Chanyu

Chanyu was the supreme title of the Xiongnu ruler. The title held on the eastern steppe for four centuries before Khan replaced it. The Han Shu gives the full style as Chengli Gutu Chanyu, 撑犁孤塗單于, and glosses it as “son of heaven”.^[1]^[2]

The gloss is the reason the title is argued over. Chengli is commonly understood as Tengri, and Gutu as a word for son or for fortune. If these interpretations hold, the Xiongnu ruler bore a sky-title of the same shape as the title of the Göktürk khans, half a millennium before them. The Han Shu says what the words mean in Chinese. It does not say what they are in the original. That is the whole of the evidence.

Interpretations of the title

By 1930 the equation of the Xiongnu word chengli with tängri, “heaven”, was generally acknowledged among scholars, who found the word in Turkic and in Mongolic.^[3]

The second word has been interpreted in several ways. Chengli gutu may be Old Turkic täŋri qut, “holy majesty”, and so a sign of a Turkic Xiongnu court.^[4] A second reads gutu as kut, “fortune”, and not as “son”, and regards the Han Shu’s “son of heaven” as a misreading.^[5] A third rejects the equation of gutu with kut. The Han Shu glosses the word as “son”, and a Turkic kut would have been written with a single character. No word for “son” that matches gutu has been found in Turkic or Mongolic. It tried Tungusic hutta and weighed Mongolic köyün, “son”.^[4]^[3]

The Göktürk khan, it is argued, was no son of Heaven but a man favoured by Heaven, a kind of envoy of Heaven, whereas the Chinese emperor was the Son of Heaven.^[6] The equation of chanyu with Tengri is then rejected, and the title is set beside Turkic Kür-Han and Mongolic Gur-Han, as the title of a universal ruler.^[7]

The word chanyu itself has been explained in five ways. It may be the Turkic yabgu, and the Tengri-Kut-yabgu of the whole title a Turkic phrase.^[8]^[9] A second sees in it a Chinese phrase meaning “vast”, formed after the First Emperor’s huangdi, and so no older than Bagatur.^[10]^[11] A third reads it as the Chinese rendering of a Xiongnu word for “broad”, reconstructed as targü and related to Mongolic delgüü, “to spread out”.^[12] A fourth sees in its second element a word of the type of khan.^[13] A fifth derives Turkic tarqan and Mongolic daruya from the same word. It sets chanyu with three other titles of the Xiongnu court, huyu, yanzhi and tuqi, as the source of the Turkic titles qayan, qatun and tegin, and rejects the equation of chanyu with yabgu because the sounds do not fit.^[14]^[15]

The Chinese accounts are said to equate the title of the Göktürk khan with that of the Xiongnu chanyu because both peoples were Turkic.^[16]

The style in the rulers’ own letters

The Chinese gloss is not the only evidence for what the title was taken to mean. The Xiongnu court’s own letters also survive in Chinese translation. The letter of 176 BC opens: the great chanyu of the Xiongnu, set up by Heaven, respectfully asks after the emperor’s health.^[17] Around 174 BC the court of Laoshang deliberately enlarged the style, on the advice of a Han defector. The new style read: the great chanyu of the Xiongnu, born of Heaven and Earth and ordained by the sun and moon. The same defector had the tablet and the seal made larger than the Han ones. The form of the letter thus said what the words said.^[17] The Shiji also reports the daily practice that goes with it: the chanyu came out of his tent in the morning and bowed to the rising sun, and in the evening to the moon.^[17]

Whether the heavenly mandate in that style is borrowed from China or is an Inner Asian idea in its own right cannot be settled. Its language stayed in use among steppe rulers from the Xiongnu to the Chinggisids.^[18] Attempts to connect chanyu with the later titles yabgu and tarkhan have found no general acceptance.^[18]

The office

The chanyu stood at the head of a graded order, which the Shiji and the Hou Han Shu both set out. The grades were a table of succession as much as a table of command. Below him were the Left and Right Worthy Kings and the Left and Right Guli Kings, called the Four Horns in the later chapter. Below them came six further kingships. All ten holders were sons and brothers of the chanyu, and in their order they were the men who would become chanyu.^[19] The heir apparent was always the Left Tuqi King. Tuqi is the Xiongnu word that the Shiji glosses as ‘worthy’.^[17] The rule may have been the brother before the son. The two great crises of Xiongnu history, the war of the five chanyus in the 50s BC and the split of 48 AD, both began when a chanyu tried to pass the throne to his son instead.^[1] Alternatively, the order of brothers was confined to one generation.^[20] 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 rule held among Huhanye’s sons alone and lapsed when the last of them was killed, before the split of 48.^[20]

The title belonged to one house. The Han Shu says the chanyu’s surname was Luandi. Two centuries later, the Hou Han Shu writes it Xuliandi.^[1] From Huhanye on, the chanyus took the word ruodi into their names. The Han Shu says that ruodi is the Xiongnu word for “filial”, and that they took it because they had seen the Han give their emperors the epithet “filial” after death and admired it.^[1] This posthumous name has been compared with the Turkic custom of not speaking the name of a great man after his death and giving him another, called kong.^[21] In the early years of the Later Han the chanyu Yu was arrogant. He compared himself to Bagatur and answered the Han envoys insolently.^[19]^[22]^[23]

Afterwards

The word outlived the people. The Zhou Shu says that the title of the first Göktürk khan, Illig Khan, was like the chanyu of old.^[24]^[25] When the Tang set up a protectorate over the surrendered Göktürks in 650, they called it the Shanyu protectorate, using the old Xiongnu title for an office of their own.^[26] The Han abolished the chanyuate of the Southern Xiongnu in 216, four and a quarter centuries after Bagatur took it. It is also argued that only the power ended that year.^[27] Cao Cao kept the chanyu Huchuquan at Ye and divided his people into five divisions. Even so, a Southern Chanyu still stood among the dignitaries at the Jin accession of 265. The title lasted without land until 304.^[27] In that year the Jin made Liu Yuan Northern Chanyu. He founded the Xiongnu Han state.^[27] The title returned with the Xiongnu houses of the fifth century: Helian Bobo of the Xia called himself Heavenly King and Great Chanyu.^[28]^[29] In the fourth century the title of Great Chanyu was also borne by Xianbei rulers such as Murong Hui, Shulohan of the Tuyuhun and Qifu Guoren, at a time when none of them is called khan.^[30] By the third and fourth centuries, it is held, the title had become a badge conferred at the pleasure of the Chinese sovereign. When Yuan Shao and Gongsun Zan fought each other, Yuan Shao sent the seals of chanyu to four Wuhuan chiefs by a forged imperial order.^[31]^[32]

The chanyus can be counted as the First, the Second and so on, as the Chinese emperors were counted after Qin Shihuang, beginning with Bagatur. Duman then did not bear the title, and the name “Duman chanyu” of the Shiji is a later addition.^[11] Another observes that the word chanyu stands before Bagatur’s time only in the account of Li Mu and in a few passages, and that it may have been inserted later.^[33]

References

^ a b c d e Han Shu, juan 94
^ Kurakichi 1926, p. 8
^ a b Kurakichi 1930, p. 72
^ a b Kurakichi 1926, p. 38
^ Kafesoğlu 1997, p. 62,250–251
^ Ögel 2015, p. 289
^ Ögel 2015, p. 121–123
^ Hassan 1985, p. 283,296–297
^ Togan 1981, p. 40
^ Kurakichi 1926, p. 9–12
^ a b Kurakichi 1930, p. 71–77
^ Hassan 1985, p. 301
^ Hassan 1985, p. 283–284
^ Pulleyblank 1962, p. 256–264
^ Pulleyblank 1962, p. 89,91,109
^ Taşağıl 1995, p. 18
^ a b c d Shiji, juan 110
^ a b Golden 1992, p. 61
^ a b Hou Han Shu, juan 89
^ a b 内田吟風 1933, p. 105,107
^ Ögel 2015, p. 184,209,219
^ Jagchid 1989, p. 57
^ Ögel 2015, p. 218,222
^ Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
^ Hassan 1985, p. 298
^ Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194
^ a b c 内田吟風 1934, p. 279
^ 内田吟風 1935, p. 578
^ Kurakichi 1926, p. 14
^ Kurakichi 1945, p. 499–504
^ Hou Han Shu, juan 90
^ Kurakichi 1926, p. 13–14
^ Ögel 2015, p. 60–61

Sources

Han Shu, juan 94 (after Shiji)
Shiji, juan 110
Hou Han Shu, juan 89, 90
Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194
Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50

Literature

Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
Uchida Ginpū 内田吟風, 後漢光武帝の對南匈奴策に就て下篇：匈奴の分裂と光武帝の南匈奴統御 (1933)
Uchida Ginpū 内田吟風, 後漢末期より五胡亂勃發に至る匈奴五部の狀勢に就て (1934)
Uchida Ginpū 内田吟風, 五胡亂及び北魏に於ける匈奴 (1935)
Shiratori Kurakichi, A Study on the Titles Kaghan and Katun (1926)
Shiratori Kurakichi, On the Territory of the Hsiung-nu Prince Hsiu-t'u Wang and His Metal Statues for Heaven-worship (1930)
Shiratori Kurakichi (übers. İbrahim Gökbakar), Kaghan Unvanının Menşei (1945)
Bahaeddin Ögel, Büyük Hun İmparatorluğu Tarihi I (2015)
Bahaeddin Ögel, Büyük Hun İmparatorluğu Tarihi II (2015)
Ümit Hassan, Eski Türk Toplumu Üzerine İncelemeler (1985)
Zeki Velidi Togan, Umumi Türk Tarihine Giriş I (1981)
İbrahim Kafesoğlu, Türk Millî Kültürü (1997)
Edwin G. Pulleyblank, The Consonantal System of Old Chinese, Part I (1962)
Edwin G. Pulleyblank, The Consonantal System of Old Chinese, Part II (1962)
Ahmet Taşağıl, Gök-Türkler, Bd. I (1995)
Sechin Jagchid; Van Jay Symons, Peace, War, and Trade Along the Great Wall. Nomadic-Chinese Interaction through Two Millennia (1989)