Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (73 page)

To look at it from the other direction produces much the same results. If one looks up in a Chinese-English dictionary the two dozen or so partly generic words used for various foreign peoples throughout Chinese history, one will find most of them defined in English as, in effect, ‘a kind of barbarian’. Even the works of well-known lexicographers such as Karlgren do this. This is much like looking up the many words for specific plants and birds and getting the definition ‘a kind of grass’ or ‘a kind of bird’. Those words do not actually mean ‘a kind of grass’ or ‘grass’ in general; they mean a particular variety or species of grass, such as ‘wild rye’, or they refer to some specific aspect of grass, such as ‘dry grass (straw)’, and the dictionary maker either could not find out what it was or was too lazy to define it accurately. Only the Chinese generic word
c
ǎ
o
can be equated well with the English generic word
grass
(and
c
ǎ
o
is not ‘a kind of grass’). This is comparable to the situation with
barbarian,
but is more difficult because Chinese has no generic word equivalent to
barbarian,
or indeed any one word that is even close to it, while English has no words for the many foreign peoples referred to by one or another Classical Chinese word, such as
hú,
yí,
mán, and so on.
⁹³

It can further be demonstrated that the Chinese did not have the
barbarian
ensemble of ideas about foreigners purely conceptually. Classical Chinese writers sometimes express admiration for the people of foreign cultures, usually those who lived in cities, had written literature, and so on: that is, people who were, technically speaking, civilized. The texts say they are “most like the Chinese” among the other “foreigners”—here using one of the generic terms frequently used for the foreigners of that region in general,
including those who lived in cities, nomads, and any others.
The Chinese writers compare particular aspects of the foreign culture to the corresponding ones in Chinese culture. Why would they do that if those cultures were
barbaric?
They certainly were
not
barbaric in the eyes of the Chinese who wrote the reports. But the Chinese word used for the admired foreign people and their culture is the same one used for Central Eurasians such as the Hsiung-nu and many other peoples the Chinese usually did not admire, for example
hú, which is used for both the urban civilized peoples of the west and for the Hsiung-nu and other nomads in the same region and further to the north. The word cannot possibly be translated correctly as ‘barbarian’.

In the T’ang period there is a true generic word for ‘foreigner’ and ‘foreign country’,
f
â
n.
⁹⁴
Unlike the modern dictionary definition ‘foreign, barbarous’, however,
fân
itself has no negative connotations in T’ang texts, as is evident from the copious Chinese sources that exist on the T’ang period. In T’ang texts the term is often used like one would say today ‘abroad’, without naming any particular place. It is also used—instead of other sometimes pejorative words—in bilingual diplomatic documents such as the T’ang-Tibetan treaty of 821–822, where the language of the inscription erected in Lhasa in 823 is extremely polite and sensitive to that sort of thing. In other words, this particular generic term for foreigners, perhaps the only true generic at any time in Chinese literature, was practically the opposite of the word
barbarian.
It meant simply ‘foreign, foreigner’ without any pejorative meaning.

T’ang writers had reason to hate the Uighurs after their repeated sack of Loyang, despite the Uighurs’ help in restoring T’ang Dynasty rule in China, and despite the little-noted fact
⁹⁵
that the sacking had been authorized by the T’ang government as a means of repaying the Uighurs for their services. This hatred does indeed come through, in many explicit and implicit ways, from that time until the destruction of the Uighur Empire, but they still call them
fân
much of the time. The usual angry word for Uighurs or other foreigners giving the Chinese trouble was
lǔ
‘prisoner, slave, captive’,
⁹⁶
which is used even when the foreigners in question clearly never were slaves or captives of anyone. The idea one gets from the texts is ‘those miscreants who should be locked up’ or something to that effect. In case anyone might think that this is the missing Chinese word for ‘barbarian’, it must be pointed out that the same texts more often than not use the word to refer to internal
Chinese
bandits, rebels, or simply, ‘miscreants who should be locked up’.
⁹⁷
The word does not even mean ‘foreigner’ at all, let alone ‘barbarian’.

In sum, the word
barbarian
embodies a complex
European
cultural construct, a generic pejorative term for a ‘powerful foreigner with uncouth, uncivilized, nonurban culture who was militarily skilled and somewhat heroic, but inclined to violence and cruelty’—yet not a ‘savage’ or a ‘wild man’. The idea of the
barbarian
was simply nonexistent in China, and there was and is no Chinese equivalent of the word. Reading Chinese historical texts reveals that among the many Chinese words for foreigners, those which refer to Central Eurasians include civilized, urban people (whom the Chinese sometimes admired), nomads, fishermen (in Manchuria, in the South China Sea, etc.), agrarian people living in villages, and so on. None of the words for them encode the ideas of military prowess, nonurban nonagrarian life-style, and uncouth culture, three of the primary meanings of the European word
barbarian,
which therefore cannot possibly be equated with a single one of the many ancient and medieval Chinese terms for foreigners, including Central Eurasians.