Taren River

The Taren, 他人水, is the river at which, according to the Zhou Shu, the Göktürks gathered to worship the spirit of heaven.^[1] The text sets the gathering in the middle ten days of the fifth month, after the khan’s yearly sacrifice at the cave of the forebears.^[1] The sentence that follows names the bare mountain Bodeng Ningli, the spirit of the earth.^[1] The Bei Shi and the Tongdian repeat the sentence on the river word for word.^[2] The Sui Shu names no river. It says that in the middle of the fifth month the Göktürks killed many sheep and horses as a sacrifice to heaven.^[3]

The Zhou Shu gives the river a name and a month. It gives no location.^[1] One translation renders the name as the Tamir river.^[4] The identification has passed into the literature. The literature adds that the Tamir had been sacred to the Xiongnu as well.^[5] In ordinary Chinese the two characters 他人 mean “other people”. The French translation of 1864 read them so: in the fifth month other men were assembled to worship the spirit of heaven on the same mountain.^[6]

Of the two places of worship in the Zhou Shu’s account, the cave and the river, only the river has a name.