'Well, how'd you become king, then?' Swords in early medieval China.

• Author: Cutter, Robert Joe
• Position: Critical essay

The calendar this year has dictated that the meetings of our Society and that of the Association of Asian Studies coincide. Thus deprived of a portion of what, in this election year, might be called my "base," the burden of being witty, intelligent, and entertaining--none of these my natural modes--is nearly more than these poor shoulders can bear, and the excellent addresses given by Stephanie Jamison, Michael Drompp, and others in recent years have set the bar pretty high.

I had originally thought to talk about memory and language in early medieval China. My interest in this topic was sparked by the purchase of Jason Thompson's Edward William Lane, 1801-1876: The Life of the Pioneering Egyptologist and Orientalist (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2010). I have long aspired to heed the urgings of various leaders and members of our society to read not only the articles in my field in our esteemed journal but those in other fields, as well. Although I do so when possible, and with great profit, the breadth of expertise and erudition on display in the pages of JAOS means that some articles are naturally less accessible than others. But now, here before me was a fat book relating somehow to both the Ancient Near East and the Islamic Near East and having a title every single word of which I fancied I understood. Thus, I determined to let neither the interminable requests from my deans, nor the whimsical approach to citation on the part of the occasional student, keep me from reading every one of the 747 pages of this jumbo-sized book.

On p. 521 of Thompson, in a discussion of the problems of copyists' errors in Arabic, came this passage:

It is said that the Caliph al-Mutawakkil (r. 847-61) wrote to one of his governors: "Count [??] the men from Medina who are with you and inform us of their number!" But a dot fell on the letter C transforming the word into [??], which means "emasculate." The governor obediently emasculated his Medinan men, all of whom died except one or two. Although this is an anecdote about a scribal error, as opposed to an oral one, it puts one in mind of an account, also set in the ninth century, from China:

On the first day of the first month of the eleventh year of the Dazhong reign period [30 January 857], the emperor went to the Basilica Enclosing the Prime to receive the [New Year's] congratulations of the court. (1) Grand Preceptor of the Heir Apparent Lu Jun, who was already eighty, walked from south of the bell frames to the steps of the basilica and expressed congratulations before the emperor. His delivery was clear and deliberate, and the entire court admired him. On New Year's Day of the twelfth year [of the Dazhong reign period; 19 January 858], [the emperor again] received congratulations at the [Basilica] Enclosing the Prime. Junior Preceptor of the Heir Apparent Liu Gongquan, also already eighty, in his turn acted as the representative of the bureaucracy. The courtyard of the Basilica Enclosing the Prime was vast, and by the time he had walked from south of the bell frames to the foot of the basilica, he was worn out. After expressing congratulations, he misstated the emperor's honorific title, which was Sheng jing wen si he wu guang xiao huangdi by [getting the words he wu guang xiao mixed up and] saying "guang wu he xiao." The censors impeached him and expelled him [from office], fining him three month's food rations. To leave office at seventy was what the regulations of old had prescribed. Gongquan was unable to act competently in accordance with the ritual, suffering humiliation in his dotage, and people much pitied him. Although emasculation and humiliation seemed a promising start for a talk to a group of academics (so many of us, after all, are engaged in perpetrating or fending off these eventualities), it became apparent that I would not be able to do justice to notions of memory and language--and mistrust of language--in the time I had. So I have retreated to a smaller, though I hope no less trenchant subject: swords in early medieval China.

I ask you to imagine that you work in a famous museum. Day after day you are surrounded by famous artifacts and works of art. You have studied and written about some of them, lectured on them, and taught others about them. They are like old friends, so well do you know them. Let us further imagine you are an authority on arms and armor and that one day you are at the Cloisters in Upper Manhattan. As you walk past the famous gisant of Jean d'Alluye, you see something odd, something you have never noticed before.

Jean d'Alluye was interred about 1248, and it has been said that his gisant "could well serve as the almost perfect illustration of a knight's equipment in the classical age of chivalry." (3) The mail, the spurs, the sword and sword belt, the shield, and other appurtenances of the knight are all there. But it is the sword that has suddenly drawn your attention--more specifically, its pommel and guard, which you suddenly realize differ significantly from European swords of the time, as well as from those of the Islamic world. (4)

This is the way I like to picture Helmut Nickel discovering that the sword worn by Jean d'Alluye--or rather the stone representation of the sword that is part of the stone effigy of Jean d'Alluye--may have been based on a Chinese original. Nickel finds that the pommel and guard are representative of those on Chinese swords beginning from around the late eighth century. It is known that Jean d'Alluye travelled to the Holy Land in 1241 on one of the minor Crusades, and Nickel speculates that he obtained the sword then.5 In the final paragraph of his article on the effigy. Nickel writes,

Whether it was traded peacefully along the ancient Silk Road, or was carried by a raider in the conquering hordes of the Mongols, whether Jean d'Alluye acquired it as an exotic collector's item in the bazaar of some Levantine port, or took it as booty on a Syrian battlefield, we will never know. In any case, though, this extraordinary weapon was important enough for him and his family to have it faithfully portrayed for posterity on his effigy. It is quite a claim to say that a sword depicted in stone on a gisant in Manhattan represents a real iron or steel sword from China that was not just an implement of war but also a prized possession of a French knight entombed near Le Mans in the middle of the thirteenth century. Yet the evidence presented, if not conclusive, is certainly tantalizing.

The notion of Jean d'Alluye's sword as a sentimental or talismanic object with which he wished to be identified for eternity is not outlandish. Certainly swords had functions in the Chinese past, too, that extended beyond warfare. Notably they played a role in royal legitimacy and served as literary topics and images.6 One of the most famous examples of the latter is Ouyang Xiu's (1007-1072) "Riben dao ge" [Song on a Japanese Sword], but there are many others, both earlier and later than Ouyang Xiu. (7)

My topic today is the context of four short, inconspicuous texts about swords from the very end of the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.-220 C.E.). The four pieces are by Cao Cao (155-220), who was the most powerful man in China at the time; his son Cao Pi (187-226), who was Cao Cao's heir apparent and who ultimately accepted the abdication of the last Han emperor and founded the Wei dynasty (220-265); Cao Zhi (192-241), Cao Pi's younger brother and one of the most famous poets in Chinese history; and Wang Can (177-217), another famous poet associated with the Cao family. (8) Not long after the last of these pieces was written, the Han came to an end, and the empire divided into the three states, or kingdoms, of Wei, Shu (221-263), and Wu (222-280). Wei was the state founded by Cao Pi, and thus began nearly four hundred years of disunion and strife. The pieces I will mention are significant because there are still questions surrounding the rise of Wei and because the period encompassed by the lives of these figures has ever since been one of the most famous in all of Chinese history, affecting and influencing not only Chinese of all walks of life but people wherever Chinese culture reached. Through anecdotal literature, poetry, fiction, and opera--and more recently through film, television, comics, and video games--individuals and stories of the period have been embedded in Chinese culture to a degree that exceeds even the Arthurian material in the Anglo-Saxon world. (9) Some indication of the relevance of the period in the modern world is provided by the extent of the coverage in China a few years ago of the discovery of what is said to be Cao Cao's tomb, the open and well-publicized arguments among scholars over whether it really is his tomb, and the excitement generated in Henan province over the tourist dollars that were sure to come. It must also be said that the Han-Wei juncture was a crucial period for Chinese literature--one that powerfully influenced subsequent centuries of writers and poets.

Before turning to the texts in question, some background will be helpful. The appearance and existence of numinous signs and objects have for millennia played a legitimating role in Chinese kingship, and the possession of such objects as symbols of power has been as important to Chinese rulers as to their counterparts elsewhere in the world. Early texts tell of nine bronze tripod cauldrons that were cast by the legendary Yu, founder of the Xia dynasty (ca. 2070-ca. 1600 B.c.E.), or by his son, and which passed in turn to the subsequent Shang A (ca. 1600-1045 B.c.E.) and Zhou Ml (1045-256 B.c.E.) dynasties. (10)

Glimpses, too, there are of other pre-imperial regalia. Dating perhaps from the middle of the Zhou dynasty, the "Gu ming" [Testamentary Charge] section of the canonical Shang shu [Hallowed Documents] mentions a Yellow River chart (He tu) among the objects on display during the funeral of King Cheng of Zhou...