Kirghiz Entertainments

The Xin Tang Shu lists four entertainments of the Kirghiz: tricks with camels, the lion, feats on horseback and rope skills.^[1] The sentence before it names their instruments: the flute, the drum, the mouth organ sheng, the reed pipe bili and plate bells.^[1] The Kirghiz were the people of the upper Yenisei who broke the realm of the Uyghurs. This notice is part of the Xin Tang Shu’s description of them.^[1] It names the acts. It does not say who performed them, on what occasion or before whom.^[1]

Place in the chapter

The description of the Kirghiz runs through their land and herds, their ruler and his court, their food and their gods.^[1] Their ruler was called Are. He kept his court at the Blue Mountain behind a palisade instead of a wall.^[1] He lived in felt tents joined into one great tent, which the notice calls midizhi. The other chiefs lived in small ones.^[1] Meat and mare’s milk were the food of the groups, and only the ruler had cakes.^[1] Then come the music and the shows, and after them the gods. The Kirghiz offered to the spirits of water and grass at no fixed time, and they called their shaman gan.^[1] The list of entertainments is therefore one item among the customs of daily life.

The four acts

The first is nong tuo, play with the camel.^[1] The Kirghiz kept camels, oxen and sheep, and oxen were the most numerous.^[1] The road from the ruler’s camp to the seat of the Uyghurs took forty days by camel.^[1] The two characters name an act with camels and no more.^[1]

The second is shizi, the lion.^[1] The notice lists the animals of the country: the wild horse, the deer, the yellow sheep and others of the forest and steppe. No lion is among them.^[1] A lion on a Kirghiz stage was therefore a costume or a figure, and not an animal. The Jiu Tang Shu describes the lion dance of the Tang court.^[2] The lion was made of woven hair, with a man inside it who imitated its bowing and taming.^[2] Two men with a rope and a whisk played the trainers. Five lions stood, each in the colour of one of the five directions. A hundred and forty sang.^[2] The Chinese lion, it says, came from the peoples of the south-west, from India and the land of Shizi.^[2] The notice does not say whether the Kirghiz lion was played in this way.^[1]

The third is ma ji, the skill on horseback.^[1] The horses of the Kirghiz, the notice says, grew very large and strong. The stallion that fought best led the herd.^[1] Their riders split wood into shields that covered the thigh and the leg. They also carried a round shield on the shoulder against arrows and blades.^[1] The notice describes the horsemen in war. It does not describe a performance.^[1]

The fourth is sheng ji, the skill on the rope.^[1] At the Eastern Capital in 606 two girl entertainers danced facing each other on a rope tied between two pillars ten zhang apart. They passed shoulder against shoulder without breaking off their song.^[3] The Jiu Tang Shu says that the old act of Gaoqi was probably the play on the rope of its own day.^[2] The Jiu Tang Shu names the single acts of its own court with the same word ji that the Xin Tang Shu uses for the Kirghiz feats on horse and rope.^[4]

The vocabulary of the list

The four names belong to the vocabulary of the Chinese court. The entertainers of the Sui and the Tang were known by the same words. The list may therefore say as much about the interpreters who put the Kirghiz acts into Chinese as about the acts. According to the chapter, the Kirghiz envoy came to the capital in the Huichang era. The chancellors then had him questioned through interpreters about the mountains, rivers and customs of his country.^[1] The notice on the Kirghiz may come from that inquiry.

The Xin Tang Shu gives no date for the shows and no scene in which they were played.^[1] What stands is four names of acts and a list of instruments, set down in the language of the Tang court.^[1]

Music and the shamans

A survey of the Kirghiz reads the list as social entertainment. It takes the feats on horse and rope for possible feats of lassoing, and it connects their music with shamanizing.^[5] The connection rests on the account of Gardīzī, in the eleventh century. In it the shamans of the Kirghiz gather on certain days. To the sound of musical instruments they fall into a trance. The people ask them about the future, whether hardship or plenty, rain or drought, security or conquest of the enemy.^[6] The Xin Tang Shu says nothing of music at the shaman’s rites.^[1]