East Asian History - ANU

20LEWIS MAYO53 The great variety of names for differentkinds of hawks and the different provenancesand attributes of these laid out in DuanChengshi's text on hunting birds suggests ahighly differentiated market for the birds inTang times. See Youyang zazu, qianji,juan20, pp.194-7. See also Schafer, "Falconry inT'ang times," pp.324-35. Diplomaticexchange brought more exalted birds frommore distant places, and conferred uponthem the charisma of the political (ratherthan commercial) forces with which theywere associated.54 The position of the royal mews in theformal structure of the Tang government isset out in the Xin Tang shu, juan 47, Baiguan zhiB 13' it- 2 [Monograph on governmentfunctionaries, part 2], p.1218. On theroyal mews in the Tang, see Schafer,"Falconry in T'ang times," p.305.55 Arthur Waley, The life and times of PoChu-i, 772-846 A.D. (London: George Allen& Unwin, 1949), pp.36--7.56 Some index of this line of argument is thecritique of royal hunting and meat consumptionin a Buddhist poem preserved atDunhuang. "Shang huang quanshan duanjiu rou wen" LIfJ;g.lIVTmi)( [A textof the emperor superior exhorting good andgiving up meat and wine], Beitu 8412, Haino.51. See Wang Fanzhou, Dunhuang sengshi jiao ji [Buddhist monastic poetry fromDunhuang, annotated and edited] (Lanzhou:Gansu Renmin Chubanshe, 1994), p.66.their strategies for the augmentation of imperial distinctiveness; those ofscholar-bureaucrats and their injunctions to austerity and duty to family andstate; those of palace women with their mastery of arts of instruction andentertainment; and those of ritual specialists and their knowledge ofdeportment, sequence, and standards of measure and balance in the use ofobjects and of words in the structures of everyday life and ceremonial.The power struggles between these pedagogic interests and projects wasfundamental to sovereignty: the emperor's body was situated between themand they competed to take it over. Protocol was a central method fornavigating between them, as well as a stake in and an instrument of thesestruggles. The goshawks, as one element in this field of attraction andrepulsion, were affected directly by the trajectory of these rivalries, trajectoriesthat were constituted in the shifting interests of the emperor. Moreover,hunting birds had a precise institution into which they were incorporated: theroyal mews. 54 As a result, they had a specific location in the overall field ofinstitutional struggles that were played out on and through this pedagogiccompetition for the imperial interest. Earlier in the Tang, the mews had beenpolitically controversial: they were under eunuch control and were thus anobject of attack by those who arranged themselves against eunuch interests.The abuses of the eunuchs who procured food for the royal hawks and dogswere extensively highlighted by scholar-bureaucrat critics. At the end of thereign of Dezong, who had become closely involved both with eunuchs andwith the Hanlin @# academicians who made up the inner court after therevolt of the independent military governors of Hebei in the early 780s, oneof the prime actions of the clique of Wang Pi::E {E and Wang Shuwen ::E*j((associated with the emperor Shunzong 1I&t*, who briefly followed Dezong,ruling only for the year 805) was to attack the privileges of the eunuchs whowere associated with falconry:Another scandal was that of the Imperial Falconers, who had been in thehabit of going round extorting money from the people of Ch'ang-an byspreading bird nets over the doors or wells, and refusing to let them beremoved till paid to do so. They also crowded into taverns, ate and drankheavily and went away without paying. This type of palace racket was nowsuppressed. 55Rhetorically and institutionally, hunting birds were situated in a war overthe emperor's private life and those who administered it, which wasidentified with the overall sovereignty order of the empire.The presentation of the Ganjun shan goshawks, in company with Tibetanwomen and horses for the imperial birthday, situates them firmly in thisdomain of private imperial leisure, and the proclivities of the emperor's body.They are therefore exposed to all of the rival projects with their alternativeprotocols, alternative calendars (for the day and for the months and years),and histories of struggle against hawks and the institutional interests withwhich they are affiliated. For Buddhism they appear as a life-taking force,karmically injurious, a sign of the emperor's slavery to his passions. 56 For