eunuchs and the guard ranks filled mostly with rich playboys from the capital (ZZTJ 254.8237), the political drama was now played out within the walls of the inner palace. The strategic importance of the Xuanwu Gate, together with the prestige of the many guard units, was soon lost. For example, a late Tang source⁶⁷ has an eyewitness report on the deplorable condition during the Yuanhe era (806–20) of an originally prestigious imperial guard office. However, these new changes are mostly beyond the scope of this book.

The Process of Sinicization

The case of Prince Chengqian had many historical precedents and parallels. In addition to Tuoba Xun, the Northern Wei heir apparent, two other prominent cases were that of the Sui heir apparent Yang Yong and Taizong's elder brother Crown Prince Jiancheng, Chengqian's uncle. Careful study of these cases reveals an interesting pattern of succession struggles during the era: the “bandwagon” of sinicization and the patronage of classical Chinese scholarship or other authentic Chinese literature and arts as a most effective tool in such contentions, when the regime was hard-pressed for political legitimacy to rule the entire Central Kingdom.

In the case of Emperor Yangdi of the Sui, we see his marriage at a young age to a daughter of a prominent southern royal family (in fact the daughter of a puppet Later Liang emperor); his patronage of the Southern Buddhist temples; his love of almost everything connected to the south, which before the final unification was seen even by many in the north as the site of the “legitimate” Chinese regime; and, last but not least, his status as an extraordinarily talented man of Chinese literacy⁶⁸—all of this certainly had figured in his successful contention for the throne against his elder brother and the Confucian dizhang rule of succession.

Li Shimin's bid for the throne is a very old and thoroughly studied topic. Many factors for his triumph over his elder brother have been proposed: his unmatched military deeds in solidifying the dynasty, his command of a large group of talented followers, his ability to control the crucial Xuanwu Gate, his preemptive strike, and so on.⁶⁹ But the issue of sinicization has not attracted enough attention in the context of his eventual command of political legitimacy and its role in the defeat of his brothers. In fact, Li Shimin set up an “academy” in his official residence to patronize classical literature and scholarship as early as 621, while the regime was not yet solidified (ZZTJ 189.5931-32). One has to admit that Li Shimin had remarkable political foresight and long-term planning in the struggle for succession.

The situation is perhaps best enlightened by the aforementioned quote of Emperor Gaozu when Li Shimin began to show his independence. It not only indicated the Li clan's ethnic self-identity as discussed earlier but also the notion that Li Shimin's political aspirations were prompted partly by his sinicization—being “taught by educated Hàn.”

The case of Prince Chengqian can be studied then in the same context. The hapless Prince was known to have frequently “ignored his learning,” whereas his main rival Li Tai was a diligent student and, following in the footsteps of his father, set up a literary “academy” to patronize classical scholarship; his courtyard was then “as crowded as a marketplace.” In the spring of 642, he even presented the court with a major work authored under his sponsorship (ZZTJ 195.6150, 196.6174). On the other hand, his reported love of hunting and war games aside, there were two interesting episodes indicative of his attitude toward the most important national affair in the Central Kingdom—agriculture. First, he was accused of having “interrupted farming” (ZZTJ 196.6168). Second, he was credited with saving the life of an attendant of the imperial manor from Emperor Taizong's order of execution (Tang huiyao 4.44). The incident demonstrated Chengqian's quality of decency, something the official history was reluctant to show. The attendant's alleged offense was, interestingly, that he had been ignoring the maintenance of the garden. It should also be noted that, judging by his surname Mu, this hapless attendant was undoubtedly of Xianbei descent.⁷⁰

Proceeding from the cases I have reviewed here, a general rule in the succession struggle can be summarized as follows. The elder sons, Prince Yong, Prince Jiancheng, and Prince Chengqian (and the Tuoba Prince Xun in some sense), tended to be upstaged by their more “cultured” and more “sinicized” younger brothers, Emperor Yangdi, Emperor Taizong, and Prince Tai respectively.

One may find interesting parallels elsewhere. For instance, there were several cases of elder and more militaristic sons being passed over for succession in the Turco-Iranian realm, which has puzzled early Muslim and later authors.⁷¹ Bosworth has suggested they be a reminiscence of the Steppe custom of ultimogeniture. However, as many Mongologists have pointed out, the Mongol practice of ochigin, a term with a Turkic origin, regarding the inheritance of property might not necessarily apply to political power (khanship). In the Särbo-Chinese connection, the cultural aspect of these cases would also seem an interesting topic. One notes that, among the Ghaznavids for example, in contrast to the militarist elder brother Mas'ud, the younger brother Muhammad's tastes “were predominately literary and studious.”⁷²

The paradox back in the Central Kingdom is that what these more sinicized younger sons had to overcome was the very Chinese primogeniture succession principle. Among other things, it created an acute dilemma for Hàn ministers and officials in taking sides. The famous courtier Wei Zheng is a good example. This deep self-conflict could be observed throughout Wei's life, on which most biographies, including Howard Wechsler's fine study, fail to elaborate. Wei Zheng was noted for his loyalty to Emperor Gaozu's original heir apparent, Prince Jiancheng. As shown by an interesting episode in Jiu Tang shu (71.2559), he was still quite unwavering on the dizhang primogeniture succession rule after many years of service under Emperor Taizong, whose ascension to the throne represented a breach of this very principle.

This politico-cultural aspect of Turco-Mongol conquest regimes, namely enhancing their legitimacy by patronizing the “native” culture and religion at the expense of their own ethnic heritage, was also amply demonstrated by, inter alia, almost all Turkic dominions in the Middle East, at least up to the fourteenth century, as observed by Richard Frye and Aydin Sayili.⁷³ A similar endeavor would be observed in the Qing's succession struggles, exemplified by the miserable end of both Chen Menglei, the compiler of the voluminous Gujin tushu jicheng (Complete Collection of Literature from Ancient Times to Present Day), and his immediate royal patron.⁷⁴

However, if the sinicization or patronage of Hàn culture represented the political dimension of the blood tanistry struggle, then the military dimension was equally if not more important. For the support of the imperial guards who would actually carry out the dirty and often bloody job, the military aptitude and valor of the contender were also crucial, as attested by the cases of Emperor Yangdi of the Sui and the Tang emperors Taizong and Xuanzong. Failure in the military aspect and/or an overkill in sinicization would lead to disastrous results for the contenders, best shown by the case of Prince Tai, whose maneuver led to the downfall of the Crown Prince Chengqian but fell short of Tai's ultimate objective of replacing him. One can note similar effort in patronizing traditional Chinese scholarship by Emperor Gaozong's heir apparent, Li Xian, whose famed annotation of Hou Hàn shu (History of the Later Hàn) has since become an integral part of that dynastic history. Li Xian's scholarly pursuits, obviously for enhancing his status in the face of his mother Wu Zetian's blatant political challenge to him and the entrenched Hàn patriarchy tradition, proved counterproductive too.

The strong opposition to Prince Li Tai as a replacement for Prince Chengqian also suggests in my view the existence of a political force at the Tang court that was not sympathetic to Tai's overt sinicizing tendency. This, among other things, shows that sinicization was a complex and slow process and was not always oneway. Few authors have noted that the choice of the new crown prince Li Zhi, later Emperor Gaozong, represented a political compromise in this ethnico-cultural context. It can be clearly seen from the fact that Li Zhi was close to Li Yuanchang, a follower of Prince Chengqian in the Li clan, and Zhangsun Wuji was once a friend of Hou Junji, another important member of the Chengqian clique (ZZTJ 197.6195 and Quan Tang wen 161.1645). Sun Guodong has pointed out that Zhangsun Wuji, Li Zhi's decisive backer, was not a man of letters, while three major supporters of Prince Wei, namely Liu Ji, Cen Wenben, and Cui Renshi, all were, and all had rather miserable ends.⁷⁵ Indeed, Zhangsun Wuji carried the Tuoba Xianbei legacy both by descent and in deeds. Instead of being stripped off by the “basically sinified” former tribesmen as David Honey has argued, the “Barbarian” felt hat that Zhangsun Wuji wore soon set the fashion and was later labeled by the Confucian historians as “devilish” as quoted earlier, another indication that Prince Chengqian's alleged neurosis was hardly an anomaly in the ruling aristocracy.

However, the best evidence that this choice was a compromise in the context of sinicization was Prince Li Zhi himself. In addition to ordering Türk companions for his sons as mentioned earlier, he proved himself the ultimate Northern boy by marrying his father's wife as well as allowing her to dominate the court.

The Issue of Legitimacy and the Role of Religion

The issue of sinicization (or patronage of native cultures in the general Turco-Mongol political sphere) as the political arm of the blood tanistry struggle leads to the issue of political legitimacy of the Turco-Xianbei regimes, including the Sui and the (early) Tang, in China.

In his resourceful and often stimulating book on China's frontiers, Thomas Barfield contends that as a universal rule the Steppe nomadic regimes were not interested in settling in and taking over the Chinese heartland.⁷⁶ However, this principle would seem at times dependent on disavowing the Steppe identity of the nomads as soon as they crossed to the south of the Great Wall, for they would soon develop a strong interest afterward in doing exactly that. The Tuobas might have originated in the Xing'an Mountains, but the strong Turkic elements, both linguistic (see the Appendix of this book) and political, in them and their successors were hard to ignore. The Turco-Xianbei rulers in northern China certainly did not show great hesitation in aspiring to become true sons of heaven for all those under heaven. As mentioned earlier, the Tuoba Wei's wholesale sinification and transfer of its capital were viewed by many as prompted by such an aim. It is remarkable that the Nüzhen (Jurchen) emperor Wanyan Liang (reign 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 his illness, from which he never fully recovered (ZZTJ 198–99). This clearly and unequivocally shows the importance he attached to his Turkic connections.

I would add that this “Turkic identity” was further reflected in Emperor Taizong's death. Several authors have observed that certain features of his mausoleum, particularly the large number of stone statues representing real-life personalities, were imitative of the ancient Türk burial custom.⁹⁰ I contend that, rather than mere imitation, it in fact reflected the Tang imperial house's Steppe background and identity. For a son of heaven well known for his obsession with posterity and historical legacy in the Sinitic world, Emperor Taizong's mausoleum is a manifestation of his other cultural identity.

The Tang house's respect for non-Hàn burial customs both within and beyond the Chinese heartland was documented. For example, Emperor Taizong once sharply condemned the Eastern Türks' adoption of the (Hàn) tomb burials in violation of their ancestral traditions (Cefu yuangui 125.1501),⁹¹ and Emperor Xuanzong issued an edict allowing a surrendered Türk official “to be buried according to the native [Turkic] customs” (Cefu yuangui 974.11446).

Nearly three centuries later, when the Tang dynasty was in its death throes, there was another fascinating case of atavistic reflection of its ethnic roots. In the year 904, shortly before his murder by the founding monarch of the succeeding Liang dynasty (907–23), the Tang emperor Zhaozong (reign 888–904) was forced into a miserable banishment from the Tang capital with a small entourage, a virtual prisoner of the Liang soldiers. In constant fear of regicide and anticipating the final end of the once glorious dynasty, Emperor Zhaozong cited a folk poem lamenting his fate (ZZTJ 264.8627), likening himself to a “freezing bird at the peak of Mount Hegan.” Interestingly, from hundreds of possible metaphors in volumes of Chinese literature for describing a despondent monarch in his last days, Emperor Zhaozong picked up a folklore icon that originated from the area where Mount Hegan was well known. The final note to this sad episode is that Hegan was an old tribal name found among the Tuoba core followers, and the namesake mountain was actually located in the immediate area of the old Tuoba capital Pingcheng (near present-day Datong in the province of Shanxi), which has had heavy concentrations of ethnic descendants of the Northern nomads ever since the early Tuoba period.⁹²

Conclusion

By examining the incessant succession struggles and other characteristics of the period, I demonstrate that the early Tang, far from being a “native” dynasty, was in fact a regime with heavy Turco-Xianbei traits, and hence may be more aptly termed a Särbo-Chinese regime. But for the cause of political legitimacy, the imperial family made enormous efforts to present itself as a bona fide Hàn house and to make sure that no compromising evidence was left in any records.

Two historical factors have contributed to the Tang's near success in maintaining this image throughout history: (a) its status as the all-dominating polity in the vast East-Central Asian continent and the sole custodian of historiography, with hardly any independent cultural entity in existence to provide an alternative view or perspective, and (b) the passing of the time.

Besides being in exclusive control of traditional historiography, the Confucian scholar-officials all but monopolized every genre of writing in classical East Asia.⁹³ This is reflected in the fact that, in all three major Altaic languages, the early words for “writing” and “books” are generally considered as cognates of the Chinese character bi, “pen, writing brush.”⁹⁴ The long-speculated existence of a Xianbei script⁹⁵ must be largely abandoned after the discovery of the Xianbei cavern and other equally rich collections of archaeological findings, especially tomb inscriptions and other artifacts of this period. Without an effective script, let alone a body of existing literature, nomadic oral tradition, albeit rich, was no rival to the tomes of Chinese literature (or “cultural repertoire” in Jack Goody and Ian Watt's words)⁹⁶ accumulated since the archaic age.

Conversely, what may have been even more critical were the deliberate efforts by the Northern autocratic families who dominated the political stage in China for centuries. For the specific Sui objective of conquering the south where “legitimate” Chinese dynasties had been maintained, and for the general need for political legitimacy through to the early Tang, a particular task of the Sui/ Tang ruling class was to obscure their non-Sinitic Steppe background and connections. A particular case in point is the contrast between Zhou shu (The History of the Northern Zhou Dynasty), the official Tang-authorized history of the victorious Zhou regime in the struggle to unify northern China, and that of the loser, Bei Qi shu. Because the early Tang ruling clique was dominated by the descendants of the Northern Zhou aristocracy, the chief compiler, Linghu Defen, being the grandson of the Zhou general-in-chief Linghu Zheng (Zhou shu 36.643), Zhou shu could hardly afford any real impartiality or objectivity. This was noticed and criticized even by the Tang historian Liu Zhiji.⁹⁷ Meanwhile, the ruling families of the Qi fared quite miserably after forfeiting their state. Some former royal household members even ended up peddling candles (ZZTJ 173.5382), and the Northern Zhou aristocracy's distrust of the people of the former Qi domain persisted well into the Tang times and might even have contributed to the cause of the An Lushan Rebellion.⁹⁸ The narration in Bei Qi shu was therefore much less inhibited, if not deliberately negative, in describing the Qi regime. As an example of issues pertinent to this study, one can get significantly more information on the Turco-Xianbei cultural and political traits of the Qi ruling clan than of that of the Zhou,⁹⁹ whereas in reality the latter was much more “Xianbei-ized” than the former.¹⁰⁰ In view of the “politically correct” ethnic images in Zhou shu, one should not be surprised by the even less frequent Northern traits in the Tang records.

On the second factor, of the passing of time, after the death in exile of the Buddhist monk Falin, it was not until the Southern Song that the kind of political atmosphere first emerged in which questions would be raised on this long-stablished historical image. By that time, few solid records remained to allow concrete and detailed examination of the real origin and characteristics of the Tang imperial house.

This study also tries to show the inherent problem of relying on traditional historiography without critically examining the very source of these records: just like the Arabo-Persian authors who would not write about their ruler's Turkic culture and heritage, even without the attentive interference from a court obsessed with its historical image, Confucian historians would still hardly have found the many Turco-Xianbei aspects of the regime they were serving a worthy topic. Repeated rewriting and editing of the histories for the sake of elegance and concision, if not for some less honest purpose, had made the situation even worse.

By studying several aspects of the Tang blood tanistry struggles, especially its relationship with the so-called sinicization, one can see that, contrary to the conventional view that conquerors would soon melt in the sea of Chinese populace, the sinicization of Steppe people in the Central Kingdom was a long and painful process. The strong reactions to Tuoba emperor Xiaowen's forced wholesale sinicization, culminating in the Six-Garrison Rebellion and the downfall of the Northern Wei, could still see their ripples in early Tang.

Another seemingly entrenched notion challenged in this chapter is the classification of Chinese dynasties into “native” and “conquest” regimes. Even in his otherwise enlightening book on China's “perilous frontier,” Thomas Barfield sticks to the conventional view that “the collapse of the [Northern] Wei marked the end of Manchurian rule in China.”¹⁰¹ Yet as I have shown, in many aspects the (early) Tang bore striking similarity to the Qing dynasty. In addition to the succession struggles, the institution of heir apparent, the frontier and ethnic policy, the advance into Central Asia, and even the fate of the “national language,” I may add that the Tang and the Qing were the only two Chinese dynasties during which provincial governors held enormous prestige and power. At the very least, these facts suggest that the distinction between a “native” and a “conquest” dynasty is at best a gray area.