Dengzhu

Dengshuzi, 鄧叔子, was Anagui’s uncle and the ruler whom the remnant of the Rouran raised after the khan’s death. The Zhou Shu gives him no title beyond “ruler” and no reign beyond a year of flight.^[1]

Elevation (552)

Early in 552, Bumin broke the Rouran north of Huaihuang, and Anagui killed himself. Anagui’s son Anluochen fled to the Northern Qi. The remnant again set up Anagui’s uncle Dengshuzi as their ruler.^[1] The Bei Shi tells it in the same words. Here it copies the Zhou Shu and is not a second witness.^[2] No source says who he was before 552. If he was Anagui’s paternal uncle, he was a brother of Futu. The Wei Shu counts six sons of Futu by the Houlüling widow of Tulun and does not name the other four. It does not name any of Futu’s brothers. Another account makes him a son of Anagui instead.^[3]

Defeat and death (553–555)

In 553, Issik Khan, Bumin’s son, broke him at Mount Mulai north of Woye, on the edge of the Ordos. The Bei Shi writes the mountain’s name without its first character, and the Zhou Shu’s collation note records the variant.^[4] Mukan, Issik’s brother and successor, then led an army against Dengshuzi and destroyed what was left. This is Mukan’s destruction of Dengshuzi. Dengshuzi fled with the survivors to the Western Wei.^[1] There Mukan’s envoys asked for him. The Wei seized Dengshuzi and some three thousand of his people. They handed them to the envoys and had them killed outside the Qingmen gate of Chang’an.^[1] The Zhou Shu gives no year for the flight or the killing. The Rouran chapter of the Bei Shi dates the flight of the Rouran into Guanzhong to the second year of the Wei emperor Gong, 555. More than a thousand households fled under their ruler. The Zhou Shu’s own collation note treats that year as Dengshuzi’s flight.^[5]

One account has the Qi emperor force him to march against the Göktürks in 553, to keep Qi influence alive in the steppe. The Zhou Shu, by contrast, knows him as the uncle and puts him among the Rouran who went west to the Wei, not south to the Qi.^[3] The two accounts may describe two groups of the remnant: the one under Dengshuzi that went west, and the one under Anluochen that went south. The sources do not say.

The Qi account

The annals of the Qi tell it differently at three points.^[6]

The Qi annals write his name 登注, not 鄧叔子. They also give him the title ilteber.^[6] They make him Anagui’s 從弟, a younger cousin. The Zhou Shu, by contrast, makes him Anagui’s uncle. Third, the annals have him flee south to the Qi in the second month of 552, with Anluochen and with his own son Kuti. He did not stay in the steppe. On this account, the ruler the remnant raised there was Dengzhu’s second son Tiefa.^[6]

On the same account, Dengzhu did rule, but briefly and a year later. In the second month of 553, the Qi sent him and Kuti back north. The Khitan killed Tiefa. The people set up Dengzhu in his place. His own chief Afuti killed Dengzhu. The people then set up Kuti.^[6] Therefore, a ruler killed by his own chief in 553 cannot be the ruler the Western Wei handed to Mukan’s envoys to be executed at the Qingmen gate. The Rouran chapter of the Bei Shi tells both endings one after the other. In 553, Afuti killed Dengzhu. Two years later, an unnamed “ruler of the Rouran” was handed over outside the Qingmen gate, with more than three thousand of his people.^[5]

This raises the question whether 登注 and 鄧叔子 are one man or two. The evidence does not settle it. Some scholars follow a note of Sima Guang to his Zizhi tongjian. They take them for two men, raised by different parts of a scattered people. Dengzhu, Anagui’s cousin, was killed by Afuti in 553. Deng Shuzi, Anagui’s uncle, was killed outside Chang’an in 555.^[7] The two names are close enough in sound to be the same man written twice. The two careers, however, are too different to be reconciled by a copyist’s slip.

Assessment

Dengshuzi’s year is the year in which the Göktürks finished what Bumin had begun. The killing at the Qingmen gate is the first recorded instance of a Chinese court delivering a steppe ruler’s enemies to him on demand. The Göktürks would ask the same of the Tang for Heshana in 619. The end of the Rouran is part of the story of Anagui, and Dengshuzi belongs to that end.