The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 06. Alien Regimes and Border States, 907-1368
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MULTILINGUALITY
31
centuries, by contrast, we have ample evidence and even surviving texts that
show clearly how
and to
what extent
the
Chinese language
and
script were
used side by side with other languages and writing systems. Never before had
Chinese been challenged as the sole language of administration as during that
period.
The overwhelming majority
of the
population
in
China proper was,
of
course, Chinese,
and the
conquerors
had to
adapt their ways
of
government
to
the
multilinguality
of
their territories.
As far as the
spoken language
is
concerned,
the
foreigners
in the
bureaucracy relied largely
on
interpreters
if
they
did not
themselves know enough Chinese. For this reason
all
dynasties
of conquest
had
interpreters attached
to
their offices
so
that they could deal
with
the
Chinese population, particularly
in
lawsuits
and
trials.
The
use
of
intermediaries
not
only complicated
the
procedure
but
frequently
led to
abuses. Bribing an interpreter could become
a
means of influencing
a
judge's
decision without
his
knowing.
On the
other hand, linguistic competence
became an important factor
in
rising
in
the bureaucracy, as can be seen
in the
careers
of
many Yuan ministers.
Unlike the earlier conquerors like the Hsien-pei
or
T'o-pa, who never had
a script
of
their own, each
of
the alien rulers between
the
tenth
and
four-
teenth centuries ordered
the
creation
of a
national script. These graphic
systems invented
to
write non-Chinese languages
are of
great interest
to
linguists,
and the
ongoing decipherment of
some
of
them must
be
regarded
as
a
brilliant achievement
of
modern scholarship. The Khitans introduced
in
920 the so-called large Khitan script and
in
925 the small script that seems
to have been syllabic;
the
single elements
or
syllabographs are either simple
Chinese characters
or
shaped like artificially constructed Chinese charac-
ters.
24
The Jurchens,
as
well, developed
two
scripts, also called large
and
small,
in 1119 and 1138,
respectively.
For
some time three written
lan-
guages, each with their own scripts, were used simultaneously
in the
Chin
state:
Chinese
for the
Chinese
and
Po-hai, Khitan
for the
Khitans,
and
Jurchen
for
the Jurchen sectors of state administration. Later
in
1191-2
the
Khitan script
was
officially abolished,
and
thereafter only Chinese
and
Jurchen were recognized as legitimate.
Unfortunately,
few
specimens
of the
Khitan
and
Jurchen scripts have
survived;
we
have
no
official documents
on
paper
or
silk, only epigraphic
monuments such as inscribed steles
or
inscriptions on seals and metal imple-
ments, plus
a
few graffiti
on
walls
or
ceramics. Little progress has been made
in reading Khitan. Although the Jurchen script was graphically modeled
on
24
For a
succinct discussion,
see
Daniel Kane,
The
Sino-Junhen vocabulary
of
the Bureau
of
Interpreter!
(Bloomington, 1989),
pp.
n-20; and Ch'ing-ko-erh-tai
et al.,
Ch'i-tan hsiao
nu
yen chiu
(Peking,
1985).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
32 INTRODUCTION
Chinese, Jurchen characters can in only a few exceptional cases be linked with
Chinese originals; rather the majority of Jurchen signs, which included both
semantograms and phonograms, were inventions. They can, however, be
deciphered because of the survival of
a
bilingual Chinese—Jurchen glossary of
the early sixteenth century, produced by the Ming Bureau of Interpreters.
2
'
The Tanguts also invented a script that at first glance looks like Chinese but
is in fact entirely unrelated. It was based on exceedingly complicated princi-
ples including many ideographical compounds. The decipherment of its
more than six thousand different characters was made possible by the great
number of surviving specimens, including epigraphy, manuscript texts, and
printed books, among which were many texts translated from Chinese. It was
once assumed that the Tangut script disappeared with the extinction of the
Tangut state, but in fact it continued to be among the Tanguts right through
the Yuan dynasty, and the last datable specimen of Tangut writing is a
Buddhist stele dated 1502.
26
The Mongols, who had no national script of their own when they rose to
power after 1200, had the great sense not to try to invent a complex writing
system like that of their predecessors but instead used the alphabetic script of
the Uighurs to write Mongolian. This is still today the official script of the
Mongols in the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region of the People's Repub-
lic of
China.
No decipherment was therefore needed, nor was it any problem
for modern scholars to read texts in the second national script for Mongolian,
which was devised by the Tibetan 'Phags-pa Lama (1235-80) and was de-
clared to be the national script in 1269. It was designed to be a universal
script for writing all languages and
was.
based on the Tibetan alphabet. The
letters, however, were not arranged horizontally as in Tibetan but vertically
so that the script could be used as an interlineary text together with Chinese.
Although no official bilingual documents in Chinese and Mongolian have
survived, with the exception of
copies
of
such
documents inscribed on steles,
it has been ascertained that a great part of the Chinese juridical texts written
in colloquial language that survive in several Yuan period collections go back
to the Chinese interlineary versions that accompanied the documents' origi-
nal Mongolian texts. As a result, the Chinese of
these
texts is ungrammatical
because the words follow the very different Mongolian word order and syn-
tax. The official use of colloquial Chinese was in itself an innovation, for
until the late thirteenth century, only literary Chinese had been used in
25 See Kane, The Sino-Junben
vocabulary,
for the most up-to-date study.
26 See the note by Hsu P'ing-feng in Chung-kuo she-hui k'o-hsiieh yuan k'ao-ku yen-chiu so, ed., Hsin
Cbung-kuo u k'ao ku fa hum ho
yen
chiu (Peking, 1984), p. 631; and Cheng Shao-tsung and Wang
Ching-ju, "Pao-ting ch'u t'u Ming tai Hsi Hsia wen shihch'uang," K'ao kubjuehpao, 1(1977), vol. 1,
PP-
I33-41-
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MULTILINGUALITY 33
government and administration. Even under the Mongols it was, moreover,
never totally displaced by colloquial Chinese, and throughout the Yuan
dynasty many edicts and ordinances were still written in the literary lan-
guage. We may therefore say that even within the use of Chinese language
and script, some kind of bilinguality developed under the Yuan.
Translation
The pro-Chinese intellectual elites among the foreigners not only frequently
achieved great skill in writing literary Chinese but also invariably tried to
acquaint their compatriots with Chinese literature through translations.
This,
too, must be regarded as an innovation; earlier conquerors in the Six
Dynasties period could not give their own people translations of Chinese
texts,
as they had no written language in which to record them. Not surpris-
ingly, under the conquest dynasties the selection of Chinese texts for transla-
tion was largely guided by considerations of what was regarded as useful for
governing the Chinese. Although information on translations into the
Khitan language is scanty and fragmented, it is known that in addition to
laws and medical works, some Chinese histories were translated, namely, the
ninth-century general history Tung li by Ma Tsung (d. 823) and the Chiu wu-
tai shih (the [old] History of the Five Dynasties), the latter chosen perhaps
because the period of the Five Dynasties coincided with the rise of the
Khitans to imperial power. Another historical work translated under the
Khitan was the Chen-kuan
cheng-yao
(Important principles of government
from the Chen-kuan period). This collection of conversations between the
T'ang emperor T'ai-tsung and his ministers provides a vividly written hand-
book on T'ang statecraft that, because of its political style and pragmatic
contents, was much appreciated by all the non-Han conquerors. It was later
translated into Tangut, Jurchen, and Mongolian and, centuries later, into
Manchu. Among the Khitan translations the Confucian classics are notice-
ably absent, which is surprising because they have always been in the eyes of
the Chinese an essential guide to ruling a state and regulating social rela-
tions.
Khitan emperors and ministers knew and made use of them but
apparently read them in Chinese.
A much fuller selection of Chinese works was translated into Jurchen.
Many Confucian classics were translated, including the Analects (Lun-yii) and
the Meng-tzu. A few Taoist books such as the
Tao-te ching
were also translated.
Among the histories we find translations of the Ch'un-ch'iu (Spring and
autumn annals), which was of course also one of the Confucian classics, and of
such standard dynastic histories as the Shih-cbi (Records of the grand histo-
rian),
the Han-shu (History of the Han dynasty), and the Hsin
T'ang
shu
(New
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34 INTRODUCTION
history of the T'ang). Also translated was a collection of seventy-nine model
examination essays (the
Ts'e-lin)
by Po Chii-i (772-846), which might have
served as an examination crib for Jurchen candidates. From Korean sources
we know that handbooks on strategy and the primer
Ch'ien-tzu wen
(One-
thousand-character classic) were also available in Jurchen versions. It seems
therefore that the Jurchens were more eager than the Khitans were to have
their nationals informed about Chinese history and civilization. Unfortu-
nately, not even the tiniest fragment of either the Khitan or the Jurchen
translations has been preserved.
The case is different for the Tanguts, whose translation activities were even
more comprehensive than those of
the
Jurchens.
In contrast with Khitan and
Jurchen translations, we do not have to rely on secondhand information, as
the many Tangut texts that have been discovered include translations of
Confucian classics like the Lun-Yii (Analects) and the
Meng-tzu,
encyclope-
dias,
and works on statecraft. Military treatises such as the
Sun-tzu ping-fa
(Master Sun's art of war) have survived in Tangut versions, and medical
handbooks were translated from Chinese together with texts on veterinary
medicine, the latter an important field of knowledge for the horse-exporting
state of Hsi Hsia.
The selection of Chinese texts for translation into Tangut was based on
considerations of practical usefulness. The same is true for translations of
books into Mongolian, but with the notable absence of Chinese handbooks
on military strategy, presumably because the Mongols who had conquered
the whole of China did not think that much could be learned from the
Chinese strategists of
antiquity.
Printed editions of translations from Chinese
are known to have existed and included the
Hsiao-ching
(Book of
filial
piety),
the Confucian exegetical work
Ta-hsiieh
yen-i (Expounded meaning of the
Great Learning), the
Chen-kuan cheng-yao
(Important principles of govern-
ment from the Chen-kuan period), and several handbooks on statecraft and
administration. Of these, only the
Hsiao-ching
in Mongolian has survived,
and a small fragment of what was probably the Mongolian translation of the
administrative handbook Ta-Yiian
t'ung-chih
(Comprehensive regulations of
the great Yuan). Other translations were made under the Yuan but never
printed, such as books on medicine and pharmacopoeia, works on political
ethics,
and the
Shu-ching
(Book of documents). Among the titles of unprinted
translations into Mongolian are also several works of
an
educating and edify-
ing nature, for example, a collection of anecdotes taken from Chinese history,
and gnomic works. The Chinese originals from which some of these transla-
tions were made cannot be identified.
All of this concerns what we may term secular literature translated from
Chinese. In terms of quantity, however, the translated Buddhist literature
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MULT1LINGUALITY 35
must have far surpassed the secular literature. Although Buddhism was both
popular and enormously influential under Liao and Chin, it is not known
whether Buddhist texts were ever translated into Khitan or Jurchen. The
Tanguts, on the other hand, produced a huge corpus of Buddhist scriptures in
their own language and script, translated from the Chinese versions. The
Buddhist canon in Tangut was printed in Hang-chou in 1302, long after the
extinction of the Hsi Hsia state, and some volumes of that edition have
survived, in addition to the great number of Buddhist Tangut texts found in
Khara-khoto. Under the Yuan, many Buddhist works were translated into
Mongolian, partly from Chinese and partly from Tibetan, and some fragments
of printed Buddhist scriptures have been discovered in Central Asia, mainly in
the
Turfan region. These represent, however, only
a small
fraction of the corpus
of Buddhist translations done under the Yuan. An impressive monument of
the multilinguality among Yuan period Buddhist
believers are
the inscriptions
at the Chii-yung Pass north of
Peking.
These pious texts exalting the religious
activities of the emperor recorded in six languages - Sanskrit, Chinese, Mon-
golian (in the 'Phags-pa script), Uighur, Tibetan, and Tangut - were in-
scribed on the interior
walls
of
a
huge gateway that
was
built in 1345 under the
last Mongolian emperor of China.
It is perhaps a legitimate question to ask to what degree the multilin-
guality of
the
states and their administrations was perceived by the masses of
the subjects. The answer can, at best, be speculative. Trials presided over by
a foreign judge who knew no Chinese might well have been the most fre-
quent occasion for a Han Chinese commoner to be confronted with a lan-
guage problem. The lowest echelons of administration that had the most
direct contact with the ordinary people were more largely staffed by Chinese
personnel. It was only in the higher political and military offices whose
activities impinged only indirectly on ordinary people that the foreigners
were overrepresented in relation to their overall numbers. This was certainly
the case under the Liao, Chin, and Yuan; there is practically no information
available on the ethnic composition of the Hsi Hsia bureaucracy. We could
advance the hypothesis that under all the dynasties of conquest, millions of
rural Chinese may well have never encountered a foreigner, at least in the
countryside. The cities, as a rule garrisoned by foreign soldiers, were a
different case. In the same way, not many Chinese outside the cities would
have ever seen a document in a foreign language and script.
There was, however, at least one feature of life among the population at
large that constituted a constant reminder of foreign domination. This was
money. Although there were fewer coins with a Khitan inscription than coins
with a Chinese inscription, such coins are known to have existed. Only one
specimen of a coin with a Khitan inscription has been discovered so far, a cash
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
36 INTRODUCTION
datable to the reign period from 1095 to no
1.
As far as we know, the
Jurchens never cast cash with Jurchen inscriptions but used only Chinese
script on their coins. The Tanguts issued coins inscribed in both Chinese and
Tangut. The paper money of Chin was exclusively printed in Chinese, with
no
Jurchen characters added. Under the Yiian, coins were cast that showed an
inscription in Chinese but spelled with 'Phags-pa characters, and the same is
true for Yiian paper money. The surviving specimens of Yiian paper money
have a long inscription in Chinese, and only the official designation of the
bills was repeated with a transliteration of the Chinese words in 'Phags-pa
script. Everybody who handled money in the Yiian period was therefore
aware that the state issuing the notes and coins was only partly Chinese.
People in the market had yet another opportunity of being reminded of the
multilinguality of the state: Some officially approved weights have survived
bearing inscriptions in Chinese, Mongolian, and Persian (in Arabic script).
THE HAN CHINESE UNDER ALIEN DOMINATION
What were the effects of this long period of foreign domination on the
Chinese population? Certainly the conquests themselves involved great loss
of life, widespread destruction of property, and the disruption and dislocation
of society at every level. This was least with the Liao, who acquired their
Chinese territories by negotiation and under whom disruption and destruc-
tion affected far more widely the former population of Po-hai, and with the
Hsia, who seem to have taken most of their territory in Kansu intact from the
incumbent regimes. The Chin conquest of the Liao empire met with only
halfhearted resistance and did not cause widespread destruction, but their
conquest of Sung territories in north China involved long years of bitter
warfare and much physical damage and social disruption. The Mongolian
conquest of Hsia and Chin was destructive out of all proportion to these
earlier campaigns. The Mongolian armies all but obliterated the central
territories of Hsia in modern Ning-hsia, and in their conquest of northern
China they wreaked havoc and destruction on settled populations on the same
scale as they had done in Iran, Russia, and northern India, destroying cities,
massacring their populations, and even contemplating turning north China
into pasturelands for their herds.
For a quarter of
a
century thereafter, north China suffered endemic warfare
and administrative chaos. At the end of the Chin in 1207, its empire had had
a population of about 53 million, at a time when China as a whole is usually
thought to have had between 110 and 120 million people. By the end of that
century in 1290, the total registered population of China had fallen to less
than 60 million and remained at that level in the late fourteenth century
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THE HAN CHINESE UNDER ALIEN DOMINATION 37
under the early Ming. The loss was particularly severe in the northeast. The
population of Hopei and Shantung fell catastrophically to little more than
one-third of its former level in the eighty years between 1207 and 1290.
Many factors make the interpretation of these figures difficult. But there
was clearly a huge loss of population during the thirteenth century, and there
is every reason to attribute much of this to the destruction wrought by the
Mongolian armies in northern China, although other factors probably played
their part. Southern China, by contrast, was invaded and conquered by a
Mongolian Yuan regime already firmly rooted in China and inured to Chi-
nese ways. Khubilai had every reason to attempt to take southern China
intact as far as possible and with its productive base undamaged, but here too
populations declined seriously over the thirteenth century, though not to the
catastrophic levels in the former Chin territories.
The different Mongolian policies enforced in their conquests in north China
down to 1234, and those imposed in the south in the 1270s, exaggerated
population trends already established under Sung. Although China's popula-
tion steadily grew during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, its distribution
began to change radically. In 742 under the T'ang more than 60 percent of the
Chinese people lived north of the Huai River. But by the twelfth century the
situation was reversed, with the majority living in the south. Even though
China's population as a whole had doubled, the population of the northwest
had actually declined, and that of the northeast remained static, although a
sizable population came to be concentrated around modern Peking, a major
metropolis under Liao and Chin. The Yuan conquest, which devastated the
north but left southern China relatively untouched, accelerated this trend and
left the northwest moribund and the northeast a relative backwater apart from
the region around their capital Ta-tu (Peking). Parts of Hopei did not recover
their mid-T'ang levels of population until the sixteenth century, and they have
never recovered their relative importance.
The conquests themselves were not the only destructive forces unleashed
on the Chinese population by these governments. All the alien dynasties were
military regimes in origin, and all engaged in frequent wars with their
neighbors, both in the sedentary realms of China and Korea and in the
northern steppe. Huge armies were conscripted for their campaigns, both
from the tribal populations, which had always lived in a state of constant
readiness for warfare and provided their cavalry, and from their Han Chinese
subjects, who were used as infantry in campaigns against sedentary states
where static warfare and the reduction of walled cities were necessary. Some
of their campaigns were immensely costly in lives; the Liao invasions of
Korea, the Hsia's constant wars with the Sung and Chin, and the abortive
invasions of Japan under Khubilai are just a few random examples in which
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
38 INTRODUCTION
losses were numbered in many tens of
thousands.
The huge costs of constant
warfare also put a great strain on the material resources of all the states of this
period: Much of the benefit from the vast increase in productivity in Sung
China was dissipated in supporting a huge army. The conquest dynasties
subjected their settled populations to constant arbitrary levies of labor and to
requisitions of goods needed by their military. Their command economies
gradually developed an ever-more complex system of households designated
as producers of specific products or as providers of special services, including
military services, for the state.
Also connected with the organization of these dynasties was a greatly
increased number of
slaves
and semiservile dependents, both state owned and
in private hands, and a broad tendency toward personal subordination in
society. Slavery was especially widespread under the Jurchen Chin. Each of
these dynasties seems to have permitted members of the ruling house to
establish huge personal followings and to administer their own personal
territories outside central control.
It is realistically impossible to compare the situation of the average Han
Chinese household living under the Sung with that of their contemporaries
living under any of the conquest dynasties: The level of taxation differed
little,
and the day-to-day government was not more oppressive. Many people
in the countryside probably rarely set eyes on one of their alien rulers. In the
cites,
however, things were different; troops and administrators were sta-
tioned there, and each of the conquering dynasties brought with them groups
of non-Han merchants and clients who played some part in government,
Uighurs under the Khitan and Uighurs and men from all over Western and
Central Asia
(se-mu)
under the Yuan.
For the educated Chinese elite, imbued through their education with ideas
of state service as officials, accommodation with the new order was more
difficult. The regions of China controlled by the Khitan and Tangut had
never supported a large, well-educated elite. They had always been cultural
backwaters, and even in
A.D.
900 they had for centuries been under military
rule,
with the local literati playing a minor role. But in both states, as they
grew to maturity there was great need of literate men in government service.
Many of these came from the Han Chinese population. The Liao eventually
had its own examination system, its own Han-lin academy (which was suffi-
ciently important to be given a Khitan name), its own state historiographers,
and its Confucian scholars who expounded the classics to its emperors and
heirs apparent. The Southern Administration was almost entirely staffed by
Han Chinese officials. Educated men wrote, published, and acquired surrepti-
tiously the writings of Sung authors. Buddhism flourished mightily under
imperial patronage, and many of the clergy were probably Chinese. Chinese
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THE HAN CHINESE UNDER ALIEN DOMINATION 39
art, too, continued. At least one early Khitan prince was a sufficiently fine
painter for his works to be included in Sung Hui-tsung's imperial collections:
Some survive today. The wall paintings discovered in Liao tombs are lively
and impressive descendants of the vigorous Chinese tradition of
figure
paint-
ing familiar from early T'ang. Liao architects laid out cities on Chinese (or
Po-hai) models and built great temple complexes, some of whose stone
pagodas remain standing.
Clearly, Chinese cultural life - a provincial, rather old-fashioned version,
perhaps, but still basically Chinese - endured and many of
the
Khitan nobil-
ity embraced Chinese culture side by side with their own. Many Han Chinese
served in the government, a few of them reaching the highest offices. How-
ever, the question of ethnic identity was complex. Some of these successful
Han families became increasingly like their rulers, intermarrying with
Khitan noble clans and, if they served long at court, perforce adopting the
Khitan life-style. The average Han Chinese official perhaps retained more of
his cultural heritage but was excluded from real positions of
power.
Impor-
tant decisions, especially military decisions, were a preserve for the Khitan
officers at the court.
The Liao government attempted to apply different rules to their Han
subjects and their tribal peoples. But this did not mean that their Chinese
population was misgoverned. Su Ch'e, who visited the Liao court as an
ambassador in 1090, was rather surprised to find that the law was not unduly
weighted against Han Chinese, though he was amazed at the degree of
corruption prevalent.
Nor do the Han Chinese seem to have been disaffected. They were the one
major ethnic group that never once rose up against the Khitan, and at the
very end, when the southern Han Chinese section of the Liao came under
threat simultaneously from the Sung and
the
Jurchen, the population fiercely
resisted the Sung and then gave up the Southern Capital to the Jurchen
without even token resistance.
It is more difficult to describe the situation under the Tanguts, for our
sources are less full and the ethnic groups within the Hsia state were less
neatly divided geographically than under the Khitan. But here again there
seems to have been a strong continuation of Chinese cultural life,
a
great deal
of publication and printing in both Tangut and in Chinese, and a lack of sharp
ethnic conflict between the ruling elite and the Han Chinese population.
With the Jurchen conquest the situation was altered. In both Liao and
Hsia the dominant non-Han groups were not greatly outnumbered by their
Han subjects. When the Jurchen conquered the Liao, they inherited the
manageable northern Chinese population of the border provinces, but when
they went on to conquer north China from the Sung, they found themselves
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40 INTRODUCTION
in control of a vast and steadily increasing Chinese population of more than
40 million people, almost
as
many as the entire population of T'ang China in
the eighth century. By 1207 their census listed 53 million people. The
Jurchen were certainly outnumbered by their Chinese subjects by more than
ten to one. Their response to this situation was an interesting and complex
one.
The Jurchen were, naturally, at some pains to preserve their racial identity.
Intermarriage with Chinese was forbidden, and at first the Chinese were
ordered to adopt the Jurchen costume and hairstyle. But at least after 1152
when Peking became the Central Capital and seat of government, the
Jurchen elite, unlike the ruling group of the Khitan, no longer lived in their
tribal homeland enjoying a peripatetic, seminomadic life-style. A Jurchen
population remained in Manchuria, but the ruling house and a majority of
the hundred or so great Jurchen ruling clans lived in former Liao or Sung
territory surrounded by Han Chinese. The Jurchen, like the Mongols later
on, differentiated between the Chinese populations conquered at different
stages - between the "Northerners," formerly subjects of Liao, and the
"Southerners" living in old Sung territory. Chin Shih-tsung preferred to
employ former Sung officials. A new policy imposed by the Jurchen was the
settlement of large detachments of Jurchen troops on extensive military
colonies throughout their Chinese territories. These, together with other
government lands, took up a considerable proportion of north China's farm-
land and were worked by Chinese dependants.
But Chinese society as a whole was little disturbed: Merchant, artisan,
landlord, and peasant continued their avocations. The literate elite were
drawn into government service, and as the Jurchen established a Chinese-
style central government on T'ang lines, Han Chinese continued to provide
the staff for most government bureaus. High culture was preserved. A huge
amount of literature was written in all genres, canonical exegesis, prose and
poetry, most of it reflecting conservative T'ang or eleventh-century Sung
standards and unaffected by the contemporary innovations under way in
Southern Sung territories, of which Chin scholars remained ignorant.
While Confucianism continued along rather routine paths, independent of
the Tao-hsiieh teaching that was gradually blanketing other forms of thought
in the south, Buddhism and, even more, Taoism
flourished
under the Jurchen,
and new literary genres aimed at a new semipopular audience - chantefables
and primitive dramatic performances
—
also emerged. Printing continued to
exhibit a high standard of
excellence.
Chin culture in which the highly culti-
vated Jurchen and Khitan participated along with Han Chinese may not have
achieved the polished perfection of the Southern Sung, but it was a sturdy,
independent tradition, equally firmly rooted in the Chinese past.
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