Constructing Ideals, Defining an Era: Event, Process and Rhetoric in the Lives of Yelü Chucai (1189-1243)

• In Event: Between Epigraphy and History: New Approaches to Premodern Chinese Life Writing

Abstract

The life of the Kitan scholar and official Yelü Chucai has been considered in great detail and remains highly influential in assessments of thirteenth-century China, yet little attempt has been made to pull apart the layers of his portrayal. His three extant biographies, the spirit-way inscription composed by Song Zizhen in 1267, the composite biography in Su Tianjue’s Mingchen shilüe of the 1320s and the biography in the Yuan History (completed 1370), are all clearly related and all idealize their subject. The texts nonetheless praise his life and frame his participation in Mongol governance very differently to pursue divergent rhetorical ends. Interrogating the intersections of these texts at important points and incidents, this paper will expose key elements at each layer of Chucai’s portrayal. The funerary inscription, which provides the basis for the other two portrayals, is concerned, alongside its subject’s personal morality, with underlining his and his family’s value as loyal Kitan cultural intermediaries, in the past and the future. Edited by Su Tianjue with an eye to the changed circumstances of the early fourteenth century, the text was amended again in great detail by the Yuanshi compilers to produce a more specifically ‘Chinese’ model minister for Ming officialdom and sharpen criticism of those around him. Interrogating these editorial decisions and priorities in the handling of his biographical material afford essential insights into the compilation process and its impact on models of officialdom, governance and post-Mongol Chinese identity.

Author

• Geoffrey Humble, University of Birmingham