CHAPTER FIVE

EASTERN

THE KINGDOM OF SHAN-SHAN: NIYA TO LOU-LAN

I. INTRODUCTION: THE SHAN-SHAN KINGDOM

Historical data regarding the Shan-shan kingdom is extremely limited and dispar• ate. What little emerges from the Chinese dynastic histories and other Chinese written records has been amplified by the translation and interpretation of the Chinese and KharoHhi documents and inscriptions discovered in this century at the ancient sites in the area, mostly from Niya, Lou-Ian, Endere, and Miran in the Shan-shan kingdom region, but also at other sites including Khotan and the region (with a script of modified ). The first Kharo~thi document was found by Sven Hedin at Lou-Ian in early March, 1901, but it was who uncov• ered the most number of both KharoHhi and Chinese documents during his expe• ditions to Central Asia in 1901, 1906-7, 1913-14 and 1930. The Otani expedition (1902, 1909-1910) recovered some KharoHhi and Chinese documents; most of the Kharosthi ones have been secretly kept in the Ryukoku University in Tokyo and not yet analyzed. The famous letter of Li Po 'fflj in Chinese to the king of Karashahr was discovered by Tachibana at the L.A. site in March-Aprill909. In 1928 Bergman, a member of the joint Chinese and Swedish Northwest Investigation Team, found a piece of silk with Kharo~thi writing on the edge from a tomb near Lou-lan. In re• cent years further discoveries both of documents and of silk with Kharo~thi writing have been made by the Chinese Archaeological and Investigation Teams in Sinkiang Province, some of which provide important new data. Studies of the Kharo~thi and Chinese documents and inscriptions since the 1920's have led to breakthroughs as well as to some hotly debated theories that various scholars have put forth, beginning with E. J. Rapson in 1929 with publication of five Shan-shan kings from deciphered Kharo~thi documents discovered by Stein. Over thirty-five years later, in 1965, John Brough offered several important conclusions gained through linguistic analysis and a new theory concerning the relation of the Shan-shan kingdom with the Kushana empire. His work stirred the world of Cen• tral Asian studies and re-activated interest in the study of Shan-shan history and in the painstaking process of re-examining and deciphering of the Kharosthi documents. 324 CHAPTER FIVE

During the 1970's K. Enoki and K. Nagasawa,Japanese scholars of Chinese history, sharpened the debate surrounding the chronology of Rapson's five Shan-shan kings and attempted to correlate the data of the KharoHhi documents with evidences from Chinese historical source materials. In 1979 the Chinese scholar Ma Yung determined that the Shan-shan king Va~mana was the Yiian Meng of the Chin-shu records, thus making an important linkage with Chinese history. From the late 1980's to the present, several Chinese scholars, notably Hsia Nai, Wang Kuo-wei, Lin Mei-ts'un, Meng Fanjen, Hou Ts'an and others, have delved into the problems and offered significant new assessments and hypotheses based on re-examination of the documents and on some newly discovered documents and materials from Lou-Ian L.A. and from tomb sites in the Shan-shan region discovered by the Archaeological Investigation Teams of Sinkiang Province. Though many problems and questions still remain, in the aggre• gate, a sketchy picture of the history of Shan-shan is emerging for the early centu• ries and will be summarized below.

A. Early History (The Han Dynasty Period in : 206 B.C.-220 A.D.)

A kingdom known to the Chinese as Lou-Ian first appears in Chinese official docu• ments with the report of Chang Ch'ien 5!~. This and other accounts are recorded in the Western Regions (Hsi-yii l!§:lgt) section of the Han-shu (Former Han History) and in the Shih-chi. 1

The original name [of the Shan-shan kingdom] was Lou-Ian jfjjj. The king's seat of government is at Wu-ni ch'eng ffi!E!Iit. From the Yiian Kuan (Jade Gate, see Fig. 1) it is 1,600 li (about 500 miles) and 6,100 li (about 3,000 miles) from Ch'ang-an. There are 1,570 households and 14,100 persons, and an army of 2,912 men. They have [various] officials: a Fu-kuo hou, Ch'iieh-hu hou, Shan-shan tu wei, Chi chii-shih tu wei, left and right chu-ch'ii, one Chi Chii-shih chiin and two interpreters-in-chief. To the Northwest it is a distance of 1,785 li (about 595 miles) to the seat of the Protector General (Hsi-yii tu-hu i1§J!I(~~), and 1,365 li (about 455 miles) to [Mo] Shan kuo ( ~) Jli~ (kingdom of Ink Mountain, thought to be in the Turfan or Korla area) and 1,890 li (about 630

1 Pan Ku, Han-shu, chiian 61 (Memoir on Chang Ch'ien and Li Kuang-li) and 96a and b (The Western Regions), Shanghai: Chung-hua shu-chii ch'u-pan-she, 1962 (1975 printing), Vol. 9, pp. 2687-2705 for chiian 61, and Vol. 12, pp. 3871-3932 for chiian 96a and b. These chapters have all been fully translated into English with notes by A.F.P. Hulsewe, China in Central Asia, Leiden, 1979. Ssu-ma Ch'ien (ca. 90 B.C. ), Shih-chi, chiian 123 (Memoir on Ta-yiian) . However, Hulsewe observes that chiian 123 may well be a later interpolation possibly based on the material in chapter 61 of the Han-shu. Hulsewe (1979) , introduction, pp. 3-39. Concerning Chang Ch'ien, whose report only mentions Lou-Ian as a small kingdom, Hulsewe notes that Chang Ch'ien clearly did not actually pass through Lou-Ian. Ibid., p. 77, note 49.