A steppe ruler who sent an embassy to a Chinese court sent gifts with it, and the court sent gifts back. Chinese writers named the first gifts tribute and the second bestowals or yearly payments.[1] The names put the Chinese ruler above the nomad. The goods that moved did not always follow the names.[2]

The words

One study of the frontier lists the Chinese terms. All goods sent to China by officially recognised rulers from outside, and all gifts from nomad rulers to their Chinese counterparts, counted as tribute. The terms were xian, rugong and tonggong.[1] Everything the court gave in return was a bestowal (zenglai, shangci) or a yearly payment (suibi).[1] The court presented bestowals as a recognition of the merit of those who submitted, and the chosen words suggested the superiority of the Chinese ruler.[2] When nomad power equalled or exceeded the power of the court, the nomad leaders demanded humbler words. The goods were then called gifts, even where they were worth more than a traditional bestowal.[3]

Three occasions

Bestowals were given on three kinds of occasion. The court gave them to the members of a tribute mission, who were supposed to have come to receive them. It sent bestowal missions to the frontier to give gifts to the nomad leaders. Finally, it handed out hurried bestowals to rebellious leaders to calm a tense situation.[3] Yearly payments are old. The same study finds them as early as the Han and says that their size depended on the relative strength of the two sides.[3]

Cases from the sources

In 51 BC the court gave the Xiongnu chanyu Huhanye regalia, horses, gold, cash and 8,000 bolts of silk at his audience, and the sums rose with later visits.[4] In AD 50 the Han fixed a yearly gift of silk for the Southern chanyu.[5]

Under the Northern Zhou the court gave the khagan Taspar 100,000 lengths of silk floss, brocade and coloured silk every year.[6] Taspar’s own horses were worth only a fraction of that.[7] In 584 Ishbara Khan wrote to the Sui emperor that all the sheep and horses of his country were the emperor’s livestock, and that the silks of the emperor’s country were all his.[8]

In 727 the Tang opened a market at the Western Shouxiang city for Bilge Khan and delivered silk there each year. Two Tang histories call the silk a gift and a third calls it the price of horses, as a separate article shows.[9] In 757 the Tang granted the Uyghur crown prince 20,000 bolts of silk a year, and in the following decades it paid forty bolts for each Uyghur horse.[10]

The Chinese side

The Cefu Yuangui lists the delegations that brought tribute. From the first appearance of the Göktürks at the frontier, about 545, to the last foreign visits at the Sui court in 616, their delegations numbered nearly a fifth of all other foreign delegations together.[11] Some scholars hold that, from the Chinese point of view, silk was the cost of peace. Chinese writers found the demand for silk a kind of robbery.[12] On this view, the Chinese court welcomed foreign luxury goods when they came as gifts and opposed them when they were offered for trade.[11]

The court used the procedures to show its wealth. In 610 the court let envoys from the west into the market of Luoyang to trade, and instead gave them a feast. The ground was covered with mats and the trees were wrapped in silk.[13]

Limits set by the court

The court tried to hold down the size of the missions and the volume of trade. In 787 the minister Li Mi proposed that the Uyghur envoys should not number more than 200 and that their horses for sale should not exceed 1,000.[14][15] In 821 Uyghur chiefs came with 2,000 men to fetch a Tang princess and brought 20,000 horses and 1,000 camels. The Xin Tang Shu says that no envoys of the four peoples to China had ever been so many. The court allowed 500 to go to Chang’an and kept the rest at Taiyuan.[14]

At times the court also forbade the sale to foreigners of gold, silver, silk and iron, and of goods as harmless as embroidery or pearls.[16] Officials who traded with foreigners were punished. At the end of the Sui, Yuwen Huaji and his brother nearly paid with their lives for trade with the Göktürks.[17]

The value of the exchange

The same study says that the value of bestowals and yearly payments often exceeded the value of the tribute. For that reason they were a second way for the nomads to get essential Chinese goods.[3] It adds that many Chinese dynasties paid tribute to stronger nomad powers in the guise of tributary formulas, because trade and gifts were far cheaper than war.[3] Others take the horses and the silk as one barter, forced by the threat of raids, in which the amounts followed the balance of military power.[12]

The steppe side is heard in the letter of Ishbara quoted above and in the Orkhon inscriptions. There Bilge Khan says that the Chinese gave gold, silver and silk in quantity, without being asked.[18]

References

  1. ^ a b c Jagchid 1989, p. 115
  2. ^ a b Jagchid 1989, p. 115–116
  3. ^ a b c d e Jagchid 1989, p. 116
  4. ^ Han Shu, juan 94
  5. ^ Hou Han Shu, juan 89
  6. ^ Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
  7. ^ Sinor 1990, p. 307
  8. ^ Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
  9. ^ Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194; Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215; Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance), juan 213
  10. ^ Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 195
  11. ^ a b Ecsedy 1968, p. 143
  12. ^ a b Ecsedy 1968, p. 142
  13. ^ Ecsedy 1968, p. 143–144
  14. ^ a b Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217
  15. ^ Mackerras 1972, p. 97
  16. ^ Ecsedy 1968, p. 145
  17. ^ Ecsedy 1968, p. 146
  18. ^ Kül Tegin inscription

Sources

Literature

  • Sechin Jagchid; Van Jay Symons, Peace, War, and Trade Along the Great Wall. Nomadic-Chinese Interaction through Two Millennia (1989)
  • Ildikó Ecsedy, Trade-and-War Relations between the Turks and China in the Second Half of the Sixth Century (1968)
  • Colin Mackerras, The Uighur Empire According to the T'ang Dynastic Histories (1972)
  • Denis Sinor (ed.), The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (1990)

Related

What links here2

Institutions and Titles
Diplomacy of the Steppe Empires · The Economy of the Steppe Empires

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Tribute Missions and Bestowals.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/institutions/tribute-missions-and-bestowals/

Last revised: 8 November 2026