Chinese or ‘Barbarian’? A New Look at the Tuoba’s Diplomatic Strategies during the Northern Wèi Period (original) (raw)

How and why the Western and Eastern Han conducted foreign affairs has been well documented by Yü Ying-shih in his "Trade and Expansion in Han China" (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U. of California P., 1967), while Hans Bielenstein (in BMFEA 68 [1996]: 5-325) has analyzed Southern Chinese foreign relations during the Six Dynasties. More recently, the latter has also taken on "Diplomacy and Trade in the Chinese World, 589-1276" (Leiden: Brill, 2005). Yet, a crucial period in Chinese history has been neglected as far as foreign affairs are concerned: The Northern Wei Dynasty (386-534 CE) established by the Tuoba tribe. Seeing that, for the first time since the establishment of the empire, a large part of China was controlled by alien rulers, who distinctly acted in the manner of the ethnically "Chinese" emperors that preceded them, this is quite surprising. One would think that questions of how and why emperors of foreign descent approached other alien entities would have been answered long ago. At first glance, this might seem to be true. At least if one follows W. Eberhard’s interpretation of the single eligible source: the "Weishu." In his "Das Toba-Reich Nordchinas" (Leiden: Brill, 1949) he argues that the Tuoba rulers expected their vassals to pay tribute. In return the emperors duly compensated the gesture of subordination by bestowing valuable counter-gifts. However, only a few paragraphs later Eberhard tells us that the "Weishu" not even once records such gifts. Eberhard thus clearly adheres to the “traditional” and rather simplistic understanding of the so-called tributary system, that is to say the view that acknowledgement of Chinese sovereignty would have been lavishly reciprocated by the imperial court. However, a brief glimpse at the data recorded in the "Weishu" illustrates that the Tuoba relied on various diplomatic strategies in dealings with foreign entities. In this paper I will disclose such strategies and analyze whether they were, for instance, reactions to specific situations or devised as general rules of contact with a certain “state.”

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