Law, Subjecthood, and State Control in Early Tang (618-755)

Abstract

The early Tang (618-755) was an empire of military expansion and cosmopolitanism. At its largest extent, its territory extended from the Korean peninsula to present-day Afghanistan. It governed a large multi-ethnic population and it attracted into its borders many foreign merchants, Buddhist monks, and immigrants. Under such complex circumstances, whom did the state consider as insiders and outsiders of its empire? What was the imperial court's conception of subjecthood? And how did it assert its control over those that it identified as its subjects?

This thesis argues that laws and institutions of imperial governance were foundational to the conception and administration of subjecthood in the early Tang. It proceeds from a philological study of the terms used in Tang law to denote subjects and foreigners. It shows that the Tang court drew these distinctions on the basis of political affiliation, not ethnicity. People who accepted the court's rule over them were deemed Tang subjects regardless of their ethnic background and so the Tang court absorbed many non-Han people into its empire as ordinary subjects, drawing on their manpower and tax revenue. Against this picture, the thesis re-examines the practical significance of the well-known 'Hua-Yi distinction', a notion that differentiated insiders, 'Hua', and outsiders, 'Yi', on ethnic and cultural grounds. Although this notion has been widely seen as the fundamental idea of self-identification in the pre-modern Sinitic world, this thesis proposes that ethnicity and culture in fact played only a limited role in defining members of the empire and in binding members of the Tang populace to their state.

To test how the Tang court's normative views of subjecthood worked in practice, the thesis turns to a series of case studies. Each explores a different set of challenges that the Tang state faced in maintaining legal and administrative control of its subjects. These case studies show how the Tang court used sophisticated systems of household registration, immigration control, and naturalisation to enrol subjects on state records, regulate travellers' activities, and accommodate immigrants. Foreigners under the Tang, from Goguryeo princes and Nihon noblemen to Sogdian merchants and Buddhist monks from the Indian sub-continent, were all subject to close surveillance and strict regulation. So, although the Tang is widely regarded as an open empire which always welcomed foreign people and cultures, this thesis discloses a restrictive side of the empire that historical cliches have tended to obscure. Show more