Michael C. Brose has written an important book concerning the period during which China was incorporated into the greater Mongol Empire (Yuan dynasty, 1260–1368). Brose's book breaks new ground in the social history of the period by exploring immigrant families who served the Mongols. Known as semuren, literally “people of the various categories,” they ranked second in the official social hierarchy behind the Mongols. The first generation of immigrants came to China from elsewhere in Eurasia to serve as civil and military officials. According to the conventional view of Yuan history, the Mongols employed semuren because they distrusted Chinese bureaucrats, and as a result, Chinese tended to withdraw from contact with the government.
Brose complicates the standard understanding of the semuren through a study of the Uyghurs who served the Mongols in China. He argues that the barriers between Uyghurs and Chinese were far more permeable than we previously imagined. These multilingual Uyghurs cultivated identities as loyal semuren of Inner Asian descent, but they simultaneously espoused Confucian values and integrated into Chinese literati society. Brose's argument profits from a grounding in social science theory of identity. Following the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Brose contends that Uyghur families adopted “strategies” of training sons in multilingual literacy and bureaucratic skills that served as “cultural capital” to maintain status simultaneously in Mongol political and Chinese social hierarchies of power.
Chapters 3 and 4 investigate the histories of several Uighur semuren lineages. They originated as social and political elites in the Gaochang Uyghur kingdom, located at the Turfan oasis in present northwestern China. When the Uyghur king voluntarily submitted to Chinggis Qan in 1209, many of the Gaochang elite entered into Mongol service. The Mongols particularly valued the Uyghurs for their bureaucratic talents and literacy in multiple languages. The early adherence of these Uyghurs to Chinggis Qan became valuable “political capital” that allowed their descendants to inherit high status.
Chapters 5–7 focus on one Uyghur line that eventually adopted the surname of Xie. Their strategies of identity are particularly well documented in Chinese-language sources, including local gazetteers, epitaphs, eulogistic poetry and essays, and a family history. The progenitor of the Xie lineage, Eren Temür (1190s–1260s) is introduced in chapter 3. He entered Mongol service in typical Inner Asian fashion by joining Chinggis Qan's personal bodyguards as a youth. Early in his career, he participated in military campaigns and later moved to Shandong to tutor the sons of Chinggis Qan's youngest brother. Eren Temür's son, Qara Buqa (1246–84), and grandson, Xie Wenzhi (d. 1340), held civil and military posts in north and south China. Xie Wenzhi eventually moved the family residence and ancestral graves from Shandong south to Jiangsu. He had five sons and a nephew who passed the prestigious Confucian jinshi civil service examination between 1315 and 1330 and pursued purely civil careers in the provincial and central governments. Members of this generation had excellent reputations as literati, but they continued to take public pride in their Uyghur heritage and serve the Mongols as semuren. The family's adopted surname is an excellent example of their ability to straddle the worlds of Mongol power and elite Chinese culture. Xie is a homophone of a common Chinese surname, but the chosen graph had distinctly foreign connotations referring to the Selenga River in Mongolia, their supposed ancestral homeland.
The exclusive focus on the Xie in the later chapters enriches our understanding of their cultural strategies but sacrifices attention to the wider context. Brose argues that the dual identities of the third and fourth generations of the Xie reflected the general tendency of elite Uyghur families to maximize social and political power and, more particularly, was a strategy to hedge against the potential fall of the Mongols. While this may partly explain Xie actions, some contemporary Uighur semuren made fewer accommodations to Chinese norms. For example, some families did not adopt Chinese-language surnames. What explains the differences? Were geographic or political factors involved? The Xie's residence in the literati heartland of southern Jiangsu perhaps influenced their choices. Political alignments also may have played a role. The most prominent member of the fourth generation, Xie Zhedu, was appointed to high offices under the reformist Prime Minister Toghto (1340–44, 1349–55) but retired while the nativist Prime Minister Bayan was in power. What were the cultural strategies of Bayan's semuren followers? An additional chapter on other Uyghur families in the early fourteenth century might have allowed a finer analysis of variations in semuren identity.
Although Brose has not issued the final word about the Uyghurs in Yuan China, he has written a pathbreaking book that offers valuable insights into identity and power in the Mongol Empire. Subjects and Masters should be an essential addition to the libraries of all scholars interested in premodern Chinese and Inner Asian social, cultural and political history.
