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0189 Notes on Marco Polo : vol.1
Notes on Marco Polo : vol.1 / Page 189 (Grayscale High Resolution Image)

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doi: 10.20676/00000246
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119. CARAGIAN   173

Hsin T'ang shu, 222 A, 4b; YS, 61, 4 b; misread « San-shên-lan » by a slip of CHAVANNES in TP, 1912, 612). But although Sa-t'am may actually be an old name, there is still some doubt as to the identity of the name, Sidam, of the king with that of the city. The inclusion of the story relating to that king in « Sanang Setsen »'s Chronicle is also somewhat surprising, but the king's lavish use of gold is quite in agreement with the old reputation of the « River of Golden Sand », and I think that LAUFER'S identification of SCHMIDT'S people of « Jang » (= Yang), in such a case to be read as Jang, has a good chance of being correct. I must add that the name is much older in Tibetan than has hitherto been assumed. In the Tibetan chronicle of the late T'ang period, which I brought back from the Tun-huang Cave, mention is made of Tibetan campaigns against Jan; the name certainly existed as early as the 8th cent.

But if I readily admit LAUFER'S identification of Mong. Jang in Qara-Jang, Cayan-fang, and Lolo-Jang with Darn, 'Jan, and 'fans of Tibetan texts, this does not give any definite clue either to the origin of the word Jang, or to its original ethnical meaning. In Mongol use, Qara-Jang is the

designation of the Ta-li kingdom, the former   â Nan-chao kingdom of T'ang times, which is
generally supposed to have been Thai (or Tai); the Cayàn-fang were Mosso; and the Loio-fang, of course, Loio; a motley crowd indeed. In 1904 (BEFEO, rv, 159), I had tentatively proposed to see in the Jang of the Mongol period the same name as that of the tt Ts'uan of Chinese texts. I expressed myself as follows : « I feel inclined to see in Jang a Mongol transcription of the name of the Ts'uan, but to reserve in principle the name of Qara-Jang for the tribes of the ancient Nanchao. The ancient Ts'uan, according to the Chinese, were divided into White and Black Barbarians

of Po-man and ,4 i ; Wu-man]; although the people of the ancient Nan-chao must not have originally belonged to the Ts'uan tribes, our sources state that they had for a long time intermarried with the Black Barbarians, and even that the Nan-chao were but a branch of the Black Barbarians. The Mongols may have applied to the Nan-chao the inaccurate designation that had

become the rule.   [In a note I explained that the designation was inaccurate because the real
descendants of the Black Ts'uan must have been the Lolo tribes, known under the latter name in Yüan and probably already in T'ang times, who were themselves subdivided into numerous tribes, including White and Black Lolo.] The Qara-Jang, in the broad sense of the name, would thus be all the tribes which were included in the Nan-chao kingdom, those of Yün-nan-fu where the Nanchao had their second capital as well as those of Ta-li where they always had their true metropolis, but the name referred more specifically to the Ta-li Valley, cradle of the Nan-chao. »

CHAVANNES dissented from me on the value of Qara-Jang when the term was taken in its restricted sense and not applied to the whole of the Ta-li kingdom. According to him (TP, 1904, 471), Qara-Jang, in its restricted sense, referred to the thirty-seven tribes which were called the Black Barbarians (Wu-Man), which occupied the eastern half of Yün-nan and were only in a state of relative dependence to the kings of Ta-li. CHAVANNES's arguments are not all of equal value. When he quotes Uriyangqadai's biography in which it is said that the Qara-Jang are the Black Barbarians (Wu-Man), this has no bearing on either side of the question, since the biography merely wants to define the Qara-Jang in relation to the Cad an-fang, who it says are the White Barbarians (Po-Man); the opposition is between the people of the Ta-li kingdom and the Mosso, not between the respective populations of Ta-li and Yün-nan-fu. In the same way, when the