Sabao

The sabao was a Chinese official who stood at the head of a community of foreigners. Most of those communities were Sogdian.^[1] The Chinese name transcribes a Sogdian word, sartapao, the master of a caravan.^[2] The Chinese states made the sabao an official of mandarin rank because the communities he led carried more economic weight than their numbers suggest.^[3]

The word

The word has two roads into Chinese. The Indian sarthavaha was the leader of a caravan, the man who guided it to its destination. By extension it named the head of a merchant guild.^[2] The word passed into Sogdian through Bactrian. Ancient Letter V is addressed to the chief merchant Aspandhat, s’rtp’w, which is the Sogdian form.^[4]^[2] The word also entered Chinese through Buddhist texts as sabo, where it named the Bodhisattvas, the masters who showed the way.^[2] When the post was fitted into the official ranks, the title took the form sabao, after the pronunciation of the Sogdians, who formed the majority of the foreign communities.^[2] The river that Chinese geography calls the river of the sabao is the Zarafshan.^[2]

The office in the Chinese states

The exact meaning of the title is disputed. The sources that survive preserve mostly the religious role of the sabao under the Tang.^[1] The Tongdian, completed in the year 800, describes a bureau of the sabao. It was directed by the sabao himself and by the head of the xian cult, with three further officials of mandarin rank: an invoker of the cult, a duty officer and a scribe-archivist.^[5] The duties were wider than the titles suggest.^[6]

The post is older than the Tang. Under the Northern Qi (550 to 577) the safu, as the same title was written, served in an institution that carried out the work of a ministry of foreign affairs and foreign trade. Two safu were on duty at the capital, and one in every region.^[7] Under the Sui the sabao of the provinces stood at the head of every community of hu with more than 200 households.^[7] The Tang kept part of this organisation.^[6]

Two documents from Turfan show the sabao at work. In directives of 549 and 550, issued by the royal government of Gaochang for the ceremonies of the lunar new year, the sabao is one cult official among Chinese functionaries.^[6] In a decision of 619 on the allocation of grain, a sabao is charged with securing the delivery of millet to a merchant named Ju Buluduo.^[8] The sabao therefore kept close ties with the merchants of his community.^[9]

The head of the community

The sabao may have been recruited from the community itself. Many Sogdian families in China counted sabao of Gansu among their ancestors in the fifth, sixth or seventh century.^[9] The family of Li Baoyu had sabao in three generations in the sixth century at Wuwei.^[9] A tomb discovered at Xi’an names its occupant as sabao of Wuwei in Sogdian and in Chinese.^[9]

Inside the community each unit, called nāf in Sogdian, stood under a sartapao. He presided over the cult or supervised it, and he commanded a hierarchy.^[2] The grades in the Chinese list match the little the Sogdian texts say. The head of the xian cult and the invoker correspond to priests named in Ancient Letter I.^[2]

It was unusual that a community of 200 households had an official of mandarin rank. The smallest Chinese unit with a representative of the central power was normally the district. This view explains the exception by the economic weight of the foreign communities, which exceeded their numbers.^[3]

Individual sabao

The tomb of An Jia, who died in 579, shows a sabao of the Zhou period. An Jia came from Wuwei, was sabao of Tongzhou, one of the districts of Chang’an, and was later promoted to governor general.^[10] The epitaph of Kang Yuanjing, dated to 673, calls his father “Grand Sabao of All China”.^[11] The stele of An Wantong names an ancestor as sabao in the time of the Wei emperor Taizu (386 to 408).^[9]

Such titles need care. A single epitaph usually supplies the information, and the titles of the ancestors may have been invented.^[11] Some Sogdian families may also have played on the ambiguity of the word. They could turn caravan masters among their forefathers into officials in retrospect.^[9] A similar arrangement is reported for the south. A Persian merchant of the ninth century reports that the Chinese ruler at Canton gave a Muslim the administration of justice among the Muslims who had come to the country.^[9]

The end of the system

The sabao disappears from the epitaphs in the second half of the seventh century. The last whom the literature knows is Long Run, who held the post before 646.^[3] At Turfan and Dunhuang in the eighth century no sabao is found. Sogdians lived there in townships named Conghua and Chonghua, “rallied” to the empire, as full subjects with the same duties and rights as the Chinese around them.^[12] The sabao for 200 households left the Tang codes. Only the central bureau remained in the first half of the eighth century, and its tasks may have changed.^[13]

The sources describe the religious role of the sabao better than the commercial one. They do not show the sabao leading a caravan.