Subjects and Masters: Uyghurs in the Mongol Empire (review)

At the core of Michael Brose’s recent monograph (esp. Chapters 4–7) is a fascinating case study of a family of Uyghur Semuren 色目人 who, after four generations in China in the service of the Mongol Yuan regime, came to emulate Chinese literati. Family members adopted Chinese-style surnames (in this case either Xie 偰 or Lian 廉) and literary names; they studied the Classics; they became noted poets and calligraphers; they cultivated a reputation for filial sons and chaste widows; and they participated actively in a variety of elite pastimes, exchanging poems and parting prefaces with Chinese acquaintances, penning colophons to paintings, and hiking into the mountains to appreciate nature and cavort with Buddhist hermits. Although Brose may at times be too quick to take certain claims at face value—as when he concludes on the basis of a tomb epitaph that one Uyghur woman really was “steeped in the Confucian classics, and understood the proper roles of the filial wife and daughter-in-law” (p. 242)—taken as a whole, the evidence he provides is overwhelming. As such, Brose’s monograph not only constitutes the most detailed study to date of a Uyghur Semuren family in Yuan China, it can also serve as a basis for comparison with other well-known non-Chinese clans residing in China (such as the Tibetan Lun 論 family under the Tang and Pu Shougeng’s 蒲壽庚 family under the Song).

Brose’s study raises a number of stimulating questions. To begin with, why did Uyghur officials feel compelled to emulate Chinese elite practices? Here Brose focuses primarily on two possibilities: “They were undoubtedly genuinely attracted to Chinese cultural modes and ways, as we can see in examples such as Xie Wenzhi, who is said to have got the bug as a very young boy. They were probably also canny, sensing. . . . that Mongol rule of China would not last so very long, and were thus positioning themselves to be able to survive a future loss of Mongol political authority in China” (p. 266). In other words, they had both ideological and pragmatic reasons, surely a sensible explanation. Curiously Brose chooses not to enter into the sinicization debate, though in fact he provides fodder for both sides of the argument. On the one hand, when the author argues that “the consistent references . . . to the Xie family’s origins in Uyghuristan [i.e., Gaochang] and their Confucian character seems to be a subtle ploy to rest the family’s prestige on two, seemingly contradictory, bases of identity as ‘Confucianized Uyghurs’” (p. 203), one is reminded of Pamela Crossley and Evelyn Rawski’s accounts of the Qing emperors’ meticulous efforts to maintain a Manchu identity while simultaneously remaining “culturally null.” On the other hand, it is worth observing that these references to Gaochang are found in texts composed by Chinese contemporaries and, thus, they do not necessarily reflect the Xie family’s own sense of self-identity. Moreover, one should remember that places of origin were frequently appended to surnames as a sign of respect and that, within Chinese biographical genres, it was the norm to identify the individual’s place of origin. Would one necessarily expect the Chinese sources to falsify this information? In the end, given the sheer number of ways in which certain Uyghur Semuren emulated Chinese literati, the term “sinicization” would seem not entirely inappropriate.

Another important question raised by the book concerns the place of the Uyghur Semuren in Yuan society. On this issue, it seems to me, the author makes three important points. First, he rejects “the assumption that there was a clear division between political elites (Mongols and Semuren) and social and cultural elites (Chinese)” (p. 14). Instead, Uyghur Semuren “created simultaneous identities as political and social elites,” by means of which they “straddled that gap between subjects and masters” (p. 135), thus becoming “social actors as much at home among the powerful Chinese shidafu elite as they were among the...