Introduction
Controlling the physical movement of people was a well-established tradition throughout imperial China. Scholars have argued that the Qin (221–206 BCE) and Han (206 BCE–220 CE) empires required their subjects to register personal information, including their place of residence, with local governments, and both empires exerted strict control over the flows of officials and those who traveled for personal reasons within the territory, mainly through checkpoints and travel documents.Footnote 1 Recent studies have also shown that forced resettlement was a common means of mobility regulation. Ancient states, from the Qin to the Mongol empire, achieved their imperial goals through a variety of measures, one of the most important of which was the relocation of subjects and conquered peoples whenever and wherever they saw fit.Footnote 2
There is, however, another aspect of state control of population movements that has rarely been studied in its own right. How did states regulate the movement of people coming from outside? In this essay, I use the case of the Northern Wei dynasty to explore this question. Issues of interest include the evolution of Northern Wei policies concerning migrants and the modes of regulating their mobility (whether entry to the Northern Wei, mobility within the empire, or return to their home state), the state's role in supervising the geographical mobility of migrants, how interstate relationships shaped and were shaped by migration policy and practice, and the ways in which state policies affected migrants.
Unlike the unified Qin and Han empires, the Northern Wei was situated in a multipower world. Built by the Tuoba (Tabgatch) clan of the Xianbei (Sarbi) people, who reportedly originated in Inner Mongolia, the Northern Wei was one of the Inner Asian–built states in North China. It emerged in the fourth century and did not become the sole northern ruler until the early fifth century. In South China during this era, there were four successive dynasties based in Jiankang (modern Nanjing), all competing to become the dominant power and vying for political legitimacy with the Northern Wei: the Eastern Jin (317–420 CE), the Liu-Song (420–79 CE), the Southern Qi (479–502 CE), and the Liang (502–57 CE). In this context, constant military conflict was an everyday reality for people in both the north and the south; even during periods of truce, low-level friction in the border areas was not uncommon.
As a result, a considerable number of men and women were displaced. Waves of conquered peoples from South China flowed into the Northern Wei capital cities. In addition, many southerners fled to the Northern Wei, either individually or with their family members and followers. Often, when power in the south changed hands, imperial family members of the dethroned dynasty crossed the border to seek safety in the north, and some of them even allied with the northern ruler against the usurper back home. High-ranking civil and military officials, too, left the south in great numbers because of either political persecutions or their personal interests.
One consequence of such northbound migrations was that people from south of the border were viewed as a critical domestic and diplomatic issue by the Northern Wei government. The concern can be attributed not only to the number of migrants but also to the possibility that migrants from the rival state could act as a fifth column. Furthermore, the question of how to deal with certain high-ranking individuals, especially exiled imperial princes, posed a challenge for the northern government. Thus, the Northern Wei took a variety of measures to control the mobility of migrants, targeting mainly those from the south.
One distinctive characteristic of the Northern Wei forms of control was the spatial segregation of migrants. As many scholars have shown, space is not merely a backdrop for human events; it can also be an instrument of domination.Footnote 3 Indeed, space, under Northern Wei rule, operated as a tool of discipline and a tool for excluding or including migrants. The Northern Wei government not only restricted migrants’ geographical mobility through the infrastructure of its capital cities, it also created places that separated southern border-crossers from Northern Wei subjects, marginalized them within its cities, and divided them into two groups: outsiders and imperial subjects.
This essay draws on a wide variety of evidence from textual (official histories, geographical records, and anecdotes), epigraphic (excavated funerary inscriptions), and archaeological sources. The dynastic histories, the Wei shu (History of the [Northern] Wei dynasty) in particular, provide biographies of cross-border migrants and detailed accounts of state responses to cross-border migrants from the southern regimes. I have also made extensive use of excavated funerary epitaphs because these epigraphic records contain information concerning the first-generation migrants and their offspring skipped in the received texts. Even so, the sources are incomplete, and some of the information is too partial to be interpretable. Moreover, most, if not all, of the surviving evidence, particularly the dynastic histories, was written by male elites, who paid little attention to women, not to mention the common people. Hence, this study is not intended to be comprehensive. Rather, it is a starting point for understanding migration control and its consequences during this era as a window into human mobility and the treatment of foreigners in imperial China, two topics that remain largely unacknowledged in the current scholarship.
Entry
In premodern China, people were required to prove their identities on numerous occasions from birth to death. Under Han law, for example, travelers had to show valid passports (zhuan) to officials at each checkpoint on the journey. This type of travel document was usually issued by the person's home county and recorded the person's name, social and legal status, physical information (e.g., residence, age, height, and skin color), and the purpose of the travel.Footnote 4 But the Han-era passport and similar documents were designed for domestic purposes. How, then, did a foreigner in premodern China prove his or her identity? How did ancient states identify a person coming from another country?
For the Northern Wei government, these questions were complicated. Since people from south of the border—regardless of their reasons—had left their hometowns in a hurry, they did not always have credible sources, such as official documents, to prove who they were. Even when they did, it is doubtful whether the authorities could have verified the documents’ validity. The task was even more challenging when the two sides had severed diplomatic relations,Footnote 5 which reduced the opportunities for exchanging and verifying personal information about border-crossers through official channels.
In the absence of convincing evidence provided by either the border-crosser in question or his home state, the Northern Wei authorities used at least two methods to verify the person's identity. One was oral testimony from someone who had also come from the south and knew the newcomer. However, this was not usually deemed a trustworthy means of proving a border-crosser's identity, partly because of the uncertainty of oral testimony based on recollection and social networks, but more likely because of the Northern Wei people's distrust of southerners, which extended to both the border-crosser and the person who identified him.Footnote 6
Another approach was to conduct a thorough investigation at three levels of government—municipal (e.g., frontier garrison or county), provincial, and central. Upon arriving, the border-crosser would be inspected by the official of the frontier garrison or county in which he first arrived. He would likely be questioned about his name, his origin, and the reason for his defection. The local official would then make a report based on his investigation and the border-crosser's statement. At this level, the local official had no power to make decisions, so he needed to report to his superior at the provincial level and await instructions.Footnote 7
The provincial official in charge likely conducted another investigation to verify the report submitted by the local office, although none of our sources specifically mention such investigations. Like his subordinate at the local level, he had no authority to make the final decision and was hence required to submit a formal memorial (biao) informing the imperial court of the arrival of southerners.Footnote 8
At the central level, the responsible official was possibly one of the two heads of the Office of Interstate Relations, namely, the “director of the Section of Southern Visitor Receptions” (Shangshu nan zhuke langzhong).Footnote 9 He would review the documents sent from the provincial government and then dispatch emissaries to conduct another investigation.Footnote 10 Once the investigation was finished, he and other court officials would debate the reliability of the newcomer at a court conference.Footnote 11 What would happen, then, if they could not reach a consensus? An early sixth-century case provides an answer. It shows that the then-director of the Section of Southern Visitor Receptions suspected the motive behind the defection of two brothers—one of them claimed to hold a prominent position at the imperial Liang court. The director might thus have argued with his colleagues. Perhaps no agreement was reached on the issue, so he requested that the emperor send people to two Northern Wei provinces bordering the Liang—Xú and Yang—to carry out a secret investigation and collect intelligence regarding the background of the two brothers. The emperor agreed, and the result of the ensuing investigation confirmed the official's suspicion: the reason for the two brothers’ side-changing was that one of them had committed a crime in the south.Footnote 12
The process undoubtedly took time. Therefore, such thorough investigations might have been conducted primarily for certain prominent individuals, such as imperial princesFootnote 13 and court officials. The Northern Wei government needed to identify high-ranking migrants in part because the identities of such individuals were sensitive—the stay or return of the ruling family members of the dethroned dynasty, for example, could damage interstate relationsFootnote 14—and in part because of fear of espionage, which was not uncommon during this era.Footnote 15 To put it simply, the objectives of the identification determined who deserved to be identified.
What about other border-crossers? We have not yet found evidence about whether the Northern Wei authorities checked the identities of ordinary people, or whether they would have been able to do so, especially when people were relocated from the south to the north en masse. What we know for certain is that the Northern Wei relocated large numbers of people to its imperial core for political and economic reasons despite its concern that these migrants would become a threat from within. This tension between the state's interests and its need for security may have thus contributed to close surveillance of migrants’ domestic mobility in the Northern Wei.
Spaces of Exclusion
Historians have shown that a variety of factors—such as politics, economics, religion, and education—brought migrants from near and far to cities in imperial China,Footnote 16 but they rarely discuss a simple question: Where did these people live? Did migrants cluster together, as they did in the Chinatowns and Little Italys of many modern metropolises? If so, did they “form sections of their own, separate to a certain extent from the rest of the population, and keep their own language and customs”?Footnote 17 Or were they segregated because of outside pressure?
In the case of the Northern Wei dynasty, the answer to the last question is yes. Indeed, throughout the dynasty, the Northern Wei restricted the southern migrants, both alive and dead, to specific areas in the capital and its environs. As far as we can surmise from extant sources, it is this practice of the spatial segregation of newcomers that distinguished the Northern Wei from other dynasties in premodern China.
Pingcheng
The Northern Wei moved its capital twice: first to Pingcheng (north of modern Datong, Shanxi Province) in 398 CE and next to Luoyang (in Henan Province) in 494 CE. Each time, it built the capital nearly from scratch and accordingly had the chance to plan the city's layout.
Pingcheng comprised a palace city, an outer city to the south of the palace city, and an outermost city wall that was 32 li (approximately 14.72 kilometers) in circumference.Footnote 18 Its population is estimated to have been around one million.Footnote 19 It included, alongside the old residents in Pingcheng, the ruling group, officials, soldiers, and commoners who had moved from Northern Wei's previous power base in Inner Mongolia. Buddhist monks and merchants also traveled from Central and South Asia to Pingcheng,Footnote 20 and many stayed for some time.Footnote 21 War captives and slaves of foreign origin, too, were present,Footnote 22 and the size of the forced migrant population is estimated to have been around 600,000.Footnote 23
One can assume that Pingcheng's residents were diverse in terms of country of origin, ethnicity, language, religion, social status, and occupation. This diversity made Pingcheng a dynamic and multicultural city, but it also threatened the capital's security. The Northern Wei government hence enforced a zoning policy, beginning in its early years. The first Northern Wei emperor reportedly segregated the elites from commoners; he also singled out four base professions—performers, craftsmen, butchers, and liquor vendors—and confined their practitioners to special quarters.Footnote 24 It is clear that the founding emperor imposed imperial authority over the capital city to “map social hierarchy onto the urban landscape.”Footnote 25 Moreover, according to a southern description, the outer city, as the major residential area for officials and commoners alike, was divided into wards (fang) that ranged in size from seventy families to as many as five hundred.Footnote 26 Each ward was also managed and patrolled by officers in charge (Zhusi) and wardens (Lizai).Footnote 27 In this way, people, including migrants, experienced restrictions on their freedom to move.Footnote 28
The Northern Wei government strove to control migrants from south of the border by segregating them spatially from the general populace of Pingcheng. Generally speaking, people from the southern state, including those with known relatives south of the border,Footnote 29 were relocated to the Sanggan River area, some 60 kilometers southwest of Pingcheng.Footnote 30 But the Northern Wei authorities seem to have drawn finer lines among border-crossers. For example, after taking control of a large part of the Liu-Song territory in Shandong peninsula in 469 CE, the Northern Wei government categorized the surrendered Liu-Song officials into three groups: highest-ranking guests (shang ke), secondary-ranking guests (ci ke), and lowest-ranking guests (xia ke). The categorization was based on the migrants’ willingness to surrender, motives for surrender, and original status in the south.Footnote 31 Evidence shows that the first two groups were brought to Pingcheng shortly after their surrender and temporarily assigned to live in guest hostels (kedi).Footnote 32 Some of them resided in the guest hostels for only a year or so and were soon bestowed mansions inside the capital,Footnote 33 while others seem to have spent years in the hostels before leaving for provincial posts.Footnote 34 By contrast, those who were categorized as the lowest-ranking guests were not so fortunate. They were relocated to the south of the Sanggan River.Footnote 35 Once people arrived in Sanggan, they were not allowed to leave freely. Most of them stayed there for at least a decade,Footnote 36 and some of their children were even born and grew up in Sanggan.Footnote 37
What kind of lives did people lead in Sanggan? Take deportees who came to the Northern Wei in 469 CE as an example. Because they were likely obliged to leave their possessions behind, and even worse, they reportedly suffered from famines in their new homes for years,Footnote 38 many people were said to “live in poverty”Footnote 39 or to be “cold and hungry for more than a decade.”Footnote 40 To support themselves and their families, some deportees worked as transcribers for Buddhist monksFootnote 41 and some did manual jobs—they either “ploughed during the day and studied at night”Footnote 42 or worked as waged laborers.Footnote 43
The Northern Wei authorities took an active interest not only in where southerners lived but also in where they were buried. An imperial decision (zhi) issued in the mid-fifth century says that “all southerners who submitted to [our] country must be buried in Sanggan.”Footnote 44 This rule has been attested by a recently discovered inscription on the tomb of a southerner who fled to the Northern Wei in the early fifth century and was buried in Sanggan in 472 CE.Footnote 45 The fact that southerners’ cemeteries were confined to the same area far from the capital, regardless of their rank or place of death, suggests that the cemeteries of southern migrants were not allowed to lie in proximity to those of other people.
Exceptions were occasionally made to the Northern Wei's strict policies governing southerners. One example concerns a Northern Wei general who fled from the south in 417 CE due to a brutal persecution carried out against his family. When he died on his way to a new post near Luoyang, his body was supposed to be transported back and buried in Sanggan, like those of other southerners. Yet his subordinate, who was entrusted with the deceased's last will, petitioned the emperor to bury the remains near the border between the north and the south. The emperor approved the request.Footnote 46 This story nonetheless suggests that such cases were privileged; without imperial approval, southerners were not allowed to be buried elsewhere.
Luoyang
The Northern Wei seems to have changed its policy regarding the residential areas of southern migrants after the capital moved to Luoyang. Indeed, it introduced new measures designed to regulate the mobility not merely of southerners, but of all foreigners.
By the early sixth century, Luoyang, which covered an area of nearly 80 square kilometers,Footnote 47 was the world's largest city.Footnote 48 A sixth-century work informs us that its population at its peak is estimated to have been between 440,000 and 550,000.Footnote 49 But the actual number of Luoyang residents was surely much higher when unregistered people, such as slaves, are taken into consideration. Central and South Asian monks and merchants also came to Luoyang along the Silk Roads, as attested by extant Buddhist hagiographiesFootnote 50 and tomb epitaphs.Footnote 51 Furthermore, Luoyang hosted many exiles and refugees from southern states (first the Southern Qi and then the Liang), Central Asian kingdoms, Rouran Khaganate (in outer Mongolia), and Koguryo (a Korean kingdom from 37 BCE to 668 CE). Simply put, Northern Wei Luoyang was a cosmopolitan city.
To keep Luoyang's diverse population under control, the Northern Wei emperors built a carefully planned city. Like Pingcheng, Luoyang consisted of a palace city, an inner city, and an outer city. But unlike the former political center, the new Luoyang capital was divided into an orderly grid by ten imperial avenues, five of which ran east–west and five of which ran north–south.Footnote 52 The resulting organization included more than three hundred residential wards.Footnote 53 Zoning clearly took place. One east–west imperial thoroughfare split the inner city into two halves: the northern half of the inner city was exclusively a palace complex,Footnote 54 while the southern half was dominated by government offices and residential areas belonging to noblemen and high-ranking officials, especially those of Inner Asian background.Footnote 55 Reportedly, government offices were also differentiated from ordinary dwellings,Footnote 56 and they were mainly clustered along the Tongtuo Avenue, the largest north–south thoroughfare.Footnote 57 The rest of Luoyang's residents lived in the outer city, where the intermixing of the four classes of people—shi (officials), nong (farmers), gong (artisans), and shang (traders)—is said to have been forbidden.Footnote 58 Some professionals of low status, such as musicians, singers, brewers, coffin sellers, and butchers, were even required to live in wards named after their professions.Footnote 59 By enforcing such segregation, the imperial government could efficiently monitor its people.
One of the most distinctive characteristics of Northern Wei Luoyang city planning is that the southern part of the outer city was known to contemporaries as an enclave for foreigners. The Four Foreigners’ Hostels (Siyi guan) and Four Foreigners’ Wards (Siyi li) were located on the southern bank of the Luo River, Luoyang's main water source, and symmetrically placed to the east and west of Tongtuo Avenue.Footnote 60 All newcomers, regardless of background, were assigned to a particular hostel—Jinling,Footnote 61 Yanran,Footnote 62 Fusang, or Yanzi—based on their country of origin.Footnote 63 For instance, Jinling was the ancient name of Jiankang, capital of the southern states in this era, so southerners were placed in the hostel named after Jinling. It is said that new arrivals were required to stay in the hostel for three years, after which they would be directed to move to one of the Four Foreigners’ Wards—Guizheng (literally, back to the rightful), Guide (back to the virtuous), Muhua (admire the civilized), and Muyi (admire the righteous).Footnote 64 All of these names, in contrast to those of the guest hostels, are value-laden terms that stress the Northern Wei's moral superiority and have nothing to do with the origins of particular foreigners.
The question then arises, why were migrants placed in the southern part of the city? Some scholars have proposed that the site of the Four Foreigners’ Hostels and Four Foreigners’ Wards was deliberately chosen because it was near the Luo and Yi (Luo's main tributary), where migrants, especially southerners, could easily access the aquatic products that they were accustomed to eating.Footnote 65 This is possible, yet a more likely explanation is the region's proximity to government offices. We can look at the Manyi di (Hostels for Barbarians) of the Western Han period (206 BCE–9 CE) as an example. The Manyi di hosted foreign chieftains, envoys, and their followers. It was reportedly located to the north of Weiyang Palace, the main imperial palace complex of the capital Chang'an (near modern Xi'an), because the Western Han bureaucracy was located to the northwest of Weiyang Palace.Footnote 66 In light of this, and considering that most of the Northern Wei government offices were placed along the inner city section of Tongtuo Avenue, the fact that the Four Foreigners’ Hostels and Four Foreigners’ Wards were also built along Tongtuo Avenue should be seen not as a coincidence but as a strategic move that placed foreigners under the direct control of the government. Moreover, given the location of the Four Foreigners’ Hostels and Four Foreigners’ Wards and considering the waiting periods for migrants, it is apparent that the Northern Wei government consciously segregated newcomers from its subjects, thereby placing them in a liminal space.
The move from hostel to ward was also noteworthy. When a border-crosser lived in the hostel, he was viewed and treated as a guest by the Northern Wei government—the term “guest” could mean that he was welcome to stay, but at the same time, it recognized the person as “from elsewhere.” Upon moving to one of the Four Foreigners’ Wards, however, the individual was incorporated into the Northern Wei population and accepted as a new subject of the empire.Footnote 67
Here, too, exceptions existed. Some cases show that people who were placed in an assigned ward could move somewhere else, as long as they had imperial approval. One exiled Southern Qi prince, for example, petitioned Emperor Xuanwu (r. 500–515 CE) to permit him and his wife, who was the emperor's elder sister, to move into the inner city.Footnote 68 A Northern Wei official also petitioned Emperor Xiaoming (r. 515–28 CE) to allow his nephew, a famous physician who had surrendered from the Liang in 526 CE, to move out of the hostel so he could live with family.Footnote 69 Even so, these two examples indicate that the residential policy regarding foreigners, and southerners in particular, was still enforced in the last days of the dynasty.
The Northern Wei policy regarding migrants’ residential areas was unprecedented. Unlike previous imperial dynasties, the Northern Wei created an exclusive residence area for all newcomers, whether they were sojourners or long-term migrants, imperial exiles or merchants. Scholars have pointed out that Northern Wei Luoyang served as the model for the Sui dynasty (581–618 CE) capital of Daxing (later Tang dynasty Chang'an, now Xi'an), which mimicked its physical shape and its zoning of foreign communities; it also influenced the city planning for Tang Chang'an.Footnote 70 However, it is unclear whether Northern Wei's segregationist model of migrant space reflected a key yet long-forgotten northern legacy, given the Inner Asian origin of the Northern Wei ruling group.Footnote 71 Or was it diffused from a Central Asian tradition, as some scholars have suggested?Footnote 72 At this point, definite answers to both questions appear elusive, given the available data. I will therefore leave this puzzle to future research.
Redefection
The Northern Wei government not only asserted control over the entry of southerners and their mobility within the capital cities, it also prohibited them from leaving the country and returning to the south. In 474 CE, the young emperor issued an edict, saying that “From now on, apart from those guilty of plotting rebellion, great sedition, threatening the order of the state, or defection, any [other] crimes do not implicate their (i.e., the criminal's) family members.”Footnote 73 This edict attests that defection, in the eyes of the Northern Wei government, was a felony, so much so that the authorities punished not only anyone who defected to another regime but also the defector's relatives. If that was the case, how did the Northern Wei authorities punish southerners who switched allegiance a second time? What charges did a defector and his family members face?
In general, if a border-crosser tried to defect to the south but did not succeed, his punishment was nothing less than execution. Even if a defection was only planned, not accomplished, everyone involved would be executed once the scheme was uncovered.Footnote 74 Because defection to the south was severely punished, it was sometimes used as an excuse to remove an enemy. Li Hui (d. 479 CE), Emperor Xiaowen's maternal grandfather, was thus accused by Empress Dowager Wenming (442–90 CE) of attempting to defect to the southern state. Although the motivation behind the empress dowager's false accusation was likely the rivalry between the two imperial consort families, Li Hui, his sons, and two younger brothers were all executed.Footnote 75
A defector's family members were all guilty by virtue of their relationship to him, based on the idea of collective responsibility, whether or not they were aware of the plot beforehand. The guilty parties included the defector's father, sons, brothers, and cousins. In one case, even the defector's adopted brothers were condemned,Footnote 76 suggesting that the range of collective responsibility was wide. However, their punishment differed based on the degree of their relationship to the defector.Footnote 77 Evidence shows that the defector's father would be executed.Footnote 78 Sons aged fifteen or older would also face the death penalty, even if a son denounced his father to the state before the act of treachery was carried out;Footnote 79 a son aged fourteen or under could be spared the death penalty, but he would be forced to undergo castration and would later be sent to serve as a eunuch in the imperial palace.Footnote 80 For this reason, Cui Mo (d. ca. 460 CE), a former Liu-Song commandery governor, refused to leave with a southern envoy who attempted to smuggle him back. Cui Mo feared that once he left, his son, borne by his northern wife, would be sentenced to castration. His fear was justified. Indeed, he later passed along the opportunity to another surrendered southern official, who immediately seized the chance and headed back to the south.Footnote 81 We are told that the defected official's northern son who was left behind suffered castration not long afterward.Footnote 82
Usually the defector's male siblings, both biological and adopted, and his cousins were sentenced to exile.Footnote 83 This less severe punishment may have been chosen because these relatives were neither the principal offender nor the criminal's conjugal family members. Thus, their sentence was commuted from the death penalty to banishment in order to show imperial benevolence. In addition, exile was perceived as an effective means of increasing the number of soldiers on the border. In 456 CE, a court official proposed that those who had not committed a great felony or murder should be banished to the frontier instead of being executed. Doing so, he argued, could strengthen the border defense and reduce the heavy burden borne by garrison soldiers.Footnote 84
There were many exile destinations in Northern Wei times, including Liangzhou,Footnote 85 Dunhuang,Footnote 86 and Yangzhou.Footnote 87 It is noteworthy that the former two destinations were located to the west of Luoyang and the third to its south, but the brothers and cousins of defectors who submitted to the south were normally sent to the northern frontier.Footnote 88 Very likely, this arrangement was intended to sever their ties with relatives on the other side of the border. For the same reason, unless the exiles were granted an amnesty by the emperor,Footnote 89 they were generally banished for life.Footnote 90
Women are rarely the focus of the received texts and surviving tomb inscriptions; thus, we do not have sufficient evidence to determine whether a defector's wife and his female blood relatives were held liable. However, this possibility cannot be ruled out. Around 520 CE, a court official argued in his memorial that “an unmarried woman should be responsible for charges against her parents, whereas a married woman should be punished for [crimes committed by] her husband's family.” He claimed that this was “the common principle in the past and the present.”Footnote 91 This reasoning indicates that a defector's wife and his unmarried daughter could be held liable for the crime.
In short, the Northern Wei government took a strong stand against side-changers and their families. It did so for several reasons. By punishing those who dared to rejoin the rival regime in the south, the Northern Wei strengthened its legitimacy. Meanwhile, it sought to prevent future defections by intimidating wavering opportunists.
Yet some individuals frequently changed sides with impunity. The sources suggest that these people were mainly high-ranking military officers who controlled strategic border cities and had significant personal armies.Footnote 92 In the face of changing political circumstances, they usually needed to make a timely and tactical surrender to ensure their personal survival and/or career advancement. Their side-switching was nonetheless not condemned because it offered the Northern Wei court an excellent opportunity to expand its southern territory and gain the upper hand in the wars with the southern states with relatively little effort.Footnote 93 Thus, when a southern border general who had repeatedly switched his allegiance between the northern and southern states defected again to the Northern Wei in 505 CE, he was not merely pardoned by the emperor. He also received several appointments and a noble title because he had handed over an important border city to the Northern Wei. As the emperor told him, compared with his achievement of “making a high mountain,” his crime of defection was nothing more than “a spot [like] a single load of earth.”Footnote 94 Moreover, by pardoning high-ranking people or giving them lesser sentences, the Northern Wei showed the ruler's benevolence and at the same time encouraged more people to surrender from the south.
Conclusion
As Adam McKeown notes in his study of modern migration control, “regulation and flows are inseparable.”Footnote 95 The same held true in Northern Wei times. I am not suggesting that we can anachronistically identify passports, visas, and modern territorial borders in fourth- to sixth-century China. However, the Northern Wei forms of control unquestionably emerged as responses to cross-border migration, the product of an era of political fragmentation.
As a result of interstate conflicts and internal power struggles in the south, deportees, refugees, defectors, and exiles were all forced to leave their homes, and many went to the Northern Wei. Although the migrants were diverse—modern migration scholars might well place them in different categories and discuss them separately—the Northern Wei government viewed all of them as “people of the south” (nanren)Footnote 96 and treated them with general suspicion. Therefore, it regulated their spatial mobility in three main ways: by checking the identity of migrants when they entered the Northern Wei, creating exclusive residential areas in the capital cities for migrants, and punishing any migrant who attempted to return to the south. Nonetheless, this study has also shown that the Northern Wei policy was flexible. The Northern Wei opened its doors at times to certain southerners who could serve its interests, which included but were not limited to expanding its territory, attracting support from southerners, and bolstering government legitimacy.
Migration policy not only was shaped by and shaped interstate relationships but also, as we have seen, affected migrants and their family members in the north in multiple ways. No other policy, however, compares to the practice of spatial segregation in the extent of its influence on migrants’ everyday lives. By placing migrants on the edges of the capitals and even, unlike other imperial dynasties, creating residential areas exclusively for migrants, the Northern Wei government created enclaves of otherness, thereby demarcating a boundary between southerners and imperial subjects. While migrants in Luoyang, compared with their counterparts in earlier years, were placed much nearer the imperial city, they were also surveilled more directly and constantly by the state and the locals. Visibility is a guarantee of order,Footnote 97 yet it also brings discrimination. The neighborhoods for foreigners gave physical presence to the idea of exclusion and hostility, which likely left a lasting mark on the ways the Northern Wei people perceived the empire, the city, and their relationships with “outsiders.” In this light, it is understandable why some southerners in our sources were eager to move out of the foreigners’ neighborhoods.Footnote 98 And they were certainly not the only ones who wanted to leave.
This essay has offered a general survey of the ways the Northern Wei controlled migrant mobility and highlighted the particularity of its methods. More studies of migration control and the treatment of foreigners in other periods and places are still needed if we are to understand the nature of human mobility in premodern times, and therefore the place of migration in today's world.
Acknowledgments
The research for this article was generously supported by Harvard University's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Institute of History and Philology at Academia Sinica, Taiwan. I would also like to thank Keith Knapp, Andrew Chittick, Evan Nicoll-Johnson, Jin Xu, and Griet Vankeerberghen for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. The final version has benefited from the kind and thoughtful suggestions of the two anonymous JAS reviewers. Finally, I am indebted to Xiaofei Tian, my co-organizer of the workshop on “Migration and Border-crossing in Early Medieval China” at Harvard University on May 23, 2019, and this forum, for her help and support. All errors are solely my own.
