The Yiyuan is a collection of supernatural tales compiled by Liu Jingshu, an official who served the Liu-Song dynasty and died in the 460s. This tale is set in the early years of the Eastern Jin, during a confrontation between the renegade general Wang Dun (266-324) and Jin Emperor Ming (Sima Shao, r. 323-325) in 324. Wang Dun was preparing to launch an attack on Jiankang, the Jin capital, when Emperor Ming went in person to scout out his camp. The confrontation ended with Wang Dun’s death from an illness and the decisive defeat of his forces outside Jiankang. The earliest version of the story of Emperor Ming’s reconnaissance mission is in the Shishuo xinyu (New Tales of the World) collection, which like the Youming lu (see source 4.5) was compiled under the auspices of Liu Yiqing. However, that version does not explain why Wang Dun would refer to the emperor as a “yellow-bearded Xianbei slave.” The Yiyuan version implies that he inherited his yellow hair from his mother, a Xianbei woman of base status from the northern frontier. The later Jinshu account of Emperor Ming’s reign repeats this interpretation and identifies his mother’s place of origin as “Yan and Dai” (northern Hebei and northern Shanxi).

This story has puzzled and fascinated modern historians, because no other source from the early medieval period describes the Xianbei as yellow-haired.¹ Moreover, tomb murals from the Northern Dynasties depict the Xianbei with black hair and facial features similar to the Chinese, and modern genetic studies appear to show that they had typical Northeast Asian phenotypes. One possible explanation is that the old Xianbei confederation included members of light-haired peoples from Central Asia, such as the Wusun and Yenisei Kyrgyz (see sources 4.12-4.15).

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During Wang Dun’s rebellion, he encamped his army at Gushu.² Jin Emperor Ming went personally [in disguise] to spy on the encampment. Wang Dun was then taking an afternoon nap and dreamt of a sun enveloping the city [of Gushu]. He awoke with a start and said, “A yellow-headed Xianbei slave came into our camp. Why didn’t anyone capture him?” The emperor’s birth mother, Madam Xun, was a woman from the principality of Yan.³ That is why he resembled [a Xianbei] in appearance.

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1. An early ninth-century Tang poem on the fall of the Western Jin dynasty refers to “yellow-headed Xianbei” capturing the city of Luoyang, but this appears to be poetic license and an allusion to the story about Emperor Ming. In fact, Luoyang fell to Xiongnu rebels in 311, not the Xianbei. ↩︎
2. At modern Dangtu county, Ma’anshan, Jiangsu province. ↩︎
3. The principality of Yan corresponds to modern Beijing. It was a fief held by members of the Wei and Jin nobility. According to her biography in the Jinshu, Madam Xun was a lowly maidservant who gained the favor of Emperor Ming’s father Sima Rui (later Emperor Yuan, r. 317-323) and bore him his first two sons in 299-301, when he was still a young prince in his early twenties. Sima Rui’s official wife (who was childless) saw Madam Xun as a threat to her position, while Xun herself openly expressed resentment at Sima Rui’s failure to promote her to the status of concubine. As a result, Sima Rui dismissed her from his household and grew estranged from her. When her eldest son Emperor Ming acceded to the Jin throne in 323, he had her brought to the imperial palace and accorded the treatment befitting an emperor’s mother. She outlived Emperor Ming by ten years, dying in 335. ↩︎