The Semantic Context of Word Play with the Label Hu in Anecdotes about the Tang

Shao-yun Yang

On the problem of translating Hu

Few words are as ubiquitous as Hu in modern Chinese-language studies of Tang

culture. In these studies, we are routinely told that early and mid-Tang society was remarkably
open to people, music, games, clothing styles, and food from Central Asia, Persia, India, and the
Inner Asian steppe, all of which are given the convenient but ambiguous designation Hu.1 Often
accompanying such statements is the claim that Tang culture reflected a high degree of Huhua
(Hu-ization)a rather ironic neologism, given that the classical understanding of hua
as the civilizing (transformative) influence of a sage made it implausible, if not impossible,
that the Hu peoples would be regarded as agents rather than beneficiaries of such influence. In
China, the image of a strong, confidently cosmopolitan Tang empire has come to serve as an
attractive alternative to the long-infamous (but largely mythical) insularity and xenophobia of
late imperial Chinese society, and historians writing in English have been quite happy to
embrace it as well. Only recently, however, has a sustained attempt been made to complicate and
reassess this picture of the Tang by using concepts and theories related to ethnicity to examine
Tang attitudes towards foreign peoples and cultures. 2 While this is a big step in the right
direction, one necessary approach that remains lacking is the critical study of how the label Hu
was actually used in Tang sources, in order to establish if the rather loose employment of that
label in modern Chinese scholarship accurately reflects Tang usage.3

The first major obstacle to such an approach might be that most non-Chinese historians
have uncritically accepted the traditional English translation of Hu as barbarian, and with it an
impression (not usually found in Chinese-language historiography) of the label as generally
pejorative and denoting cultural inferiority. In reality the label Hu was not, as far as we can tell
from the sources, considered inherently derogatory before and during the Tang. Although
negative stereotypes about peoples labeled as Hu did appear in some discursive contexts (one of
which will be discussed later), they are far outnumbered by neutral usages of the label, especially
in the Tang period, and this suggests that the stereotypes never became universally or even

1
However, scholars are increasingly recognizing that openness to Central Asian cultural influences should be traced
back to the capital cities of the Northern Dynasties in the latter half of the sixth century. See Bi Bo , Lun
Beizhou shiqi de huren yu huhua , Wenshi 2005(4), 149171.
2
I refer to Marc Abramsons groundbreaking study based on his Ph.D. dissertation of 2001 (Princeton University):
Marc S. Abramson, Ethnic Identity in Tang China (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
3
A similar study is needed for the equally ubiquitous label Han , often used as the opposite of Hu and even more
problematic because its modern importance as an ethnonym makes anachronistic assumptions difficult to avoid.
widely identified with it.4 In fact, arguments against the translation of Hu as barbarian were
recently made, although from different perspectives, by Daniel Boucher and Christopher
Beckwith. 5 Beckwith argues that the term cannot possibly connote barbarism when it was
applied to both city-dwelling (hence civilized) Central Asians and nomadic peoples (whom he
assumes were regarded as barbaric). Bouchers argument is more complex and will be
explained later in this paper, but it should be noted here that he translates Hu as Western when
Chinese Buddhist texts use the term in a generic, non-technical sense. In this he claims to follow
the practice of Edward H. Schafer 6 , but I should note that Schafer was himself not fully
convinced of the superiority of this translation over barbarian. In a kind of introductory
glossary for his classic The Golden Peaches of Samarkand, Schafer gives a concise explanation
of the evolution of the label from ancient (Warring States, Qin, and Han) to medieval (Three
Kingdoms to Tang) times:

In Tang times, persons and goods from many foreign countries were styled hu. In ancient
times, this epithet had been applied mostly to Chinas Northern neighbors, but in
medieval times, including Tang, it applied chiefly to Westerners, and especially to
Iranians, though sometimes also to Indians, Arabs, and Romans.

Yet, Schafer gives this item the heading Hu Barbarians and ends it with the line, I have often
translated it badly as Western or Westerner.7 Why he thought this a bad translation is not
explained, but one suspects it has to do with his well-known penchant for less prosaic words.

4
The oft-cited case of the ban on the word Hu in the early fourth-century state of Later Zhao , which was ruled
by an ethnic group (called Jie in the sources) that may have been of Sogdian origin, need not indicate that this
label was seen as derogatory at the time. As I have argued elsewhere, the objectionable aspect of the label in this
context may have been its connotation of foreignness and not any inherent idea of barbarism or inferiority, hence the
replacement of both Hu and Jie by the distinctively indigenizing term Guoren (People of the State) as a
standard designation. Shao-yun Yang, Race War and Ethnic Cleansing in Fourth-century China? Reassessing
the Role of Ethnicity in the Fall of the Later Zhao (AD 319351) and Ran-Wei (350352) Regimes (Unpublished
conference paper, Harvard East Asia Society Graduate Student Conference, 2007).
5
Daniel Boucher, On Hu and Fan again: the Transmission of Barbarian Manuscripts to China, Journal of the
International Association of Buddhist Studies 23:1 (2000), 728; Christopher I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road:
A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 2009), 359. I do not,
however, agree with Beckwiths larger argument that just because ancient Chinese and Greco-Roman negative
stereotypes about foreigners were not exactly identical, no pre-modern Chinese term should ever be translated as
barbarian. More on this below.
6
Boucher, On Hu and Fan again, 21 n. 37.
7
Edward H. Schafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of Tang Exotics (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1963), 45. Italics original to the text; I have changed Schafers Romanization to Hanyu Pinyin in
this and subsequent quotations. By Northern neighbors, Schafer means primarily the Xiongnu and other
nomadic peoples, and by Iranians, he means primarily the Sogdians and other Central Asian speakers of Iranian
languages, but also the Persians.
 Despite Schafers own reservations, I would agree with him that Western and
Westerner are the most appropriate translations for Hu as normally used in Tang texts. That
said, a problem can still occur when this translation is applied to poetry, a literary form in which
the fondness for historical allusions and the constraints of meter allowed Hu to be used as a label
for nomads long after this usage had become obsolete and anachronistic in other contexts. For
example, Schafers translation of four lines from Yuan Zhens (779831) poem The Fa
Melodies reads:

Ever since the Western horsemen began raising smut and dust,

Fur and fleece, rank and rancid, have filled Xian and Luo.

Women make themselves Western matrons by the study of Western makeup;

Entertainers present Western tunes, in their devotion to Western music.8

The first two lines are a reference to the An Lushan and Shi Siming Rebellion of
755763, but Western horsemen does not fit the context well. An Lushan (d. 757) was a
Sogdian, and the translation Western is appropriate for him specifically9, but Shi Siming (d.
761) was a Trk, and their armies included few Westerners but many nomads such as Trks,
Kitans, Tongra , and Qay/Kai . 10 It seems clear that these lines contain conventional
stereotypes of nomads as fur-wearing, mutton-eating horsemen; hence Hu is being used in the
anachronistic sense of nomad. But starting from the mention of Hu makeup, the poet
switches to the topic of Central Asian influences on Tang fashion and musical tastes, and a
translation of Hu as Westerner then becomes necessary. I would therefore translate the four
lines as follows:

Ever since nomad horsemen stirred up the smoke and dust of war,
8
Ibid., 28. Xian is an abbreviation of Xianyang , thus an allusion to Changan. Luo is an abbreviation of
Luoyang. I have left the in the title untranslated, because there is no scholarly consensus on what it
means. See a recent survey of the problem by Zhu Yukui , Jinershinian Tangdai faqu yanjiu zongshu
, Chengdu daxue xuebao (Sheke ban) 2009(2), 5961.
9
An Lushans father is believed to have been a Sogdian from Samarkand because he used the Chinese family name
Kang ; his stepfather, surnamed An , may have been a Sogdian from Bukhara. His mother was an Eastern Trk
of the Ashide tribe. See Xin Tangshu 135.4569.
10
While Chen Yinke (also known as Chen Yinque) once argued that much of An Lushans army was made
up of Sogdians, this has been convincingly refuted by Huang Yongnian. See Huang Yongnian , Jiehu,
Zhejie, Zazhong Hu kaobian , in Tangdai shishi kaoshi
(Taipei: Lianjing chubanshe, 1998), 187200.
 Fur coats and the stench of mutton have filled Changan and Luoyang.11
The women become Westerners wives12 and learn Western makeup styles13;
The musicians perform Western songs and play only Western music.

Of course, Yuan Zhen was using poetic license by conflating older and current meanings of Hu
to suggest that An Lushans nomad soldiers had some causal relationship with the popularity of
Central Asian culture in Changan; in any case, we know from numerous other sources that this
popularity predated An Lushans rebellion, although it did seem to reach a zenith in the decades
leading up to it. Yuan Zhen was not the only Tang poet to indulge in such conflations, but we
should not assume from this that Tang people did not normally distinguish between nomads and
Central Asians. 14 While the Changan elite generally had little interest in or respect for the

11
Schafers Fur and fleece, rank and rancid, while lyrical and alliterative, obscures the references to stereotypical
nomadic clothing and diet. A reader might well be led to think the poets complaint is only about herds of animals.
Schafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand, 28.
12
Schafer (ibid) has as Women make themselves Western matrons, missing the intended meaning of
. The in is ambiguous, however. It reminds one of a line in the roughly contemporary Dongcheng laofu
zhuan by Chen Hong , which reads, Now the northern Hu live intermingled with the people
of the capital, taking wives and having children .As Robert Joe Cutter has argued,
northern Hu does not seem to have been a precise term. Given the timeframe of the story, the Uighurs seem
likely candidates, but it is possible that Chen was using the term in a general way. The phrase is
anachronistic to the Tang context and hardly occurs outside poetry and classicizing court prose. Xiang Da
interpreted the northern Hu in this passage to be descendants of the defeated Trks resettled in Changan in the
630s, while Chen Yinke believed they were Sogdians passing off as Uighurs by travelling to Changan with Uighur
diplomatic delegations (a practice that is mentioned in sources on the period 763804). According to Chen, the
Uighurs were the true northern Hu, although he only found evidence of them being called northern Fan .
But from the context of the preceding line in the Dongcheng laofu zhuan passage, which claims that foreign tribute
embassies of the early eighth century never stayed behind in Changan, it seems most likely that the referents of the
term northern Hu were members of Central Asian tribute embassies who were forced to remain in Changan after
the Tibetans conquered the Gansu Corridor in the wake of the An Lushan Rebellion. According to the Xin Tangshu
and Zizhi tongjian, there were several thousands of these envoys, and they settled permanently in Changan,
marrying, having children, and buying land while living off a stipend provided by the Tang court (this stipend was
finally discontinued in 787). Both Xiang Da and Chen Yinke were aware of the presence of these envoys in
Changan, but their refusal to accept that the author of the text inaccurately conflated northern Hu with western
Hu led them to look to the Trks and Uighurs as referents instead. Robert Joe Cutter, History and The Old Man
of the Eastern Wall, Journal of the American Oriental Society 106.3 (1986), 520; Xiang Da, Tangdai Changan yu
xiyu wenming (Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 2001 [1933]), 7, 9, 3637; Chen
Yinke, Du Dongcheng laofu zhuan (1948), collected in Jinming guan conggao chubian
(Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2001), 339342.
13
Chen Yinke has argued that at least one of the fashionable makeup styles, namely the ochre face , was
borrowed from the Tibetanssee Chen Yinke, Yuan-Bai shi jianzheng gao (Beijing: Sanlian shudian,
2001 [1950]), 197, 269.
14
See for example Xin Tangshu 100.3933 and 215a.6034 (Jiu Tangshu 194a.5159 is similar), where the Trks
(Tujue ) are clearly distinguished from the Sogdians (Hu ) serving their rulers as advisors. In a recent article,
Moriyasu Takao argues that the Hu girl mentioned in Tang poetry was typically a Sogdian and that some
Buddhist writings took Hu to be a synonym for Sogdian, but refrains from asserting that Hu referred to Sogdians
in every context, including such phrases as Hu makeup styles and Hu music. Moriyasu Takao , Tdai
ni okeru Ko to Bukkyteki sekai chiri , The Tyshi-kenky 66.3
(December 2007), 506538, esp. 515516. I thank Professor Nicolas Tackett for referring me to this article.
nomadic way of life, it was a very different story with all things Central Asian, and people who
found Western fashion and music disconcerting were always in the minority.

Apart from the direct consequences that a misleading translation of Hu can have for the
analysis of pre-Tang and Tang discourses on ethnic and cultural difference, a rather less serious
result of an incomplete understanding of the semantic range and context for the use of Hu has
been that a few humorous anecdotes involving this label were recently interpreted as important
evidence of Tang ethnic discourse or attitudes towards foreigners, when in fact the word Hu was
only serving as the vehicle for a riddle, a pun, or a play on multiple definitions. In other words,
each interpreter missed the joke. Basic to these misinterpretations is an assumption that there was
something embarrassing or insulting about the label Hu, either in itself or as a pun for another
word. In the rest of this paper, I will attempt to put these anecdotes in their proper context. It will
hopefully become apparent that two of them are simpler (and probably funnier) than one might
expect, while the third is far more complicated than has previously been realized.

Word games and puns on Hu

Marc Abramson uses a Northern Dynasties story (doubtless repeated throughout the
Tang) from the mid-eighth-century collection Sui-Tang jiahua to make an argument
about the uneven level of sinicization and ability (or desire) to pass that could occur even
within a single family of foreign immigrants to the Tang Empire:

A man visiting a minor functionary named Lu of the Northern Qi (whose dynastic clan
was non-Han) noticed that a non-Han (huren) was sitting on a chair in Lus house and,
curious, asked Lu who he was. Lu responded that the man was his cousin and that he, in
contrast to Lu himself, was still an old barbarian (laohu), a condescending and often
pejorative term when applied to others. This anecdote shows that while Lu was able to
pass, his cousin was unable or, most likely, unwilling to, for a variety of reasons, of
which his appearance was only the most obvious one (the passage also observes that the
cousins spoken Sinitic was noticeably nonstandard).15

As discussed earlier, the assumption that laohu was meant in a pejorative sense is unfounded.
But more importantly, this interpretation misses the punch line of the story: The man whom Lu
called his cousin was not really his cousin at all. Let us look at the original text of the anecdote:

15
Abramson, Ethnic Identity in Tang China, 164.
 Someone visited the home of the Palace Gate Attendant Lu Sidao and saw a Westerner
(Huren) sitting there. He asked who this man was, and [Lu Sidao] replied, My elder
cousin Lu Hao. The fanyu of Lu Hao is laohu (old Westerner).

16

Some explanation of fanyu may be necessary here, especially since its meaning seems to
have been understood as nonstandard spoken Sinitic. Although the term means ironic or
sarcastic statement in modern Chinese, in the Northern and Southern Dynasties it designated a
kind of word game. The idea was to take the fanqie reading of a two-word phrase or name
(i.e., join the initial consonant from the first word with the vowel or diphthong from the second),
then reverse the order of the words and take the fanqie reading again, and finally put the two
fanqie readings together to form a new phrase. So, for example, the fanqie reading of laohu
is lu, and the fanqie reading of hulao is hao; combining them produces the invented name
Lu Hao. Lu Sidao (531582 or 535586) was not really introducing a cousinhe was indulging
in a playful word trick not so different from an English palindrome. Indeed, he would have been
quite dismayed if this trick were taken as evidence that he was a Westerner passing off as a
Chinese man. After all, he was a member of the prestigious Fanyang Lu lineage, which
could trace its ancestry back through many generations of office-holding, beginning with the
famous late Eastern Han minister and classicist Lu Zhi (d. 192).17 This does not necessarily
mean that Lu Sidao despised Westerners if he did, why would he have invited one to his
home? But he was almost certainly extremely proud of his own genealogy and sensitive to any
attempt at questioning its veracity.

For reasons unknown, fanyu word play fell out of popularity after the Northern and
Southern Dynasties. Puns, in contrast, have remained a staple of Chinese humor, and it is to this
type of word play that we now turn. A few recent studies have claimed that in the Tang period,
the homophony of Hu with hu (fox) allowed for puns that insultingly equated Central
Asians with wild foxes. However, there is insufficient evidence to support this claim. The only
story that has actually been used to argue for fox puns being an insult to Central Asians took
place in the winter of 752, when the Tang emperor Xuanzong (Li Longji , 685762,

16
Liu Su , Sui-Tang jiahua (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1979), 55.
17
Lu Sidaos biography can be found at Sui shu 57.13971403; biographies of his ancestors can be found in (from
latest to earliest) Wei shu 47.10451051, Jin shu 44.12541259, Sanguo zhi 22.650652, and Hou Hanshu 64.2113
2119.
r. 712756) arranged for the military commissioners An Lushan and Geshu Han (d. 757),
who had long been enemies, to meet in a banquet in the capital, hoping to effect a reconciliation
between the two. During the banquet, An Lushan abruptly extended an olive branch to Geshu
Han, saying, My father was a Westerner (Hu), and my mother is a Trk; your father was a Trk,
and your mother was a Westerner (Hu). My ancestry is therefore quite similar to yours. Why
cant we be good friends?18 Geshu Han replied, The ancients said that the wild fox (yehu )
howls and bows to its den, because it has not forgotten its roots. How would I dare to not be of
one mind with you? 19 An Lushan, catching a pun on the word hu, flew into a rage and shouted,
How dare you, you Trk! A bigger quarrel was only averted because the eunuch Gao Lishi
(684762), who was hosting the banquet on behalf of the emperor, shot a look at Geshu
Han that deterred him from answering An Lushan again.

Most interpreters have assumed that Geshu Hans pun was unintentional, that his
response to An Lushans offer was sincere, and that An Lushan was either oversensitive or too
uneducated to recognize a classical allusion from Geshu Han, who was versed in the classics and
histories.20 This impression is based on a line that appears in all versions of the anecdote and
reads, Lushan thought that Geshu Han was ridiculing him as a Westerner /
. However, the problem clearly cannot have been with the label Hu itself, since
An Lushan had just used the same label to refer to his father without any sense of embarrassment.
Xiaofei Kang cites the Jiu Tangshu version of the story as evidence that hu [fox] was a
derogatory term used to describe hu [barbarian], people of Central Asian origins, during the
Tang, an interpretation that was perhaps based on Huang Yongnians earlier suggestion that
Geshu Hans faux pas lay in accidentally reminding An Lushan of a Tang custom in which the

18
Geshu Hans father was a Western Trk of the Trgish tribe, and his mother was a member of the
Khotanese aristocracy. See Xin Tangshu 135.4571 and 225a.6411.
19
Following the version in Yao Runeng , An Lushan shiji 1. The late Qing scholar Miao
Quansun (18441919), when annotating the An Lushan shiji, argued that this version was inaccurate or
corrupt because it was contradicted by the later version in the Jiu TangshuXin Tangshu, and Zizhi tongjian, in
which Geshu Han says, The ancients said that it is inauspicious for a wild fox (in Xin Tangshu and Zizhi tongjian,
wild is omitted) to howl at its own den, because this is a sign that it has forgotten its roots. How would I dare to
not do my utmost [to befriend you]? All modern interpretations of the story have also followed the Jiu Tangshu,
Xin Tangshu, and Zizhi tongjian. However, I believe that these three sources are in fact in error, and that the error
began when the editors of the Jiu Tangshu misread the (bow to) in An Lushan shiji as (auspicious), and
then tried to make sense of the text by transplanting the from (to not forget ones roots) in front of ,
thus making (inauspicious) and (to forget ones roots). This error was uncritically repeated by the
Xin Tangshu and Zizhi tongjian. This argument is supported by the fact that while the idea that a fox howling at its
own den is inauspicious is attested by no extant ancient text, there is a saying, the fox dies with its head pointing to
its den , that does convey the idea of not forgetting ones roots and is attested in early texts like the
Huainanzi , Liji , and Lienuzhuan . Abramson notes the Liji reference, but misses the
contradiction between it and the Jiu Tangshu version of Geshu Hans wordsAbramson, Ethnic Identity in Tang
China, 203 n. 28.
20
For example, Huang, Du Chen Yinke xiansheng Huchou yu huchou, 209.
pun on hu was used to deride Central Asians as foxes.21 Similarly, Abramson cites the story as
the most famous instance of how ethnic insults during the Tang often hinged on equating the
non-Han with animals. 22 But there is actually no other direct evidence for foreigners being
insulted as foxes in the Tang or earlier periods, so the use of this story as an indication of
common practice is problematic at best. Puns on Hu (which was also a common Chinese
family name) and hu (fox) are found in various works of short zhiguai fiction from the
Northern and Southern Dynasties and Tang, with favorite motifs being fox demons who either
use the family name Hu or impersonate Westerners (Central Asians or Indians). 23 Clearly,
writers of zhiguai fiction found presenting a character as a Westerner or a bearer of the Hu
family name to be a witty and effective way of foreshadowing that characters true identity as a
fox demon, but this need not have anything to do with the general use of fox as an ethnic slur.

I would therefore argue that interpretations of hu [fox] as a pun-based pejorative term

for Central Asians reflect a problem of focusing too narrowly on the fox motif, and consequently
missing the fact that the pun in Geshu Hans classical allusion allowed wild fox to sound like
wild (i.e., boorish and uncivilized) Westerner. In other words, although the pun was made on
the word fox, the crux of the insult was the accompanying adjective wild (ye). I would
further argue that in fact, Geshu Hans pun was deliberate, and the line How would I dare to not
be of one mind with you? was thinly veiled sarcasm. If Geshu Han had spoken about a fox
without adding the adjective wild, the allusion could well have been accepted without offense;
however, he evidently relished the chance to call An Lushan a wild Westerner and
simultaneously display his learning and wit. This did not escape Gao Lishis notice, hence the
withering glance that the eunuch cast in Geshu Hans direction. Unfortunately, the crucial
difference between the offensive pun wild fox/wild Westerner and the neutral pun
fox/Westerner was already lost by the eleventh century, causing the editors of the Xin Tangshu
and Zizhi tongjian to distort the context of the pun by deleting the word wild (ye) as a
redundancy. Possibly, a semantic shift in the Northern Song had begun to give the label Hu a
pejorative meaning in its own right an issue I will return to at the end of this article.

A Buddhist joke (or two) about Hu

21
Xiaofei Kang, The Fox (hu) and the Barbarian (hu): Unraveling Representations of the Other in Late Tang
Tales, Journal of Chinese Religions 27 (1999), 50; Huang Yongnian, Du Chen Yinke xiansheng Huchou yu
huchou jianlun hu yu hu zhi guanxi , in Tangdai shishi
kaoshi (Taipei: Lianjing chubanshe, 1998), 206209. Kangs citations do not include Huangs article
(originally published in 1948), but Huang seems to have been the first to make this argument.
22
Abramson, Ethnic Identity in Tang China, 2728.
23
On this, see Huang, Du Chen Yinke xiansheng Huchou yu huchou, 201209; also Kang, The Fox (hu) and
the Barbarian (hu), 4954. Both Huang and Kang drew most of their examples from stories preserved in Taiping
guangji Chapters 447454.
 In 740, the pro-Daoist Emperor Xuanzong was persuaded by his ministers to order all
foreign Buddhist monks from other states (waiguo Fanseng ) to leave the Tang
empire and return to their own countries.24 The Indian Tantric monk Vajrabodhi (669741), who
had come to China by sea in 719, therefore chose a date for his departure from Changan,
according to his hagiography in the tenth-century Song gaoseng zhuan. However, when his
attendants later informed him that the travel date was approaching (xing youri 25), he
reportedly replied, I am an Indian monk (Fnseng 26), and not a foreign Westerner (Fan
Hu ). The imperial edict has nothing to do with me, so I will not leave after all. Several
days later, Vajrabodhi suddenly appeared to change his mind again. Hiring a third-rate horse
carriage (shengzhuan ) from a courier station and declaring an intention to head for Yanmen
(present-day Dai county , northern Shanxi), he went to the palace to take his leave of
the emperor. Xuanzong was astonished and immediately wrote an edict in his own hand,
permitting Vajrabodhi to stay.27

One recent study of medieval Sino-Indian contacts has used the first part of this story as
evidence that India held an exceptional position in the Chinese world order during the Tang
period, causing Indians in China to enjoy more respect than other foreigners did. Abramson,
again using only the first part of the story, has argued that Vajrabodhi was asserting an Indian
ethnic identity outside the standard Han Self/non-Han Other opposition, in order to position
himself in a place along the savage-civilized continuum far above the generic barbarian.28 One
common weakness of these interpretations is that they stop at Vajrabodhis apparent refusal to
leave China, and assume that he was being serious and even adamant about it. No attempt is
made to explain why, within a few days, Vajrabodhi was getting ready to go to Yanmen, which
was furthermore in the wrong direction for anyone returning to India, whether by land or by sea.

24
Abramson sets the story in 719 during Vajrabodhis brief visit to Luoyang, and then argues that it may be
apocryphal, because there is no supporting evidence to indicate that such an edict was issued at this date. Sen,
however, follows Chou Yi-liang in using a record in the Buddhist Tripitaka to date the edict deporting foreign
monks to 740, shortly after a Buddhist monk was implicated in a rebel conspiracy. In the absence of any evidence to
the contrary, I agree with Chou and Sen. Tansen Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-
Indian Relations, 600-1400 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003), 5354, 267 n. 173; Abramson, Ethnic
Identity in Tang China, viii, 199 n. 3; Chou Yi-liang, Tantrism in China, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 8:3/4
(1945), 320.
25
Abramson misreads xing youri to mean that the emperor would soon issue an edict, and thus assumes
that Vajrabodhis attendants were informing him about an imminent edict, and not about the approaching departure
date. This mistake leads to another, in which Vajrabodhis attendants are judged to be voicing their routine
assumptions about his identity by assuming that he is one of the foreign Buddhist monks the edict is directed at.
In fact, no such assumption was made; it was Vajrabodhi himself who at first recognized that the edict applied to
him, and only later claimed that it did not. Abramson, Ethnic Identity in Tang China, viiiix.
26
To avoid confusion with , I have added a tone mark to the Romanization for .
27
Zanning , Song gaoseng zhuan (T50.2061), 1. A complete annotated English translation of
Vajrabodhis Song gaoseng zhuan hagiography may be found in Chou, Tantrism in China, 272284.
28
Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade, 5354; Abramson, Ethnic Identity in Tang China, viiiix.
After analyzing the semantic context for the labels Fnseng and Fan Hu, I believe that both parts
of the story may actually be jokes about different meanings associated with Hu.

Chou Yi-liangs translation of the Vajrabodhi story reads the Fan of Fan Hu as Tibetan
(the reason for which will be explained later), and Hu as Central-Asiatic (which is roughly
equivalent to Westerner). Sen rejects this in favor of foreign barbarian, arguing that
Vajrabodhi is highlighting an ethnic, rather than geographical, difference between him and
other foreign monks in China. 29 However, I would argue that Vajrabodhis (or at least, his
hagiographers) choice to contrast the terms Fnseng and Fan Hu does have to do with
geography, and a translation of Fan Hu as foreign barbarian would tend to obscure this. The
context for the distinction between Fnseng and Fan Hu begins with the Sui-period Buddhist
monk and translator Yancong (557610), whom Sen quotes as a second example of
exceptional Chinese respect for Indians. 30 A scion of the prestigious Li lineage of Zhao
prefecture , Yancong was apparently the first monk to argue against the previous Chinese
Buddhist practice of labeling Central Asians and Indians alike as Westerners (Hu). In an essay
entitled the Bianzheng lun , he asserts:

In the past, we called that part of the world by the generic name of Western states
(Huguo ). [However,] the Westerners are the descendants of assorted western
barbarians (za Rong ), while the Indians (Fn ) are the descendants of sages. Their
roots being so different, there is no reason for one to mix them up. [But people who] do
not understand the difference well frequently think they are one and the same. Seeing
someone with a Western face, they call him an Indian; seeing someone who is really an
Indian, they carelessly call him a Westerner. How lamentable it is that they cannot tell the
true from the false!

31

Yancongs criterion for differentiating Westerners from Indians is not clearly explicated
in the Bianzheng lun, but a Song-period Buddhist source reveals that it was based on geography.
The early twelfth-century Fanyi mingyi ji by Fayun (10881158) states:

29
Chou, Tantrism in China, 278; Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade, 267 n. 172.
30
Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade, 54.
31
Daoxuan , Xu gaoseng zhuan (T50.2060) 2.
 From the Han to the Sui, everyone referred to the Western Regions as Western states.
In the Tang [sic], there was the Venerable Yancong who alone distinguished between the
Westerners and the Indians. All the peoples to the west of the Pamirs were classified as
Indians, and all the places to the east of the Iron Gates were called the lands of the
Westerners.

32

Identifying the Indians with the lands west of the Pamirs is rather surprising, since India is
actually south of the Pamirs. This may reflect that Yancong, despite having written books on the
Western Regions (Central Asia) and India 33 , had an inadequate knowledge of Indian
geography, and we shall see that he was belatedly taken to task for this in the Song period.

Yang Jidong points out that when Daoxuan (596667), Yancongs hagiographer,
was compiling the Da Tang neidian lu sutra catalog in 664, he inserted a note under
every title that contained the word Hu (for example, in the phrase Huben , Hu[-script]
edition) to inform the reader that the correct word should be Fn, which was originally an
abbreviated Chinese transcription of the Sanskrit sound Brhman. Another Tang Buddhist
catalog of the early eighth century, when copying passages from earlier texts like the Chu
sanzang ji ji by Sengyou (445518), also changed all occurrences of Hu to
Fn.34 However, against Yangs argument that Hu and Fn were interchangeable names for the
Sanskrit language in the Chu sanzang ji ji, Boucher proposes that third-century Buddhist
manuscripts labeled as Fn in the Chu sanzang ji ji were written in the Brhm script, while the
manuscripts labeled as Hu were written in the Kharoh script. The extinction of the Kharoh
script in the third or fourth century made this distinction meaningless by the Sui-Tang period,
when nearly all Indian Buddhist manuscripts were written in the Brhm script, leading to the
replacement of Hu by Fn in Buddhist scholastic writing.35

32
Fayun, Fanyi mingyi ji (T54.2131) 1. On the Iron Gates, a mountain pass near Termez in present-day Uzbekistan,
see Section 13, note 9 of John E. Hills annotation to the Hou Hanshu at
http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/hhshu/notes13.html#9. Hills annotated translation of Hou Hanshu 78 has
now been published as Through the Jade Gate to Rome: A Study of the Silk Routes during the Later Han Dynasty,
1st to 2nd Centuries CE (Charleston, SC: BookSurge, 2009).
33
Yancong is known to have written a Xiyu zhuan (Account of the Western Regions) and a Tianzhu ji
(Record of India), although both books are now lost. Daoxuan, Xu gaoseng zhuan, juan 2.
34
Yang Jidong, Replacing hu with fan: A Change in the Chinese Perception of Buddhism during the Medieval
Period, Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 21.1 (1998), 161162.
35
Ibid., 163164; Boucher, On Hu and Fan again, 718.
 While Bouchers argument is plausible, it does not address the question of why
Yancongs objection to the indiscriminate use of the label Hu was based on ethnic and
geographical differences, and not on the disappearance of Buddhist manuscripts in Kharoh.
The most likely answer to that question is that even if the original Hu/Fn distinction was a
Kharoh/Brhm distinction, the labels had been significantly redefined by the early seventh
century as a result of disputes between Buddhists and Daoists over the Hua Hu jing
(Scripture on the Transformation of the Westerners [by Laozi]).36 A late Ming Buddhist text,
the Amituo jing shuchao wenbian by Zhuhong (15351615) provides
this clue:

In ancient times, before any competition began [between Buddhists and Daoists], all
languages from the west were called Western languages. Only later, because the Daoist
priests forged the Hua Hu jing, did we call [the language] to the west of the Pamirs
Indian and [the languages] to the east of the Pamirs Western.

37

It is admittedly difficult to determine the reliability of an explanation given so long after the
original controversy, but Zhuhongs analysis does cohere with the religious context of the Sui
and early Tang, a context that neither Yang nor Boucher takes fully into account.

Yang Jidong notes the ideological controversies among Buddhism, Confucian [sic] and
Taoism during the early medieval period and even mentions the Hua Hu jing as a product of
these controversies, but also claims that the hu culture was commonly thought to be
uncivilized, and that hu always had a very strong racist sense and signified something
uncivilized and inherently contradictory to Chinese culture. In his view, the replacement of Hu
by Fn in Sui-Tang Buddhism shows that the Chinese were [now] more at ease to accept Indian
thought as a part of their own culture. 38 These arguments clearly rest on the questionable
assumption that Hu was always an inherently derogatory label. However, there are also problems
with Bouchers counter-argument that because Han Yus (768824) infamous attacks on
Buddhism and the Buddha denigrated them as Yi-Di but [did] not invoke hu and the
presumed cultural connotations attached to it, Hu was therefore not pejorative enough a label
to inspire Buddhisms critics to invoke it for their purposes.39 Han Yus style of prose and

36
On the early textual history and influence of the Hua Hu jing, see Erik Zrcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China:
The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism in Early Medieval China (Leiden: Brill, 1959), 288320.
37
Zhuhong, Amituo jing shuchao wenbian, in 1 juan.
38
Yang, Replacing hu with fan, 164167.
39
Boucher, On Hu and Fan again, 18 n. 28.
choice of labels can hardly be taken as representative of all anti-Buddhist polemics in the Tang.40
Furthermore, Yang Jidong does provide an example of the denigration of Westerners (Hu) being
used as an anti-Buddhist strategy by the early Tang court astrologer Fu Yi (555639), a
Daoist who repeatedly petitioned for the proscription of Buddhism and was arguably much more
obsessed with the religions foreign origins than Han Yu.41 As Abramson has shown, Fu Yis
arguments included an explicitly racialist discourse positing Hu as a separate species with non-
human characteristics. Although Falin (572640), Fu Yis main opponent from the
Buddhist camp, sought to rebut the anti-foreign rhetoric by citing classical examples of sage-
kings who were believed to have come from barbarian peoples, he was also compelled to use
Yancongs geographical definitions to dissociate the Buddhas homeland from the Western
Regions (xiyu ) whose inhabitants Fu Yi was dehumanizing:

The Westerners (xi Hu ) are those thirty-six states to the east of the Pamirs, and have
nothing to do with India, the birthplace of the Buddha.
42

Yancongs new definitions of Hu and Fn were probably not made in response to Fu Yis
attacks, since Fu Yis earliest recorded polemics are dated eleven years after Yancongs death.
But we may take Fu Yi as just an extreme example of a discourse about Westerner moral
inferiority that had been appearing in anti-Buddhist rhetoric since the composition of the Hua Hu
jing around the beginning of the fourth century. The argument of the Hua Hu jing was predicated
on the idea that Laozi, after going to India to become the Buddha, was forced to teach an inferior
moral system of monastic asceticism because the depraved natures of the Westerners could not
be transformed in any other way. This claim that the inferiority of Buddhist morality could be
traced to the limited moral capacities of its original adherents was taken up by numerous anti-
Buddhist critics in the fifth and sixth centuries, few of whom had actually had any meaningful
contact with Indians.43 Although Buddhist apologists used various tactics to disprove or subvert
the Hua Hu jing story, they naturally also resorted to the easier tactic of denying that the Indians
were Westerners at all. This may well have extended to avoiding the use of the word Hu by
replacing it with Fn in scholastic writing. It is interesting to note that the apologists never
seriously attempted to defend the Western peoples of Central Asia, many of whom were
Buddhists as well, from the charge of being morally inferior or even sub-human, perhaps because
they did not consider this relevant to the objective of protecting Buddhisms reputation in China.
In fact, Yancong was happy to dismiss Central Asians as the descendants of assorted western

40
On this see Abramson, Ethnic Identity in Tang China, 6667.
41
Yang, Replacing hu with fan, 165.
42
Ibid.; Abramson, Ethnic Identity in Tang China, 5868, 7677. I have modified Yangs translation of Falins
argument.
43
Zrcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China, 304305; Richard Mather, Chinese and Indian Perceptions of Each
Other between the First and Seventh Centuries, Journal of the American Oriental Society 112.1 (1992), 36.
barbarians, as long as the birthplace of Buddhism could be recognized as a land of sages.
Daoxuan did essentially the same in the Da Tang neidian lu, expressing the difference between
Hu and Fn in the following terms:

Also, the assorted western barbarians known as Westerners are frontier people in the
west who belong to barbarian (Man-Yi ) types like the Di and Qiang. Why
should [the language of] the sutras be called a Western language? The Buddha was
born in India, and the literati of that land, the Brahmins (poluomen), were collectively
called Fn. The meaning of Fn is pure.

44

Neither the anti-Buddhist denigration of Westerners nor the Buddhist effort to

dissociate India from the label Westerner seems to have had any impact outside religious
circlesin everyday usage, as argued earlier, Westerner continued to carry no inherent
derogatory connotation. However, if Zanning (9191001), the author of Vajrabodhis
hagiography, is to be believed, the practice of calling foreign Buddhist monks Indians rather
than Westerners had been taken to an extreme by the early Song period, simply perpetuating
the confusion that Yancong and Daoxuan had tried to eliminate:

Regarding the Western languages and the Indian language: Firstly, the five parts of India
all speak the Indian language (i.e., Sanskrit). Secondly, the peoples to the north of the
Himalayas are the Westerners. South of the Himalayas are the Brahmin (i.e., Indian)
states; they are separated from the Westerners and therefore have a different written
script and language. As for our part of the world, translators from the Eastern Han up
to the Sui dynasty all referred to India as a Western state, thus becoming confused
about the people (miaoyi , lit. descendants) of India and calling [the sutras]
scriptures from Western lands. The Venerable Yancong alone recognized this
[problem], and he recorded and earnestly denounced it. In the Tang, Daoxuan
promoted the same [argument], and from then on, whenever we heard anyone rolling his
tongue [to chant sutras] or saw anyone with a black complexion, we invariably called him
an Indian monk, and unanimously assumed he was speaking the Indian language. The
Venerable Yancong, it can be said, was busy wielding an axe to catch the chirping cicada

44
Daoxuan, Da Tang neidian lu (T55.2149), juan 1. Daoxuan was mistaken about the etymology of Brhman, the
Sanskrit word that was abbreviated and transcribed as Fn (alongside the use of a full transliteration as poluomen)
the root brh is believed to mean to grow.
 in front of him, not seeing that the reflection from his axe head was shining on the
yellow-feathered siskin behind him. Since he said that there were both Westerners and
Indians in the western lands, why did he not divide them based on north and south
[instead of east and west], and [thus] distinguish between the true and the false?
Calling them all Western in the beginning was really no different from calling them all
Indian since the Sui dynasty. This is what is meant by going too far is as bad as not
going far enough.

45

Yang Jidong believes Zanning wrote these comments to dampen a movement by Buddhist
monks of his time to censor the word Hu from their sutras, but this is still somewhat missing the
point.46 Zannings criticism was firstly about laypeople indiscriminately using the label Fn on
foreign monks in the same way as the label Hu was used before the Sui, so this problem was
clearly not limited to the editing of sutras. Related to this was a criticism of Yancong for
choosing an imprecise geographical boundary, namely the Pamirs and the Iron Gates, to mark the
boundary between Westerners and Indians, when the Himalayas would have made a better
choice (however, Zanning does not elaborate on whether this should cause the Tibetans to be
added to the Westerner category). Tansen Sens argument that Zanning represents an attempt
by Buddhist clergy in the early Song court to completely dissociate Chinese Buddhism from its
Indian origins may also be relevant to his apparent distaste for the reflexive use of the label
Indian; if so, it would provide an ironic contrast with the early Tang Buddhist attempts to
dissociate the religion from Central Asia by identifying it more closely with India.47

While the absence of earlier versions of the Vajrabodhi story makes it difficult (if not
impossible) to ascertain if Zannings role was one of composition or compilation 48, I find it
likely that Zanning would at least have understood the words attributed to Vajrabodhi as a joke.
45
Zanning, Song gaoseng zhuan, juan 3.
46
Yang, Replacing hu with fan, 162.
47
Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade, 137140.
48
Abramson acknowledges that it is problematic to assert that we are hearing the voice of Vajrabodhi, given that
the text is written in literary Sinitic within a specifically Chinese tradition of Buddhist hagiography and most likely
mediated by a series of Han transmitters, but proceeds to make an interpretation that ignores or side-steps this
problem. Abramson, Ethnic Identity in Tang China, ix.
The key here is the semantic sleight-of-hand by which Vajrabodhi deliberately misunderstands
the Fanseng of the imperial edict as Fan Hu , which allows him to shift the issue from
the distinction between foreign and Chinese monks to the difference between Indians and
Westerners. Before it can be explained how this shift could be amusing to Zanning and his
readers, however, two clarifications will be needed.

First, it should be clarified that neither Fanseng nor Fan Hu was an inherently offensive
label. Sen translates Fan Hu as foreign barbarian, although his translations of Fan and Hu
elsewhere suggest that he considers barbarian and foreigner to be interchangeable. 49
Abramson translates Fanseng as alien monks in his retelling of the Vajrabodhi story, but
argues elsewhere against consistently translating Fan as foreigner or alien on the grounds
that this would connote geographical and political outsiderness, implying that individuals and
groups so designated were external to the Tang Empire and ineligible to become subjects of the
empire. He goes on to assert, however, that barbarian is often the most appropriate choice
for translating Fan, Hu, and other Chinese labels for foreigners precisely because of its
consistent association with inferiority, lack of civilization, and externality in the broadest
sense. Later, when mentioning the Vajrabodhi story again, he translates Fan Hu as
barbarian.50 This inconsistency seems to reflect a lack of clarity about what Fan meant in the
Tang imperial contextdid it convey inferiority and externality, or equality and inclusion?

Beckwith is essentially right in noting that in the Tang period, Fan had no negative
connotations and was a generic term for foreigners without any pejorative meaning. As he
observes, it was practically the opposite of the word barbarian. However, his description of it
as perhaps the only true generic [word for foreigner and foreign country] at any time in
Chinese literature is probably incorrect.51 Variations on the classical categories Yi , Di ,
Rong , and Man often served a similar generic purpose, except that they were most often
used with a pejorative or patronizing connotation and are therefore quite justifiably translated as
barbarian. Although the original referents of these labels were groups specific to frontiers in
the east, north, west, and south respectively, this limitation could be overcome through collective
synecdochic terms like si Yi (the Yi of the four directions), Yi-Di, Rong-Di, and Man-Yi.
Furthermore, whenever any of the labels Yi, Di, Rong, and Man was paired with Xia , Hua ,
or Zhongguo (Classical Chinese terms for the ethnocultural Self) in a dichotomous
relationship, it was understood to represent the generic uncivilized Other.

49
Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade, 53. See foreigner (hu) on 49 and civilized barbarian (shufan) on 53.
50
Abramson, Ethnic Identity in Tang China, viii, 3, 77.
51
Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road, 359360.
 Available sources suggest that in addition to using the Yi/Xia (or Hua/Yi) dichotomy, the
Tang Empire invented a new dichotomy for the purpose of distinguishing foreign countries (Fan)
from the territory under direct imperial administration (Han ). 52 The two dichotomies
coexisted, operating within different contexts: Yi/Xia or Hua/Yi in the sphere of classicizing
ideological rhetoric and court writing, and Fan/Han in the world of day-to-day civil and military
administration (including edicts dealing with practical military matters). Foreigners who settled
permanently in the Tang capital or the various Tang prefectures continued to be labeled as Fan
on the basis that they or their immediate ancestors had entered the empire from outside. It should
be emphasized that whereas the Yi/Xia dichotomy was based on a savage-civilized continuum
(in Abramsons words), the Fan/Han dichotomy was purely geographical in character and even
proved so acceptable to foreign peoples that it was used in diplomatic discourse. A particularly
interesting case is the use of Fan and Han to refer to the Tibetan and Tang empires respectively,
in which Fan carried a double meaning because it was also part of the Chinese name for the
Tibetans, Tufan . This resulted in the Tibetans often being called Fan for short. Beckwith
misses the double meaning when noting that the word Fan was used instead of other sometimes
pejorative words in Tang-Tibetan diplomacy. 53

That brings us to the second clarification, which is that the Fan in Fan Hu does not refer
to Tibetans. There are at least two examples from the seventh century of the label Fan Hu being
used by Buddhist monks to refer specifically to Central Asians. The earlier of the two is in
Daoxuans Sifen l shanbu suiji jiemo shu , composed in 648. In this
text, Daoxuan explains the origins of the Chinese term for a Buddhist monk, heshang /:

Since ancient times, [Chinese] translations [of Buddhist texts] have been mixed with [the
language of] the Fan Hu. The Westerners (Hu), when transmitting the Indian language
(tianyu ), were not able to master the correct pronunciations. As a result, the
pronunciation was distorted and changed to heshang.

52
There is evidence that this usage of the word Fan began in the late fifth or early sixth century under the Northern
Wei, although the corresponding usage of Han began in the Tang. The Northern Wei used Han as an ethnonym for
the indigenous north Chinese population, not a geopolitical designation. On this topic see a recent article by this
author: Shao-yun Yang, Fan and Han: The Origins and Uses of a Conceptual Dichotomy in Mid-Imperial China, ca.
5001200, in Political Strategies of Identity-building in Non-Han Empires in China, eds. Francesca Fiaschetti and
Julia Schneider (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz Verlag, 2014), 935.
53
The issue of whether should be read as Tufan or as Tubo has been quite intensely debated. The reading Tubo,
which has become common in modern China, is based on the assumption that the second character transliterates the
Tibetans name for themselves, B (Wylie: Bod), but that assumption has no strong supporting evidence. Beckwith,
Empires of the Silk Road, 360; Yang, Fan and Han.
 54

The Fan Hu of this passage are quite easily identified, since we know from other Tang Buddhist
sources that the pronunciation of a colloquial Indian word for teacher was first adapted to
khosha (transcribed in Chinese as ) in Khotan and Kashgar , and then became
heshang in China.55 The second and later example is from Daoshis (d. 683) Fayuan zhulin
, completed in 668. Daoshis summary of the famous pilgrim Xuanzangs (602
664) journey to India describes him as passing through the various Fan Hu countries north of
the Himalayas before entering present-day Pakistan, and we know from
Xuanzangs own account that these countries were in Sogdiana and Gandhara.56 I could find no
examples, however, of Fan Hu being used in a context in which the Fan referred to Tibet, hence
my conclusion that Chou Yi-liangs translation of Fan as Tibetan is incorrect.

By pretending that the Fan in the category Fanseng was identical to the Buddhist monks
use of it in the label Fan Hu, the Vajrabodhi of the Song gaoseng zhuan story consciously
conflated the Tang Empires Fan/Han dichotomy with the Chinese Buddhist communitys own
Hu/Fn dichotomy. The two dichotomies were of roughly equal age, and as we have seen,
neither connoted an inferior/superior or uncivilized/civilized distinction, except occasionally
with Hu/Fn in the context of Buddhist apologetic against the Hua Hu jing mythand even then,
the distinction was not overtly or aggressively made. There was therefore nothing very serious at
stake in Vajrabodhis self-identification as an Indian monk and self-dissociation from the
category foreign Westernerneither an assertion of Indias exceptional position in Chinese
perceptions of foreigners (as Sen argues), nor an objection to being subsumed in the broad
category Fan (as Abramson argues). Rather, Vajrabodhi was simply repeating the Buddhist
scholastic assertion that Indians were not Westerners, but in a context where the assertion was
both incongruous and irrelevant, and therefore somehow amusing.

Indeed, it seems that in this story, Vajrabodhi was not expecting his equation of Fanseng
with Fan Hu to suffice for an exemption from the deportation edictthat is, if we can even
assume that his remarks were reported to the court at all. Otherwise, he would not have soon
announced his departure for Yanmen, a strategic outpost on the frontier with the second Eastern
Trk khaganate. Since that khaganate was, by 740, in the final stage of a process of civil war,

54
Daoxuan, Sifen l shanbu suiji jiemo shu, juan 3.
55
For example, Huilin (737820), Yiqie jing yinyi (T54.2128), juan 22. Huilin was himself a
Kashgari, and would quite likely have been familiar with the Kashgari form of the word.
56
Daoshi, Fayuan zhulin (T53.2122), juan 29.
disintegration, and replacement by the Uighur khaganate, Vajrabodhi would have put himself in
great personal danger by heading into the unsettled steppe on a carriage drawn by the slowest
grade of horses. I would argue that the only logical reason for him to attempt this was that he
knew he would be stopped by an emperor afraid of becoming indirectly responsible for the death
of an eminent monk. This was effectively an act of karmic blackmail to ensure that Vajrabodhi
would be allowed to remain in Changan.

At the same time, it is tempting to see Vajrabodhis actions as a challenge to what

Abramson calls the undifferentiated mass of non-Han Others denoted by the terms fan and
hu.57 In other words, Vajrabodhi could be interpreted as making a statement that if all foreigners
were Fan or Hu to the Tang court, then it did not matter which Fan or Hu country he returned
to. The problem with this reading is that as we have already seen, the Trks and other nomadic
peoples were not generally regarded as Hu by the Tang. A more plausible interpretation, then, is
that Vajrabodhi was playing with the difference between the original Han-period usage of Hu
and the usage that had become standard by Tang timesin other words, pretending to ignore the
semantic change from Hu as Xiongnu (and more generally northern nomad) to Hu as
Westerner, and this just a few days after he made remarks that showed he knew exactly what
Hu meant in the Tang context! The fact that the label Hu did not even appear in the imperial
courts deportation edict was conveniently forgotten, so deft was the move from Fanseng to Fan
Hu and finally to just Hu. Unfortunately, we lack additional evidence to prove this hypothesis,
since the only other source that mentions the attempted trip to Yanmennamely, Vajrabodhis
hagiography in the Fozu tongji of 1269omits the first part of the Song gaoseng
zhuan story altogether, saying only:

The following year, [Vajrabodhi] took his leave to travel in Yanmen. [The emperor] did
not permit this, and had him moved to reside in the Jianfu temple (in Changan).

58

Removed from the context of the deportation edict and the play on Fanseng and Fan Hu,
Vajrabodhis choice to go to Yanmen appears completely sincere, random, and devoid of irony
or humor. That irony and humor may in fact have been lost on Zhipan (dates unknown), the
author of the Fozu tongji, who was evidently aware of the Buddhist Hu/Fn distinction but quite
confused about who the Hu in that distinction was referring to. Most of Fayuns statement about
57
Abramson, Ethnic Identity in Tang China, ix.
58
Zhipan , Fozu tongji (T49.2035), juan 29. This account dates the Yanmen episode to 720. The Jianfu temple
is best known as the site of the Lesser Wild Goose Pagoda .
Yancong using the Pamirs and the Iron Gates as a geographical boundary between the Hu and
the Indians is repeated verbatim in the geographical chapter of the Fozu tongji, along with the
comment:

There are some who refer to the five parts of India as Hu states, to Indian sutras as Hu
sutras, and to Indian monks as Hu monks. These are all major errors.
59

Zhipan goes on to elaborate on this point from the perspective of Buddhist cosmology, but he
ignores Zannings argument for a north-south distinction between Westerners and Indians and
rather surprisingly identifies the Hu people not with the west but with the nomads of the north:

In the west of Jambudvpa are the five parts of India, ruled by the flying cakravartin
kings. These are the Indian people. In the east is Cnastan, which has received the
civilizing influence of the emperors, the sage-kings, the Duke of Zhou, and Confucius.
This is the country of superior men (junzi ). In the north are the northern barbarians
(Di ), the lands of the Xianyun, Xiongnu, and Hu people. These regions are distinct
and separate, and one should not confuse oneself by referring to the Indians as Hu. For
example, the old terms Hu kneeling, Hu sutras, Hu and Han, and old Hu are all
without basis, and should not be used.

60

Concluding remarks

Zhipans insistence on maintaining the distinction between Hu and Fn reflects the

lingering influence of a Buddhist scholastic practice that had lasted nearly seven hundred years,
while his identification of the Hu with steppe nomads reflects a semantic change from his own
59
Ibid., juan 32. At this point I stop translating Hu as Westerner and leave it untranslated, since it will become clear
that Zhipan did not associate the Hu with the west.
60
Ibid. Cnastan, the land of Cna, was a hybrid Sanskrit-Iranian name for China, commonly transliterated in
Chinese Buddhist texts as zhendan The Xianyun were an ancient northwestern people with whom the Western
Zhou dynasty is recorded to have had military conflicts. It was later believed, though without any solid basis, that
they were ancestors of the Xiongnu. Hu kneeling was a Buddhist monastic practice of showing respect by
kneeling on the right knee; see Huilin, Yiqie jing yinyi, juan 36.
time. By the end of the Song period Hu had ceased to be the standard label for Central Asians,
replaced largely by Huihui (derived from Huihu , Uighur) because much of Central
Asia was now ruled by Turkic-speaking Muslim states. Huihui, in turn, gradually became a
generic designation for Muslims of any kind.61 With these changes, the use of Hu was reduced to
anachronistically classicizing, literary, and/or derogatory references to nomadic or formerly
nomadic peoples like the Kitan, Jurchen, and Mongolsas seen, for example, in Hu Yuan ,
the pejorative name for the Yuan dynasty that appears in numerous early Ming sources.62 The
invention of numerous negative compound phrases beginning with hu in the Song-Yuan-Ming
period (for example, huluan , hulai , and the synonymous hushuo and huchai
) may also be relevant here, and would make an interesting topic for further research.63 Hu
survived in the names of various Western food plants like the sesame (Hu hemp ),
walnut (Hu peach ), and black pepper (Hu pepper , the original Chinese pepper
being the Sichuan pepper), but it seems that the only newly introduced crop to be labeled as hu
after the Song was the carrot (Hu turnip ).

After centuries of relative obscurity, Hu was revived in Chinese historiography of the

early twentieth century as a neutral generic label for a wide range of ancient steppe and Central
Asian peoples, replacing terms such as Yi, Di, Rong, and Fan that had newly become politically
incorrect because of their actual or perceived derogatory connotations. Indeed, Hu could well be
called the only pre-modern generic term for the Other that remains current and acceptable in
Chinese historical writing, since Chinese equivalents of the English terms non-Chinese and
non-Han are awkward and not commonly usedthe Chinese language rarely defines concepts
in terms of negatives. Ironically, English-language scholarship tends to prefer the terms non-
Chinese and non-Han because of the perceived ethnocentrism of the translation
Hu=barbarian and the perceived anachronism of the translation Hu=ethnic minority
(frequently seen in Chinese-English dictionaries published in China).64 Hopefully, however, this
paper has demonstrated that neither barbarian nor non-Chinese/Han is necessary as a
61
On the origins and evolution of the term Huihui, see Yang Jun , Huihui mingyuan bian ,
Huizu yanjiu 2005(1), 3541; Lu Yonglin , Huihui yici de laiyuan ji hanyi de bianqian
, Anhui wenxue 2009(6), 314.
62
There were rare exceptions: Wei Tais (fl. 10681100) Juanyou lu refers to Arab and Persian
merchants residing in Guangzhou as Huren , although they were most commonly called Fanren in
his time. See Jiang Shaoyu , Songchao shishi leiyuan (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe,
1981), Vol. 2, 1009.
63
The earliest use of such a hu compound that I have found is in Sima Guangs (10191086) Qi budai gu
dousha zhazi , dated 1085, which contains the phrase huluan daren . Wang Genlin
ed., Sima Guang zouyi (Taiyuan: Shanxi renmin chubanshe, 1986), 363.
64
Ethnic minority (shaoshu minzu ) is arguably not an othering label, since its usage always carries a
strong sense of inclusion in and integration with a historically multi-ethnic Chinese nation. Instead, its use in place
of traditional labels serves to avoid and negate the sense of otherness conveyed by those labels. An awareness of this
ideological context has led scholars outside China to reject the use of ethnic minority to refer to historical peoples.
translation for Hu, and that historians have much to gain from exploring the full range of
possible nuances, transformations, and contexts in pre-modern Chinese names for the foreign
Other.