Jie (ethnic group)

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Jie
羯
*ki̯at
Map of Sixteen Kingdoms in 338 AD, showing the Later Zhao, a state ruled by the Jie.
Total population
assimilated into Han
Regions with significant populations
Later Zhao
Languages
Jie

The Jie (Chinese: 羯; pinyin: Jié; Wade–Giles: Chieh2; Middle Chinese: [ki̯at][1]: 246 ), also known as the Jiehu (羯胡), were an ethnic group of northern China in the 4th century. They were part of the Five Barbarians during the Sixteen Kingdoms period. Under Shi Le and his family, they established the Later Zhao dynasty which dominated northern China from 319 to 351 AD. The Jie ceased to play a role in Chinese history after Ran Min's killing order and the wars that followed the collapse of Later Zhao. Some figures from the Northern Dynasties were identified as being descended from the Jie.

Name and origins

Historical records do not give a clear origin of the Jie. In Chinese, the word "Jie" literally means "wether" or "castrated sheep", which contains a negative connotation. According to the Book of Wei (6th century AD), the name Jie was derived from the Jiéshì area (羯室, modern Yushe County in Shanxi province), where the Jie resided.[2][3]: 6, 149 

After the Xiongnu Empire split in the 1st century AD, the Southern Xiongnu mainly resided in Bing province as a vassal state of the Han dynasty. However, during the fall of Han in the late 2nd century, the tribes rebelled against their chanyu and dispersed, effectively dissolving the institution.[4] By the 4th century, the Xiongnu name had largely fell out of use, and their descendants within the Great Wall were called "Hu" or broadly categorized into miscellaneous groups (雜胡; záhú) such as the Chuge, Lushuihu, Wuhuan and Jie.[5]

Records describe the Jie as having high noses, full beards and deep eyes, which led researchers to believe that they were of mixed Central Asian or Western Regions origins. The Book of Jin provides that Shi Le's ancestors were members of the Qiāngqú (羌渠), one of the nineteen tribes of the Southern Xiongnu. Sinologist Edwin G. Pulleyblank suggests that Qiangqu was a transliteration of Kangju, a kingdom in Central Asia, whose name is likely a variant form of Sogdia and were once subordinate to the Xiongnu. The Qiangqu tribe may have been formed by the Xiongnu out of citizens captured and extracted from Kangju.[6] Some have further link Shi Le's surname, Shi (石), and Jie (羯) to a Sogdian statelet known as 石國 Shíguó (literally, "Stone Country", at Chach Zhěshí 赭時, now Tashkent, also meaning "Stone City" in Common Turkic). Other scholars, such as Yao Weiyuan, link the Jie to the Lesser Yuezhi (Xiao Yuezhi 小月氏), who lived close to the Han dynasty's northwestern periphery and were also vassals of the Xiongnu.[7]

According to Chinese researcher, Chen Yong, the rise of Shi Le and the Later Zhao saw many Hu people from different backgrounds and even Han Chinese to adopt the "Jie" label. He asserts that Shi Le, due to small size of his own tribe, promoted a common "Jie" or "guoren" (國人; countryman) identity to unite the assortment of Hu tribes under his rule and strengthen his power base, which would explain the sudden spike and decline of the Jie population around this time.[8]

Jie language

There are widely differing accounts of the exact language of the Jie, with two theories uncertainly suggesting that the Jie language was either Turkic[9][10] or Yeniseian.[11][12] Some authors believe the Jie were of Indo-European origin (probably Iranian).[a][14]

Others claim that the Jie were an ancient Yeniseian-speaking tribe related to the Ket people, who today live between the Ob and Yenisey rivers—the character 羯 (jié) is pronounced /kiɛt̚/ in Hokkien, /kʰiːt̚/ or /kiːt̚/ in Cantonese, /ciat̚/ in Hakka and ketsu in Japanese, implying that the ancient pronunciation might have been fairly close to Ket (kʰeˀt).[b] The root 羯 may be transliterated as Jié- or Tsze2- and an older form, < kiat, may also be reconstructed. This ethnonym might be cognate with the ethnonyms of Yeniseian-speaking peoples, such as the Ket and the Kott (who spoke the extinct Kott language, but their ethnonym is believed to have Buryat origins). Pulleyblank (1962) connected the ethnonym to Proto-Yeniseian *qeˀt/s (*cew-ç) "stone". Vovin et al. (2016) also pointed to *keˀt (*qid) "person, human being" as another possible source.[17] Alexander Vovin also suggests that the Xiongnu spoke a Yeniseian language, further connecting them with the Jie people.[18]

Among the Yeniseian languages, Jie is hypothesized to be Pumpokolic. Vovin, Vajda, and de la Vaissière have suggested that Jie shares the same idiosyncrasies with the Pumpokol language, and the two are therefore closely related. This argument is strengthened by the fact that in northern Mongolia, Yeniseian-derived hydronyms have been demonstrated to be exclusively Pumpokolic, while influence from other Yeniseian languages is only found further north.[17] This therefore lends credence to the theory that the Jie are a Pumpokolic-speaking tribe, and confirms that the Pumpokolic-speaking Yeniseians existed in the core territory of the Xiongnu state.

History

Sixteen Kingdoms

Most of what is known about the Jie people comes from the Later Zhao dynasty, one of the Sixteen Kingdoms that existed in the first half of the 4th-century. The earliest recorded Jie was Shi Le, a minor chieftain from Wuxiang County in Bing province (roughly modern-day Shanxi) under the Western Jin dynasty. However, his name was not originally "Shi Le", as it does not appear that the Jie had family names; Instead, his original name was either Bei (㔨) or Fule (匐勒). He became chieftain by succeeding his father Zhouhezhu (周曷朱) and grandfather Yeyiyu (耶奕于) before him. When a famine struck Bing in 303, he and many other Jie and Hu people became displaced. The Jin provincial inspector, looking to fund his military for an ongoing civil war, had them captured and sold into slavery. The Jie and Hu were scattered around the Hebei and Shandong regions, with Shi Le himself becoming a slave.

After attaining freedom, Shi Le became a bandit and later a rebel leader with his Han Chinese friend, Ji Sang, who reportedly gave Shi Le his name. When their rebellion was defeated in 307, Shi Le joined the Han-Zhao dynasty, where he quickly rose through the ranks and became a key commander in their war against the Western Jin. He was effectively an independent warlord over the Hebei region and made the city of Xiangguo his capital. In 319, he formally broke away and established the Later Zhao, going on to conquer his former state in 329. While far reaches of the north remained largely independent, the Later Zhao would dominate northern China and maintain a stalemate with the Eastern Jin dynasty in the south for the next two decades.

To strengthen his power base, Shi Le issued a ban on the word "Hu", replacing it with the word "guoren" (國人; countryman) when referring to the Jie and other Hu tribes. Shi Le's family also had a peculiar practice of adopting many people into their clan. His brother, Shi Hu was a distant cousin who was adopted by his father during their tribal years. Shi Le continued this practice during his rise to power, adopting the likes of Shi Hui (石会), previously Zhang Beidu (張㔨督) of a different Hu tribe as an elder brother and Shi Pu (石璞), great-grandson of the prominent Chinese minister, Shi Bao, as a kinsman. The adopted members were all turned into powerful princes and officials.[8]

Following Shi Le's death in 333, Shi Hu violently seized power from his son, Shi Hong and ascended the throne the following year. During his 15-year reign of terror, Shi Hu shifted the capital to Ye and oppressed the common Han Chinese people through excessive corvée and conscriptions, but at the same time, he also promoted the spread of Buddhism. When he died in 349, his family members engaged in a brutal internecine struggle for the throne, and during the course of the conflict, his adopted Chinese grandson, Shi Min forcibly took control of the emperor and capital. The Later Zhao was split into two as Shi Zhi, a son of Shi Hu, mounted his opposition to Shi Min from the old capital at Xiangguo.

After surviving multiple assassination attempts, Shi Min suspected that he could not trust the Jie and Hu in Ye. In 349, he ordered the killing of every Jie and Hu, identifying them by their high noses and full beards. Shi Min personally led his soldiers to massacre the tribes in Ye while his generals purged their armies of tribesmen. According to some sources, more than 200,000 of them were slain, but a large portion of them were also Han Chinese who were mistaken by their facial features.[19][20] Later that year, Shi Min slaughtered the Shi clan in Ye, changed his name to Ran Min and proclaimed himself Emperor of (Ran) Wei.

Ran Min's genocide policy appears to have ceased after he ascended the throne, as he granted his son the title of chanyu to win back the support of the tribes. Regardless, his killing order had already had an adverse effect the Jie population. The civil war ended with the massacre of Shi Zhi and his family at Xiangguo in 351, bringing an end to the Later Zhao dynasty. The last members of the Shi clan fled to the Eastern Jin in the south, where they were all sentenced to death upon their arrival. In the coming years, the remaining Jie people were eventually annexed by the Xianbei-led Former Yan, who defeated Ran Min and conquered the Hebei and Shandong regions.

Later history

Hereafter, the Jie people seemingly faded into obscurity and disappeared from history. Nonetheless, there have been attempts to link them to several figures from later periods of time. Gai Wu, a rebel during the Northern Wei dynasty, is described in the Book of Qi as a Jiehu (羯胡), although the Book of Wei states that he was a Lushuihu. Both Erzhu Rong and Hou Jing, two famous warlords of the Northern Dynasties, were identified as Qihu (契胡) and Jiehu respectively, and modern scholars have suggested that they could have been be related to the Jie.[21] The Tang dynasty rebel, An Lushan, who was of Sogdian and Göktürk origins, was also called a "Jiehu", and according to the unearthed epitaph of Shi Chonggui, the ruling Shi clan of Later Jin (936–947), who were Shatuo Turks, claimed descent from Shi Le.[22]

Religion

Both Shi Le and Shi Hu endorsed Buddhism by granting the Kuchean monk, Fotu Cheng a privileged position within their government. Buddhism was at first restricted to government officials, but as the religion became increasingly popular among commoners as well, Shi Hu encouraged religious freedom, stating that his people have the right to worship the Buddha, who was a "foreigner" like him. Under Later Zhao, Fotu Cheng's teachings spread, and more than 800 Buddhist monastries were established. The Jie were also noted to have practiced cremation, which was notably a custom in the city-state of Chach in the Western Regions.

Aside from that, some scholars have speculated that the Jie believed in Sogdian Zoroastrianism, stating that there was a temple or altar in Ye called "Hutian" (胡天), which was the Chinese name for the Zoroastrian god, Ahura Mazda. Another example they cite was the construction of a giant lamp during Shi Hu's crowning ceremony as Heavenly King due to the veneration of fire in the religion.[23][24][25]

See also

Notes

  1. Medieval Sinologist David A. Graff suggests Central Asian or Iranian origins.[13]
  2. Western Washington University historical linguist Edward Vajda spent a year in Siberia studying the Ket people and their language and his findings helped substantiate such conjecture into the origins of the Ket people, where DNA claims show genetic affinities with people of China and Myanmar, suggesting a Sino-Tibetan origin.[15] He further proposes a relationship of the Ket language to the Na-Dene languages indigenous to Canada and western United States, and even suggests the tonal system of the Ket language is closer to that of Vietnamese than any of the native Siberian languages.[16]

References

Citations

  1. Pulleyblank, Edwin George (1963). "The consonantal system of Old Chinese. Part II" (PDF). Asia Major. 9: 206–265. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2019-12-17. Retrieved 2011-02-06.
  2. Wei, Shou (554). 魏書 [Book of Wei]., Vol. 95.
  3. Taskin, V. S. (1990). Цзе [Jie]. Материалы по истории кочевых народов в Китае III–V вв. [Materials on the history of nomadic peoples in China. 3rd–5th cc. AD] (in Russian). Vol. 2. Moscow: Nauka. ISBN 5-02-016543-3.
  4. Fang, Xuanling (1958). 晉書 [Book of Jin] (in Chinese). Vol. 104. Beijing: Commercial Press.
  5. Tang, Changru (2010). 魏晋南北朝史论丛. Commercial Press. ISBN 9787100074513.
  6. Pulleyblank, Edwin G. (1963). "The consonantal system of Old Chinese. Part II" (PDF). Asia Major. 9 (2): 246–248. ISSN 0004-4482. Archived from the original (PDF) on 16 December 2014. Retrieved 2 May 2020.
  7. Haw 2006, p. 201
  8. Chen, Yong (2008). "The Jie-hu of Late Zhao was the Za-Hu who Migrated to Hebei (North of Huanghe River) from Bingzhou" 后赵羯胡为流寓河北之并州杂胡说. Ethno-National Studies (1): 66–75.
  9. Shimunek, Andrew; Beckwith, Christopher I.; North Washington, Jonathan; Kontovas, Nicholas; Niyaz, Kurban (2015). "The Earliest Attested Turkic Language". Journal Asiatique (1): 143–151. doi:10.2143/JA.303.1.3085124. ISSN 1783-1504.
  10. Yakup, Abdurishid (2015-12-31), "'Lacuna filling' in Old Turkic Runiform Inscriptions and Old Uyghur Texts", Interpreting the Turkic Runiform Sources and the Position of the Altai Corpus, De Gruyter, pp. 206–214, retrieved 2024-08-27
  11. Kim, Hyun Jin (2013). The Huns, Rome and the Birth of Europe. Cambridge University Press. p. 176. ISBN 978-1-107-06722-6.
  12. Shimunek et al. 2015, p. 149.
  13. Graff 2002, p. 74.
  14. Lewis 2009, pp. 82–83.
  15. "East Asian Studies 210 Notes: The Ket". Archived from the original on 2019-04-06. Retrieved 2009-10-09.
  16. "The Ket People". Archived from the original on 2007-03-03. Retrieved 2009-10-09 – via Google Video.
  17. Vovin et al. "Who were the *Kjet" (羯) and what language did they speak?" Journal Asiatique 304.1 (2016): 125–144 [126–127]
  18. Vovin, Alexander. "Did the Xiongnu speak a Yeniseian language?". Central Asiatic Journal 44/1 (2000), pp. 87–104.
  19. The Buddhist Conquest of China, Erik Zürcher, p. 111
  20. Maenchen-Helfen, Otto J. (1973). The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture. University of California Press. p. 372. ISBN 0520015967. Retrieved January 16, 2015.
  21. Graff, David (2003). Medieval Chinese Warfare 300–900. Routledge. ISBN 9781134553525. Retrieved 10 December 2021 – via Google Books.
  22. Barenghi, Maddalena (2017). "Ancestral Sites and Lineages of the Later Tang (923–936) and the Later Jin (936–947) Dynasties According to the Song Sources". Journal of Asian History. 51 (1): 18. doi:10.13173/jasiahist.51.1.0001. hdl:10278/3720502. JSTOR 10.13173/jasiahist.51.1.0001.
  23. Tang, Changru (2010). "〈魏晋杂胡考 三 羯胡〉". 《魏晋南北朝史论丛》 (in Chinese). Beijing: Commercial Press. ISBN 9787100074513.
  24. Wang, Qing (2002). "〈石赵政权与西域文化在中原的传播〉". Western Regions Studies (3): 91–98.
  25. Chen, Sanping; Mair, Victor H (2017). "A 'Black Cult' in Early Medieval China: Iranian-Zoroastrian Influence in the Northern Dynasties". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. 27 (2): 201–224. ISSN 1356-1863.

Sources