Shi Xiaozhang’s Spirit Road Stele and the Rhetorical “Barbarization” of Late Tang Hebei

In 1943, Chen Yinke proposed the influential theory that the late Tang court’s inability to reestablish direct control over the provinces of Hebei was due to the latter’s transformation into an ethnoculturally “barbarized” or “Hu-acculturated” (Huhua) region. Drawing on recent critiques of the theory, this essay reexamines the spirit road stele inscription that Liu Yuxi composed for Shi Xiaozhang in 838, a key piece of evidence for Chen’s view that the late Tang elite perceived Hebei as barbaric. By analyzing this passage and various other late Tang and Northern Song texts that have previously been cited to support the Hebei barbarization theory, I demonstrate that most of the texts cannot, in fact, be interpreted as evidence of ethnocultural change in that region or even as evidence for a perception of ethnocultural change on the part of the Chang’an elite. Moreover, rhetoric is a more illuminating framework for understanding why some of these texts (including the spirit road stele inscription) do impose an image of barbarism on autonomous regions like Hebei. This “barbarizing” rhetoric can be traced to a growing interest in associating the classical Chinese-barbarian dichotomy with distinctions between moral and immoral political behavior among Chinese subjects.