Tang China’s Relations with the Pastoral Nomads of Inner Asia, 618-756

FAIN: FB-53191-07

Jonathan Karam Skaff
Shippensburg University (Shippensburg, PA 17257-2200)

This project will examine Tang China’s diplomatic, military, economic and cultural interactions with the Turks and other tribes on China’s northern frontier, who conventionally have been portrayed as “barbarians” starkly opposed to “civilized” Chinese. This study will argue that frequent pragmatic interactions occurred between nomadic peoples and Tang civil and military officials stationed in the northern borderlands. Seeking to attract allies and gain an advantage in warfare against the nomads, Tang officials consciously and unconsciously adopted Inner Asian diplomatic and military practices. The resulting effects on Tang culture and institutions demonstrate that borderlands could be important conduits of premodern cultural change.

Associated Products

Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors: Culture, Power, and Connections, 580-800 (Book)
Title: Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors: Culture, Power, and Connections, 580-800
Author: Jonathan Karam Skaff
Abstract: Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors challenges readers to reconsider China's relations with the rest of Eurasia. Investigating interstate competition and cooperation between the successive Sui and Tang dynasties and Turkic states of Mongolia from 580 to 800, Jonathan Skaff upends the notion that inhabitants of China and Mongolia were irreconcilably different and hostile to each other. Rulers on both sides deployed strikingly similar diplomacy, warfare, ideologies of rulership, and patrimonial political networking to seek hegemony over each other and the peoples living in the pastoral borderlands between them. The book particularly disputes the supposed uniqueness of imperial China's tributary diplomacy by demonstrating that similar customary norms of interstate relations existed in a wide sphere in Eurasia as far west as Byzantium, India, and Iran. These previously unrecognized cultural connections, therefore, were arguably as much the work of Turko-Mongol pastoral nomads traversing the Eurasian steppe as the more commonly recognized Silk Road monks and merchants. This interdisciplinary and multi-perspective study will appeal to readers of comparative and world history, especially those interested in medieval warfare, diplomacy, and cultural studies.
Year: 2012
Primary URL: http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/HistoryWorld/Ancient/?view=usa&ci=9780199734139
Primary URL Description: Oxford University Press US website
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780199734139

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