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22LEWIS MAYOIsigns of the ancestors. In perusing the riseand fall of previous ages, and in thinking onwhat people of the past took anddiscarded ... and promoting the humanenessof loving life and hating killing, We commandthat the tribute of eagles, ospreys, goshawksand merlins shall cease. On the one hand,let us halt the increase of excursions, and onthe other let us promote the sentiment ofthose that fly and run. In recent days peopleof all colours have not held to the provisionsof the decree, and have frequently offeredtribute of goshawks and falcons. This cannotbe maintained. How can the recent decreesbe shown to them? Later people will say thatwe have transgressed and violated theprohibitions. The goshawks and falconspresently in the royal mews should be takento the mountains and forests and released.Henceforth, people of all colours must notsend in offerings of this kind. If they meetthis kind of tribute, officials at the gatesshould not accept it," p.2029.63 At the same time prisoner, woman, horseand hawk only earn good treatment if theycan learn to judge the commands and wishesof their masters. The satisfactions of masteryrely on compliance, and this can never beguaranteed. The prisoner may not berecondite, the singing girl may not smile, thehorse may not gallop, and the hawk may flyslowly, or miss its target.64 Schafer continues, "Moreover, the imperialpharmacists had to take account of thetastes of these reagents, as related to theFive Organs of the body, and other complexmatters, such as the rule which determinedthat in maladies of the stomach anddiaphragm, the royal patient should eat firstand then take the medicine, while in diseasesof the heart and belly, he should take themedicine first and eat afterwards. Thecompounding took place in the watchfulpresence of the highest councillors of stateand the commander of the guard, and thefinished product was tasted by the chiefpharmacists, by the great Chamberlain (thepharmacists' superior), and by the crownprince (presumably lest he be too anxiousto succeed) before going on to thesovereign's bedside." The golden peaches ofSamarkand, p.179. Schafer's account isbased on the sections on imperial physiciansin the Da Tang Liudian :k$f;Tql*!· [SixInstitutes of the Tang]. See Song ben DaTang Liudian **:k$ft\ [The Songand horses are in this respect constituted as a force of danger: they aredispensable, and acceptable in moderation, but their attractions mayovetwhelm the emperor and imperil the realm. Prisoners, women, horses andhawks share lives of confinement and restraint: they are the products ofseizure. All are to be tamed, reduced to submission by techniques ofsubservience: in this way punishment and entertainment belong on acontinuum.63 At the same time hawks, criminals, women entertainers andhorses are united in being objects of imperial mercy. He releases them,refusing to reproduce their subordination and the techniques of restraintwhich maintain it. These lives have all given themselves over to the ruler,placed themselves in the confined world of his household-his palace or hisjails-unwillingly. Moreover, they are all received from the hands of others,sent up by delegates and subordinates. Yet each has a hold on the emperor;he is prisoner of their strange enticements. Perhaps in releasing them frombondage he expresses a wish to be liberated from the fetters of desire, fetterswhich these constrained and confined lives produce for him.The illness of the sovereign is a central issue for the political system.Medicine produces and reproduces the order of the state and the world."Each medicine should contain one 'superior' drug, monarchical andheavenly, to lengthen life, three 'middle' drugs, vassal and human, tostrengthen the organism, and nine 'inferior' drugs, ministerial and earthly, tocure the disease."64 Medicine is hierarchically structured, in a succession ofpositions and functions. The monarch, or heaven, serves to prolong life. Thesubordinate human, located in the centre, is engaged in a strengtheningaction, while the work of curing, ruling and punishing the disease (and thusof governance as a punitive cure) is the job of the delegated minister/servantlocated at the earthly level. Hawks traverse this structure-they are locateddirectly with the monarch, and with heaven, the area of flight. Yet they arealso vassals, secured from the periphery, from those who acknowledge theemperor's superiority. These vassals are local authorities, in a position ofmediation between imperial heaven and the functionaries who work on theground-where functions of security and tax collection are performedIcopy of the Six Institutes of the Great Tang],juan 10 and juan 14 (Beijing: ZhonghuaShuju, 1991), pp.221-3 and 329-31.Governmental order and cure are both thesame thing (zhi ¥i§l). But the emperor andofficialdom are not involved in a ceaseless waragainst political disease, through theestablishment of a state of somatic equipoisein the territory of the empire. Governance wasmore than triumph over irregularity anddisorder (rebellion or disease). Yet the healthof the emperor was, especially in the ninthcentury, a central target of political action, anda focus of political struggles. The imperialIquest for longevity set systems of knowledgeand ethics and the institutions which producedthem against each other. The death of the rulerwas, moreover, a structuring force in thepolitics ofthe middle and late Tang. Xuanzong,who ascended the throne at the time of theoverthrow of the Tibetans by Zhang Yichao,had the rectification of government in revengefor the murder of his father Xianzong *(who reigned from 805-20) as one of hiscentral pre-occupations. See Michael T. Dalby,"Court politics in late Tang times," in Twitchettand Wright, Cambridge history of China, vol. 3,Sui and T'ang China, pt 1, p.670.
BIRDS AND THE HAND OF POWER23through recruitment from amongst the common people. The exercise of thelowest level of government functions is literally part of the life of the soil.Hawks perform the work of seizure on the ground, capturing the humblelives of hares and pheasants as a delegated ministerial servant, procuringmeat which may, through the virtue of its qualities, aid the health of theimperial body, defined by the expanse of heaven and empire. Meat too wasgoverned by these medical regularities. It was something through whichdirectional and temporal virtues could be ingested, incorporating the thingsof the world into the orderly, governed body of the monarch.65White Birds and Post-Imperial Histories, 884-911Deep in the winter of 884, Suo Hanjun %'¥, the Guiyi jun's DefenceGarrison Chief66 in the town of Suzhou Jffif 1+[,67 reported to his superiors68-undoubtedly the Guiyi jun leaders in Dunhuang-that a white goshawk hadbeen taken east by a party of twenty people led by Suo Ren'an %'1=, thedeputy Defence Commissioner69 of Suzhou. The goshawk made its journeyin company with a chestnut stallion. Both were intended as gifts for thekhan70 of the Uyghurs. The report of the goshawk's journey is embedded in65 The claims that this health made on theplants and animals of the empire wereenormous: it generated and relied uponpractical relations of command over territory.Medicines included "aconite from Chekiangand Szechwan, cassia bark and buds fromnorthern Kwangsi and southern Kiangsi,rhubarb from the northwest, ginseng fromthe north and Manchuria, lotus root from themouth of the Yangtze, fritillary from Hupehand Szechwan, sweet flag from southernSzechwan, liquorice from the north andMongolia ... , goral horns from the mountainsof Szechwan and the Tibetan foothills intonorth China, Mongolia and Manchuria, oxbezoars from Szechwan and Shantung,rhinoceros horn from southern Hunan,python bile from Lingnan, wild boar bezoarsfrom the Ordos, arsenic from T'ai-yiian inShansi ... " Schafer, The golden peaches ofSamarkand, p.180.66 Fangshu du }jJl0(;:W, chief of a unit of 500soldiers. See Feng Peihong, "Wan Tang-WudaiSong chu Guiyi jun wuzhi junjiang yanjiu" [Astudy of the military officers of the Guiy jun inthe Late Tang, Five Dynasties and Early Song],in Dunhuang Guiyi jun shi zhuanti yanjiu[Specialised studies in the history of the Guiyijun in Dunhuangl, ed. Zheng Binglin (Lanzhou:Lanzhou Daxue Chubanshe, 1997), p.l46. Ithank both Colin Jeffcott and Paul Clark forgiving me copies of this book.67 Modern Jiuquan , located in the desertbetween Dunhuang and modern Zhangye(Ganzhou). Jiuquan is close to JiayuguanJ{; m 1m, the western terminus of the Ming fj}3dynastyGreat Wall.68 The report is the document now held in theBritish Museum as S.389. The transcriptionsused here come from Rong Xinjiang, Guiyi junshi yanjiu, pp.304-5. Only the title of DefenceGarrison Chief is given in this report: the nameof Suo Hanjun appears in a report sent amonth earlier by the same office. This is nownumbered S.2589. The connection betweenthe two documents has been made by RongXinjiang (who transcribes S.2589 in Guiyijunshi yanjiu on pp.303-4)' The report has cometo have a key place in modern scholarlyreconstructions of the history of the Gansu!corridor. The first major study was in TangChangru, "Guanyu Guiyi jun de jizhong ziliaoba" [Notes on several materials relating to theGuiyi jun], originally in Zhonghua wenshiluncong 1 (1962) reprinted in Lanzhou Daxuelishixi Dunhuang xue yanjiu shi and LanzhouDaxue Tushuguan, eds, Dunhuangxuewenxuan [Selected writings on Dunhuangstudiesl (Lanzhou: Lanzhou Daxue, 1983),pp.185-6. It is mentioned by Nicholas SimsWilliams and James Hamilton in their discussionof the Turco-Sogdian letter from Tamar Qus toa priest called George in Dunhuang. TheTurco-Sogidan document is Or. 8212 (89); aphotographic reproduction of the Chinesetext of Suo Hanjun's report is found in theappendix to their volume, Documents turcosogdiensdu IXe--Xe siecle de Touen-houang(London: School of Oriental and AfricanStudies, 1990). A Chinese transcription andEnglish translation of part of the text appearson pp.283-4 of Rong Xinjiang's article"mThong-khyab or Tongjia: a tribe in the SinoTibetan frontiers in the seventh to tenthcenturies" (translated by Wilhelm K. Miiller),Monumenta Serica 39 (1990-91): 247-99.69 Fangyushi WJ fJ!!. See Hucker, A dictionaryof offiCial titles in imperial China, p.210:"Defense Commissioner: A delegate from thecentral government on ad hoc duty assignmentIsupervising a Prefecture (chou), or a designationconferred on certain Prefects (tz'ushih);after 762 displaced by the moreprestigious title Military Commissioner (chiehtushih)." The Defence Comissioner post inSuzhou is not of course a central appointment,but part of the defense administrationof the Guiyi jun. The presence of this rank inSuzhou coheres with the logic that Huckeridentifies: it is granted in a prefecture wheredefence is a special priority. The first use ofthis rank is said to be in 698 in Xiazhou I 1+1(see Feng Peihong, "Wan Tang-Wudai-Songchu Guiyi jun wuzhi junjiang yanjiu," p.156).(Xiazhou is located in what is now uninhabitedland in the Ordos desert on theborder between Shaanxi and Inner Mongolia.)Significantly, the business of defence istargeted at specific peoples: for instance, aSenior Defence Commissioner was appointedin 714 in Youzhou jHj'I'.(modern Beijing) toresist the Khitan and the Xi , and aLongyou 1liIi:i Defence Commissioner wasappointed in the area of <strong>East</strong>ern Gansu toresist the Tibetans (see Feng Peihong, id.,pp.156-7). The post was generally in placeswhere a risk of military rebellion was held toexist. Following the An Lushan rebellion thepost spread throughout the country; everymajor prefecture and important lOVER
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