IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| Notes on Marco Polo : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
| 181. COTAN 419 his first embassy in 632. It may be that the transcription was adopted only then, though there is another possible solution. Already before 618, a Central Asian painter who, despite certain minor difficulties, was probably a Khotanese, and connected with the royal family, had come to China, where his foreign style of painting had found great favour; his fame was however surpassed by that of his son, who was summoned to the Chinese Court c. A. D. 627, and who did, among other paintings, portraits of the Khotanese royal family. The father is known as n` Yü-ch'ih Pa-chih-na (*-1uat-d''i B'uât-t'si-nâ, *Vijayavardhana ?), the son as r ~ fff Yü-ch'ih I-sêng (*•juat-d"i •1ét-sang, but the personal name need not be here a transcription); on the two painters, cf. WALEY, An Index of Chinese artists, 98. It may be that both received the Chinese surname Yü-ch'ih only after 632, but it is perhaps more likely that, in imitation of the already existing surname Yü-ch'ih, it was given to Yü-ch'ih Pa-chih-na at an early date, perhaps under the Sui, and was extended only in 632 to all the members of the royal family of Khotan. Since the surname Yü-ch'ih existed before it is recorded as that of the royal family of Khotan, we should expect it to be an accurate transcription, and to have been chosen only on account of a certain phonetic analogy. On the other hand, the form to be rendered was not so much Vijaya as the form which Vijaya had taken in Khotanese, and we know now that this form was Visa, whatever may be here the value of the small semicircle, generally indicating « that some sound had ceased to be spoken » (cf. KoNOw, in JRAS, 1914, 342-343; Saka Studies, 12, 195). But, if Yü-ch'ih was not used as the surname of the kings of Khotan before the beginning of the T'ang dynasty, that does not mean that the « surname » Vijaya does not occur earlier as a mere transcription. There was in the 1st cent. a king of Khotan called Ti 1 Wei-shih (*Jwi-ii; cf. TP, 1907, 201), though it would be too risky to restore as Vijaya this Wei-shih, occurring as it does at such an early date and among names none of which can be restored with any probability. More important is the text of the Sui shu (83, 5 b) saying that the sur- name of the king of Khotan was f Wang and that his personal name was t jr ,~j Pei-shih- We do not know how the family name Wang, so common in Chinese, came to be attributed to the king of Khotan in the Sui shu. But Pei-shih-pi-lien, though it is not a very strict transcription, seems to have a fair chance of representing a name well known in the Khotanese royal genealogies, Vijayavikrama (cf. Ancient Khotan, 582; THOMAS, Tibetan Texts and Documents, t, 126, 142, 143, 147, 162, 163; HOERNLE'S « Turkish » hypothesis, in JASB, 1899, Extra-Number, 7, cannot be retained). The final part -n instead of -ma would be in agreement with a Khotanese form of the name; both -ana and -ama had given -am in that language (cf. BSOS, ix, 541). It seems difficult to suppose that this Vijayavikrama (?) should be the same person as the one who figures in our fragmentary lists, and who seems to have lived in the 8th cent. (KoNow, in JRAS, 1914, 349; THOMAS, loc. cit. 163); but there may have been two Vijayavikrama, just as THOMAS is led to admit that there were two Vijayavarman and two Vijayakirti. The Khotanese king of 632 about whom the Hsin T'ang shu says that his family name 27. | |||||||||||
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