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Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

IV. The Indo-Chinese ' Kingdoms of Women '

In the Chiu T'ang shu, it is said that the ' Eastern Kingdom of Women ' bordered on the south-
east on Ya-chou (south-west of Ch'êng-tu), and was conterminous to the 羅 女 蠻 Lo-nü Man and the
Po-lang (or «White Wolf») Barbarians. The Po-lang are known from other texts, and are to be located
on the south-western border of Seü-ch'uan. The case of the Lo-nü Man is more difficult. In
principle, Man is the designation of tribes of southern China which are not of Tibetan origin : Lolo,
Nan-chao, the modern Yao who claim descent from P'an-hu, etc.; most of them lived or live in Yün-
nan, Kuei-chou and Tongking. Lo-nü seems to mean « Lo girl », « Lo woman », Lo (*Lâ) alone being
a transcription, and there are, from T'ang times down to the late Middle Ages, many mentions of a
tribe or kingdom of the Lo (*Lâ) or 羅 氏 Lo-shih (« Lo clan »). Among the ancient Pan-tun Man
(« Board-shield Man »; cf. supra, p. 679), there were five leading clans, the first of which was the
Lo clan (cf. d'Hervey de Saint-Denys, Ethnographie, Méridionaux, 56); in the middle of the
13th cent., we still hear of the Lolo Lo-pu, or « Lo tribe », the ancient seat of which was consequently
called Lo-pu, between Ta-li and Yün-nan-fu. But I am not prepared to propose a precise identi-
fication for the « Lo-women Man », and only wish to draw attention to the fact that the occurrence
of nü in the name suggests a rendering «Lo-women Man», i. e. seems to imply the notion of a 'King-
dom of Women ». This may be the ' Kingdom of Women ' west of the Pan-tun Man alluded to in
the Liang sŭ kung chi.

The tradition that one or several ' Kingdoms of Women ' existed in Yün-nan or in Indo-China
cannot be doubted. The Man shu, written in 864, describes in several paragraphs the countries
surrounding the Nan-chao kingdom of Yün-nan. One of them (44 b) is devoted to the kingdom
of 夜 牛 Yeh-pan (*Ia-puăn), lying north of the Nan-chao, in which women had sexual intercourse
only with demons (kuei; cf. also T'ai-p'ing yü-lan, 789, 18 b); this would seem to connect the tra-
dition concerning this kingdom with the tale of women having intercourse with demons in the
account of the 'Kingdom of Women' in Indonesia; but I think that the real connection is rather with
the later ' demon priests' of the Lolo. Another paragraph concerns the ' Kingdom of the Woman
King ' (Nü-wang kuo); this passage is also cited in T'ai-p'ing yü-lan, 787, 19 a, as drawn from the
Nan-i chih, « Description of the Southern Barbarians », which is the title under which the T'ai-
p'ing yü-lan cites the Man shu. The text is the following : « The Kingdom of the Woman King
is more than thirty days distant from [the seat of the] southern governor (鎮 南 節 度 chên-nan
chieh-tu) of the territory of the Man (i. e. of the Nan-chao Kingdom; the seat of this southern
governor of the Nan-chao probably was in the region of P'u-êrh or of Ssŭ-mao; cf. H. Maspero,
in BEFEO, XVIII, III, 32). This kingdom is ten days (erroneously « ten months » in T'ai-p'ing
yü-lan) from 驩 州 Huan-chou (in the modern province of Nghệ-an in northern Annam, perhaps
at the village of Nhạn-tháp; cf. BEFEO, IV, 183-184; XVIII, III, 30), and often engages in trade
with the people of Huan-chou. The Man robbers (Man-tsei, i. e. the Nan-chao) once led a punitive
expedition of 20,000 men against that kingdom, but were hit by the poisonous arrows of the Woman
King; not one out of ten remained; whereupon the Man robbers retired. » According to Maspero
(loc. cit., 32), the ' Kingdom of the Woman King ' must have been either a Tái (Thai) tribe or a