Pingliang

Pingliang was a district on the north-western frontier of China, in the east of present-day Gansu.^[1] It lay between the Gansu corridor and Chang’an.^[2] The Sui Shu opens its account of the Göktürks with the place. Their ancestors, it says, were mixed hu of Pingliang, of the surname Ashina.^[3] When Emperor Taiwu of the Northern Wei destroyed the Juqu, the Ashina fled with five hundred families to the Rouran.^[3] The conquest fell in 439. This dates the flight.^[4]

The sentence in the histories

The Pingliang sentence belongs to the Sui Shu. The Zhou Shu does not have it.^[5] The Bei Shi gives it as a second account of the Göktürks’ origin, introduced with “some say”, after the wolf legend.^[6] The Tongdian takes it over and adds a note in small type, “today Pingliang commandery”. It then joins the sentence, in one sentence, to the clause on the Xiongnu that the Zhou Shu and the Bei Shi give.^[7] For this sentence both works depend on the Sui Shu. The three texts are therefore a single attestation of it.

The mixed hu

Hu, 胡, is the Chinese word for the foreigners of the north and the north-west. 雜胡 means “mixed hu”.^[8] The phrase has been understood in two senses. Some take it for barbarians of mixed race. Others take it for barbarians of various origins that cannot be identified more closely.^[1] A third rendering holds that the hu lived mixed among other peoples. It has been rejected on philological grounds.^[1] The French translation of 1864 gives “barbarians of diverse races”.^[9]

The same phrase stands in the annals for the year 409.^[10] In that year, as the Zizhi tongjian records, Bobo, king of the Xia, attacked the Qin with twenty thousand horsemen. He carried off more than seven thousand households of the mixed hu of Pingliang.^[10] The annals name other peoples there as well. In 433 Jin Ya, a Xiutu of Pingliang who held a Wei generalship, rose with Di Ziyu, a Qiang, against the Wei commander of Anding. The rising failed.^[11]

Under the Xia and the Wei

In the late 420s Pingliang was a stronghold of the Xia, the state of the Helian house.^[12] In 428 the Xia ruler Helian Chang withdrew to Pingliang. The Wei later captured him. His followers raised his brother Ding and went back there.^[13] Emperor Taiwu came to Pingliang himself in the eleventh month of 430, the Wei Shu records. He had trenches dug around it.^[4] In the twelfth month Ding’s brothers came out bound and surrendered. The Wei Shu records that Pingliang was pacified.^[4] In 435 a decree allowed the orphans and the old among the people of Chang’an and Pingliang who had been moved to the Wei capital to return home.^[4] In the summer of 439 the troops of Pingliang and Fucheng marched in the rearguard of the army that Taiwu led west against the Northern Liang and its capital, Guzang.^[4]

The Sui Shu does not say how mixed hu of Pingliang came to flee at the fall of the Juqu.^[3] Some scholars connect the region with the Helian, the Xiongnu house of the Xia.^[8] Others place the ancestors of the Ashina within the Northern Liang state itself, from which they fled to Gaochang about 439.^[14] A third theory has the Wei campaign against the Liang reach a village of Turkic semi-nomads in Pingliang. The campaign laid the village waste.^[15]

Later history

Pingliang remained a base on the frontier.^[16] In 534 Yuwen Tai rode there with a light escort. The generals of the murdered commander Heba Yue raised him to lead their army.^[16] In 545 the same Yuwen Tai sent an embassy of the Western Wei to the Göktürks.^[5] After Li Yuan, the founder of the Tang, had entered Chang’an, the rebel Xue Ju sent a general to take Pingliang commandery. Xue Ju allied himself with Ilig, then a shad north of Wuyuan, as the Jiu Tang Shu tells.^[17]

Every later mention of Pingliang in the history of the Ashina goes back to the one sentence of the Sui Shu.