Diwan

Diwan is the only religious specialist of the Rouran whom any source names. The Wei Shu names her in order to tell how she ruined a khan.^[1] The episode is “a very clear record of shamanism among the Rourans”, as one modern account puts it. It is also a story about a court.^[2]

Zuhui’s disappearance and return

One of Chounu’s sons, Zuhui, disappeared. The khan searched for him and offered rewards, in vain.^[1] Diwan was the wife of Fushengmou of the Wuyin clan. She was a woman of about twenty who practised as a physician and a sorceress and claimed the help of spirits. She had already won the khan’s trust and free access to his tents.^[1] She told him that the boy was in heaven and that she could call him down. Chounu and his mother rejoiced.^[1]

In the autumn of the following year they pitched a tent in the middle of a great marsh. For seven days they fasted and purified themselves, and they prayed to heaven.^[1] After a single night Zuhui was in the tent. He said that he had been in heaven all along.^[1] Mother and son held him, weeping and laughing. They summoned the whole people and proclaimed Diwan the Holy Woman. Chounu took her as khatun. Her husband received rank and three thousand cattle, horses and sheep.^[1]

Khatun

Diwan had the black arts, and she was beautiful as well. Chounu loved and honoured her and trusted her word. She threw the government of the state into disorder, and this went on for years.^[1]

When Zuhui was grown, his mother questioned him. He answered that he had been in Diwan’s household the whole time and had never been in heaven. “Going to heaven” was what Diwan had taught him to say.^[1] Zuhui’s mother told Chounu everything. Chounu answered that Diwan’s mirror showed distant things and could not be doubted. He added that slander was not to be listened to.^[1] Diwan, now afraid, slandered Zuhui to the khan. Chounu had the boy secretly killed.^[1]

Death (520)

At the beginning of the Zhengguang era, in 520, Chounu’s mother sent the mohequfen Li Julie and others to strangle Diwan.^[1] Chounu was angry and wished to execute Julie and his companions. Within the year the Azhiluo defeated him. On his return, his mother and ministers killed him and set up Anagui.^[1] The civil war that followed has its own article.

Assessment

The chapter tells the story as a moralist’s case. It is the case against a ruler who preferred a sorceress to his mother’s counsel and lost his throne and life for it. Chinese historians told such stories about Chinese emperors in the same way.

What the chapter preserves unintentionally is a Rouran court in which a woman of no rank by birth could become khatun on the strength of a claimed passage between earth and heaven. It preserves a seven-day fast in a tent in the steppe as the form of a prayer to heaven. It also preserves the “Holy Woman” as a title a khan could confer. On the usual dating, Buddhism reached the Rouran only after her death, from the oasis cities of the Tarim. Diwan is the last figure of the older steppe religion at the Rouran court. Turkic Atlas takes up what that religion was under Tengrism.^[2]