The Jimen jiluan is an account of several waves of violence that occurred in Youzhou (modern Beijing) in 761, following the assassination of the rebel leader Shi Siming. The text was lost during or after the Song period, but a long excerpt is preserved in the Kaoyi (Historiographical Commentary) to the Zizhi tongjian.

Shi Siming was the third leader of the An Lushan Rebellion (755-763), after An Lushan and An Qingxu. An Lushan was a Turco-Sogdian immigrant who rose through the ranks of the Tang northeastern frontier army and became a Military Commissioner in 742. Lushan enjoyed great favor with the Tang emperor Xuanzong (r. 712-756) and was an ally of the powerful chief minister Li Linfu (d. 753). After Linfu’s death, Lushan feuded with the next chief minister, Yang Guozhong (d. 756). In 755, Guozhong’s attempts at turning Xuanzong against Lushan provoked a full-scale rebellion: Lushan marched the northeastern army on the imperial capitals Luoyang and Chang’an, succeeded in capturing both, and proclaimed himself emperor of a new Yan dynasty, with his capital at Luoyang. Xuanzong and his court fled to the Sichuan Basin, while Tang loyalist forces rallied and managed to contain the rebels from expanding further.

Lushan’s disgruntled son Qingxu assassinated him and seized the Yan throne in 757, but then lost power to Lushan’s general Shi Siming after losing Chang’an and Luoyang to counterattacks by the combined forces of the Tang court and the Uyghur khaganate. As Yan emperor, Siming oversaw a revival of rebel fortunes, including the recapture of Luoyang, but was himself assassinated at Luoyang in a conspiracy hatched by his son Chaoyi. Chaoyi then also moved to eliminate his younger brother Chaoxing (known in some sources as Chaoqing), whom Siming had favored over Chaoyi.

Shi Chaoxing controlled An Lushan’s original home base at Youzhou, which was defended by an ethnically diverse collection of rebel military units. His defeat and death, followed by a purge of his followers, apparently led to a highly volatile situation in which rebel troops of different ethnic origins began fighting it out in the streets. According to the Jimen jiluan, the losing side included a large number of Sogdians, and the winning side decided to finish the job by ordering a slaughter of all Sogdians in the city. The description of this massacre appears to have drawn inspiration from the Jinshu account of Shi Min’s massacre of the Jie in Ye (see source 4.4), particularly the reference to the Sogdians as Jie¹ and the notion that high-nosed people were vulnerable to being mistaken for (or falsely identified as) Sogdians and killed.

Some modern historians have read the massacre of Sogdians in Youzhou as evidence that An Lushan’s rebellion caused a xenophobic wave of anti-Sogdian hostility in the Tang. This interpretation does not fit the massacre’s context as part of an internecine conflict among the rebels. There is, in fact, no credible evidence of anti-Sogdian prejudice in the post-rebellion Tang court, which continued to employ large numbers of Sogdians as military personnel.

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At that time, [Shi] Chaoyi had already had [Shi] Siming assassinated and illegitimately claimed the imperial throne [of Yan]. He secretly ordered the bogus (i.e., rebel) Policy Adviser of the Left, Zhang Tongru, and the bogus Minister of Revenue, Kang Xiaozhong², to plot together with Chaoxing’s generals Gao Juren and Gao Ruzhen to have Chaoxing executed….

Tongru and Juren led more than ten infantry into the Rihua Gate [of Youzhou]. The bogus commander of the city garrison, Liu Xiangchang, encountered them and, surprised, asked them what their business was. Tongru looked to his left and right, upon which his men beheaded Xiangchang. Soon after, Chaoxing’s trusted subordinate Wei Minghe asked them the same thing and was also beheaded. The citadel descended into chaos. Chaoxing was terrified but was still able to put on his armor, pick up his weapons, and come out to fight with twenty to thirty of his trusted subordinates. They ran around the stables to find horses, but all were gone except for one sick horse.³ Chaoxing mounted that horse and tried to spur it forward, but it would not move. He then dismounted to fight on foot. Tongru erected a white flag to invite Chaoxing’s followers to surrender, promising that all who surrendered would be pardoned and retain their official posts and titles. Though the [hundred] young ruffians [who served as Chaoxing’s bodyguards] had benefited greatly from his largesse, they also resented the harsh beatings they had suffered under him. More than half of them surrendered. Nonetheless, Chaoxing went to battle with the ten or more who remained by his side. None of their arrows failed to find its mark and pierce deep into the body of its target. Tongru’s troops were defeated, suffering up to a hundred casualties, and retreated from the citadel. People [in the city] did not know the reason for the fighting; all hid in terror.   

Tongru fought for a long time at the city gates. Close to sunset, Chaoxing knew he was outnumbered and fled and hid in the Xiaoyao Tower on the city walls. No one knew his whereabouts. Tongru’s troops entered the imperial city and began looting its gold and silk. They took all the clothing belonging to the wives of Siming and Chaoxing. Around midnight, the Fan (foreign) general Cao Minzhi captured Chaoxing in the tower.⁴ Chaoxing said, “There are six or seven of us brothers. I am just one man, so what is the use of killing me?” Gao Ruzhen said, “Your Highness’s cruelty has made many of us resentful.”⁵ Chaoxing said, “Please let me off this one time; I won’t dare to be cruel again.” The men guarding him all laughed. He then said to Cao Minzhi, “This belt that I’m wearing is brand new and worth thirty taels of gold. I humbly present it to you, general.” Minzhi replied, “Once you’re dead, Your Highness, I can take it off your body myself.” Those around him laughed even harder. They strangled him with a bowstring, cut off his head, and sent it to Luoyang in a box.⁶ …

Tongru arrested Chaoxing’s followers and executed them all. One of Siming’s best generals, Xin Wannian, had enjoyed exceptional favor from Chaoxing. He was also good friends with Gao Juren and Gao Ruzhen; the three men were like brothers. When arresting Chaoxing’s followers, Tongru initially planned to include Wannian, but he forgot about Wannian when actually carrying out the executions. Afterwards, he ordered Juren and Ruzhen to behead Wannian and send him the head. Juren had wine laid out and drank with Wannian, saying, “Minister Zhang has ordered me to kill you, younger brother, and that’s why I’m here.” Wannian kowtowed and begged simply for a quick death. Juren yelled out, “We brothers are going to plot to capture Zhang Tongru; I would never kill you, younger brother!” So, Ruzhen and Wannian led their serfs, more than a hundred men in all, into the citadel and beheaded Tongru at the citadel’s southern covered walkway. The city [again] descended into chaos. They also killed several military commanders with whom they had long been on bad terms. Together, they elevated the bogus Secretariat Director Ashina Chengqing as commander of the city garrison.⁷ They put the heads of Tongru and the others whom they had killed into boxes and had Wannian take them to Luoyang, falsely claiming that these men had intended to surrender the city of Ji (Youzhou) [to the Tang court]….

Juren and Ruzhen led several hundred men, all fully armored, on patrols around the city, which frightened the people of the city even more. Chengqing served as garrison commander for one or two days but felt ill at ease. He and [Juren and Ruzhen] distrusted each other, so he led several tens of Fan cavalry soldiers out of the citadel and came to the gates of Ruzhen’s residence, where he sent a message: “May I trouble you, General, to come out and see me for a moment?”⁸ Ruzhen did not expect any danger, so he ran out in front of the mounted troops. Chengqing struck him with his sword, and he died on the spot. Chengqing went to the city’s eastern garrison and, with the bogus Minister Kang Xiaozhong, mobilized Fan (Türk) and Jie (Sogdian) [troops]. Juren heard that Ruzhen had been murdered and was shocked and enraged. He led the troops under his command to attack [Chengqing], and the two sides met in battle under the Yanshe Tower.

The battle lasted from noon to evening. Juren’s troops were all young men from the extramural militia (chengpang 城傍).⁹ They were brave and fast, riding and shooting arrows as if flying. Although Chengqing’s troops were many in number, they were no match [for Juren’s] and were routed; very many of them were killed or wounded, and the bodies of the dead lay in heaps like small mountains. Chengqing and Xiaozhong fled the city, gathered their surviving troops, and moved east to set up a defensive position at Lu county. They next went south to pillage other subordinate counties [of Youzhou] and pitched their camps in the open field for more than a month, before taking a minor route to Luoyang to explain what had happened. The families of the Fan troops [who had been left behind] in the city all climbed over the city walls and left, one by one. Juren issued an order to the people of the city: Anyone who killed a Hu would be generously rewarded. As a result, the Jie-Hu were wiped out. Even their small children were thrown into the air and impaled on spears. Very many people were wrongfully killed because they had high noses and looked like Hu.

[Translator’s note: The narrative goes on to explain how Shi Chaoyi sent his general Li Huaixian to Youzhou as its new Military Commissioner. After Gao Juren and his troops refused to accept Huaixian’s authority, Huaixian laid an ambush for Juren and had him killed. In 763, Shi Chaoyi lost Luoyang to a Tang-Uyghur counterattack and fled to Youzhou, but Li Huaixian had already surrendered to the Tang and refused to give Chaoyi sanctuary. Chaoyi then hanged himself and the An Lushan Rebellion finally ended.]         

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1. However, Tang loyalist propaganda against An Lushan often referred to him as a Jie or Jie-Hu, for reasons that are not fully understood. There may have been some perceived connection between the Sogdians and the Jie ethnic group of the fourth century (which was by then extinct). ↩︎
2. Kang Xiaozhong’s surname suggests that he was a Sogdian with family origins in Samarkand. ↩︎
3. There were originally more than a hundred fine horses in the city’s stables, but Zhang Tongru had earlier sent an armed detachment under Kang Xiaozhong to seize the horses at their usual watering site. ↩︎
4. In Tang military terminology, Fan 蕃 generals were officers in the Tang army whose families originated from lands outside the Tang empire. Cao Minzhi’s surname indicates that he was a Sogdian with family origins from Ushrusana. ↩︎
5. The text reads “Gao Ruyun,” but this is probably a scribal error mistaking 震 for 雲. ↩︎
6. Shi Chaoyi, like Shi Siming previously, ruled the Yan rebel regime from a court in Luoyang. ↩︎
7. Ashina Chengqing was one of An Lushan’s original inner circle of trusted generals. Little is known about him, but his surname indicates descent from Türk nobility. ↩︎
8. Because Ashina Chengqing was ethnically a Türk, these “Fan cavalry” were probably also members of Turkic groups who had joined the An Lushan Rebellion. ↩︎
9. The extramural militia were drawn from families living outside the walls of prefectural capitals. Due to limited sources, the ethnic composition of these militia forces remains unclear. Some Chinese historians believe they were predominantly recruited from foreign immigrants, but the text here seems to imply that the extramural militiamen under Gao Juren’s command were mostly Chinese. They may also have included men of Goguryeo descent, as some historians believe the surname Gao, borne by both Juren and Ruzhen, indicates descent from the Goguryeo aristocracy. ↩︎