Abstracts

9:40-10:40    Panel 1, Going South

Evan Nicoll-Johnson (University of Alberta), “Guo Pu the Wanderer: Magic and Migration in the Jin Dynasty”

During the collapse of the Western Jin dynasty in the early fourth century, hundreds of households migrated from the area around the fallen capital of Luoyang across the Yangtze river. They settled in and around Jiankang (modern Nanjing), which became the capital of the Eastern Jin dynasty. Early medieval collections of biographies and anecdotes contain many narratives that describe the experiences of individuals as they made this journey to the southeast. The scholar, poet, and prognosticator Guo Pu (276–324) appears as a character in several of these anecdotes, which stand out for portraying their protagonist as uniquely capable of predicting and avoiding the perils associated with dynastic collapse. For others, migration to the southeast was a traumatic, debilitating experience that came to represent a barrier between a lost golden age and the less vibrant present. While anecdotes about Guo Pu and other travelers do not appear to have originated in a single text focused on the experiences of migrants, their use of common terms and themes creates an identifiable narrative pattern. With their emphasis on magic, strange creatures, and divination, anecdotes detailing Guo Pu’s travels may not offer much in the way of reliable information about the historical Guo Pu, but they do create a compelling image of what the migration meant to those who lived in its aftermath. When read alongside other migration narratives, these anecdotes illustrate how literary texts mediate individual experience and collective memory, allowing complex and chaotic periods to become intelligible as historical moments. 

 

Lu Kou (Williams College), “Detainees and Letters to Request Release in Early Medieval China”

The period of Northern and Southern Dynasties (420–589) witnessed drastic political reshuffling when rival court centers engaged with one another in military and cultural competitions. The rise and fall of political powers led to heartbreaking separations. There were generals captured, envoys detained, and royal family members sent away and kept as hostages—not to mention the large scale of displacement that happened after dynastic fall as the elite members of the fallen state were often forced to migrate to and serve in a new dynasty. While some detainees managed to ascend to high positions, there were also many who longed to return home and delivered messages, either orally or in writing, to high-status officials or former friends to entreat their intervention to facilitate the detainees’ release. This paper examines the extant letters to request release composed by detainees, especially those by the famous courtier Xu Ling 徐陵 (507–583). It analyzes the “moving words” articulated by the courtiers who lacked yet desired mobility. Here the “moving words” refers to both how rhetorically “words” can “move” the intended readers and how historically “words” were able to “move” across dynastic boundaries and participate in the larger political context. Specifically, the issues this paper examines include: how the letter writers can interweave the personal and public for effective persuasion; how they fashion a sense of “self” and “others” beyond the barbarous/civilized binary and address different audiences; how they interpret recent political affairs and historical antecedents to legitimate their request.

 

10:40-11:40    Panel 2, The Mobility of Texts and Images

Keith N. Knapp (The Citadel), “Cultural Baggage: The Transmission and Spread of Accounts of Filial Offspring during the Northern and Southern Dynasties”

A number of southern authors compiled works called Accounts of Filial Offspring (Xiaozi zhuan); however, no southern depictions of these works’ beloved tales exist, except on the frontier. Only one northerner is known to have compiled a Xiaozi zhuan, yet filial piety stories adorn many Northern Dynasties’ artifacts. How could the north have so many images of these tales, yet not have produced the texts upon which they were based? How could southerners produce so many of these texts, yet not illustrate them with images? My paper argues that southern defectors and refugees brought with them Xiaozi zhuan that provided the textual material from which the images were created. By looking at the stories on Northern Dynasties’ artifacts and their details, one realizes they are modeled after the tales found in two Xiaozi zhuan preserved in Kyoto, Japan, which were compiled by southern authors. Importantly, the first two Northern Wei tombs that have illustrations of filial piety tales belong to men who were southern emigres. Moreover, the preponderance of filial piety images are found in sixth century Luoyang, where southern Chinese influence was considerable. In other words, Xiaozi zhuan manuscripts came from the south, but it was northern aristocrats who decided to decorate their funerary equipment with images of stories drawn from these books. Due to the influence of Buddhist iconography, northerners rendered the tales in multiple scenes.

Fan Zhang (NYU-Shanghai), “Between Hexi and Pingcheng: Migration of Image, Style, and People”

This paper focuses on the artistic interaction between the Hexi corridor and Pingcheng during the fifth and sixth century. Through a contextualized analysis of two images, the musicians from the tomb of Song Shaozu (477) and the Cintamani in Dunhuang Cave 285 (inscriptions date 538 and 539), I demonstrate how migration of patrons and artisans facilitated the bidirectional exchange of images and styles. The first case study on Song Shaozu’s tomb explores how its depiction of musicians was inspired by the pictorial bricks from burials in Dunhuang and Jiuquan. By situating the production of the Song Shaozu painting in a larger historical context of the population movement from Hexi to Pingcheng, I propose that the patrons of Song’s tomb, who came to Pingcheng from Dunhuang, were likely to employ artisans from the Hexi corridor to create the musician images in a Hexi style and thus to assert the patron’ identity as a Dunhuang native. This paper further complicates the interaction between Hexi and Pingcheng by introducing the second visual example, Cintamani in Dunhuang Cave 285, the iconography of which can be traced back to the innovative formula of Cintamani first seen in Pingcheng. Tracing the evolving representation of the Buddhist jewel from Pingcheng to Luoyang and finally to Dunhuang, and reading it together with the story of Prince Dongyang, the sponsor of Dunhuang Cave 285, this paper seeks to offer a dynamic picture of the exchange between Pingcheng and Dunhuang via the movement of people, image, and style.

 

1:00-2:00    Panel 3, Looking Back and Around

Jack W. Chen (University of Virginia), “Looking Back across the River: Nostalgia as Migrancy in the Shishuo xinyu

This paper will examine the representation of nostalgia in the Shishuo xinyu, a work that is colored by its retrospective sensibility. This is perhaps most apparent in the anecdotes that touch upon the loss of the North and the subsequent forced migration across the Yangtze by the Jin dynasty court and its elites. However, nostalgia for the lost patrimony and sorrow at the new reality of the migrant Jin court extends beyond territorial concerns in these anecdotes, inflecting stories that draw contrasts between the present moment and past achievements, or anecdotes that repeat earlier scenes. I will argue that nostalgia in the Shishuo is born of the migrant condition of the Jin elites, and moreover, that the Shishuo can be read as a text that thematizes the condition of migrancy in its insistence on recalling a past that always overshadows the present.

Xiaofei Tian (Harvard University), “The Worlds on the Edge between Darkness and Light: : Fifth-century ‘Supernatural’ Stories of a Migrant Community”

After the “barbarian” invasion and the collapse of the Jin court in the early fourth century, many northerners fled and crossed the Yangzi River to settle in south China, traditionally considered peripheral to the Central Plains. They found themselves in a land populated by unreasonable gods, elusive spirits, wayward shamans, and indigenous “creatures” who spoke no recognizably human language yet whose babies cried “just like human babies.” Focusing on You ming lu, a fifth-century paradoxographical collection, this paper explores how the stories are permeated by the attraction to an exotic but perilous land on the one hand and the fear of contamination and hybridity on the other, sentiments that characterized the Jin elite settler-colonialists in their new geographical and social reality.

 

2:00-3:00    Panel 4, Rootedness, Relocation, and Identity

Andrew Chittick (Eckerd College), “Borderlands and Migration to North and South: A Study of the Qing-Qi Region in the Fifth Century CE”

This paper looks at the experience of the people of the Qi region (in modern-day Shandong province) in order to contrast the treatment of migrants by the Tuoba Wei and Jiankang Empires (a.k.a. the Northern and Southern Dynasties). The Qi region was conquered by the Jiankang regime in 409-10 and held against repeated northern attacks for almost sixty years, until it was taken over by the Tuoba regime during the Jiankang civil war of 466. Thereafter, most of its elite residents were either forcibly relocated to the Tuoba Wei capital, or fled to the south. The case study shows that the Jiankang regime mostly did not use the strategy of forced relocation in settled border regions, and instead left most of the local elite in place if possible. They actively recruited members of the local elite into high positions in the governing order, primarily through personal patron-client relationships with members of the imperial house and the military elite. Finally, the southern regime did not make strong ethnic distinctions, recruiting military leaders opportunistically from many different regions. The relative openness of this approach worked to the benefit of selected members of the local elite, but also left local regions with considerable autonomy, which proved to be a significant weakness in times of internal conflict.

 

Wen-Yi Huang (Harvard University), “How to Name People on the Move? A Case Study of the Northern Wei”

Between the fourth and sixth centuries CE, many people were forced to leave their homes in the south of what is now China and entered the Northern Wei state (386-534 CE) as a result of inter-state wars and internal political conflicts. The Northern Wei government developed a series of policies directed toward southerners within its territory, among them the practice of naming. In this paper, I will analyze how the Northern Wei government labeled and categorized people on the move, those from the south in particular, as well as their residential areas. I will also discuss the implications of the labels that the Northern Wei government used. Through this case study, I aim to provide some thoughts on how to talk about migration and migrants in the context of ancient mobility.

 

3:15-4:15   Panel 5, Moving Monks and Merchants

James Robson (Harvard University), “Monks, Movement, and Migration: A Preliminary Assessment of the Large Scale Movement of Buddhist Monks in Early Medieval China”

The movement of Buddhist monks back and forth between India, Central Asia, and China is well known, but there has been less attention paid to the movement of monks within China. Yet, early Chinese Buddhist texts are filled with information on the various movements of monastics. It was common for monks to travel extensively to different monasteries in medieval China, but there has been little study of the nature of those movements. The movement of monks was also significant for the history of the spread of Buddhism to different regions in China during the early medieval period (3rd to 6th centuries). This talk seeks to asses the extent and impact of the large scale movements of Buddhist monks in China during the early medieval period. What types of sources can be used to track the movements of monks in premodern China? Were there large scale migrations to particular monasteries? We know, for example, that due to the large-scale relocation of monks to Chang’an after Kumārajīva (344-409) initiated his translation work there in 401 CE the government had to establish new offices to manage them. What were some of the key impacts of the movements of Chinese monks? How were the movements of monks regulated? How did ideas and doctrinal developments move with people? What role did Buddhist monasteries play as hostels that took in people who were on the move? What role did traveling monks play as key figures in artistic and cultural change? By asking these questions this talk aims to provide a preliminary assessment of the importance of the movements and migrations of Buddhist monks in China during the early medieval period.

Jin Xu (Vassar College), “Following in the Footsteps of Siddhartha: Shi Jun Sarcophagus and the Picturing of an Allegorical Biography"

Migration was a dominant feature of life in early medieval China. Over the course of nearly four hundred years, Chinese populations were regularly displaced by wars and conflicts; nomadic peoples continuously moved to and settled in North China; officials and officers were dispatched to remote frontier regions; merchants and envoys arrived from as far as India and Persia; and missionaries and pilgrims visited a wide range of cities as they traversed the Silk Road. Upon death, everyone was assumed to embark on a journey in the afterlife, destined for the lands of immortals, heavens, or the next incarnation. Many images from the early medieval period represent these different types of migration. However, none of them can quite compare to the reliefs on the Shi Jun sarcophagus, a 6th-century house-shaped stone coffin. The sarcophagus, uncovered in Xi’an in 2003, belonged to a Sogdian couple from Central Asia. The reliefs on its exterior, I argue in this paper, portray the couple’s migration on the Silk Road as a journey that not only overcomes geographic and temporal distances, but also transcends cultural and religious boundaries. The reliefs depict a cosmopolitan migration as they show Shi Jun’s immigrating to China as a merchant, relocating to the capital as a Chinese official, transmigrating as a Buddhist devotee, and most impressively, ascending to heaven alongside his wife, blessed by Buddhist, Zoroastrian, and Sogdian deities.