However, if the sinicization or patronage of Hàn culture represented the political dimension of the blood tanistry struggle, then the military dimension was equally if not more important. For the support of the imperial guards who would actually carry out the dirty and often bloody job, the military aptitude and valor of the contender were also crucial, as attested by the cases of Emperor Yangdi of the Sui and the Tang emperors Taizong and Xuanzong. Failure in the military aspect and/or an overkill in sinicization would lead to disastrous results for the contenders, best shown by the case of Prince Tai, whose maneuver led to the downfall of the Crown Prince Chengqian but fell short of Tai's ultimate objective of replacing him. One can note similar effort in patronizing traditional Chinese scholarship by Emperor Gaozong's heir apparent, Li Xian, whose famed annotation of Hou Hàn shu (History of the Later Hàn) has since become an integral part of that dynastic history. Li Xian's scholarly pursuits, obviously for enhancing his status in the face of his mother Wu Zetian's blatant political challenge to him and the entrenched Hàn patriarchy tradition, proved counterproductive too.
The strong opposition to Prince Li Tai as a replacement for Prince Chengqian also suggests in my view the existence of a political force at the Tang court that was not sympathetic to Tai's overt sinicizing tendency. This, among other things, shows that sinicization was a complex and slow process and was not always oneway. Few authors have noted that the choice of the new crown prince Li Zhi, later Emperor Gaozong, represented a political compromise in this ethnico-cultural context. It can be clearly seen from the fact that Li Zhi was close to Li Yuanchang, a follower of Prince Chengqian in the Li clan, and Zhangsun Wuji was once a friend of Hou Junji, another important member of the Chengqian clique (ZZTJ 197.6195 and Quan Tang wen 161.1645). Sun Guodong has pointed out that Zhangsun Wuji, Li Zhi's decisive backer, was not a man of letters, while three major supporters of Prince Wei, namely Liu Ji, Cen Wenben, and Cui Renshi, all were, and all had rather miserable ends.75 Indeed, Zhangsun Wuji carried the Tuoba Xianbei legacy both by descent and in deeds. Instead of being stripped off by the “basically sinified” former tribesmen as David Honey has argued, the “Barbarian” felt hat that Zhangsun Wuji wore soon set the fashion and was later labeled by the Confucian historians as “devilish” as quoted earlier, another indication that Prince Chengqian's alleged neurosis was hardly an anomaly in the ruling aristocracy.
However, the best evidence that this choice was a compromise in the context of sinicization was Prince Li Zhi himself. In addition to ordering Türk companions for his sons as mentioned earlier, he proved himself the ultimate Northern boy by marrying his father's wife as well as allowing her to dominate the court.
The Issue of Legitimacy and the Role of Religion
The issue of sinicization (or patronage of native cultures in the general Turco-Mongol political sphere) as the political arm of the blood tanistry struggle leads to the issue of political legitimacy of the Turco-Xianbei regimes, including the Sui and the (early) Tang, in China.
In his resourceful and often stimulating book on China's frontiers, Thomas Barfield contends that as a universal rule the Steppe nomadic regimes were not interested in settling in and taking over the Chinese heartland.76 However, this principle would seem at times dependent on disavowing the Steppe identity of the nomads as soon as they crossed to the south of the Great Wall, for they would soon develop a strong interest afterward in doing exactly that. The Tuobas might have originated in the Xing'an Mountains, but the strong Turkic elements, both linguistic (see the Appendix of this book) and political, in them and their successors were hard to ignore. The Turco-Xianbei rulers in northern China certainly did not show great hesitation in aspiring to become true sons of heaven for all those under heaven. As mentioned earlier, the Tuoba Wei's wholesale sinification and transfer of its capital were viewed by many as prompted by such an aim. It is remarkable that the Nüzhen (Jurchen) emperor Wanyan Liang (reign 1149–61) also went through an extensive process of sinicization prior to his disastrous military expedition to unify China.77
However, since the collapse of the Western Jin, the political and cultural “legitimacy” had always been regarded, by people in both the south and north, as residing with the Southern dynasties (Bei Qi shu [The History of the Northern Qi Dynasty] 24.347–48). The Sui/Tang regime spared no effort in overcoming this politico-cultural obstacle. One of the crucial endeavors was to present themselves as having been Hàn Chinese all along. Various post-Islamic-conquest Iranian dynasties of native and Turkic origins did exactly the same to achieve political legitimacy.78 The appearance of the sinicization bandwagon in the blood tanistry struggles of the Tuoba's Sui and Tang successors is thus a natural extension of this conscious effort.
Few authors have paid attention to the acute ethnic strife, especially in the Northern Zhou domain, just prior to the Sui/Tang unification of the country. An important reason was the cover-up and fence-mending efforts by these two regimes. A good example was the sack by the Northern Zhou forces of the city of Jiangling in 554, the temporary capital of the southern Liang house and an established cultural centre. The brutality, horror, and in particular the large-scale and indiscriminate enslavement of ethnic Southern Hàns, all social strata included, would certainly have paled the atrocities allegedly committed by the Manchus in conquering southern China. But for obvious political reasons, not the least of which was the fact that the fathers and grandfathers of the Sui/Tang ruling clique were active participants in this most savage feat, only sporadic pieces of evidence of the actual atrocity were preserved, while deeds hard to gloss over like the burning of the Liang royal library were conveniently blamed on the victims' own acts (ZZTJ 165.5121). Today one can only present very brief discussions of the savageries of the Northern Zhou army based on some sporadic data.79
It is simply unbelievable that memories of such atrocities would be forgotten in a matter of a few decades when the Sui, followed by the Tang, came to power. In this context we can understand the obsession these two regimes had with their “politically correct” ethnic images, as well as the utility of the bandwagon of sinicization in succession struggles. For instance, the famed aversion to the character hu, “foreign,” by the Emperor Yangdi or his father, Emperor Wendi, was therefore in my view not caused by some arrogant sinocentricism as most authors have alleged, but was dictated by the need for political legitimacy as perceived by the Sui rulers and the ethnic skeletons in the Yang family's closet.
It is also interesting to examine the role of religion in this context. Many authors including Arthur Wright have noted that Emperor Yangdi's patronage of the southern Buddhist schools was politically motivated. But few seemed to have recognized the ethnic factor here: the Sui was evidently using Buddhism to help bridge the ethnic divide, a feeling that must have been very strong after the Jiangling atrocity, whose major perpetrators included Emperor Yangdi's very grandfather Yang Zhong. The latter actually bore a “Barbarian” surname, Puliuru, during the Northern Zhou's bloody conquest of the southern state.
The utility of religion became even more evident in the house of Tang. After the short-lived Sui, the early Tang emperors were no great patrons of the “foreign” religion, namely Buddhism, that had failed to prolong their predecessor's mandate of heaven. For the urgent need of political legitimacy, the Tang imperial house found an even better solution than the southern Buddhism schools to mask the clan's non-Hàn origin: to identify themselves as the descendants of Li Er (Laozi), the alleged founder of Taoism.
A striking parallel can be found among the Safavids, the founder of the most splendid post-Turkmen dynasty in Iran that was largely responsible for the now entrenched Shi'a heritage in that country. With a questionable claim of native Iranian (or rather Kurdish) origin,80 the clan's family language was nevertheless Turkic Azeri.81 For obvious politico-religious considerations, particularly an authentic Shi'a origin, the family falsified a genealogy from one of the