Imagining matriarchy: "kingdoms of women" in Tang China.

• Author: Jay, Jennifer W.

The title of this essay generates several questions at the outset. Were the "kingdoms of women" (nuerguo, nuwangguo, nuziguo) that were imagined in the Tang dynasty matriarchies in the same sense as were the Amazons - whose very existence has been questioned by current anthropologists?(1) How were matriarchies conceived within and outside Tang boundaries in the seventh to tenth centuries? What do the kingdoms of women tell us about powerful women in the East Asian cultural zone at a time when the Tang empress Wu Zetian (624-705, r. 684-705), Silla Korea's three ruling queens and Yamato/Nara Japan's half-dozen empresses exercised at least nominal authority?(2) Chinese sources designated "kingdoms of women" either on the grounds that no men were present in the population of these self-contained societies, or that women and their female descendants served as heads of both state and society. Our primary purpose here will be to identify and discuss these kingdoms of women, as known in Tang China, in the context of the current use of the term "matriarchy."

1. MATRIARCHY AS A THEORY AND CONCEPT

   In this essay matriarchy is defined as "that form of social organization in which descent is reckoned through the female line, where the mother is the head of the household and the children belong to the maternal clan."(3) An additional condition defining a matriarchy is that power and authority be exercised by the women in decisions concerning community and foreign relations, social standards and values, including the sexual conduct of the men.

   Idealist social evolutionists such as J. J. Bachofen, L. H. Morgan, and F. Engels argued in the nineteenth century that matriarchy advanced humanity from barbarism to a higher evolutionary stage through the "mother-right" or the mother's bond to her child, thus predating patriarchy in the general evolution of society. After gaining support for about a century, the theory of evolutionary matriarchy lost its appeal and was no longer a serious academic topic by the 1930s. Currently anthropologists consider matriarchies such as the Amazon women to be myths; none have been substantiated by twentieth-century ethnology. They assert that such myths derived from men's deep-rooted fear of losing power and authority in their patriarchal society.(4) Naive travelers, amateur ethnologists, and social evolutionaries, who came from patriarchal societies, mistakenly interpreted matrilineal and matrilocal societies as matriarchies, not recognizing that despite descent and residence through the women, men still monopolized rights and power.

   In the past decade the topic has been revisited by academics and feminists. In studying minority societies such as the Naxi and Lahu, anthropologists in mainland China still cite the outdated theory of evolutionary matriarchy, treating aspects of matrilineal descent and matrifocal residence as "living fossils" of matriarchies of dominant female power.(5) In the West, Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban claims that although anthropological fieldwork has not confirmed the matriarchal thesis, the final word is still to be determined by future research on the prehistory of human society.(6) Harvey Greisman asserts that the concept of matriarchy has resurfaced due to the allegorical and utopian potential it offers some feminist theorists in their attempt to "reclaim" history and re-make it by deconstructing patriarchy.(7) Other feminists have rejected the possibility of matriarchy, arguing that the myth places undue emphasis on biological determinism and denies the universality of the subordination of women, thus making the dismantling of patriarchy more difficult.(8)

2. IMAGINED CHINESE MATRIARCHIES UNCONFIRMED BY ETHNOGRAPHY

   In their categorical refutation of matriarchies as products of the imagination, current anthropologists have not considered the Chinese conceptualized kingdoms of women, known as nuerguo, nuziguo (women's countries), or nuwangguo (woman-ruled country). In fact, there were two categories of kingdoms of women, one with mythical and fantastic aspects, and the other with fuller documentation in the historical sources through interaction with Tang China. We discuss first the mythical kingdoms.

   A kingdom of women is first mentioned in Shanhai jing, a work traditionally dated to the fourth or third century B.C.(9) Despite being dismissed as unreliable by Sima Qian (141-86? B.C.),(10) information on two kingdoms of women found its way into the dynastic and institutional histories. In Shanhai jing, Nuziguo is located "west beyond the seas" where two women lived, surrounded by water. Guo Pu's (276-324) annotation describes a Yellow Pond where the women bathed to get pregnant; male children would die by the age of three. Another kingdom of women is located "west of the great beyond," but the annotation cites fisherman lore and places it in the eastern sea, being populated only by women.(11) The two kingdoms of women seem identical, particularly in their non-sexual procreation and the absence of adult males.

   The vagueness of the location and structure of the kingdoms of women in the Shanhai jing annotations is transmitted to the dynastic histories compiled from the third to eleventh centuries, which contain confusing and conflicting accounts of these kingdoms. Without ethnographic confirmation, the historians ignored the unreliability of the informants and the incredible, mythical nature of the kingdoms and simply repeated and embellished what had already been recorded before their time. In Hou Hanshu, one of the Shanhai jing kingdoms of women is thus identified as an island in the eastern sea where men were absent and women became pregnant through staring into a magic well.(12) Legends, myths, and imagination constructed three kingdoms of women where snakes, monkeys, and ghosts were taken as husbands. One kingdom had a woman serving as ruler with no husband. In another kingdom, the men were said to be subordinated by women and taken as concubines in numbers ranging from one to one hundred, depending on the woman's status.(13)

   The Liangshu records that in 499 the monk Huishen reported a kingdom of women located a thousand li east of Fusang (identified as Japan) where the women had beautiful white skin, and body hair reaching the ground.(14) After becoming pregnant in the second or third month of the year by immersing themselves in water, they would give birth in the sixth or seventh month. Lacking breasts, they nursed their offspring with hair that grew from the neck. The children could walk after a hundred days and were fully grown in three or four years; they avoided people and especially feared men.

   A brief entry in Suishu locates a kingdom of women west of Fuguo in Sichuan, but the location has shifted to west of Dashi (Persia) in Jiu Tangshu.(15) The Xin Tangshu account has the western kingdom of women situated on an island northwest of Fulin (Syria, Eastern Roman Empire).(16) The land was endowed with precious commodities and subordinated to Fulin. The women mated with men sent annually by the Fulin king for the purpose of procreation; male children were not allowed to survive.

   The Xin Tangshu account of this western kingdom of women is almost a verbatim copy of the version in Da Tang xiyu ji, authored by the notable monk Xuanzang (603-68), who traveled through India and central Asia from 629 to 645.(17) Without visiting this kingdom, but citing local legends and Buddhist lore, he recorded another version that was ignored by the dynastic histories, most likely due to its fantastic aspects. In south India a bride was abducted by a lion with whom she conceived twins (a boy and a girl) in human form. Later the boy slew his lion-father and sailed off to found an island kingdom called Shiziguo ?? (Kingdom of the Lion's Son, Simhala, modern Sri Lanka). The girl landed on an island west of Persia, had sexual intercourse with demons there, and gave birth to female children in the kingdom that was called Xi da nuguo (??).

   Citing Buddhist lore, Xuanzang wrote that later the Simhala kingdom barely escaped the havoc wreaked by five hundred female raksasi (demons) led by a queen. They changed themselves into beautiful women to seduce shipwrecked merchants and sailors. When tired of the men's sexual services, the women imprisoned them to be devoured while they lured other captives to the island. This account was too incredible for the Tangshu compilers, who did not include either the human-lion or the human-demon tales.(18)

   In the twelfth century, Zhou Qufei, author of a travelogue upon which Zhao Rugua based his own work half a century later, transferred the mythical kingdoms to an island in the south seas, perhaps the Sunda straits in southeast Asia.(19) We are told that every few years a flood would produce foot-long lotus seeds and two-foot long peach-pits which the exclusively female population presented to their woman ruler. The women achieved pregnancy by exposing themselves naked to the south wind, giving birth to girls only. Shipwrecked men taken on shore by the women would die within several days, as related by an informant who claimed to have escaped from the island. Zhao Rugua's tale is followed by an abridged account of the western kingdom of Tibet, which we will discuss later.(20)

   The above kingdoms of women, although appearing in the dynastic histories, are clearly fantastic. They fall into the category of imagined matriarchies, like the mythical Amazon women. These fictional constructions re-emerge in the kingdoms of women that are portrayed in the late sixteenth-century novels...