Gender and Empire: A View from Yuan China

Since in Euro-American academe scholars of the non-West are often (perhaps inevitably) marginalized, I am very pleased to be included in this project devoted to exploring the interactions of gender and empire in the medieval world. At the same time, I would be less than intellectually honest if I did not point out that the terms of the inquiry immediately raise serious methodological and perhaps even epistemological questions: To what extent can these terms be translated across cultural boundaries?

Of the three central categories in the proposed enterprise—gender , empire , and medieval —only the first is unproblematically applicable to the Chinese case. Although China's gender system was in many respects very different from that (or those) of medieval Europe, China clearly had a gender system, and like those elsewhere in the world it was fundamentally premised on a hierarchy of male over female. ¹ And in China as elsewhere, the image of male-female hierarchy was frequently deployed as a symbol or metaphor for political and other types of power relations, as we shall see further below.

The meaning of the term empire in the Chinese context is far less transparent. In modern Chinese, the word used to translate the English word empire is di guo (literally "emperor's (or imperial) country"), but that particular understanding of the term di guo is a nineteenth-century neologism directly related to China's experience of Euro-American imperialism in that period. The term di guo was never conventionally used to refer to China itself. That said, historians of China routinely speak of the "Chinese empire." In order to explain what we mean by that phrase I must ask the reader to undergo a crash course in Chinese political history.

In the standard historiography, the founding of the Chinese empire is credited to the man who in about 221 B.C.E. managed to vanquish all other contenders for power in the north-central heartland of the geographical entity we today call "China." Deciding that the designation used for rulers up to that point (wang , usually translated as "king") did not convey the unprecedentedly grand nature of his conquest, this man created a new title for himself, the title that we translate as "emperor" (huang di ). The reign of this "First Emperor of Qin" was short-lived, however, and the real archetype of what is commonly called "empire" in China was established by the succeeding regime, which founded a new dynasty on the First Emperor's model. This was the Han dynasty (202 B.C.E.-220 C.E.). Like Rome, with which it is often compared, the Han not only established suzerainty over central China but sent its military out to conquer distant realms. Eventually Han military power came to extend south into present-day Vietnam, east into the Korean peninsula, and west as far as the Tarim Basin. More important, the Han implemented a number of institutions, most notably a system of centralized bureaucracy serving a hereditary imperial house, that were to be the mark of "Chinese" imperial government into the twentieth century. It was also in this period that the term Han became an ethnic/cultural marker, used to distinguish settled agriculturalists living under Han rule from those under the dominion of nomadic tribes outside Han borders. ²

When the Han collapsed in the early third century, China entered what is commonly called a "period of disunity" (known in Chinese historiography as the "Northern and Southern Dynasties" [220-589]) during which, for several centuries, a succession of ethnically (culturally?) Chinese regimes in south-central China contended for power with regimes founded by non-Han "barbarian" invaders in the north. But whatever the distinctions of customs, language, and political organization between the northern and southern regimes, at least in later Chinese historiography these regimes (some of which lasted for over a century...