East Asian History - ANU

42LEWIS MAYOISO See Shazhou dudu fu tujing, (P,2005,transcribed in Zheng Binglin, Dunhuangdili wenshu huiji jiaozhu, p.19), whichdetails the auspicious songs and theauspicious white wolf appearing inDunhuang at the time ofWu Zetian:fEtU.As noted, popular songs full of auspiciousomens were also said to have been incirculation in central China at the time of theTang founder's revolt against the Sui. SeeWechsler, Offerings of jade and silk, p.62.lSI "Song of the White Sparrow," lines 59-60. "Ever since the emperor Tang ascendedto the clouds, there has been no cause for awhite sparrow to lodge in an imperial palace."Emperor Tang was the sagely founder of theShang j';16 dynasty.152 Most notable were the struggles of ZhangHuaishen to secure formal investiture fromthe Tang as military governor of the Shazhouregion in the period just after the whitegoshawk was given to the Uyghur khan. SeeS.1156, which is the report of his emissaries'failures to secure a positive outcome on amission to Chang'an. There is a transcriptionof this document in Rong, Guiyi jun shiyanjiu, pp.167-9. See also Rong Xinjiang'sbroader discussion of this issue, id., pp.163-92.153 See Tang Changru, "Baiyi tianzi shishi,"pp.227-38.154 Baifu tujue S ijJX. They arepresent in association with Qarluqs in thestruggle between the Uyghurs and theTibetans over Beiting (Beshbaliq) in the790s, mentioned Jiu Tang shu, juan 195,p.5209. For a translation see Mackerras, TheUighur empire, p.102.ISSFor example the White Orchid Qiang(Bailan qiang s1Mi%) and White DogQiang (Baigou qiang S J{iJm. Referencesto the former appear in Du You t.±ffi, Tongdian [Comprehensive Institutesl,juan190 (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1984), p.1022,and to the latter in Xin Tang shu, juan 201a,p.6216. I thank the anonymous reviewer ofthis article for drawing my attention to theimportance of whiteness in Qiang culturaland political traditions.geography. The song itself constitutes an auspicious sign: official gazetteersrecord the songs being sung spontaneously by the people when a new orderis constituted. The songs are listed along with the presence of white sparrowsand white wolves as auspicious or miraculous events.150 Like the sparrowitself, the song has this quality because it seems to come from outside, as theproduct of forces bigger than itself. The song is fuelled by the ethers of thetime and place in which it is produced. Its author may deprecate his owntalents, but he is shown as moved by greater forces, the energies of historyand landscape, governed by the prinCiples of whiteness, gold/metal, thewest, autumn, and the powers of sacred mountains. The song preserves onthe page the arc of the sparrow in flight: it has never been known since thedays of the sage emperor Tang (who ruled under the metal element) fora white sparrow to come and reside i n the palace of an emperor. 151 TheWhite-Robed Emperor, whom Zhang Chengfeng has become, is constitutedas a new hand of power by this bird sign from outside. For symbolic forceto operate, it cannot be seen to be self-consecrating: the tremendous strugglethat Zhang Chengfeng's predecessors had undertaken to be officiallyinvested with ranks that they held de/acto through force of armsl52 comesfrom the fact that the local order of rank in the Guiyi jun Cof which they wereat the top) could not appear to be self-constituted. Their stated reverence forthe Tang state was a reverence for the legitimacy that its seals of approvalgave to an arbitrary order of power. With the Tang dynasty gone, there wasno source to grant this. The white sparrow, by bringing a new order ofsovereignty from the very direction from which legitimacy had previouslyentered the oasis, allowed the system of legitimate rank to be constitutedanew. The force of words literally created the bird in song. It was a sign thatfulfilled a pre-existing textual logic, playing out what was known from thewritten record. But it did this because it played out a political logic in whichbirds and writing helped to constitute the hand of power at the apex of asystem of rank, a hand of power in relation to which the order of writing andof birds was constituted.The rhetoric of the "Song of the White Sparrow" places the White-RobedEmperor and the Golden Mountains unquestionably in the field of politicalresonances associated with imperial divinatory cosmologies, Five Elementstheory and the Chinese literary tradition. But the white robes, the goldmountains and the west and south would also resonate with political andmoral symbolism from other sources. The white robes have associations withboth Manicheanism and Maitreya worship,153 and white-clad Turks wereactive at the time of the great steppe empires of the eighth century.154Amongst the Qiang peoples ofthe Tibet-Qinghai plateau (the areas inhabitedby the Tuyuhun), whiteness had a key function in the classificatory practiceswhich distinguished one ethno-political unit from another. 155 Whiteness thushad strong resonances with the political cultures of a great many of thepeoples surrounding the territory of the Guiyi jun. Similarly, Goldenmountains, and mountains more broadly, were of key importance in the