The Battue

A battue is a hunt in which a line of people drives the game toward the hunter or into a closed ring. Three texts describe one on the steppe or on its edge. The Wei Shu tells of a great hunt of the Wei emperor in which the Gaoche formed the ring.^[1] The hunt probably took place in 399.^[2] The Irk Bitig, probably of the ninth century, has a khan’s army go out to a battue.^[3] In the 1070s Mahmud al-Kashgari explains the word for the king’s ring hunt in his dictionary.^[4] The three texts are far apart in time and in people.

The hunt of 399

The Wei emperor Taizu marched against the Gaoche in the first two months of the second year of Tianxing, 399. Taizu’s personal name was Gui, and his posthumous title was Daowu.^[2] The Wei armies went out in three columns. They broke more than thirty Gaoche groups. They took more than seventy thousand people, over three hundred thousand horses and more than a million head of cattle and sheep.^[2] The emperor turned south from Niuchuan. The Wei Shu chapter on the Gaoche goes on: he held a great hunt, making the Gaoche the ring.^[1] Horsemen and men on foot stood in a line, and the circuit was more than seven hundred li.^[1] Many kinds of game were gathered inside it.^[1] The emperor then drove the animals to Pingcheng. With the Gaoche multitude he built the Deer Park, which reached north to the Great Wall and east to take in Baideng.^[5]

The chapter on the Gaoche does not date the hunt.^[1] The annals enter the campaign, the return to the capital in the third month and the building of the park from the captured Gaoche under the same year. They also enter a great review at the deer park in the seventh month. They say nothing of a hunt.^[2] The hunt belongs to the return march of 399.

The Gaoche of the ring were the people the campaign had just beaten. The annals count its captives at more than seventy thousand.^[2] The text does not say whether the line was made of captives or of Gaoche who had come over to the Wei.^[1] The annals of the same reign call the court’s hunts of 403 and 406 xiaolie, the word of the great hunt.^[2]

The battue of the khan

The sixty-third omen of the Irk Bitig reads: the army of the khanate went out hunting. A roe-buck ran into the battue. The khan caught it with his hand, and all the common soldiers rejoice. The omen is good.^[3] The Turkic word for the battue is sagu. The translation supplies the khan as the one who caught the roe-buck.^[6] The scene is a hunt of the whole army under its ruler, and it ends in a good omen for the soldiers. The omen comes from the Uyghur period. It is no evidence for the Göktürk khaganates.^[7]

The hunt of kings

Mahmud al-Kashgari gives the word saγïr in his dictionary: a kind of hunt of kings with their subjects.^[4] The king scatters the people among the thickets and plains to round up the animals and drive them toward him. He stands and shoots. He does not tire himself seeking the game out.^[4] The description has the same parts as the Wei hunt: a line of people, game driven inward and a ruler at the centre.

The origin of the twelve-year cycle

Under the entry bars the same dictionary tells how a king wanted a count of years that could not be mistaken. He appointed a cycle of twelve.^[8] He went out hunting and ordered the wild beasts driven toward the valley of the Ili, a great river.^[8] The beasts were driven into the water. Twelve kinds crossed it, and he gave each one the name of a year.^[8] The story explains the cycle of the twelve animals. It is no report of a hunt. It shows that a writer of the 1070s could picture a king’s hunt as the driving of game toward a river.

Limits of the evidence

None of the passages in which the Sui and Tang histories tell of Göktürk hunting describes how the game was taken. The ring hunt is attested for the Wei at the end of the fourth century, for a khan in the Irk Bitig and for the kings of the dictionary.^[9] In all three texts the battue is a hunt of a ruler, carried out by many people.