Book Reviews / T’oung Pao 94 (2008) 151-206 193
Subjects and Masters: Uyghurs in the Mongol Empire. By Michael C. Brose, Belling ham, Western Washington University, Center for East Asian Studies, 2008. xv + 348 pp. 5 Maps, Glossary, Bibliography, Index. ISBN 978-0-914584-29-2 (pb)
Michael Brose’s Subjects and Masters revisits the territory explored by Chen Yuan’s 陳垣 classic Western and Central Asians in China Under the Mongols (originally titled in Chinese in 1934 as Yuan Xiyu ren Hanhua kao 元西域人漢化考). The study of both the Mongol empire and Uyghur philology have advanced considerably since the days of Chen Yuan. Brose, an Associate Professor of East Asian and Central Asian history at the University of Wyoming, organizes his topic differently and takes his study much deeper into the social world of the Uyghurs in Mongol China. Subjects and Masters traces a group of families who held leading positions among the Gaochang 高昌 Uyghurs as they brought the kingdom to surrender to the Mongols in 1209. In the following years, these families relocated first to North China and then to South China, where they occupied a special position in the social hierarchy of the Mongol empire. As codified under Qubilai Qa’an, the Uyghurs belonged to the category of semuren 色目人, or “people of various categories” from west of China, who were given legal privileges above those of the local Chinese but below the Mongols. Hence they were simultaneously “Subjects (of the Mongols) and Masters (of the local Chinese),” as his title says (pp. 2-6). Chapters 1 and 2 provide a survey of social stratification and governing institutions in the Mongol empire, and then of the Uyghur state centered on Gaochang (Turfan). In this, the author emphasizes how the Mongol empire drew on Uyghurs for skills, especially literacy, which the Mongols themselves did not have. In Chapter 3 he traces how individual Gaochang Uyghurs were drawn into the Mongol elite in the years from 1204 to 1209, briefly surveying in succession Tatar-Tong’a 塔塔統阿 (pp. 85-87), Dashi 達釋 (pp. 90-92), Sevinch-Toghrïl 小雲石脫忽憐 (pp. 92-94), Örüng-Arslan-Tutay 玉龍阿思蘭都大 (pp. 94-95), Mungsuz 孟速思 (pp. 95-99; not “Mengsus”), Qara-Ïghach Buyruq 哈剌亦哈赤 北魯 (pp. 100-02), Bulut-Qaya 布魯海牙 (pp. 102-04; not “Buyruq-Qaya”), and finally Bilge-Bugha 比俚伽普華 (Bilge-Temür 帖穆爾) (pp. 104-12). In Chapter 4, Professor Brose follows the families of Qara-Ïghach Buyruq and Bulut-Qaya into the reign of Qubilai Qa’an (1260-1294). Chapters 5 through 7 then follow the family of Bilge-Temür’s brother Yolum-Temür 岳璘帖穆爾 (not “Eren- Temür”), who eventually took the Chinese surname Xie 偰, up through the end of the Mongols’ Yuan dynasty. During the narrative, a few other Uyghur families, such as those of Könchek / Guan Zhige 貫只哥 (father of the poet Sevinch-Qaya / Guan Yunshi 小雲石海涯 / 貫雲石; pp. 134, 190-91) and Darmagirdi 達里麻 吉而的 (pp. 153, 239-40, 243), are introduced as they intermarry with those in his main narrative. Chen Yuan’s study was intended to show how non-Chinese from the west had mastered various fields of distinctively Chinese cultural endeavor. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, as well as Michael Chamberlain’s study of biography as social
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 DOI: 10.1163/008254308X367103 194 Book Reviews / T’oung Pao 94 (2008) 151-206 practice in medieval Damascus, Professor Brose focuses instead on how Uyghurs settling in Yuan China acquired Chinese culture as a form of cultural capital. Thus he pays more attention to how cultural products like poetry, reform proposals, and funerary encomia mark families as possessing certain intellectual and social resources, than to the actual cultural products themselves. As a result, his study gives a picture of how acculturation and networking helped Uyghurs build families and careers in China. In Subjects and Masters, Professor Brose has collected extensive documentation on the Uyghur families. On the Xie family alone, he has combed through the collected works of the following Yuan authors who knew members of the Xie family: Ouyang Xuan 歐陽玄, Xu Youren 許有壬, Huang Jin 黃溍, Liu Guan 柳 貫, Wu Cheng 吳澄, Zheng Yuanyou 鄭元祐, Chen Lü 陳旅, Liu Yueshen 劉岳 申, Liu Shen 劉詵, Gong Shitai 貢師泰, Zhang Zhu 張翥, Kong (Ke)qi 孔(克)齊, Zhao Pang 趙彷, and Yu Ji 虞集. This is in addition to standard historical sources, poems by the family members Xie Yuli 偰玉立 and Xie Zhedu 偰哲篤, and inscriptions and local gazetteers-not to mention the well-used secondary litera ture. From the point of view of Sinological method, Subjects and Masters is an admirable study. Unfortunately Professor Brose shows little familiarity either with Uyghur language and onomastics or with the history of Chinese phonology and transcrip tion practices, leading him to fall into numerous errors as he tries to reconstruct the Uyghur forms of the names. In some cases he passes up available help. For example with Barchuq-Art Tigin 巴而朮而忒的斤 (whom he gives as Barchuq el-Tigin), he should have referred to Francis Woodman Cleaves, “The Sino- Mongolian Inscription of 1362 in Memory of Prince Hindu.”1 In other cases, however, Professor Brose is guilty only of adopting uncritically spellings found in the work of his predecessors. Thus, Bulu-Haiya 布魯海牙 cannot possibly be Buyruq-Qaya (“Captain-Cliff”; see p. 102) since the title buyruq is transcribed in Yuan sources with the first syllable asbei 北 or 盃 (pronounced bui in Yuan times). A more likely Uyghur original is Bulut-Qaya, “Cloud-Cliff.” Dictionaries and lists of Turkic names, such as the Drevnetiurkskii slovar’ of V. M. Nadeliaev et al., or László Rászonyi and Imre Baski’s new Onomasticum Turcicum, could have been helpful; but one also needs an awareness of Chinese historical phonology. For example, the characters yue 岳 and meng 孟 in modern Chinese were pronounced in the Yuan as yo and mung. As a result Yuelin-Tiemu’er 岳璘帖穆爾 (p. 108) could not possibly be Eren-Temür but is likely Yolum-Temür (“my road is iron”), and Mengsusi 孟速思 (p. 95) is not Mengsüz or Mengisüz, but certainly the well- attested Uyghur name Mungsuz (“without care”). Another factor to be aware of is that Yuan transcriptions even of purely Uyghur names are based on the Mongolian pronunciation; thus final –z’s, as in Mungsuz, are always transcribed as –s, since Yuan-era Mongolian had no –z sound. Finally, one should beware of the arbitrary
1) Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 12 (1949), pp. 1-133.