In the third month of 568, Empress Ashina, the daughter of Mukan Khan, reached Chang’an as the bride of Emperor Wu of the Northern Zhou.[1] The Sui Shu says that through this marriage the Zhou court obtained the music of Kang and Kucha, which the Göktürks had acquired in the west.[2] Kang is the Chinese name of Samarkand. One of the musicians was a lute player from Kucha. A Sui minister later compared his seven modes with the notes of the Chinese court music.[2] The music of Samarkand stayed a division of court music under the Sui and the Tang.[3]

The accounts of the music

The Zhou envoys had waited at Mukan’s camp for years before he let his daughter go, under the alliance of the Göktürks with the Zhou.[4] She arrived in the third month of 568.[5] Four days later the emperor held a great assembly of his officials and of the guests from the four quarters in the main hall of the palace. He gave them clothes, horses, money and silk.[5] The Zhou Shu records the arrival and the assembly but says nothing of music.[1] The music is known from three later accounts, all written at the Tang court.

The first stands in the Sui Shu’s monograph on music, in its account of the Zhou.[2] When Yuwen Tai was regent of the Western Wei, the monograph says, Gaochang submitted. Its performers were trained to serve at banquets.[2] In the sixth year of Tianhe, 571, Emperor Wu abolished the music of the four foreign peoples in the inner palace.[6] After that, the monograph goes on, the emperor took an empress from the Northern Di, the peoples of the north.[2] He obtained the music of Kang, Kucha and other states that her people had acquired. He mixed it with the older music of Gaochang and had it practised in the office of the Grand Director of Music.[2] Its sounds were set to bells and chime stones and arranged after the model of the Zhou Guan, the classic of the Zhou institutions.[2]

The order of the monograph does not match the annals.[6] The empress came in 568, three years before the abolition of 571.[5] The music may have entered the Grand Director’s office only after that date, but the text does not say so.

The second account, in the Sui Shu’s description of the court orchestras, ties only the music of Kang to the marriage.[7] The music of Kang began, it says, when Emperor Wu of Zhou married a woman of the Northern Di. He obtained the performers of the Western Rong whom her people had taken, and he adopted their sound.[7] The same chapter traces the music of Kucha to the general Lü Guang, who destroyed Kucha. It traces the music of Shule and Anguo to the Northern Wei.[7]

The Jiu Tang Shu, completed in 945, gives the fullest list.[8] When Emperor Wu of Zhou took a bride from the northern barbarians, it says, the states of the Western Regions sent people with her bridal train. The music of Kucha, Shule, Anguo and Kang gathered in great quantity at Chang’an.[8] Bai Zhitong, a man of the Jie, was set to train the young Hu musicians, and much new sound was mixed in.[8] Shule is the oasis of Kashgar, and Anguo is the city of Bukhara. All three accounts name Kang.[9] The Jiu Tang Shu alone adds Shule and Anguo.

Music of Kucha was not new in northern China.[3] Under the Northern Wei, a man named Cao Poluomen had learned the Kucha lute from merchants, and his family handed the art down.[8] His grandson Cao Miaoda was a favourite of Gao Yang, emperor of the Northern Qi. Gao Yang often beat a Hu drum himself to accompany him.[8]

Neither the Sui Shu nor the Jiu Tang Shu says how the Göktürks had come by the music.[9] In the decade before the marriage they had destroyed the Hephthalite state in the Göktürk–Hephthalite war. They had taken its lands north of the Oxus, where Samarkand lay.

Sujiva and the seven modes

One musician of the bridal train is known by name.[2] The Sui Shu writes his name 蘇祗婆, Suzhipo, and it is usually given as Sujiva. His story is told by Zheng Yi. Zheng Yi was a minister who had been a favourite of the Zhou emperor Xuan, and in the 580s he took part in the long debate on the court music of the Sui.[10]

Zheng Yi told the court that the music office used seven names for the notes. Three of the seven never agreed with the bells and the chime stones, and nobody could explain why.[2] Then he spoke of Sujiva.[2] In the time of Emperor Wu of Zhou, he said, a man of Kucha named Sujiva had entered the country with the Göktürk empress.[2] Sujiva was a master of the Hu lute, the pipa.[2] Listening to him play, Zheng Yi heard seven notes within one key.[2] He asked him about it.[2] Sujiva answered that his father had been known in the Western Regions as a master of music. The art had been handed down in his family for generations, and it had seven modes.[2] Zheng Yi compared the seven modes with the seven Chinese notes, and they matched like the two halves of a tally.[2]

The Sui Shu gives the seven names in Chinese transcription, each with a Chinese rendering and the note it matched.[2] Gong, shang, jue, zhi and yu are the five notes of the Chinese scale. Bianzhi and biangong are the two “changed” notes that make it seven.[2]

Name in the Sui ShuChinese renderingChinese note
1娑陀力“level sound”gong
2雞識“long sound”shang
3沙識“plain, straight sound”jue
4沙侯加濫“responding sound”bianzhi
5沙臘“responding, harmonizing sound”zhi
6般贍“five sounds”yu
7俟利𥯦“huniu sound”biangong

Besides the seven modes, Sujiva’s music had five dan, a word the Sui Shu explains as “key”.[2] Each dan carried the seven modes. The five fell on five of the twelve Chinese pitch pipes: huangzhong, taicu, linzhong, nanlü and guxian.[2] The other seven pipes had no modes.[2] Working from the frets of the lute, Zheng Yi set up seven further keys, so that each of the twelve pipes became a key. With seven modes on each, he arrived at eighty-four.[2] He wrote more than twenty chapters to explain the system.[2]

The proposal met resistance.[2] Su Kui, the son of the Duke of Pi, objected that the classics knew five notes and said nothing of the two changed notes.[2] Zheng Yi answered from the Han Shu’s treatise on the pitch pipes and the calendar, and the assembly followed him.[2] Then He Tuo, a scholar whom the emperor trusted, spoke against turning the key through all twelve pipes and against the seven modes. He asked that three modes be kept.[2] He had the music played before the emperor.[2] When the key of huangzhong sounded, the emperor said that it was broad and harmonious and agreed well with his heart.[2] The emperor accepted He Tuo’s proposal to use the key of huangzhong alone, and Zheng Yi’s proposals were set aside.[2] What Sujiva had brought from Kucha with the Göktürk bride was thus weighed at the Sui court a generation after the marriage, and not taken up.

The music of Kang at the Sui and Tang courts

Of the music that came with the empress, that of Kang lasted longest. When the Sui fixed the court music at the beginning of the Kaihuang era, they set up seven divisions.[7] Kang was not among them. It stood with Shule, Funan, Baekje, the Göktürks, Silla and Wa among the further troupes.[7] The Göktürk troupe is part of the story of Turkic songs at the Tang court. In the Daye era the emperor Yangdi made Kang one of the nine divisions of court music.[7] The Kang division had one song and four dance pieces, whose foreign titles the Sui Shu gives in transcription. It had four kinds of instruments: the flute, two kinds of drum and copper cymbals.[7] It had seven musicians.[7]

The Tang took over the nine divisions for their banquets and later made them ten.[8] The Jiu Tang Shu describes the Kang music as the Tang court knew it.[8] The musicians wore black headcloths and crimson robes with brocade collars.[8] The two dancers wore crimson jackets with brocade collars and sleeves, trousers of green damask and red leather boots.[8] Their dance turned as fast as the wind and was commonly called the Huxuan, the whirl of the Hu.[8] The instruments were two flutes, a main drum, a harmonizing drum and copper cymbals.[8] The Jiu Tang Shu counts the music of Kang with that of Gaochang, Kucha, Shule and Anguo as the music of the Western Rong.[8]

The witnesses

The three accounts were written at the Tang court, the Sui Shu’s monographs in the 650s and the Jiu Tang Shu in the tenth century. The nearest witness is Zheng Yi, who had heard Sujiva play and questioned him himself.[2] In all three accounts the Göktürks appear as the people through whose hands the music passed.[9] The accounts do not say what the Göktürks themselves played.[9]

References

  1. ^ a b Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 5; Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 9
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 14
  3. ^ a b Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 15; Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 29
  4. ^ Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 9
  5. ^ a b c Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 5
  6. ^ a b Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 14; Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 5
  7. ^ a b c d e f g h Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 15
  8. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 29
  9. ^ a b c d Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 14; Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 15; Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 29
  10. ^ Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 14; Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 15

Sources

Related

What links here1

Customs & Pastimes
Turkic Songs at the Tang Court

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Music of Empress Ashina (568).” Turkic Atlas, revised 28 October 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/events/music-of-the-ashina-empress-568/

Last revised: 28 October 2026