East Asian History - ANU

3297 The account of the wedding ceremoniesof the Tang princess Taihe *;J'O to theUyghur qaghan in theXin Tangshu describeshow the nine ministers of the qaghan's courtcarried the sedan chair nine times to theright: these ministers represented the nineclans. See Xin Ta ngshu,juan 217b, p.6130,and the English translation by ColinMackerras, The Uighur empire according tothe T'ang dynastic histories, p.121.98 See the reference to the "Yaylaqarel" or"Yaghlaqar state," identifying what ispresumably the Ganzhou qaghanate withthe ruling clan of the Uighur steppe empirein the Dunhuang Uyghur text P.29SSv. Thistext refers to a grey falcon replacing a blackfalcon in allusion to one political unitdisplacing another. Hamilton discusseswhether or not the black and grey falcons inthe document (which deals with the journeyof a party of Uyghurs through the territoryof Shazhou, and speaks of Uyghur and"Chinese" (Tayac) relations, presumably areference to the Guiyi jun) might correspondto the male ancestor of the Chinese emperorand the Uyghur khan respectively. Heconcludes that there are few grounds forreading the text as saying that the Chineseemperor was descended from the blackfalcon. Drawing attention to the Uyghurrequest for the Tang court to change therendering of the name of the Uyghurs to thecharacter hu for falcon (which occurredwhen a Chinese princess was married intothe ruling clan of the Yaylaqar), Hamiltonsuggests that the black Chinese falcon refersto the Yaylaqar and the grey one to the Edizclan which replaced them. He notes: "Onethus has the very distinct impression that thefalcon was considered by the Uyghurs astheir totem. I therefore wonder if it was notonly to the Uyghurs that the two falcons ofdifferent pedigree would be relevant; thefirst, the blackish one, would represent thefirst royal clan of the Yaylaqar and thesecond, the greyish one, the second dynastyof the clan of the Ediz." Hamilton, ManuscritsOufgours du IX(f-Xe sif!Cle de Touen-houang,voU, p.SS. [n 795, Alp Uluy Qutluy BilgaQayan ascended the throne and the Edizclan replaced the Yaghlaqar. With thecollapse ofthe Uyghurempire the Yaghlaqarwas established in Ganzhou, while the Edizwere based in Turpan. The claim that theYaghlaqar were the ruling family of theGanzhou Uyghurs is based on Chinese trans-LEWIS MAYOrecreate the numerically structured system of descent relations that hisancestors the steppe qaghans had insisted upon in their rhetoric and in theirceremonies: when a Tang princess went to marry the Uyghur ruler in the earlyninth century, the wedding ritual involved participation from representativesof each of the nine families of the Uyghur state.97 The reproduction of thedescent line of the Uyghur ruling family through the acquisition of the fertilityof a member of the Tang royal lineage thus directly involved the participationof the nine clans. Politics had a genealogical order and symmetry. Thiscontinued to be invoked in Uyghur rhetoric produced in the Gansucorridor98: In bringing hostages and white goshawks to this ruling hand, theforces of conquest reproduced a form of politics in which capturing work wasintegrated into the numerical organization of affiliated descent lines (and viceversa). The central activity of a qaghan was the production and reproductionof a state formed by conquest of groups and alliance between them, a historyof conquest and alliance recalled in the structure of the nine or ten clans thatmade up the state.Something more than analogy is thus involved in the rhetorical constructionof the white goshawk in Uyghur politics and writing. The proverb records andreproduces a history. The Uyghur political project which impelled the whitegoshawk's journey from Suzhou in 884 was one founded on the productionof political order through the articulation (in the sense of conjoining and inthe sense of speaking about) of relationships between subordinated groupsunited in real or fictive relations of descent. The proverb about the tuyghunand its relationship to the progenitor falcon is not simply a metaphor orriddle: the incorporation of a white goshawk into Uyghur political structureswas quite literally about the establishment of the bird within a framework ofsubordination in which lines of princely sons undertook the distinguishedwork of capturing on behalf of an illustrious sovereign, scion of distinguishedancestors. The tuyghun is a hero, marked not simply by extraordinary powersof predation, ferocity and rapacity but by the strength of perception: the wordtuyghun is affiliated with the verb tuy, to see or perceive. 99 What distinguishesa heroic, noble prince is the power to see and seize, to be gifted with powersof sight and foresight and to be predatory and rapacious-qapyan andtutyan. The record of politics-carved in runes on stone in the days of thesteppe qaghans-is a record of these qualities, an endless recounting of actsof seeing and seizing. But they are qualities which must be articulated: seizure/criptions of the titles of the qaghans ofGanzhou in the late tenth century that appearin the Song shi *51:: [History of the Songdynastyl. See Song shi, juan 490 (Shanghai:Zhonghua Shuju, 1977), p.14114. See alsoHamilton, Les Ouighours a l'epoque des CinqDynasties, p.160.99 See Hamilton and Bazin, "L'Origine dunom Tibet," p.21. SvetlanaJacquesson quotes/a different etymology for the word, given bya scholar named Biyaliev, which derivestuyghun from the reconstructed words 'toryanand 'tor-yil, with the meaning "chestnutcolouredbird," with yan being a synonym foryil, an old Turkic word meaning "bird," andtor being the word for "chestnut-coloured."See Jacquesson, "La chasse au vol en AsieCentrale," IY.l.