Download PDF | Kotyk, J. Sino-Iranian and Sino-Arabian Relations in Late Antiquity China and the Parthians, Sasanians, and Arabs in the First Millennium (Vol.8) brill 2024.
351 Pages
Foreword
Chinese, Iranian, and Arabic studies should theoretically benefit each other, and this is what any competent mind working on late antiquity and medieval subjects, particularly when the “Silk Road” is strictly involved, should expect. But apart from a very few specialists who have taken the risks to march into these adventurous areas, the necessary skills—or network of skills—necessary for such a multicultural journey are not as common as we might and should expect. In this regard, even if the aims of individual specialists might differ, it is increasingly necessary for us to consider interconnected worlds in order to better comprehend intellectual and historical phenomena that have marked the history of different centers of cultural and economic influence in the past.
The present study builds on a remote precedent, at least for some points of inspiration, which was the epoch-making Sino-Iranica: Chinese Contributions to The History of Civilization in Ancient Iran, with Special Reference to the History of Cultivated Plants and Products, written by Berthold Laufer (Chicago 1919). This work focused on the pre-Islamic Iranian influence in China. The present study tries to include additional points of view and follows other lines of investigation. In this respect, Jeffrey Kotyk, with his deep competences in Chinese and Japanese studies—which could have otherwise restricted his interests to a unilateral (Sinocentric) approach—has shown a rare intellectual ability in focusing firstly on the spread of the Indian Buddhist tradition in Iran, and then to follow its transmission from Iranian Central Asia to China without neglecting the long history of the intercultural relations between Parthia, Persia, and China with diachronic and synchronic sensibilities. At the same time, he has been able to trace developments in the opposite direction, critically evaluating the Chinese comprehension and interpretation of their neighbors in the West. In particular, the concern of the author for astral matters (astronomy, astrology, calendrical problems, and astral lore) will guide the readers to some very intriguing subjects, which will show the influences of an unpredictable (and in some cases unexpected) dialogue among different actors, such as Indians, Iranians, Arabs, and Chinese.
Furthermore, the study of the interaction emerging from such a melting-pot generated by so many different ethno-religious communities has inevitably required very scrupulous and prudent treatments of the complex phenomena at hand. Kotyk has shown the intricate relations among Zoroastrians, Manichaeans, Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, and Taoists. Popular and aristocratic social mechanisms have been observed, with scrupulous care for the diplomatic dimension and its consequences on the history of the Irano-Chinese and Arabo-Chinese relations in late antiquity.
The attention shown to the collapse of the Sasanian Empire and the impacts of the Islamic wave in Central Asia and western China is another merit of this study, which covers the historical phase until the end of the 1st millennium CE. This study follows the continuous trends of evolution in both Irano-Chinese and Arabo-Chinese relations, which could not be interrupted and left to another book. The study offers a historical evaluation of subjects that do not necessarily fall within a single domain of historical studies (e.g., Sinology, early Islam, and Sasanian history), but there is still a need to treat all of them together based on the available data in a way that satisfies the needs of disparate fields. In this regard, I must insist on the fact that the writing of this book was not so simple, given the very different methodologies and historical traditions under consideration, to say nothing of the language and philological barriers that would normally direct scholars away from such complex research.
The investigations of this book have taken into consideration many relevant aspects concerning economic and material exchanges between China and its western neighbors. Trade and international markets are discussed from various angles. The detailed material dimension of this discussion does not take away from other topics in the book. We should further note that the bibliography collects a large number of original studies in Mandarin Chinese and Japanese, which normally do not consistently appear in Western scholarship. This is a great merit of the work and constitutes strong evidence of excellence. I am certain that this book will open up new problems and facilitate fresh discussions. It should provoke further investigations. In this sense, this study offers a new brick in an intellectual bridge that might foster a new history of Eastern/Western Central Asiatic relations during such a difficult historical phase of world history, full of critical and dramatic events. This is a history that attempts to be something other than just the influence of the West on the East (or the East on the West), but rather something that tries to focus on shared global experiences of major changes in world history.
March 19th, 2024
Antonio C.D. Panaino
Ravenna/Bologna
Preface
This monograph is the fruit of the project “Sino-Iranica: Investigating Relations Between Medieval China and Sasanian Iran” that formally commenced in July 2022. The preliminary research started in 2018, when I began collaborating on the topic with Antonio Panaino, an eminent scholar of Iranology at the University of Bologna. In 2017, Antonio acted as a member of my dissertation committee at Leiden University. While writing my dissertation, I came across his excellent studies on the sciences of ancient Iran, which were related to my work on astrology in China. We subsequently invited him to evaluate my doctoral dissertation. He kindly accepted, offering valuable assistance and pointers. My project was hosted at the University of Bologna’s Dipartimento di Beni Culturali (DBC) in Ravenna, Italy. This project received two years of funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, through a Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement (No. 101018750). I am thankful to the EU Commission and the administration of the University of Bologna for facilitating this funding. I have utilized a number of resources for digitized Chinese texts, especially CBETA, SAT, SAT Taishōzō Image DB, Kanripo, CTEXT, and WikiSource, but in most instances I have checked these against the printed editions or digital facsimiles. I also wish to acknowledge my use of the image database of the project, “Visualization and Material Cultures of the Heavens,” hosted at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. For Chinese Buddhist figures, I utilized the Buddhist Studies Person Authority Databases (人名規 範檢索). I have consulted the digitized Japanese encyclopedias on Kotobank .
A number of handwritten manuscripts from the National Diet Library of Japan available in digital format have proven valuable. Part of the research for this book was carried out at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in November 2022, and again in November 2023. I utilized the library resources at Columbia University in New York City in January 2023, when I was kindly hosted by Michael Como and Bernard Faure. I utilized the collection of the Asian Reading Room at the Library of Congress in Washington DC in March 2023. Over the years, and for the present project, I have used the Digital Dictionary of Buddhism, edited by Charles Muller. I would like to extend my thanks to the colleagues who encouraged me to write this book, especially Antonio Panaino, Or Porath, Alessia Zubani, Francesco Calzolaio, Jonathan Silk, Jinhua Chen, Martina Palladino, Paolo Ognibene, Floriana Marra, and Cody Bahir. I have received comments and pointers from many scholars, which I deeply appreciate. Jayarava Attwood offered helpful comments, all of which I appreciate.
I must thank Kristen de Joseph for copyediting the book. The Chinese names and words in this book follow standard pinyin. The reconstructions of Middle Chinese words and names follow the system of Pulleyblank (1991b). For the romanization of Sasanian names, I have tried to follow those used in Shahbazi (2005) in Encyclopedia Iranica. The citations of secondary sources otherwise leave all names unmodified. The Arabic words are generally transliterated using Brill’s system, unless a given term is commonly known in current English. The Sanskrit terms follow the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST). All faults and errors in this study are my own. I take full responsibility for everything in this book.—Jeffrey Kotyk 康傑夫 (b. 1985) “Nam studere servire Deo est.”—Picatrix
Introduction
China and Iran have long enjoyed cultural and economic relations throughout history, yet the significance of West Asian polities—not only Parthia and Sasanian Iran, but also the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates—to Chinese history of the first millennium is not well recognized today in the academic and public spheres. The relationship between India and China, especially through the intermediary of Buddhism, is much better acknowledged and appreciated in scholarly and popular conceptions of Chinese relations with foreign cultures in premodern times. Central Asia polities and peoples, such as the Sogdians and Khotanese, for example, also receive attention from Sinologists, but Iran as a cultural sphere and economic counterpart also had a role to play in the evolution of China.
In reconstructing late Sasanian history, Iranologists have long benefited from Chinese records of deposed Sasanian royals fleeing to China, but my readings of modern Iranological scholarship have led me to believe that the contemporary Chinese sources and the unique Chinese reception of Iranian cultural phenomena remain understudied. Classical Chinese sources, as well as scholarship in modern East Asian languages, such as Mandarin Chinese and Japanese, could richly contribute to the field of Iranology. The Chinese side of late antiquity has much to tell us about Iran.1 The present study of Sino-Iranian relations is not without its scholarly foundations. Chinese court historians of past eras collated and surveyed primary historical sources, whether for state histories or encyclopedias, and these form the basis of much of our research. Some premodern Chinese Buddhist historians also compiled histories that are useful for our purposes. Modern scholars have subsequently dealt with various aspects of Sino-Iranian relations. Many authors have contributed to our understanding of “Sino-Iranica” in the areas of diplomacy, cultural contacts, material culture, language, and religion, but as a subfield of Asian Studies, “Sino-Iranica” has seldom been treated as a single sphere of dedicated study after the time of Berthold Laufer (1874– 1934).
It was Laufer who coined the term Sino-Iranica, effectively creating an original subfield. In 1919, Laufer in published the pioneering study on Sino-Iranian relations. He famously titled his work Sino-Iranica: Chinese Contributions to the History of Civilization in Ancient Iran, with Special Reference to the History of Cultivated Plants and Products. This is a foundational monograph, and its worth was recognized immediately after it went to press. Hopkins (1920: 653–654), for instance, wrote that “Dr. Laufer does cover a great deal of ground in fact, the greater part of the continent of Asia, and who knows where he will stop!” Laufer examined not only botanical matters, but also delved into the primary sources in Chinese that discuss Iranian culture: for example, he examined the titles of officers and members of the royalty. Laufer studied a diverse range of primary sources available to him. His work firmly established the notion of long-distance cultural and material links within the study of Sinology, which emphasizes the historical influence of West Asia on East Asia.
Recently, Ephraim Nissan has further emphasized these links, assembling a volume of collected papers celebrating Laufer’s monograph, titled For the Centennial of Berthold Laufer’s Classic Sino-Iranica (1919): Sino-Iranica’s Centennial. Between East and West Exchanges of Material and Ideational Culture. Nissan’s (2020: 13–86) overview of Laufer’s influence reveals the deep impact that Laufer made on later scholarship. The present book is certainly indebted to Laufer, and it is my hope that we can build upon his foundational scholarship a century after his monograph was published. Two contemporaries of Laufer, Édouard Chavannes and Paul Pelliot, published an innovative and influential study, “Un traité manichéen retrouvé en Chine,” in the Journal Asiatique between 1911 and 1913. This extensive study on Manichaeism in China delves into a number of other problems in Sino-Iranian relations, such as lexical issues and the transcription of Iranian vocabulary into Chinese. Their study demonstrates the utility of using dynastic histories, encyclopedias, and other compendia. Pelliot also wrote extensively on the so-called Nestorian stele of 781. His notes were edited by the eminent Sinologist Antonino Forte in a 1996 book titled L’Inscription Nestorienne De Si-Ngan-Fou. Forte expands upon Pelliot’s notes, and in the same volume offers a philologically rigorous and hitherto unmatched study of the Chinese primary sources related to the history of the Church of the East during the Tang period.
Other valuable early studies of “Nestorianism” (a problematic term, since the Church did not refer to itself like this) in China include those by Saeki, who published The Nestorian Monument in China in 1916, followed by The Nestorian Documents and Relics in China in 1937 (second edition printed in 1951). Papers in Japanese by Haneda Tōru, collected in 1958, also offer valuable observations and remarks. Research has been ongoing in East Asia. Zeng Yangqing (2005), for example, has published a valuable study in Chinese on all the extant Chinese Christian texts of the Tang period. In 2006, another Christian stele with inscriptions was unearthed in Luoyang. In 2009, Tang Li published a preliminary study of the stele with a translation, in an important volume of collected papers by several scholars, titled Hidden Treasures and Intercultural Encounters: Studies on East Syriac Christianity in China and Central Asia.
The subject of Chinese Christianity was revisited in some recent monographs. In 2018, Todd R. Godwin published Persian Christians at the Chinese Court: The Xi’an Stele and the Early Medieval Church of the East. In 2022, Matteo Nicolini-Zani published The Luminous Way to the East: Texts and History of the First Encounter of Christianity with China. Recently, I have also touched on the subject of the Magi in Chinese sources (Kotyk 2023c). There are still other studies on Christianity in Tang China. This subfield is certainly evolving. The focus of the present book will be on highlighting Christianity and its significance as an intermediary in Sino-Iranian relations. Sino-Iranian relations in late antiquity are mostly documented in diverse Chinese sources. There are scattered references to China in the extant corpus of Middle Persian and Syriac texts, but these are very limited in content. In 1983, Paolo Daffinà published an extensive study on the Chinese accounts of Sasanian Iran in a paper titled “La Persia Sassanide secondo le fonti cinesi.” This study has remained underappreciated since it was published. Samuel Lieu has written broadly on Manichaeism. He has also put together an excellent study on the diplomatic situation between China, Byzantium, and Persia in the period leading up to the Islamic conquests (Lieu 2000). Taking Daffinà and Lieu together, we get a good overview of the international exchanges and complex realities of the Sasanian period from a contemporary Chinese perspective. Studies by Rong Xinjiang are also quite valuable in approaching Sino-Iranian relations. A number of his studies have been translated into English: for example, Rong’s The Silk Road and Cultural Exchanges Between East and West (2023) touches on late Sasanian history as it is recorded in Chinese sources, especially in the article “Persian and Chinese:
The Integration of Two Cultures in the Tang Dynasty.” Encyclopedia Iranica—originally in print, but now available and updated regularly is a repository of information about Iran. When I cite this resource, the date associated with the author is taken from the “last updated” record given on the website, rather than the dates of the printed articles. Among the many articles I reference from there, there are several by the eminent Sinologist Edwin Pulleyblank, who has discussed Parthia and Persia in Chinese sources. In 1980, The Japanese Iranologist, Itō Gikyō, wrote a book titled Perushia bunka toraikō ペルシア文化 渡来考 (On the Arrival of Persian Culture), in which he discusses the eastward spread of Persian culture, particularly in the areas of art, as well as astrology, but further proposes that Zoroastrians had also come to Japan in antiquity. Two of his papers (1979, 1986) suggest that Zoroastrians, fleeing the collapse of the Sasanian empire, had somehow landed in Japan. He interprets some obscure words and persons in early Japanese history and literature as being Iranian in origin. Although present day scholars do not accept his interpretations, his work does point to other more demonstrable elements of the Iranian cultural sphere that were brought to East Asia. Studies on Zoroastrianism in East Asia are substantial, but the available primary sources are limited. I am unaware of any Zoroastrian texts in Middle Chinese, whereas we do have extant Christian and Manichaean works in Chinese. In 2015, Aoki Takeshi contributed an overview, “Zoroastrianism in the Far East,” to The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism. This is an accessible overview. It offers a good starting point, but one might find much more detailed research in Japanese and Mandarin Chinese.
There are also documents related to Zoroastrianism, either directly or indirectly, among those rediscovered at Dunhuang in northwest China. Kanda (1939) studied one of the poems written at the Zoroastrian temple there sometime in the ninth or tenth century. Ogawa (1966) extended this study further, surveying the ritual schedules and other data (documents related to finance and logistics) connected with the Zoroastrians at Dunhuang. In China, one of the pioneering modern scholars was Chen Yuan, who in 1922 published a study on the introduction of Zoroastrianism into China. There have been a number of monographs and many papers in Mandarin on Zoroastrianism in China (Xianjiao 祆教) since then: for instance, Lin Wushu (2005) is quite useful. I also consulted Zhang Xiaogui (2005, 2011, 2020, 2021). Also important is the perception of Zoroastrianism in Buddhism (a topic for which the Chinese Buddhist canon is quite valuable), which has been taken up by Silk (2008) and Deeg (2022). There are also many studies on Chinese Manichaeism. One of the most prominent authors in the West is Lieu. In 1985, Peter Bryder also published a study, The Chinese Transformation of Manichaeism, which looks specifically at how the religion was adapted by missionaries in China. Bryder also examined the transcriptions of Iranian words in Chinese Manichaean texts, but some of these could be reconsidered. Our understanding of Manichaeism in China is also evolving due in part to the rediscovery of manuscripts, such as those found in Xiapu 霞浦 in Fujian, which have been studied in detail by Zhang Xiaogui (2016) and Gábor Kósa (2020).
My concern in the present book is to link what we know about Iranian religions in China to modern Iranological scholarship, and also to highlight the adaptation and integration of these religions into the local environments in the context of wider Sino-Iranian relations. The history of astrology in China is another topic to which the present book will direct some attention. The presence of Sogdian loanwords for the planets in Tang Chinese texts was already pointed out over a century ago by Chavannes and Pelliot, but this was not in a study of astrology. Research on the practice of Buddhist astrology in China and Japan has been taken up by Yano Michio. Further research on the topic has been carried out by Niu Weixing and Bill Mak. In the past, I have also attempted to identify what is Indian and what is Iranian (or Indo-Iranian) in the relevant texts, magical practices, and iconographies.2 To this end, I have found it beneficial to carry out a comparative approach to Hellenistic and Islamicate models of astrology. In this monograph, I aim to discuss some of the problems regarding Sino-Iranian connections in premodern astrology and astronomy, especially because the practice of astrology extended into religious domains. Astral magic, in which people petitioned or venerated the planets, was brought to China initially from Indian traditions, but material from West Asia was evidently also adapted and used. This is an important but largely overlooked element in the story of Sino-Iranian relations in late antiquity.
The material and commercial exchanges between Iran and China are of particular interest to the study of Sino-Iranian relations, but this subject requires caution. For over a century, Laufer’s book has been indispensable for understanding how some botanical items and aromatics, for example, went from Iran to China. Building on his work, I think we can revise a few of his conclusions, but also extend the discussion to a number of new areas, such as metals and materia medica. Since Laufer’s time, there have been scholars who attribute a great many things to “Persia” based on an uncritical interpretation of the toponym Bosi 波斯. Many have imagined Bosi as categorically referring to Persians even after the demise of the Sasanians. The image presented is one of Sasanian and post-Sasanian Persians being the major maritime trading power between the Persian Gulf and South China during the Tang dynasty.
Laufer already cautioned us about this, but the insistence on reading Bosi as “Persia” in all cases persists, so I also present a fresh body of evidence to argue that Bosi in the context of maritime contacts ought to have been a polity or ethnonym—likely Barus—in Sumatra. The early history of Islam and the conquest of Persia by the Arabs is an especially challenging subject, based on the fact that contemporary witnesses of those events, recorded in languages such as Syriac, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, offer a strikingly different depiction from what is related in later orthodox Islamic histories. The same observation can be made in relation to Chinese sources from the Tang period. There are contentious debates among Arabists over how to treat the early history of Islam: some use the traditional Islamic texts as historically objective accounts, while others take a very critical approach, examining contemporary eyewitness reports together with numismatic evidence in order to reconstruct that critical period in history without so much reliance on religious histories. In this respect, two leading scholars include Fred Donner and Robert Hoyland. Neither work with the original Chinese sources directly, but Hoyland’s famous book, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam, cites translations from the Chinese accounts of the Arabs in the seventh to ninth century. More work has been done on these sources in Japanese and Chinese. One notable author is Tazaka Kōdō (1964), who has given an extensive overview, in Japanese, of the Chinese materials that relate to Islam, but evaluates them based on whether they conform to orthodox Islamic history. Discrepancies in the Chinese accounts are read simply as errors. Zhang Xinglang (1888–1951), whose works on China’s relations with foreign polities were recompiled in 2018, dealt with Sino-Arab relations and his interpretations of the primary sources are likewise valuable. Leslie (1986) also provides some valuable translations in a monograph titled Islam in Traditional China: A Short History to 1800. Building on these works, the lacuna that I aim to address is that of connecting such diverse Chinese sources to the wider discussion of how others saw the rise of the Arabs and Islam. We can also use these sources to describe how the Sasanians collapsed, at least according to the Chinese tradition of history writing. To this end, I have found it necessary to translate the sources as I read them, rather than relying on the translations of others. The present monograph builds upon this past scholarship and attempts to offer a dedicated study on Sino-Iranian relations, and what they meant to China and by extension the rest of East Asia. Laufer has already demonstrated that Iran and West Asia as a cultural and linguistic area exercised a significant influence over Chinese material culture, though his lessons are not always so well heeded in Sinology today. “Silk Road” studies of the last century have tended to focus on India and Central Asia as the sources of foreign cultural elements in East Asia, with less attention paid to West Asia. Trade between West and East Asia is also arguably neglected. Rezakhani (2010: 420) has pertinently argued that “the concept of a continuous, purpose-driven road or even ‘routes’ is counterproductive in the study of world history but also that it has no basis in historical reality or records.” In the modern conceptualization of the Silk Road, Rezakhani (2010: 422) also points out “the thousands of kilometers separating the shores of the Mediterranean from Bukhara and Samarkand are conveniently neglected.” In this book, I aim to focus on relations between China and these neglected regions. I will argue that the trade connections between West and East Asia are important to consider in terms of geopolitical developments during late antiquity. For example, how did trade with China, famous for its silk exports, affect relations with Byzantium and Iran? How were imports from Iran—such as gemstones, textiles, and metals—incorporated into the Chinese economy, and what did people do with them? Did unique imports from Iran have any role in material religious practices in China? This book, I wish to emphasize, is a general study, not an exhaustive survey of every item of evidence and point of contention in the secondary literature. Such an undertaking would require multiple volumes. Instead, my aim in this book is to tell the history of Sino-Iranian relations in the first millennium in terms of diplomacy, culture, religion, commerce, and material exchanges. I aim to offer a readable guidebook with both Sinologists and Iranologists in mind. We should acknowledge the reality that West and East Asia did, in fact, share significant connections in late antiquity. These relations are also inevitably reflected in Chinese texts, from which we can gain an understanding of emic views: for instance, what did Parthia mean to the Chinese? What kind of realm was Persia to literati, and how did such views differ from those of Daoist and Buddhist authors? How did the Chinese first perceive the Arabs after they had conquered the Sasanians? We must also recognize that there are a number of challenges in reconstructing the history of Sino-Iranian relations.
The nomenclature in Chinese, for example, can be confusing or ambiguous at times. The identities of persons and some trade goods also require detailed discussions, since modern dictionaries are not necessarily authoritative or conclusive. In the spirit of Laufer’s methodology, we must critically examine all primary sources and often make an argument about the identity of a person or item based on etymologies and other elements. Only in recent years have we come to enjoy access to an enormous corpus of digitized Chinese texts, including the Buddhist and Daoist canons, and the availability of works is growing with the evolution of optical character recognition (OCR) technology. This offers a great advantage to Sinologists, who can cross reference and examine texts on a scale unthinkable only a few years ago. Whether it be Buddhist texts or Daoist alchemical treatises, we can instantly read how people used things that were initially associated with Iran in varying ways. There were also, of course, the religions of Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and Christianity, as well as a small number of Jews, in China. The extent to which they interacted with Chinese religions is an intriguing question, especially in the case of Buddhism, which inherits from India negative perceptions of Zoroastrianism. We also have at least one account of a Buddhist monk and Christian cleric collaborating on a project. My background in East Asian religions has benefited me in this regard, so I would like to not only show what Iran meant for East Asian religions at an emic level, but also to illustrate the utility of using the Buddhist and Daoist canons to better flesh out Sino-Iranian relations, even when, in some cases, such relations were fantastical and imagined. At the same time, I aim to show that East Asian sources can not only tell us about how people of the region viewed Iran and the early caliphates, but also that sources in Classical Chinese can offer objective historical facts that historians ought to consider when reconstructing West Asian history. One of my main propositions in this book is that Chinese sources related to Sino-Iranian and also Sino-Arabian relations ought not to remain limited to Sinology, but that historians of wider global history ought to consider these sources in their own right, to better understand Iran and Arabia in late antiquity. China was a literate observer with recorded histories. The Chinese witnessed the Parthians, Sasanians, and early caliphates, albeit from afar.
The Chinese court also consistently interacted with representatives of all these cultures. We are indebted to historians of the past, such as Al-Ṭabarī (839–923), for reconstructing Sasanian history, but I would suggest that Chinese histories might also furnish some objective data on Persia. For instance, the commonly accepted history of the final Sasanian kings is at odds with what we read in the Chinese histories. This is a problem that must be at least recognized and addressed. Although the conceptions of West, East, and South Asia are practical, we must not remain too attached to such notions. Moriyasu (2007) makes a point that Tang China ought not to be limited to a conception of an “empire” in “East Asia”—which in itself is a modern geographical conception—but rather that it ought to be considered on the eastern side of Eurasia, in which, as a country and cultural sphere, it interacted with the wider continent as a whole, while furthermore holding a significant position in the global political order. Iranology tends to focus more on Sasanian relations with Rome-Byzantium as the “other superpower,” without proper consideration of how the Sasanians approached the Chinese on their eastern frontier. Similarly, Sinologists arguably overlook the significance of Iran to China. My approach in this study is to consider Asia as a whole in as much as possible. Indian cultures, of course, must also be included in this discussion. This book cites reconstructed pronunciations of Chinese characters. These are given in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
The reconstructed Middle Chinese readings are those of Pulleyblank (1991b), the Later Han, of Schuessler (2007). The database of Chinese characters on Wiktionary apparently includes Pulleyblank’s reconstructions among several other systems by different scholars, although these are not always input correctly, much to my dismay after having consulted the database. Pulleyblank’s system distinguishes Early Middle Chinese (EMC) and Late Middle Chinese (LMC), which Wiktionary does not distinguish. I have therefore relied on the printed edition of Pulleyblank’s book. My only modification to Pulleyblank’s readings is that I use ꜛ for the rising tone and ꜜ for the departing tone in Late Middle Chinese, as the notational symbols used in Pulleyblank’s book are not in Unicode (see Pulleyblank 1991b: 8). These reconstructions are important because the modern pronunciation and pinyin spelling of Mandarin Chinese significantly differ from how Middle Chinese was spoken. These reconstructions are tentative, but they are nevertheless essential when deciphering foreign names and words in Chinese transcription.
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