Yuwen Tai

Yuwen Tai ruled the Western Wei without wearing its crown. He was the first Chinese ruler to treat the Göktürks as a power.^[1] The Zhou Shu was commissioned by his sons’ dynasty. It calls him Taizu, the founding ancestor, in every line that concerns him.^[1] He was the chancellor of the Wei, its highest official. His political powers also gave him command of the army, and he had served the Western Wei for nearly twenty years as a high general.^[2]

Embassy of 545

In 545 Bumin’s people had grown. They first came to the frontier to trade in silk and floss, and they wished for relations with China. Taizu sent the Sogdian An Nuopantuo of Jiuquan as his envoy.^[1] The Göktürks congratulated one another that the envoy of a great state had come and that their state would rise. In 546 Bumin sent tribute in return.^[1] The embassy and the envoy An Nuopantuo have their own articles. The mission has also been understood the other way round. The Wei, they say, took the danger from Bumin seriously after the raid of 542 and forestalled a plundering expedition with an offer of trade.^[2] Bumin accepted because the offer gave him Chinese silk without the Sogdian detour.^[2] The Zhou Shu tells it as a Göktürk wish to trade, answered by an envoy. The two accounts stand together.^[2]

Alliance (551–556)

Anagui refused Bumin a daughter, so Bumin asked the Wei instead, and Taizu consented. In the sixth month of 551 the Wei princess Changle was married to Bumin. When the Wei emperor died that year, Bumin sent two hundred horses in condolence.^[1] After Mukan’s power had grown, he asked for the Rouran fugitives. Taizu consented. He seized Dengshuzi and some three thousand of his people and handed them to the Göktürk envoys. The envoys had them killed outside the Qingmen gate of Chang’an.^[1] The Zhou Shu gives no year. The Rouran chapter of the Bei Shi dates the flight of the fugitives into Guanzhong to 555.^[3] The Zhou Shu says that Taizu had been promised a daughter of Mukan as the Göktürks grew. The contract was not yet settled when he died.^[1] The biography of Empress Ashina gives the reason for the suit: Taizu was contending with the Qi and sought the Göktürks as an ally.^[4] He died in the tenth month of 556 at Yunyang, two months before the Wei emperor abdicated to his son.^[5] His death has also been put in 557, after the founding of his state, later called the Northern Zhou. His sons then finish what he had begun.^[2] The marriage came to his son the emperor Wu in 568. The Qi fell to the Zhou and the Göktürks together in 577.^[2]

Assessment

The sequence from 545 to 553 is best understood as Taizu’s bid to turn a raider into an ally against the Rouran and the Qi. It also marks the beginning of thirty years of Wei and Zhou alliance with the Göktürks that the Hegemony Wars describe. He paid for it in a princess, in three thousand Rouran lives, and in a promise his son had to redeem. What he got was the northern flank of the Zhou secured for a generation. That is what a chancellor at war with the Qi needed.