Worthy Kings of the Left and Right

The Shiji sets the Left and Right Worthy Kings first in its list of the offices below the chanyu. After them come the Left and Right Guli Kings, the Great Generals, the Great Commandants, the Great Danghu and the Gudu Marquises.^[1] The Xiongnu called a worthy man tuqi. For this reason, the Shiji says, the heir was regularly made Left Tuqi King.^[1]

The wings of the realm

The kings of the left lived in the east, from the country facing Shanggu eastward, where they bordered the Huimo and Chaoxian. The kings of the right lived in the west, from the country facing Shangjun westward, where they bordered the Yuezhi, the Di and the Qiang. The chanyu’s own court faced Dai and Yunzhong. Each had his allotted pastures and moved in search of water and grazing.^[1] The Worthy Kings and the Guli Kings were the greatest of all. The Gudu Marquises helped to govern.^[1] The chiefs from the Worthy Kings down to the Danghu numbered twenty-four. Each led ten thousand horse or several thousand. They were called the Ten Thousand Horsemen. Each appointed his own leaders of thousands, hundreds and tens, his lesser kings, chancellors, commandants and danghu.^[1] The great ministers held their offices by inheritance. The Huyan, the Lan and, later, the Xubu were the noble stock.^[1]

The Hou Han Shu gives the order of rank. The great ministers stood in this order: the Left Worthy King, then the Left Guli King, then the Right Worthy King, then the Right Guli King, who together were called the Four Horns. Next came the Left and Right Rizhu Kings, the Left and Right Wenyudi Kings and the Left and Right Jianjiang Kings, the Six Horns. All ten were sons and brothers of the chanyu. In their order, they were to become chanyu.^[2] The Rizhu King stood lower than the Left Worthy King.^[3]

A king commanded a wing with a high degree of independence. He appointed his own officers, while the centre of the realm lay under the chanyu.^[4] The Great Chiefs held their own appanages within a decimal order of command, and the Gudu Marquises, who came from other families and had no appanages, depended on the chanyu.^[5] The chiefs, the kings among them, met the chanyu at the assemblies of the year: the small gathering at his court in the first month, the great gathering at Longcheng in the fifth, and the autumn counting of men and herds at Dailin.^[1]

Precedence of the left

The order is plain in the sources. The reason is not. The Shiji says that at the chanyu’s seat the elders sat on the left and faced north. It says also that the chanyu greeted the rising sun in the morning and the moon in the evening.^[1]

The pairing of a left and a right officer, with the left the higher, may come from the Chinese court. There the ruler sat in the north facing south, so that the east, the side of the rising sun, lay on his left and ranked above the west.^[6] Not everyone accepts the borrowing. The Xiongnu titles do not name places beside the ruler. They name the two halves of the realm, the eastern and the western, and the seating in the Shiji puts every senior official on the east side and not only those of the left. Among the Göktürks who came after the Xiongnu, left and right likewise stood for east and west. Their realm divided into an eastern and a western half.^[7]

Kings at war

The Right Worthy Kings faced the Han frontier. In the third year of the emperor Wen, 177 BC, the Right Worthy King settled in the Henan land and raided the frontier forts of Shangjun, killing and carrying off people.^[1] The emperor ordered the chancellor Guan Ying to send eighty-five thousand chariots and horse to Gaonu against him. The king fled out of the frontier.^[1] The next year the chanyu wrote to the emperor. The Han frontier officers had insulted the Right Worthy King, he said. The king, without asking him, had followed the advice of the Marquis of Yilu and fought them, and so had broken the treaty between the two lords. As a punishment, the chanyu had sent the king west to seek the Yuezhi, and the king had destroyed them.^[1]

In 124 BC the Right Worthy King, who resented the loss of the Henan land and the building of Shuofang, was raiding again.^[1] Wei Qing marched out of Shuofang and Gaoque with six generals and more than a hundred thousand men.^[1] The Right Worthy King thought the Han could not reach him and was drinking. The Han came out six or seven hundred li beyond the frontier and surrounded him by night. He escaped with his best horsemen behind him. The Han took fifteen thousand of his people and more than ten lesser kings.^[1] In 119 BC Huo Qubing rode more than two thousand li out of Dai and fought the Left Worthy King.^[1] The Han took more than seventy thousand heads.^[1]^[8] The Left Worthy King and his commanders fled. Huo Qubing performed the sacrifices on Mount Langjuxu and at Guyan before he turned back.^[1]^[9] This is the Mobei campaign. In 99 BC Li Guangli beat the Right Worthy King at the Tianshan with thirty thousand horse and took more than ten thousand heads.^[1] The Xiongnu then surrounded him. Six or seven in ten of his men were lost.^[1]

The heir

The Left Worthy King was the chanyu’s deputy and heir. The Hou Han Shu says so in a clause. It names a Right Guli King who by his turn was to become Left Worthy King.^[2] The Han Shu shows the rule at work. It also shows how the rule failed.

In 96 BC Qiedihou had two sons. The elder was Left Worthy King and the younger Left Great General. When Qiedihou was dying, he named the Left Worthy King. However, the Left Worthy King had not yet come. The nobles thought him ill and set up the Left Great General. The Left Worthy King did not dare to come forward. The younger brother sent for him and offered him the throne. The elder refused, pleading illness. The younger said that if he died, the throne should pass to him. The elder agreed and became Hulugu.^[3]^[10] Hulugu made his brother Left Worthy King. The brother died after some years. His son Xianxianchan could not take his place. He was made Rizhu King, which was lower. The chanyu made his own son Left Worthy King.^[3] The episode is taken to show that the will of the reigning chanyu counted for more than the choice of the nobles.^[11] The Göktürks may have followed the same custom, in which a younger brother who took the throne made his own son the heir and moved the son of the elder brother to a lower rank.^[12]

When Hulugu died in 85 BC, he left the throne to his brother the Right Guli King, because his sons were young. The dowager and Wei Lü hid his death and forged his order. They set up the Left Guli King, his son, as Huyandi. The Left Worthy King and the Right Guli King, who had both expected the throne, resented it. They plotted to go over to the Han or to the Wusun. The plot was betrayed. The two kings withdrew to their own lands and no longer came to Longcheng.^[3]^[13] Huyandi died in 68 BC. His brother, then Left Worthy King, took the throne as Xulüquanqu.^[3]

In 60 BC Xulüquanqu died. The dowager Zhuanqu, whom he had put aside and who was the lover of the Right Worthy King, set up the Right Worthy King Tuqitang before the other kings could be called. He had succeeded his father as Right Worthy King. He took the title Woyanqudi.^[3] He killed Xulüquanqu’s men of rank and put his own sons and kin in their place. His heir and the Left Worthy King slandered the nobles of the left lands until they resented them. In 58 BC the left nobles set up Huhanye.^[3] This may point to a rift between the regions: the purge struck the men whose power lay in the left wing.^[14]

Under the sons of Huhanye the chain is clean. Fuzhulei made his brother Qiemixu Left Worthy King, Qiemoche Left Guli King and Nangzhiyasi Right Worthy King. Qiemixu took the throne as Souxie and made Qiemoche Left Worthy King. Qiemoche took the throne as Cheya and made Nangzhiyasi Left Worthy King. Nangzhiyasi took the throne as Wuzhuliu.^[3] Wuzhuliu’s Left Worthy Kings kept dying. He thought the name unlucky. He called the office Huyu (護于), the most honoured and next in line for the throne, and gave it to his eldest son. His brother Xian resented that Wuzhuliu had lowered his own title and did not want the realm passed on. When Xian took the throne after Wuzhuliu, he reduced the Huyu to Left Tuqi King.^[3] The Han Shu does not say what the name Left Tuqi King then meant.^[3] When Xian died, his brother the Left Worthy King Yu succeeded him.^[3]

The split of AD 48 and after

Under Yu the rule ran into trouble. The Hou Han Shu says that Yu’s younger brother, Zhiyashi, a son of Wang Zhaojun, stood next in line to be Left Worthy King. Yu wished to pass the throne to his own son, the text says, and had him killed.^[2] The Han Shu gives Zhiyashi another title, Right Rizhu King.^[3] Bi, a son of the earlier chanyu Wuzhuliu, said when he heard of it that by brotherhood the Right Guli King would have been next. By sonship, he said, he himself, the eldest son of a former chanyu, should be next.^[2] Yu died in AD 46. His son the Left Worthy King succeeded him. When he died too, his brother the Left Worthy King took the throne.^[2] Bi was passed over. In AD 48 the eight divisions of the south set him up as chanyu. The Xiongnu split in two.^[2]

Both courts kept the office. Bi sent his brother, the Left Worthy King Mo, with more than ten thousand men against the Left Worthy King of the Yujian, a brother of the Northern Chanyu, and took him alive.^[2] The Left Worthy King Mo succeeded Bi as Southern Chanyu.^[2] The ladder shows again in AD 93 and 94. Anguo, a Left Worthy King, became Southern Chanyu, and Shizi, who had been Left Guli King, moved up in his turn to Left Worthy King.^[2] Shizi in turn became chanyu. The Southern Chanyu stationed his kings as guards along the frontier, the Right Worthy King at Shuofang among them.^[2]

The rank outlived the chanyu’s power. In the fourth-century state of the Xiongnu Han the nobles held Chinese offices and, beside them, the old Xiongnu ranks, the Left and Right Worthy Kingships among them.^[15] The Xiongnu-style ranks were used in the later Xiongnu states and also among peoples who were not Xiongnu.^[15] Every heir named after Huhanye held the title of Left Worthy King, and not Left Tuqi King. This has been taken as support for the view that the two titles were one office.^[16]

References

^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s Shiji, juan 110
^ a b c d e f g h i j Hou Han Shu, juan 89
^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Han Shu, juan 94
^ Sinor 1990, p. 135
^ Miller 2014, p. 6–7
^ Cosmo 2011, p. 46
^ Cosmo 2011, p. 46–47
^ Ögel 2015, p. 43
^ Ögel 2015, p. 43–46
^ Ögel 2015, p. 102–103
^ Sinor 1990, p. 137
^ Ögel 2015, p. 103
^ Ögel 2015, p. 113–114
^ Sinor 1990, p. 138
^ a b 内田吟風 1935, p. 570
^ 内田吟風 1932, p. 591

Sources

Shiji, juan 110
Han Shu, juan 94 (after Shiji)
Hou Han Shu, juan 89

Literature

Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Uchida Ginpū 内田吟風, 後漢光武帝の對南匈奴策に就て上篇：匈奴分裂以前の後漢・匈奴の交渉 (1932)
Uchida Ginpū 内田吟風, 五胡亂及び北魏に於ける匈奴 (1935)
Bryan K. Miller, Xiongnu “Kings” and the Political Order of the Steppe Empire (2014)
Nicola Di Cosmo, Ethnogenesis, Coevolution and Political Morphology of the Earliest Steppe Empire: The Xiongnu Question Revisited (2011)
Denis Sinor (ed.), The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (1990)
Bahaeddin Ögel, Büyük Hun İmparatorluğu Tarihi II (2015)