Luandi

Luandi was the house that held the Xiongnu throne. The Han Shu states it in six characters at the head of its account of the Xiongnu order: the chanyu’s surname was the Luandi clan.^[1] Every ruler the sources name belonged to it: Duman, Bagatur, Laoshang, Junchen, the rival chanyus of the civil war, Huhanye and Zhizhi. So did the Southern chanyus for two centuries afterwards.^[1]

The two forms of the name

The Han Shu writes 攣鞮, Luandi. The Hou Han Shu, describing the Southern court of the first century AD, writes 虛連題, Xuliandi.^[2] These are different characters, and a different number of them. The two works are also two centuries apart. The texts cannot settle whether the two forms render one name at two dates, are two spellings of one name, or reflect a change of usage at the Southern court.

The name has also been used as an argument in the question of what the Xiongnu spoke. Some scholars hold the name to be very un-Altaic. They take the name, together with the small stock of glossed words, as ground for calling the linguistic evidence at best ambiguous.^[3] Turkic Atlas sets out the positions under the language of the Xiongnu.

The noble clans beside it

Luandi did not stand alone. The Shiji names three clans as noble: the Huyan, the Lan, and later the Xubu. It says that the great ministers held their offices by inheritance.^[4] Some scholars link these clans with the ruling house of Luandi, which stayed set apart as a ruling stratum.^[5] They treat the Scythian royal clan and the Ashina of the Göktürks as parallel cases of a ruling clan that turned itself into a separate estate.^[6] The Hou Han Shu, describing the Southern court, names four: Huyan, Xubu, Qiulin and Lan. It calls them the famous houses of the realm and says they regularly married with the chanyu.^[2] It also assigns them duties. The Huyan stood on the left, the Lan and the Xubu on the right. They judged lawsuits, decided the weight of a case, and reported the judgement to the chanyu by word of mouth. There were no written records or registers.^[2]

That is the clearest account of the working of a steppe court in any source of the period. The arrangement it describes is a royal house that rules and a fixed set of clans that supplies its wives and its judges. Seven centuries later, the Ashina are found in the same arrangement. Under steppe empire formation, Turkic Atlas holds open whether that is descent, imitation or the shape any such state takes.

Succession within the house

The order of ranks in the Hou Han Shu is explicitly a table of succession. The greatest of the ministers was the Left Worthy King, then the Left Guli King, then the Right Worthy King, then the Right Guli King. These four were called the Four Horns. Below them came the Left and Right Rizhu Kings, the Left and Right Wenyudi Kings and the Left and Right Jianjiang Kings, called the Six Horns. All ten were sons and younger brothers of the chanyu. The text says plainly what the list is for: they are the ones who in their order are to become chanyu.^[2] The offices of the other clans, the Left and Right Gudu Marquises first among them, were held by men of different surname. Rank among them went by power and by the number of followers.^[2]

According to some scholars the rule was that the eldest brother came before the son. The breaches of the rule are what the chapters record as crises. The split of 48 AD began when a chanyu killed the brother who stood next in the Four Horns in order to pass the throne to his own son.^[2] Others trace the order of brothers to a single instruction.^[7] The Han Shu says that Huhanye, when he was dying, bound his successor to pass the realm to his younger brother.^[1] In that case the order held for Huhanye’s sons and for no later generation, and it ended when the last of those sons was killed.^[8]

After the Han

The Jin Shu no longer names the Xuliandi. There are two views of what became of the house.^[9] Some scholars think that the old house died out at the end of the Han. From the Wei onward, the Chinese gave the chanyu title to the chief of the Tuge, the strongest of the nineteen Xiongnu tribes.^[10] A second holds that the house did not die out. It took the surname Liu, on the strength of its old ties with the Han. The Liu of the Jin Shu are therefore the Xuliandi under a new name.^[9] The second view adds that the Tuge had been the chanyu’s own tribe from the beginning. It cites the Tang scholar Du You, who called Duman and Bagatur men of Tuge stock.^[9] Liu Yuan, who founded the Xiongnu Han in 304, came of the Tuge.^[11] One further reading goes beyond the Xiongnu. It places Modu himself in the Tuge, and takes the name Tuge, written Tuku or Tuko in older transcriptions, for the people whose name stands behind that of the Turks.^[12] These scholars set the Tuge and the Luandi together, where the sources name them apart.

Family table

Duman (Touman)r. ?–-209chanyu
- Bagatur (Modu Chanyu)r. -209–-174chanyu
  - Laoshang Chanyur. -174–-161chanyu
    - Junchen Chanyur. -161–-126chanyu
    - Yizhixie Chanyur. -126–-114chanyu

No descent recorded for Woyanqudi Chanyu.

Drawn from the kinship given in each article: fathers and sons, daughters, wives and husbands, those from other houses in their own colour. A dashed box stands where a grandparent is named but no parent; a dot marks a place taken from a brother.