“Stubbornly Chinese?” Clothing Styles and the Question of Tang Loyalism in Ninth-Century Dunhuang

• In Event: After the Tang, Before the Tanguts: Diplomacy, Culture, and Religion along the Gansu Corridor in 800–1030 CE

Abstract

Many modern narratives of the period of Tibetan rule in Dunhuang (ca. 786–848) emphasize ethnic tensions between the Tibetans and Chinese, with clothing styles as their most visible manifestation. Some primary sources claim that Tibetan authorities forced the Dunhuang Chinese to wear Tibetan-style clothing except on New Year’s Day, when they were allowed to dress in Chinese style to perform ancestral rites, wailing bitterly as they did so. The Dunhuang manuscript P.3451 claims, however, that the Dunhuang Chinese persisted in wearing Chinese-style clothes throughout the Tibetan occupation, thus expressing a cultural identity that Arthur Waley and Edward Schafer, respectively, described as “stubbornly Chinese” and the “zeal of colonials for the pure customs of the fatherland.” Clearly, a contradiction exists in the sources regarding what kind of clothing the Dunhuang Chinese usually wore, even as these sources agree in interpreting Chinese-style clothing as a symbol of ethnocultural identity and Tang loyalism. Murals from ninth-century Dunhuang suggest instead that Chinese and Tibetan clothing styles coexisted, yet Chinese historians — privileging the textual sources — tend to read them as further evidence of covert resistance against a ‘Tibetanization’ policy. This paper analyzes the rhetorical agendas of the literary sources to argue that the forced ‘Tibetanization’ of clothing in the Hexi/Gansu region is a myth promoted by irredentist Tang literati of the early and mid-ninth century, whereas Dunhuang’s “stubborn” adherence to Chinese-style clothing is another myth that the Guiyijun regime in the late ninth century created as ‘evidence’ for an invented tradition of Tang loyalism.

Author

• Shao-yun Yang, Denison University