Tang China Research Articles

The Way of the Barbarians: Redrawing Ethnic Boundaries in Tang and Song China, by Shao-yun Yang

The Way of the Barbarians: Redrawing Ethnic Boundaries in Tang and Song China, by Shao-yun Yang

Building and Rebuilding Buddhist Monasteries in Tang China: The Reconstruction of the Kaiyuan Monastery in Sizhou

This article explores regional Buddhist monasteries in Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE) China, including their arrangement, functions, and sources for their study. Specifically, as a case study, it considers the reconstruction of the Kaiyuan monastery 開元寺 in Sizhou 泗州 (present-day Jiangsu Province) with reference to the works of three prominent state officials and scholars: Bai Juyi 白居易 (772–846), Li Ao 李翱 (772–841), and Han Yu 韓愈 (768–824). The writings of these literati allow us to trace the various phases of the monastery’s reconstruction, fundraising activities, and the network of individuals who participated in the project. We learn that the rebuilt multi-compound complex not only provided living areas for masses of pilgrims, traders, and workers but also functioned as a barrier that protected the populations of Sizhou and neighboring prefectures from flooding. Moreover, when viewed from a broader perspective, the renovation of the Kaiyuan monastery demonstrates that Buddhist construction projects played a pivotal role in the social and economic development of Tang China’s major metropolises as well as its regions.

唐 太宗代 反胃 치료법의 개발과 百濟 義慈王의 질병

唐은 기본적으로 隋의 의료체계를 수용하면서도 醫術世家의 秘傳에 의해 분산ㆍ난립된 醫術의 독점을 국가의 의료체계라는 公的 영역으로 흡수하고자 하였다. 나아가 당은 그 의술을 민간에 유포함으로써 점차 의술세가의 독점적 입지를 좁혀 나갔다. 공익을 위한 의술 공개는 당 왕조의 존재 이유를 백성들에게 가장 효율적으로 각인시키는 방법의 하나였고, 이는 초기 왕조의 안정화에 기여하였다. 당 태종대 당나귀오줌을 이용한 반위 치료법 개발은 이러한 의료정책의 결실이었다. 蔣ㆍ許ㆍ巢氏 醫官들의 연구를 통해 이루어낸 새로운 치료 법은 즉위 초반부터 숙환이 있던 의자왕에게도 주목받았다. 644년 초 의자왕은 당에 파견된 사신을 통해 의사를 알아보았고, 그해 말 입당한 태자 夫餘康信이 당 태종에게 蔣元昌의 왕진을 요청했다. 당시 장원창은 益州道로 파견나가 있었기 때문에 당 태종은 그를 백제에 보낼 수 없었다. 결과적으로 태자를 보내 백제의 신라공격에 대한 입장을 해명하고 신라를 침공하지 않겠다고 약속했던 의자왕이 645년에 신라를 공격했다. 그해 고구려와 전쟁을 시작한 당 태종은 신라를 이용하여 고구려의 병력을 남쪽으로 분산시키고자 했던 의도가 무산되었다. 현재 학계에서는 백제의 신라 공격 이유를 명확하게 설명하지 못하고 있다. 645년 백제의 신라 공격으로 백제와 당의 관계가 악화되었다. 이는 신라가 대당외교에서 성공할 수 있는 여건을 만들어 주었다. 이런 점에서 645년 백제의 신라 공격은 의자왕의 질병과 의사 장원창의 왕진 요청 거부가 중요하게 작용했던 결과라고 할 수 있다.

The Relationship Between Kūkai, Eichū, and the Emperor Saga

The Japanese monk Eichū 永忠 (743–816), who had studied in Tang China, was respected by Emperor Kanmu 桓武 (737–806) and Emperor Saga 嵯峨 (786–842) both as a Buddhist monk and a man of culture. The entry for 815 in the Nihon kōki 日本後紀 notes that when Emperor Saga made an imperial procession to Ōmi, Eichū presented him with tea. Eichū has been said to have been Saichō’s disciple, and was also admired by Kūkai. Kūkai writes in his Go-shōrai mokuroku 御請来目録 that he stayed at Ximing monastery 西明寺 where Eichū had formerly stayed, and in his Henjō Hokki Shōryō shū 遍照発揮性霊集 he records that he wrote a letter to the Chinese court in place of Eichū at this request. This paper will examine the relationship between Kūkai, Eichū, Emperor Saga, and others.

The “Brilliant Teaching”: Iranian Christians in Tang China and Their Identity

The last three decades or so have seen an increasing interest in the early history of Christianity in China, particularly in Christian communities in the Tang period. One of the pertinent questions asked—particularly by theologians—is whether the “Brilliant Teaching” (Jingjiao), as the religion called itself in Chinese, had a substantial number of Chinese converts, i.e. whether it was a proselytizing religion or rather an Iranian diaspora religion. While recent documents and new interpretations of existing sources has made it probable that we are indeed dealing with an “expat” religious community, the question of the cultural and religious identity of this community has not really been addressed: they were using Syriac as their liturgical and communal language, but were Persian, Sogdian and maybe even Bactrian in terms of origin and culture. This paper will summarize the data we can get from Chinese sources and discuss them in the light of religious and cultural identity.

在唐 백제 유민의 활동과 출세 배경

在唐 백제 유민의 활동과 출세 배경

The Patterned Guidelines of Shazhou ( Shazhou tujing ) and geographical practices in Tang China

The <i>Patterned Guidelines of Shazhou</i> ( <i>Shazhou tujing</i> ) and geographical practices in Tang China

The Way of the Barbarians: Redrawing Ethnic Boundaries in Tang and Song China By Shao-yun Yang. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019. xii + 229. $95.00 (cloth), $30.00 (ppb).

The Way of the Barbarians: Redrawing Ethnic Boundaries in Tang and Song China By Shao-yun Yang. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019. xii + 229. $95.00 (cloth), $30.00 (ppb).

Empire of Style: Silk and Fashion in Tang China, written by BuYun Chen, 2019

Empire of Style: Silk and Fashion in Tang China, written by BuYun Chen, 2019

Gender, Power, and Talent: The Journey of Daoist Priestesses in Tang China, written by Jinhua Jia, 2018

Gender, Power, and Talent: The Journey of Daoist Priestesses in Tang China, written by Jinhua Jia, 2018

Review: Empire of Style: Silk and Fashion in Tang China, by BuYun Chen

Review: Empire of Style: Silk and Fashion in Tang China, by BuYun Chen

Power Emasculated: Eunuchs, Great Clans and Political Reproduction under the Tang

Throughout the history of imperial China (221 BC–1911 AD), eunuchs married and adopted children. Evidence of those practices is particularly abundant for the latter half of the Tang Dynasty, from the late eighth to the early tenth century, thanks to the excavation of dozens of tomb epitaphs (muzhiming) for eunuchs, their spouses and descendants. From the reign of Dezong (779–805) onward, an increasing number of eunuchs claimed descent from the great clans of Tang China, highlighted by the use of choronyms in their names and titles. Both adoptions and great-clan descent contributed to the phenomenon of “eunuch dynasties” (huanguan shijia), successive generations of eunuchs belonging to the same lineage. This paper argues that sending biological or adopted sons as eunuchs into the palace was one of the strategies that officeholding clans employed for political reproduction during the long ninth century; it shows that the values of medieval Chinese society weighted heavily on the shoulders even of emasculated men, who modeled their (after)life according to traditional male gender roles. Indeed, the continued presence of great-clan eunuchs at court and the large number of commissionerships created for them contributed to the stability of the late Tang regime.

Material Culture and Fashion in Tang China and Beyond

Material Culture and Fashion in Tang China and Beyond Rebecca Doran Empire of Style: Silk and Fashion in Tang China by BuYun Chen. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019. Pp. xiv + 257. $70.00 cloth, $70.00 e-book. Silk, Slaves, and Stupas: Material Culture of the Silk Road by by Susan Whitfield. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. Pp. xi + 339. $29.95 cloth, $29.95 e-book. Discussions of the Tang period almost inevitably address, or at least refer to, the dynasty's cosmopolitanism. A complex set of interconnections between the Tang and other kingdoms made it culturally rich and open to a variety of influences. The interstate relationships that contributed to the development of Tang culture and society can be approached from numerous perspectives. These relationships include but are by no means limited to tributary and trade systems, military expansion and foreign policy, and religiously motivated movement into and out of the Tang borders by clergy and laypeople alike. One way to understand and trace the connections between the Tang empire and kingdoms across Eurasia is through the lens of materiality. This material culture encompasses a wide range of articles of clothing, jewelry, decorative objects, items of daily use, and other artistic products, as well as the attendant attitudes toward them and practices surrounding their use. The networks comprising the famed Silk Road, referring to a system of routes across Central Asia and the Middle East, linking Chang'an in the east with Antioch in the west, were crucial to forging [End Page 165] and maintaining ties between the Tang and other kingdoms. They fueled the wealth and lush material culture of the Tang, especially during its first century and a half. This rich materiality is attested in textual, visual, and archaeological sources and remains fundamental to the historical memory of the dynasty. Recent monographs by BuYun Chen and Susan Whitfield adopt groundbreaking, multidisciplinary approaches to material culture in China and beyond. They emphasize the importance of materiality—clothes, textiles, jewelry, bowls, and stupas, among other artifacts—to understanding economic, political, and ideological realities. Chen's Empire of Style: Silk and Fashion in Tang China analyzes the multifaceted Tang fashion system, powered by weavers, artisans, traders, and consumers. Focusing in particular on the significance of silk textiles, Chen utilizes archaeological and textual sources, first, to reconstruct the changing modes of production that drove the creation of these fabrics and, second, to demonstrate the existence of a dynamic fashion culture and consciousness during the Tang. Whitfield's Silk, Slaves, and Stupas: Material Culture of the Silk Road adopts an object-centered approach to the cultural interactions enabled by the Silk Road. It explores the relationships between material items and broader systems of politics, trade, and religion. The monograph traces the creation and movement of ten different objects along the Silk Road and, through this analysis, maps networks of interconnection among artisans, traders, worshippers, and consumers across vast geographic and cultural boundaries. The issues raised and methodologies utilized by both books contribute to ongoing scholarly dialogues and open new directions in the study of material culture, fashion, art, and economic and social history in the Tang and beyond. Empire of Style is divided into two main sections, which unfold progressively to address the ideological and political forces, consumer demand, and logistics of production shaping the development of the Tang fashion system. The monograph begins with an insightful introduction that challenges traditional theories of the genesis of fashion, which have tended to view the emergence of modern fashion culture as inextricably tied to the advent of a capitalist system and commodity culture in nineteenth-century western Europe. Chen debunks the "myth of a static Chinese costume" by introducing what she terms the "tactile and playful world of Tang fashion," a world marked by the [End Page 166] desire for change and "aesthetic play," wherein consumers and wearers used fashion to experiment with social role, image, and perception (pp. 5, 7, 9). Turning to the main body of the book, part 1 comprises two chapters, which explore, respectively, the political and economic developments that enabled the emergence of a cosmopolitan fashion culture during the Tang ("History") and the discursive frameworks through...

History of Aristocratic Families in Tang China, Part 1: The Struggle to Adapt

In Tang China, aristocratic families went to great lengths in order to preserve prestige and prosperity in spite of challenges and restrictions imposed upon them. This article attempts to study the ways in which this privileged class incessantly responded to the dynasty's political and social changes, demonstrated through two outstanding endeavors: adjusting traditional burial practices and conceding to assuming roles in the bureaucracy. By comparison, this article also studies ways in which humble families acted in these two aspects. The prevailing pattern of migration, namely, the “center-orientedness” (qianxi zhongyanghua 遷徙中央化), was not unique to aristocratic families; humble families were also eager to catch up with the trend. This article argues that while gradually losing physical connection and sentimental affinity for one's native place, a substantial number of aristocratic families originating in North China had actually lived in the South before ultimately serving in the bureaucracy; this historical inclination manifested itself in a deviation between families' burial locations and living areas. The choice of burial sites not only embodied the popularity of a “center-oriented” migration pattern, but also strengthened the trend of relinquishing one's sentimental attachment to the native place. This article also discusses the interactions between aristocratic families and upstarts; aristocratic families' differing approaches signified how they assessed their own situations, and in what ways connections with upstarts could aid in perpetuating their societal privilege and prestige.

New Perspectives on Medieval Daoism

New Perspectives on Medieval Daoism Livia Kohn Gender, Power and Talent: The Journey of Daoist Priestesses in Tang China by Jinhua Jia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Pp. xxvi + 324. $80.00 cloth, $79.99 e-book. Roaming into the Beyond: Representations of Xian Immortality in Early Medieval Chinese Verse by Zornica Kirkova. Leiden, Nld.: Brill, 2016. Pp. ix + 419. $158.00 cloth, $158.00 e-book. The Writ of the Three Sovereigns: From Local Lore to Institutional Daoism by Dominic Steavu. Hong Kong: Centre for Studies of Daoist Culture, Chinese University of Hong Kong: Chinese University Press; Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019. Pp. xiv + 370. $72.00 cloth, $28.00 paper. Imperiled Destinies: The Daoist Quest for Deliverance in Medieval China by Franciscus Verellen. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2019. Pp. x + 376. $75.00 cloth. The four recent publications by well-established scholars reviewed here open exciting new perspectives on medieval Daoism, building solidly on previous research while moving the field forward toward a better overall understanding. They each come at the religion from different angles and work with various dimensions, centering on different [End Page 455] social strata, religious schools, and other key features. As a result, taken together, they provide a refreshing and most intriguing picture of the wide scope and multifaceted nature of medieval Chinese religiosity. To begin, Franciscus Verellen in Imperiled Destinies: The Daoist Quest for Deliverance in Medieval China describes various concepts of destiny and causation, the impact of moral or sinful actions on life and health, and the ritual methods of redemption and resolution employed by different Daoist schools. He distinguishes four key dimensions in this context: root liability (gen 根), retribution (bao 報), restitution (shu 贖), and release (jie 解). More specifically, root liability designates the “debts and obligations that a sinner could expect to find recorded in his or her ledger of transgressions” (p. 9). It comes in three forms: • “personal responsibility,” the active transgression of taboos, rules, or precepts; • “exposure sustained,” that is, to ritual pollution, tomb plaints, curses, possessions, or negative miasmas; and • “arrears,” such as inherited ancestral evil or karmic debts of former lives. Retribution signals the results of this situation in life, divided into five categories: • “bondage,” incarceration, servitude, or entanglement; • “adversity,” different types of calamities, misfortunes, and suffering; • “loss of vitality,” ill health, decline, and early death; • “indictment,” legal troubles and judgments; and • “relegation,” future suffering in other forms of rebirth, such as the animal realm or the various hells. To remedy this multiplicity of liabilities, Daoists resorted to restitution, “aimed to improve an individual’s destiny in this life and the next, typically in hopes of healing, resolving adversity, or obtaining protection and blessings” (p. 11). Restitution comes in seven different forms, classified as [End Page 456] • “gifts” as ritual offerings and sacrifices; • “reparation” by atonement and repayment; • “renunciation” through retreats and precepts; • “purgation,” or different forms of purification and cleansing; • “supplication” in prayers and rites of petition; • “devotion” through meditation and recitation; plus • “thanksgiving” by offering rewards and recompense. The ultimate results of all these activities, then, was release, matching the type of retribution it resolved: • “liberation” in different forms of extraction, deliverance, succor, and discharge; • “preservation” through protection, healing, and recovery; • “acquittal” by means of pardon and absolution; as well as • ultimate “promotion” to the realms of the blessed by ascension and transcendence. This awesome variety of features plays out differently in the course of Daoist history, outlined in the three parts of Verellen’s book, each consisting of four chapters. Part 1 centers on the early Heavenly Masters (Tianshi 天師) school; part 2 focuses on the reformer Lu Xiujing 陸修靜 (406–477), a representative of both the Heavenly Masters and the Sacred Jewel (Lingbao 靈寶, commonly called Numinous Treasure) schools; and part 3 discusses the integrated synthesis under the Tang. Each part begins by succinctly presenting the core organizational features and conceptual structures of the form of Daoism in question, expertly summarizing previously established facts with ample references to relevant original sources, then moves on to specific visions of liabilities and their resolution. The tendency among the early Heavenly Masters, discussed in part 1, was to see evil and sin as incurred from outside...

Texts and Ritual: Buddhist Scriptural Tradition of the Stūpa Cult and the Transformation of Stūpa Burial in the Chinese Buddhist Canon

Chinese translations of Buddhist sūtras and Chinese Buddhist literature demonstrate how stūpas became acknowledged in medieval China and how clerics and laypeople perceived and worshiped them. Early Buddhist sūtras mentioned stūpas, which symbolize the presence of the Buddha and the truth of the dharma. Buddhist canonical texts attach great significance to the stūpa cult, providing instructions regarding who was entitled to have them, what they should look like in connection with the occupants’ Buddhist identities, and how people should worship them. However, the canonical limitations on stūpa burial for ordinary monks and prohibitions of non-Buddhist stūpas changed progressively in medieval China. Stūpas appeared to be erected for ordinary monks and the laity in the Tang dynasty. This paper aims to outline the Buddhist scriptural tradition of the stūpa cult and its changes in the Chinese Buddhist Canon, which serves as the doctrinal basis for understanding the significance of funerary stūpas and the primordial archetype for the formation of a widely accepted Buddhist funeral ritual in Tang China.

Transgressive Typologies: Construction of Gender and Power in Early Tang China

Transgressive Typologies: Construction of Gender and Power in Early Tang China

Gender, Power, and Talent: The Journey of Daoist Priestesses in Tang China. By Jinhua Jia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. xxxvi, 324 pp. ISBN: 9780231184441 (cloth, also available as e-book).

Gender, Power, and Talent: The Journey of Daoist Priestesses in Tang China. By Jinhua Jia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. xxxvi, 324 pp. ISBN: 9780231184441 (cloth, also available as e-book).

Transgressive Typologies: Constructions of Gender and Power in Early Tang China, written by Rebecca Doran, 2016

Transgressive Typologies: Constructions of Gender and Power in Early Tang China, written by Rebecca Doran, 2016

To Stand with the Nations of the World: Japan's Meiji Restoration in World History by Mark Ravina

Reviewed by: To Stand with the Nations of the World: Japan's Meiji Restoration in World History by Mark Ravina Steven J. Ericson (bio) To Stand with the Nations of the World: Japan's Meiji Restoration in World History. By Mark Ravina. Oxford University Press, New York, 2017. xiv, 312 pages. $29.95. This outstanding book fits in with the wave of conferences, workshops, publications, and podcasts commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Meiji [End Page 423] Restoration.1 Mark Ravina has produced a work with strikingly original interpretations of the Restoration, placing it in the broad sweep of Japanese history from the seventh century on as well as in the larger context of global history. Views of the Meiji Restoration at least in the English-language literature continue to show the influence of classic modernization-school studies that portrayed the event as marking the transition from a "traditional" polity to a modern, Western-style nation-state. Ravina, however, argues cogently that understanding the Restoration requires going beyond "a false contrast between 'traditional Japan' and the 'modern Western world'": "It was not a clash between 'modern' and 'traditional' or between 'Western' and 'Japanese' but a struggle to transcend those dichotomies and to create new institutions and practices that could simultaneously evoke both Japanese uniqueness and Western progress" (pp. 4–5). For specialists, some of the arguments the author makes are not new. Several decades ago, historians such as Mark Ericson and Conrad Totman noted a point suggested by Ravina that by the late Tokugawa era the shogunate had become more progressive than its opponents and that the last shogun might well have led Japan into the modern age,2 and others have long acknowledged that the Meiji leaders initially looked to ancient imperial institutions in establishing the new government. The conventional view, however, is that the adoption of such institutions was a temporary expedient as the leaders worked out a more fully Western form of government. By contrast, Ravina convincingly presents the revival of millennium-old patterns as a conscious strategy of invoking past imperial tradition to support revolutionary change in the present, a phenomenon he terms "radical nostalgia." A prime example was the regime's claim that the Westernizing, modern innovation of universal military conscription was not a break with tradition but a return to the Nara-era formation of imperial conscript armies. The author's other major contribution is to show that, when Japanese in the nineteenth century borrowed ideas and practices from the West, they tended to view them not as "foreign" or "Western" but as "universal"—as [End Page 424] imports that could enhance Japan's own distinctive strengths in standing up to the Western powers. In one example of this tendency, which Ravina calls "cosmopolitan chauvinism," the late Tokugawa thinker Satō Nobuhiro could argue that heliocentric European astronomy, which clashed with Christian geocentrism, was more Japanese than European because of its compatibility with Japan's own creation myths and the centrality of the sun goddess Amaterasu (pp. 11, 79–80); statesmen and intellectuals would make similar claims about Japanese borrowings from the West after 1868. While emphasizing "diachronic" continuities in thought and practice between the bakumatsu and Meiji periods, Ravina also highlights "synchronic" processes of "global isomorphism" whereby the Meiji state coopted contemporary Western ideas and technologies while at the same time it drew "asynchronically" on patterns that the ancient imperial state had likewise borrowed from Tang China (pp. 9, 16). To some extent, the author recasts views advanced by Albert Craig and others more than half a century ago that the imperial forces overthrew the shogunate in the name of traditional values and then carried out a revolution in response to the external threat of Western imperialism rather than to long-term processes of internal decay. The tradition that Ravina underscores, however, represented not so much the positive values of the Tokugawa era, which cannot fully explain the revolution that followed the overthrow of the shogunate, as the institutions of the seventh and eighth centuries, when Japan's polity and society similarly underwent a dramatic transformation. Yet, in emphasizing the change in the international environment as the factor that "destroyed the Tokugawa regime" (p...