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Title: The Three Chaste Ones of Ba: Local Perspectives on the Yellow Turban Rebellion on the Chengdu Plain.
Author : The Journal of the American Oriental Society
Release Date : January 01, 2005
Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,
Pages : * pages
Size : 226 KB

Description

It is something of a truism in discussions of early imperial Chinese history that the so-called Yellow Turban rebellion of the late second century C.E. played an important role in the demise of the Han dynasty. (1) With the court weakened by factions of bureaucrat-officials, eunuchs, and in-laws fighting over control of a series of young and ineffective emperors, an uprising centered in eastern China and led by Zhang Jue [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and his brothers Bao [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and Liang [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in C.E. 184 served as not only a theologically based outlet for pent-up peasant outrage against the state, but also provided a window for another type of opportunist to take control of the dying state. The various military men who were ordered by the court to put down the Yellow Turban rebellion, after completing their assigned tasks in relatively short order, (2) then established themselves as regional warlords, later seizing control of the Han emperor, and eventually establishing three independent states, thus ushering in a four-hundred year period of political disunion in China. This much of the story is well known, though to much of the world it is recognizable primarily from the fictional account of these events in the fifteenth-century novel attributed to Luo Guanzhong [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] the San guo yanyi [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] [Extended Meanings of the Records of the Three States]. While the standard dynastic histories covering the period, Fan Ye's [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (398-445) Hou Han shu [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] [Later Han History] and Chen Shou's [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (233-297) San guo zhi [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] [Records of the Three States], mention the uprising, (3) they tend to outline the rebellion and its impact mainly on the Han court and the lives of its major players, especially military officials. In both cases, the standard historical accounts focus on the rebellion at the imperial level and virtually ignore how the event played out in smaller locales across the "subcelestial realm." This focus is due largely to the particular set of concerns typically addressed by orthodox historiography, and not because of the absence of local evidence. Similarly, the limited scholarship on the uprising in Western languages appears focused on a few key issues, particularly the religious affiliation of the rebels and potential links between the Yellow Turbans in eastern China and the contemporaneous Way of the Celestial Masters (Tianshi dao [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) in southwestern China. (4) Chinese scholarship, on the other hand, has long fixated on the rebellion as a manifestation of class-struggle in "feudal" China. Here I shall present the case of the Yellow Turban rebellion on the Chengdu Plain in southwest China as gleaned from the standard histories and local histories of the third and fourth centuries C.E., and attempt to tease out the impact of this event on the local population and on later historiography and popular memory. Although the Hou Han shu and San guo zhi mention the Yellow Turban rebellion over one-hundred-fifty times, (5) these standard histories rarely offer more than lists of names, places, and dates of civil unrest linked to the rebels. Fan Ye's Hou Han shu notes the Yellow Turbans twenty-one times in the annals of Emperors Ling [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (r. C.E. 168-89) and Xian [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (r. C.E. 189-220), the Han rulers during whose reigns the uprising occurred. Yet, few details are offered. For example, a typical mention of the rebellion in the Hou Han shu reads something like, "In the third year of the Chuping era (192), the Yellow Turban-bandits of Qing province [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] entered Yan province [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and killed the acting city administrator Zheng Sui [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], then turned an