Drums and Banners for the Khans

Drums, wind instruments and banners were among the gifts with which the courts of northern China honoured the steppe rulers they recognised. The Northern Wei sent a king of the Gaoche a set of musical instruments with eighty musicians. They also gave the Rouran khan Anagui twenty sets of drums and horns.^[1] The Sui gave a band of drums and pipes, 鼓吹, to Ishbara in 585.^[2] In 587 they gave drums, pipes and banners to Bagha. In 607 they gave the same, with a state carriage, to Yami.^[3] The Tang invested the khans they set up with a drum and a standard, 鼓纛.^[4]

The band of drums and pipes

At the Sui court the band of drums and pipes was a mark of rank.^[5] When the Sui founder took the throne in 581, he fixed the rules of his court music. The music treatise of the Sui Shu sets them out.^[5] The emperor’s band had big and small drums lacquered and painted in vermilion.^[5] Its long horns, middle horns and transverse flutes were hung with five-coloured banners painted with intertwined dragons. The great horns carried the same.^[5] The bands of the crown prince and of an official of the first rank had crouching beasts on their banners instead of dragons.^[5] The drums of an official of the fourth rank were lacquered dark green.^[5] The banners thus hung from the instruments themselves.

Under the emperor Yang the court music still largely followed the rules of the founder’s reign.^[6] The treatise counts the band by rank. Of the long horns, 120 went with the emperor, 36 with the crown prince and 18 with princes and dukes.^[6] The great horn had seven pieces.^[6] The pieces ran from catching the horses through saddling, mounting, marching, entering the battle line and gathering the army to making camp.^[6] Their words, the treatise says, all went back to the Xianbei.^[6] A note in a Song anthology says that the Chile Song too was first in Xianbei.^[7] Neither the treatise nor the chapter on the Göktürks says which grade of band the khans received.^[8]

The Wei and the Gaoche

The Gaoche king Mi’etu killed the Rouran khan Futu north of Lake Puli and sent his hair to the Wei general Meng Wei.^[1] The Rouran chapter of the Wei Shu places the death after an embassy of 508.^[1] Mi’etu sent envoys with five dragon horses, gold, silver, sable furs and other gifts of his country.^[1] The emperor Xuanwu sent Yu Liang, the viscount of Dongcheng, with his answer.^[1] The gifts in the answer were a set of musical instruments, eighty musicians, ten bolts of red silk and sixty bolts of mixed silks.^[1]

When Anagui left the Wei court in 521 to return to the north, an edict listed the gifts he was to receive at the frontier garrison.^[1] The list runs from armour for men and horses, lances with plumes and pennants, bows and shields to robes, tents, grain and herds.^[1] In it stand twenty sets of red-lacquered drums and horns.^[1]

Yifu, Mi’etu’s brother, had been made king of the Gaoche by the Wei.^[1] In the Zhengguang era, 520 to 525, he sent tribute and asked for a vermilion-painted carriage with its curtains and cushions, a harness, a parasol and a fan, five blue canopies, five red-lacquered fans and ten drums and horns.^[1] An edict granted them.^[1] He asked for insignia, not for silk or grain.

The Sui and the Göktürks

In 585 Ishbara was hard pressed by Tardush and afraid of the Khitan in the east. He asked leave to bring his tribes south of the desert and to lodge them in the plain of Baidao.^[2] The emperor agreed and sent the prince of Jin with troops to support him.^[3] Ishbara received food and clothing, carriages, robes and a band of drums and pipes.^[2] Ishbara then struck west at Apa. This was the year of his submission.^[3]

Ishbara died in 587.^[3] In the succession that followed, his brother Bagha took the throne after a long exchange of refusals with Ishbara’s son.^[3] Bagha reported his accession to the Sui court.^[3] The emperor gave him drums and pipes, pennants and flags.^[3] The Zizhi tongjian adds that the general Zhangsun Sheng carried the tally of office to invest him.^[9] Bagha took the drums and banners west against Apa.^[2] Apa’s men believed that Sui troops were with him, and many came over.^[2] Bagha took Apa alive, in the capture of Apa.^[3]

In 607 the emperor Yang came north to Yulin, and Yami came to his travelling palace.^[3] A decree praised Yami’s loyalty and granted him a state carriage, horses, a band of drums and pipes, and pennants and flags.^[3] He was not to be announced by name at court, and his place was above the princes.^[3] Then the emperor went on to Yami’s own camp.^[3] According to modern accounts, gifts made to khans at their accession carried weight. The band and banners sent to Bagha are among them.^[10]

Under the Tang

The Tang made the drum and the standard part of investing a khan. In 629 the emperor Taizong sent the general Qiao Shiwang to Yinan, the leader of the Xueyantuo, with an edict and a drum and standard. He named him Zhenzhu Bilge Khan.^[11] Nishu, raised as Duolu Khan in the west, received a title and a drum and standard from Taizong. In 633 the Tang envoy Liu Shanyin came to invest him.^[12]

In 639 the Tang sent Ashina Simo north of the Yellow River as khan of the Göktürks who had been settled in China.^[13] Li Xiaogong, prince of Zhaojun and minister of rites, carried the document to his camp. He built an altar on the river bank and invested him there with a drum and a standard.^[12] In 641 the general Zhang Dashi invested Irbis Ishbara Yabgu Khan in the west in the same way.^[14] When the Tang general Su Dingfang broke the camp of Ashina Helu, the last khan of the western Göktürks, he took his drums, standards and weapons.^[15]

The khans’ own standards

The khans had standards of their own, the tuğ.^[16] The Zhou Shu says that the Göktürks set a golden wolf’s head on top of their banners and standards.^[16] In 617 the Göktürks of Shibi Khan sent wolf’s-head standards to two rebels against the Sui, Liu Wuzhou and Liang Shidu. They named them khans.^[17] In the war against An Lushan, the Uyghur khan made the Tang general Guo Ziyi bow to his wolf standard before he would receive him.^[11]

The gifts thus ran in both directions. The Chinese courts invested khans with drums and banners. A Göktürk khan made Chinese rebels khans with a wolf’s-head standard. The sources show what such a gift did on the steppe in one case only: Bagha’s war of 587, when Apa’s men took the Sui banners for Sui troops.

The Kutadgu Bilig, written at the Karakhanid court in 1069–1070, has the king invest his vizier with a seal, a standard (tuğ), a drum (kövrüg) and a suit of armour. Standard and drum are there insignia of office that pass from the ruler to his minister.^[18] The book says nothing of their form or number.^[19]