Xiongnu Han

In 304 Liu Yuan, of the Xiongnu house settled inside the frontier, proclaimed himself king of Han. The claim rested on the heqin marriages. For four centuries the chanyus had taken Han princesses. The house could therefore call itself the heir of the Han, and its founder took a Han surname. One account describes the step in the same terms. In it, Liu Yuan, a chief of the Tuge and a descendant of the old chanyus, appealed to the friendship and the “brotherhood” that his ancestors had had with the Han dynasty five hundred years earlier. He then named his own dynasty Han.^[1] His son Liu Cong took Luoyang in 311 and Chang’an in 316. These conquests ended the Western Jin.

Liu Yuan came from the Tuge, one of the Xiongnu tribes settled inside the frontier.^[2] In 304 the Jin made him commander of the five divisions of Bingzhou. They gave him the title of Northern Chanyu.^[3] Liu Xuan, one of the Xiongnu nobles, urged a rising. He argued that this was the moment to raise up their own people and restore the work of Huhanye.^[2] Liu Yuan called himself king of Han in 304. In 308 he took the title of emperor.^[2]

The court kept two systems of rank at once. Its nobles held Chinese offices and, beside them, the old Xiongnu ranks: the Left and Right Worthy Kings, the Lu Kings, the Guli Kings and the Duolu Kings.^[4] Liu Yao renamed the state Zhao. In the state sacrifices he set Bagatur beside Heaven and Liu Yuan beside the Supreme Lord.^[4]

The state was renamed Zhao in 319 and broke apart in 329. It is the first case in which a steppe house ruled a Chinese capital by claiming Chinese legitimacy rather than steppe legitimacy. That arrangement began with the southern Xiongnu of two centuries earlier.

The Sogdian witness

An eyewitness account of the fall of Luoyang comes from outside China. Nanai-vandak, a Sogdian merchant in Gansu, wrote to Samarkand, most probably in 313. He wrote that the last emperor had fled Luoyang in a famine. The palace and the city had been burnt, and “Luoyang is no more, Ye is no more”.^[5] The Huns, he wrote, had done it. They were men “who yesterday were the emperor’s subjects”. He did not know whether the remaining Chinese had been able to drive them out of Chang’an.^[5] The letter is Ancient Letter II. It calls the Xiongnu of Liu Cong xwn, the Sogdian name for the Huns. This is sixty years before the Huns crossed the Roman frontier.^[6]

The date of the letter rests on the events it describes. Luoyang was sacked in 190, 311 and 535. The emperor’s flight in a famine fits 311 better than 190. In 190 it was the dictator Dong Zhuo who made the emperor leave, and the famine began only in 193.^[7]