Ethnic Identity in Imperial China

An Online Sourcebook

Annotated translations of primary sources for the study of ethnicity in Chinese history, from the ancient dynasties to the nineteenth century

Future chapters

Chapter 6: Inner Asian immigrants

Chapter 7: Foreign religions

Chapter 8: “Barbarian” emperors

Chapter 9: “Han” identity

Chapter 10: The Qing empire

4.13 Ge Jiayun, Xiyu ji (Account of the Western Regions), ca. 738-740

Ge Jiayun (fl. 733-742) was a Tang general who served as Protector General of the Pacified West (Anxi) in 738-740, supervising the Tang empire’s military presence in the Tarim Basin. During his term as Protector General, he compiled a geographical description of Central Asia, the Xiyu ji, which is now lost except for quotes in the Tang huiyao (Tang State Compendium) of 961. The passage below is about the Yenisei Kyrgyz people, known to the Han empire as the Jiankun and to the Tang as the Jiegu, Hegesi, or Xiajiasi (all variant transliterations of Kyrgyz). Tang writers often used the older name Jiankun due to assumptions that older forms of ethnonyms were more correct.

For the sake of closer relations with the Tang empire, the Kyrgyz began claiming to be descendants of the Han general Li Ling in the early eighth century.1 This origin myth eventually gained them recognition as distant kin of the Tang emperor, since the Tang dynasty also claimed descent from Li Ling’s clan, the Li of Longxi commandery. But the myth also jarred with the fact, known to the Tang Chinese, that the majority of the Kyrgyz had light-colored hair and eyes. The Tang therefore rationalized that only the minority of Kyrgyz who looked like the Chinese were descended from Li Ling. It should be noted that the Kyrgyz people of today are predominantly black-haired, probably due to admixture with other Turkic and Mongolic peoples after their migration to the region of modern Kyrgyzstan.

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The people of the country of Jiankun are all red-haired and blue-green-eyed. Those among them who are black-haired and black-eyed are descendants of Li Ling. Therefore, there is a good basis for these people’s claim to be the descendants of the Colonel.2

  1. Li Ling and his army surrendered to the Xiongnu after being surrounded in the Altai Mountains in 99 BCE. According to accounts of the battle, his army originally numbered five thousand, of whom about three thousand survivors were captured. ↩︎
  2. Li Ling held the rank of Colonel of Cavalry (qi duwei) at the time of his capture by the Xiongnu. ↩︎