The Cham of Vietnam: History, Society and Art

The “Account of Champa” in the Song Huiyao Jigao

138 c฀h฀a฀p฀t฀e฀r฀ 6 The “Account of Champa” in the Song Huiyao Jigao Geoff Wade The use of Chinese texts in (re)constructing the history of Champa is certainly not a new undertaking. Many of the histories of the successive Cham polities of Linyi, Huanwang and Zhancheng have been written with the assistance of Chinese sources. For the period examined in this paper — the tenth to thirteenth centuries — Chinese texts are essential adjuncts to both the Cham inscriptions and the Vietnamese sources in writing Champa history. Georges Maspero in his seminal study Le royaume de Champa made great use of the Song dynastic history Songshi (宋史), as well as Wenxian tongkao (文獻通考), but did not have access to the work examined here: the Song Huiyao Jigao (宋會要輯稿) (SHYJG), often rendered in English as “Draft of the collected statutes of the Song Dynasty”.1 Chinese and Japanese scholars have long been utilizing this source in its original, and Robert Hartwell has also made some use of it, but it has never been made available in any translation.2 As a preliminary study to an eventual full translation of the account of Champa in the Song Huiyao Jigao, this paper is intended to make some suggestions about the usefulness of the text as a source for the history of that polity. 06 ChamViet.indd 138 1/17/11 11:30:01 AM The “Account of Champa” in the Song Huiyao Jigao 139 THE SONG HUIYAO JIGAO The dynastic histories of the successive Chinese dynasties included reports on various aspects of institutional history. Later, these sections were included in encyclopaedias and were also published as separate works, under the generic rubric of huiyao (會要) (literally “collection of the key elements”, but perhaps better translated as “rules and regulations pertaining to matters of state” or “institutional account of the dynasty”). As part of the institutional histories, these works also included selections of memorials and other major texts created during that dynasty. In some cases, they were almost encyclopaedias of the knowledge of the age, at least in terms of that knowledge necessary for statecraft. The Song Huiyao Jigao as we know it today was not actually edited until the late Qing dynasty — in fact in the early nineteenth century. The compilation of the original work, however — the Song huiyao in 2,200 juan (volumes) — had been carried out during the Northern and Southern Song dynasties in a process which extended from the early eleventh century until the middle of the thirteenth. It was a continuing account of the various institutions compiled by the Secretariat in the capital, but was never printed. After the collapse of the Song, this manuscript work was used by the Yuan administration as a major source for the compiling of the standard history of the preceding dynasty — in this case the Songshi — which was carried out in the first half of the fourteenth century. By Ming times in the early 1400s, almost half the original Song huiyao had been lost, but the extant sections were included in the huge (22,877 juan) encyclopaedia produced by the Yong-le Emperor — the Yongle dadian (永樂大典), completed in 1408. The sections of the original work were spread throughout this encyclopaedia, which was organized according to character rhyme. In 1809, the Qing scholar Xu Song (徐松) was appointed as a reviser for the compilation of the Quan Tangwen (全唐文), a compendium of writing from the Tang (618–907) dynasty. During the process of compiling this work, Xu Song had access to the Yongle dadian and began concurrently assembling the references from the Song huiyao contained in that work. He died before he could re-arrange these in any coordinated way. This version was lithographed by the Peiping National Library in 1935–6. Another variant of Xu’s compilation was published in 1957 by the Zhonghua Shuju in Beijing under the title Song Huiyao Jigao Bubian (宋會要輯稿補編) in eight volumes. It is from the latter edition that the text analyzed here is taken.3 06 ChamViet.indd 139 1/17/11 11:30:02 AM Geoff Wade 140 CHAMPA IN THE SONG HUIYAO JIGAO The account of Champa contained within the SHYJG is of course permeated with the rhetorical topoi so common in official Imperial Chinese writing about those beyond China, and there needs to be critical reading of the text to ensure that these rhetorical structures are not assumed to be a reflection...