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Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

all the tribes to the north of the T'u-yü-hun. Although the Po-lan Mountain is not certainly iden-
tified and although the seat of the Po-lan may have more or less changed in the course of time, the
« great range » must be the mountains running from north-west to south-east on the left side of the
upper Yang-tzŭ. The Sea (or Lake) of Forty Li may be one of the lakes between the Ja chu and
the Dre chu (= upper Yang-tzŭ), and the region intended for the Kingdom of the Woman King
would be the same which is ascribed to it in texts of the T'ang times, but with a greater extension
to the south-east. It seems, however, that the information of the Wei shu and the Pei shih is due
to informants who had gone to the Kingdom of the Woman King not by the easiest route west of
Ch'êng-tu, but directly west from Sung-p'an.
After these texts of Wei times, bearing on the 5th cent. and possibly, for the second one, on
the beginning of the 6th, the next mentions of Kingdoms of Women in regions adjoining Tibet
occur about 600 A. D., in two notices of the Sui shu which have passed into the Pei shih.
In Sui shu, 83, 8 a-b (and Pei shih, 96, 10 a-b), there is a notice on a kingdom called 婦 國
Fu-kuo, located « more than 2 000 li to the north-west of the Shu commandery, i. e. of Ch'êng-tu
in Ssŭ-ch'uan. Fu-kuo, if we were to interpret it according to the common usage of Chinese
onomastics, would mean « Kingdom of Fu ». In this « Fu », HERRMANN saw the Tib. Bod, « Tibet »,
and hypothetically identified it with «Central Tibet» (in Sven HEDIN, Southern Tibet, VIII, 22)
or « Southern Tibet » (ibid., VIII, 441); cf. also his Histor. and Commerc. Atlas of China, 35 F 3,
and TP, 1936, 367. But fu (*b'ju) never had a final consonant, and so could hardly be a transcrip-
tion of Bod; above all, « over 2 000 li » north-west of Ch'êng-tu leads neither to southern, nor to
central Tibet, but somewhere outside the north-western limits of the present Ssŭ-ch'uan province,
i. e. south-east of the first sharp bend of the Huang-ho, and in about the same region where I have
already located the Po-lan. A note added to the text in T'ung tien, 187, 7 a, whence it has passed
into Wên-hsien t'ung-k'ao, 329, 4 a, says that this country joined on (接 chieh) the 汶 Wên Moun-
tain, and that this was the reason why it was called fu. In ordinary Chinese, fu means « dependent »,
and there was in ancient China a technical term 附 庸 fu-yung used in reference to small feudal
states, which was also occasionally used later in reference to nations of Central Asia (for instance
in Chiu T'ang shu, 196 B, 7 a). In Han times, owing to the many petty chieftains living on the
western borders of Ssŭ-ch'uan, an administration of 屬 國 shu-kuo, or « vassal kingdoms », had
been established on that frontier. Whether so named on account of the Wên Mountain, or because
it was considered as a « dependent » kingdom, Fu-kuo bears a purely Chinese name, which can
have nothing to do with « Bod ». The mention of the Wên Mountain (Wên-shan) corroborates the
location which has been given above. Wên-shan is the name of the southern part of the 岷 山
Min-shan, and extends over a large area in north-western Ssŭ-ch'uan; even if, as it is possible, we
should here understand Wên-shan as meaning the commandery (郡 chün) of Wên-shan, no change
would be required, since the commandery of Wên-shan was to the north-west of the modern 茂 州
Mao-chou and 理 番 縣 Li-fan-hsien, also in north-western Ssŭ-ch'uan. Moreover, the location
of Fu-kuo in the same region as the Po-lan is supported by the notices on Fu-kuo in the Sui
shu and Pei shih, which give at the end a long list of smaller tribes which had about the same
customs as the Tang-hsiang, and were in the dependency either of the T'u-yü-hun or of Fu-kuo;
the Po-lan are one of them. The notice on Fu-kuo is too long to be translated here; provision-
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