Although the Hàn slur was gradually picked up by other courtiers during Empress Wu Zetian's reign, an episode recorded in a Tang period source, Chaoye qianzai (Popular Records of the Court and Commonalty 4.89), clearly showed that the traditional meaning and target were not lost on the gentry class. Besides, no better classical usage of the term could be found than the father/son's application to “educated men” and “house-owning peasant,” typical of a sedentary, agricultural Central Kingdom but foreign to nomadic tribespeople. These cases are also good examples of how “elegant” editing by historians actually corrupted the original stories.
If one finds the above arguments and evidence fragmentary or argues that the cases represented just the occasional and transient remnants of the imperial house's previous Northern exposure, a far clearer and better focused picture of the imperial clan's ethnic identity can be established by a systematic analysis of the succession struggles in the early Tang, as I show in the following sections.
The Case of Crown Prince Chengqian
First I examine the case of Emperor Taizong's original heir apparent in some detail, because it epitomizes not only some crucial political and cultural issues of the era but also the problems with both standard historiography and modern scholarship in studying these issues. In addition, this episode also sheds light on the so-called process of sinicization.
The case is succinctly described (or one may say glossed over) in The Cambridge History of China, which has this to say about Taizong's first heir apparent: “The prince apparently was intelligent and capable…As he grew older, however, the heir apparent began to behave in ways which seemed both abnormal and scandalous to the Chinese courtiers, and he may well be mentally unbalanced. He began to reject his Chinese identity and heritage, used the Turkish language, and dressed himself and his entourage in Turkish costume.”29 This is indeed an accurate narration according to the standard Tang records. But can we take the official lines, especially the alleged “mental problems,” at their face value?
Arthur Wright also calls the whole affair a “scandal” caused by Prince Chengqian's “strange neurosis,” but he does point out its connections with the Li clan's family history.30 Edwin Pulleyblank gives what I think is the most relevant observation on this case: he calls Prince Chengqian's “strange neurosis” “atavistic predilections for the Turkish life-style.”31
I demonstrate here that the whole affair was hardly a “scandal,” that Prince Chengqian did not have a “strange neurosis,” and that the predilections were not “atavistic.” On the contrary, one may find that Prince Chengqian's many acts were not much different from those of other Li boys of the time, just as the young Li Shimin, the future Emperor Taizong, once behaved, and the so-called scandal would seem no more than the norm of the Lis' family life.
Let us look at Li Shimin, the father himself. By many stories, including his own admission, Li Shimin was as “wild” in his youth as Prince Chengqian was reported to have behaved: a passion for archery and horsemanship (which continued throughout his life and were exercised with his largely ethnic, Turkic in particular, imperial guards) but little knowledge of the classics.32 In fact, Li Shimin continued some of his old habit as an emperor (ZZTJ 192.6021–22, 192.6042). Yet the same acts of his son Chengqian were depicted, very likely seasoned with exaggerated or made-up “deviate” details, as scandalous offences.
As for rejecting the “Chinese identity” and taking on “Turkish” things, it can be demonstrated with evidence provided here and in a later chapter that Emperor Taizong himself had a well-established Turkic or tribal identity and was conversant in Turkic. In particular, Li Shimin, while still a prince, became a “sworn brother” of several prominent Türk persons. They include Tuli (Tölis) Qaghan of the Eastern Türk (ZZTJ 191.5992); the loyal Türk general Ashina Simo (Cefu yuangui [Prime Tortoise of the Record Bureau] 980.11516), who was given the imperial clan name Li (Jiu Tang shu 194.5156; Xin Tang shu 215.6037), and the Western Türk prince, later Duolu Qaghan (Jiu Tang shu 194.5183).
If anything, Prince Chengqian could only be accused of being too filial a son of the many aspects of the clan's life his father found best absent from the official history. The suppression of Li Shimin's childhood name in all records is a good example. Chengqian's “scandalous relationship” with an actor-entertainer (ZZTJ 196.6191), while hardly exceptional among the long list of imperial homosexual liaisons from the Hàn dynasties on down, also fits the Turco-Xianbei patronage of the performing arts as examined earlier.
This is a typical case of how modern authors tend to go to great lengths to explain things that would have seemed quite natural after the Lis' Turco-Xianbei identity is recognized. Another example is Emperor Taizong's six famous horses whose reliefs were carved at the imperial mausoleum (another Turco-Mongol trait). Edward Schafer in his famous study of the Tang exotica concludes that the six horses “came to T'ai Tsung from the Turks” partly because one of them had the name Teqin biao, “prince's roan.”33 This subjective interpretation for the Turkic word tegin is hardly necessary after realizing, first, that the term was also a well-recognized Tuoba Xianbei title,34 and, second, when the horse was being ridden, the future Emperor Taizong was none other than a prince (Quan Tang wen [Complete Anthology of Tang Prose], 10.124).
Regarding the convenient allegation that Prince Chengqian had “mental problems,” it is interesting to notice that the original heir apparent by the Chinese dizhang (the eldest son of the principal consort) primogeniture principle of the Qing emperor Shengzu (Kangxi) supposedly had the same disorder.35 One cannot help thinking of the use or abuse of psychiatry to punish cultural or political dissidents in a more modern context.
Let me further remark that the incoming emperor Gaozong turned out no less “scandalous” than his hapless elder brother Prince Chengqian in “imitating” the Steppe life-style by marrying his father's concubine. Not as well-known but probably more revealing was Gaozong's order that his own sons have Türk companions in their inner palace (Xin Tang shu 199.5661; ZZTJ 201.6363.). At the very least, we now know that the “mentally unbalanced” Prince Chengqian was certainly not the only Li clan member who liked to speak the Turkic language.
Finally, it is no accident that Prince Chengqian was eventually “rehabilitated” under the reign of Emperor Xuanzong (Xin Tang shu 80.3565), the last Turco-Xianbei monarch of the Tang in my view, who, incidentally and despite his ministers' opposition, also liked to have Türk companions during his outings. However, the presence of a Turkic language interpreter in Emperor Xuanzong's entourage (Tang huiyao 27.521) was a sure sign that the Turco-Xianbei period was gradually coming to an end.
To summarize, though his many traits were shared by other “normal” Li boys, Prince Chengqian fell victim to not only the vicious succession struggle but also the joint propaganda efforts by the Confucian historians and the imperial court, prompted by the former's sinocentric views and tendencies and the latter's overt concern, sometimes even obsession, with the historical image and legacy it would leave behind, not to mention the commanding issue of political legitimacy in the Central Kingdom at the time. Moreover, I extract several general observations about the succession struggles and the process of sinicization from this case and many of its precedents, to be elaborated in the following sections.
But before that, let me point to a case bearing a striking resemblance to Prince Chengqian's alleged plots of revolt: the case of the Northern Wei's Crown Prince Tuoba Xun (Wei shu, 22.558.). There is, however, a key difference: at that time the Northern Wei was not the only and all-dominating regime in China. It was thus unable to gloss the incident over as perhaps another “family scandal” caused by a “mentally unbalanced” crown prince. In short, it did not enjoy, as its Sui and Tang successors did, a monopoly on historiography: the incident was clearly recorded in Nan Qi shu (The History of the Southern Qi Dynasty 57.996), the official history of the rival Southern Qi state, as a backlash against the Tuoba emperor Xiaowen's wholesale sinification drive. That effort, according to many people, was motivated by the latter's ambition to end the North-South