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Stephen G. Haw the SEMU RENT5 § a in the YUAN EMPIRE* One

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Stephen G. Haw the SEMU RENT5 § a in the YUAN EMPIRE* One Stephen G. Haw THE SEMU RENT5 § A IN THE YUAN EMPIRE* ABSTRACT Most non-Mongols and non-Chinese in the Yuan Empire were categorized as Semu reno Comparatively little work has been done on identifying exactly who they were, where they came from, how many of them there were, and what roles they fulfilled. In the absence of precise data, a number of misconceptions have crept into common circulation. It seems often to be assumed that they were predominantly Muslims, and that many of them were Persians. These assumptions are seriously questioned here. The largest single group of Semu ren was probably the Turks, of various kinds, both Muslim and non-Muslim. Many Semu ren held military posts. They formed a very important part of the Imperial Guard. By no means all were from Western and Central Asia: a significant number of them, such as the Tanguts and Tibetans, originated from areas within the East Asian Mongol Qanate. Terminology of relevance to the Semu ren is examined, including the term Huihui @] @], concluding that it has often been incorrectly understood in the past. It originally meant 'Uighur', and only gradually came to mean 'Muslim'. It is pointed out that, before Huihui was used in the sense of 'Muslim', there was no commonly-used term in Chinese which had that meaning. One very important means of cultural transmission during the Mongol/Yuan period was the physical movement of substantial * This article is an expanded version of a paper presented at the conference 'Mobility and Transformations: New Directions in the Study of the Mongol Empire' Ooint Research Conference of the Institute for Advanced Studies and the Israel Science Foundation), Jemsalem, June 29-July 4, 2014. MINGQING YANJIUXVIII (2013-14) ISSN 1724-8574 © Universiti degli Studi di Napoli "L'Orientale" Stephen G. Haw numbers of people from one part of the Great Mongol Empire to another. In the empire of the Great Qan in East Asia (which consisted basically of China and Mongolia, but also included Korea and Tibet), migrants from outside, including Central and Western Asians, were known by the general appellation of Semu reno Although the Semu ren have been the subject of study for some considerable time, there is still a lack of clarity regarding exacdy who they were. Where did they come from? How many of them were there? These and other related questions have never been fully and satisfactorily answered. Terminology A major problem with understanding who the Semu ren were is that of terminology. The term semu itself has very often been misunderstood. As recendy as 1999, Michael Dillon stated: In Yuan official documents, all of the migrants from Central Asia to China were classified as one of the peoples known as semu, a term which is often translated as 'coloured eyes' or 'blue eyes' to indicate that these were westerners whose eyes were not uniformly dark like those of the Chinese, but the Chinese characters for semu can also be translated as 'special status'.l It is really quite extraordinary that such a statement should have been made so recendy, for, as long ago as 1927, Paul Pelliot made clear that semu had nothing to do with 'coloured eyes'. Nor is there any connotation of 'special status'. Pelliot explained Semu ren as "[gens] classes dans les categories". 2 In the past, I have often used the translation 'Classified Peoples', which is more or less a rendition into English of Pelliot's French. Now, I would say that a much more accurate translation is 'people of various categories', or, more simply, 'people of various kinds'. Pelliot also noted that the term Zhu se ~~, meaning "de toutes categories", was "a la base de l'expression" semu. In fact, these two expressions, Zhu se and semu, are two contracted forms of the same longer expression. It is well known, to anyone with any knowledge of 1 Dillon 1999: 21. 2 Pelliot 1927: 266n; see also Brose 2007: 2n. 40 .
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