East Asian History - ANU

26Ichinois, pp.30-1. Discussion of the Womofrom a Tibetan perspective is found in Stein,Les tribus anciennes des marches Sino­Tibetaines, pp.67---8. The name 'Od-bar isgiven as the Tibetan equivalent of the nameWomo in Hamilton and Sims-Williams,Documents turco-sogdiens du IXe-Xe sieclede Touen-houang, p.63. A modern Chineselanguagestudy collecting together thevarious Chinese sources is Zhou Weizhou,"Womo kao" [A study of the Womo], Xibeilishi ziliao 0980.2): 1---8. Zhou gives varioussuggestions about the Tibetan original ofthe name, suggesting that it is related togYog-po for a slave (see p.l). Note thatZhou's article uses 0Eit5f:: for Womo,presumably for typographical reasons. Inthe notes on the name Womo in his 1955book, Hamilton rejects the suggestion of F.W. Thomas that Womo is linked to theTibetan word Mun-dmag found in medievalTibetan documents, on the grounds thatmun is merely a Tibetan transcription of theChinese wen )( ('civil' or 'literary") so thatMun-dmag means the civil officials attachedto military units mentioned in the Xin Tangshu. See Hamilton, Les Oui'gours a l'epoquedes Cinq Dynasties, p.31.76 A grou ping which had emerged as part ofthe military apparatus of the Tibetan empire.See Rong Xinjiang's article in MonumentaSerica cited above for a detailed treatmentof the su bject.77 See Rong Xinjiang, Guiyi jun shi yanjiu,pp.306-7.78 Huang Chao, whose rebellion was themost serious challenge to Tang authoritysince the An Lushan revolt, had committedsuicide earlier in 884. The emperor did notreturn to his capital until the following year.Zizhi tongjian,juan 256, p.8320. See Somers,"The end of the T'ang," in Twitchett andWright, Cambridge History oj China, vo1.3,Sui and T'ang times, pt 1, pp.756-66.LEWIS MAYOto form an anti-Uyghur alliance with Ganzhou; with the threat that if they didnot assent, they would face the danger of a coalition between Uyghurs andthe Durp./Longjia. But after the departure of the Tibetans from Ganzhou andseveral more days of internal discussions amongst the Durp./Longjia, thelatter, seeing their grain exhausted, abandoned the oasis. They retreated incompany with their dependants and retainers (and several other ethnicgroups including the Qiang % and Tongjia or mThong-khyab)76 toSuzhou. They arrived hungry in Suzhou-three days after the white goshawk,the chestnut stallion and the party of Suo Ren'an had departed on theirmission to the Uyghur khan. The report ends with the fate of Ganzhouuncertain, but not long after it other official communications indicate that aUyghur qaghanate had been established at Ganzhou 77The white goshawk's journey is part and parcel of the constitution of anew order of territorial power. The political forces involved in the life of thisbird were radically different from those that had affected the Ganjun shanbirds almost twenty years before. Like Zhang Yichao, the Tang emperorYizong was dead. At the time when the white goshawk left Suzhou on itsjourney, his successor Xizong 1-1 * was in exile from the Tang capital, whichwas in the process of being retaken from the troops of the rebel Huang ChaoJi .78 Imperial sovereignty claims in the old territory of the Tang werecorroded, as the emperor and the eunuch-dominated court had now becomea minor regional player amongst an array of rival warlords who had emergedin the course of the rebellion. The gravitational force which the Tang imperialcentre exerted on the Gansu corridor was radically diminished: its actions anddesires had little direct bearing on the movements and struggles of Tuyuhun,Longjia, Womo and Uyghurs, even though it continued to hold the Guiyi junin its field of symbolic force, remaining the fount of its systems of culture andprestige.In the Guiyi jun the continued evocation of the Tang order in the localsystems of rank and rhetoric was juxtaposed with a severely curtailedterritorial reach. As the report recounting the white goshawk's departure fromSuzhou makes clear, the powers over the lives and spaces of the Gansucorridor that Zhang Yichao had seemed to exercise with the gift of the Ganjunshan goshawks were no longer in effect. The Guiyi jun was not a coordinatingor dominant force: its political projects and acts of seizure andcontrol co-existed and competed with those of the Longjia, the Uyghurs, theTibetans, the Tuyuhun and the Womo. It had no effective authority inGanzhou, and little in Liangzhou. Ganjun shan, the source of the goshawkssent to Yizong, was no longer a fault line between Tang imperial claims toLiangzhou and the de/acto powers of control exercised by Zhang Yichao. Itwas now the area through which furtive exchanges between the Durp.!Longjia rulers of Ganzhou and the Womo/'Od-bar/gYog-po of Liangzhouover responses to the incoming Uyghurs were carried on. Henceforth, theGanzhou area and its birds of prey would be dominated by the Uyghurqaghan.