Chen Zhi-Qiang

Narrative Materials about the Byzantines in Chinese Sources

There are plenty of mediaeval Chinese texts dealing with the Byzantine state. Chinese material for European studies was collected by sinologists and geographers more than a hundred years ago. 1 Other scholars used the material half a century ago. 2 At present, most Byzantine scholars do their research without touching the Chinese texts. This paper is a brief introduction to written and archaeological Chinese sources relative to the Byzantines, or Romans as they saw themselves. As this paper will indicate, the two are barely divisible within the Chinese historiographic tradition. Chinese sources for Byzantium can be divided into three groups. The court chronicles of each dynasty from the fourth to the fifteenth century are the first and basic source-group for studies of Byzantine-Chinese relations. The second group comprises other mediaeval literature and the third group is the more fact• based body of government documents. The Byzantine state appears in the Chinese chronicles under such different names as Liqian, Lixuan, Lijian, Daqin and Fulin, etc. These names have long evoked heated disputes among sinologists and geographers. 3 In fact, these different names all mean the country in the extreme west of the world in the Chinese mind. The first name for Byzantium in Chinese texts comes from the name given to the eastern part of the Roman Empire by historians such as those of the Han Dynasty in the Hou-Han-Shu, 4 a fifth-century court chronicle which covers the period 25-220 CE: they called it "Daqin'. Other court chronicles from the fourth to the sixth century continued to call what had become the Byzantine state Daqin (Ta-ch'in) and also Lijian; these names appear as Daqin and Likxuan in the sixth-century Wei-Shu (The History of the Wei Dynasty);' as Fulin, Liqian and Daqin in other chronicles from the seventh to the fifteenth century; and as Folang and Fulang in the Yuan-Shi (The History of the Yuan Dynasty) covering

1. F. l lirth, China and the Roman Orient: Researches into Their Ancien/ and Mediaeval Relations as Represented in Old Chinese Records (Shanghai 1885, rp. Chicago 1975, New York 1996). 2. J. Lindsay, Byzantium into Europe: 1he Story of Byzantium as the First Europe (326-1204 AD) and lts Further Contribution Til! 1453 AD (London 1952) 423-4. 3. F. llirth, F. von Richthotèn, H. Yule, P. Pelliot, E. Chavannes, Zhang Xing-lang and Feng Cheng-jun, etc. 4. Cf The History of the Farmer 1/an Dynusty ed. and tr. H.11.Dubs (3 vols Baltimore 1938-55) and H. Bielenstein, "The Restoration of the Han Dynasty' Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 26 ( 1954) 1-209, 31 ( 1959) 1-287, with translations of Chinese sources. On the subject of China's foreign relations in the Han era see: G.F. Hudson, Europe and China: A Survey of Their Relations from the Earliest Times to 1800 (London 1931) chs. 2-3, and E. Chavannes, "Trois generaux chinois de la dynastie des llan Orientaux' Toung Pao 7 ( 1906) 210-69. 5. H.H. Franke!, Cata/ogue of Trans/ations from the Chinese Dynastie Histories for the Period 220-960 (Berkeley 1957).

Byzantine Narrative. Papers in Honour of Roger Scott. Edited by J. Burke et al. (Melbourne 2006). 506 Chen Zhi-Qiang the period 1271-1368 CE.6 The changes are hardly surprising. The continuities are more worth considering. To Chinese thinking, the Roman empire became Byzantine without essential change. lts continuities outlasted changes of dynasty or even imperial city, as they did in China itself. The historiographical tradition was also similar to the Byzantine in that historians built on one another's work by copying and embedding earlier accounts as a matter of course. The foundations of Chinese texts describing Byzantium were laid before Byzantium itself, in pre-Byzantine histories such as the Hou-han-shu and San-kuo-chih. This paper will visit those texts later. The first chronicle to include some interesting detail about Byzantium is the Wei-Shu by Wei Shuo, who was the royal historian of the Northern Qi Dynasty. This chronicle covers the period 386-549 CE and displays the typical style of Chinese court chronicles. The most interesting section about the Byzantine state is translated here. 7 The country of Daqin (Ta-chin) is also called Lixuan, with its capital, the city of An-tu (Antiochia). lt is situated in the place as far from Tiao-zhi (lraq) as ten thousand /i,8 going westwards tortuously along the coastline of the sea, and from the city of Dai as far as thirty-nine thousand four hundred li. The country is nearby the sea, which resembles the Bohai sea in China. The western sea is similar in size and shape to the Bohai sea in the east, the result of natural evolution. The territory of that country amounts to six thousand square li, being between the two seas, and is mainly tlatland, which the people of that country inhabit throughout. The royal capital of the country is divided into five cities, each city spanning five square li, and the circuit of the capital is sixty li. The king resides in the central city. In the king's city, there are eight ministers established for governing the eastern, western, northern and southern quarters of the country. In the royal capital, there are also eight ministers separately established for governing the four cities of the capital. The officials of the four cities come conjointly to hold a council at the king's city, when the important affairs of the country need to be decided, and there are problems difficult to handle in the four quarters. The king listens to the discussion, then decides what to do. The king goes out on an inspection tour to learn the changing morals and manners of his people every three years. The common people who are treated

6. Hirth, Roman Orient, with translations of the dynastie histories. 7. Most of the Chinese texts in this article are collected from the Si-Ku-Q11an-Sh11(The Complete library of the Four Treasures). The book includes 36,583 volumes, compiled by more than thn::e hundred scholars of all kinds of sciences during the period 1772-81. lt is regarded as the most comprehensive collection of ancien! and mediaeval tcxts in the world. 8. The mediaeval Chinese li is shortcr than that today. 5 li cquals approximatcly a mile (a li =32 l.904m). F. Hirth's opinion that the li cquals a stade or furlong is, perhaps, not right.