East Asian History - ANU

BIRDS AND THE HAND OF POWER41with the Northern Wei and ending with the Tang.145 It is thus part of therestoration of a local dynastic tradition. White sparrows had also been presentin central China when the first emperor of the Tang had set up his newdynastyl46 and, like the white sparrow visiting the palace of the White-RobedEmperor, they pointed to a political and geographical axis that ran fromNorth-east to South-west (from the Taiyuan ::t:J1¥-: homeland of the Tangdynasty's founder to the Sui imperial capital of Daxing cheng *, laterto become the Tang capital Chang'an). There was a long history of whitesparrow auspices in central China from the pre-Tang era,147 and Daoistaffiliatedmaterial collected in the mid-9th century by Duan Chengshi (whosefalconry treatise was compiled shortly before the arrival of the Ganjun shanbirds in Chang'an) granted the bird a distinguished place in the shiftingcelestial hierarchy of the Daoist pantheon, where it was again associated withthe change of dynastic fortune, albeit in the divine realm.148White birds were ruled by-and were emanations of-historical andgeographical forces. They marked the movement of history through theoscillation of powers (directions, colours, elements, seasons) in which oneorder of sovereignty, one hand of power, displaced another. History, as asuccession of legitimate imperial bodies produced by the descent lines ofdynastic families, was ruled by these elements. Geography, as a structure ofnuminous spaces organised by directional principles (which involved themovements of the seasons and stars and the shifting signs of auspiciousfavour) was both the object of sovereign control and the source of it. Thegeographical gazetteers from Dunhuang recorded auspices and miraculousappearances of animals manifesting themselves around the oases at varioushistorical periods. The lives of birds, like the lives of other beings in this area,from people to wolves, were historically and geographically ordered-whichmeans that they were politically ordered. If white sparrows had the capacityto constitute a new sovereign order, a new moment in history and a newpolitical geography, it was because they were themselves constituted bypolitical forces. Birds existed not outside the movements of history andpolitical force but within them. There was a political order of birds in whichwhite sparrows had a privileged position. 149 They were associated with theradical transformation of status: amongst the everyday mob of ordinary duncolouredsparrows, the albino bird is a miraculous inversion of expectation.When a person moves from subordinate or delegate to the status of emperor,a similar inversion of the everyday takes place.For such powers to transform the order of sovereignty, to be able toremake history, geography, ceremonies and politics, in short to operate,there must be a linguistic apparatus: these signs have their meaning becausethey are already recorded. As noted, the accounts of Dunhuang geographyfound in the treatises that were compiled to show the region's place in theoverall system of Tang imperial territory list the previous appearances ofwhite sparrows. The white sparrow in the song thus fulfils a destiny whichthe written record affirms to have been previously present in the local145 See "Song of the White Sparrow," line 3.For a study of the history of the Five Liangdynasties see Qi Chenjun , Wu Liang shi We[A brief history of the Five Liang] (Lanzhou:Gansu Renmin Chubanshe, 1988). I thankQi Chenjun if ri* for giving me a copy ofhis book.146 See Wechsler, Offerings ojjade and silk,pp.64 and 67. Wechsler notes that whitebirds were symbols of the west (p.64).147 Some indication of the centrality of thecataloguing of these auspices at this periodis given by the large number of referencesto sightings of white sparrows collected inthe official history of the Liu Song (I£U 7R)dynasty, extending back as far as the Han.See Song shu *iI [Song History], juan 29(Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1974), pp.843-8.148 See Duan Chengshi, Youyang zazu,qianji, juan 12, p.128.149 See Schafer, "The auspices of T'ang,"Journal of the American Oriental Society 83(1963): 198-9