A Brief History of the Tujia — Ethnic Origins (Part 1)
Chapter 1: Ethnic Origins of the Tujia — Section 1: Ethnic Name and Origins. Evolution of the Tujia Ethnic Name. The Tujia call themselves "Bizika" [Pia tpilkhat], call the neighboring Miao "Baika," and call incoming Han Chinese "Paka." "Bizi" means "local," and "ka" means "person" or "people"...
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Chapter One: The Ethnic Origin of the Tujia
Section I: The Ethnic Name and Ethnic Origin of the Tujia
The Evolution of the Tujia Ethnic Name
The Tujia call themselves "Bizika" [Pia tpilkhat], call the neighboring Miao "Baika," and call the incoming Han people "Paka." "Bizi" means "local," and "ka" means "person" or "people/ethnic group," so "Bizika" means "local people." Due to dialect differences, Tujia people in various places pronounce their self-designation slightly differently: Tujia in Baojing call themselves "Mijika," Tujia in Yongshun call themselves "Bijika," and "Bizika" is the self-designation of the Tujia in Longshan.
The Tujia people have a long history with deep roots. In Chinese historical texts, different appellations were used for the Tujia in different historical periods. Tracing back to their origins, it can be clearly seen from a large number of documents that the Tujia have a direct ancestral relationship with some of the ancient Ba people. "Ba" appeared very early; records of "Ba Fang" are found on oracle bones from the Yin Ruins, and "Ba" in divination inscriptions demonstrates that the Ba people were an ancient ethnic group. In pre-Qin historical works such as the Zuo Zhuan of the Spring and Autumn Period and the Classic of Mountains and Seas, there are many records of Ba activities. In historical texts through the ages, "Ba" served both as an ethnic name and as a place name. There have always been various interpretations of "Ba." Xu Shen of the Eastern Han, following the explanation in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, held that "Ba is a worm. Some say: a snake that eats elephants." Li Jifu of the Tang Dynasty, based on the Record of the Three Ba by Qiao Zhou of Shu Han, believed that the Lang and Bai rivers, with their winding courses, resembled the character "Ba." Sima Zhen, in his Sub-commentary to the Records of the Grand Historian, held that Ba derived from the reeds abundantly produced in the eastern Sichuan area. "Ju is pronounced ba.... Perhaps the Ba people and Ba Commandery originally took their name from ba-ju, and so the character ju was changed to ba." Ju is reed, commonly called baimao in Sichuan. Whether these explanations are reliable or not is beside the point; they all indicate that the Ba people were already active on the stage of our country's history long ago.
During the Qin and Han periods, historical texts used many appellations for the Ba people—some naming them by region, some by ethnic stock, and some by the characteristics of the weapons they used. In Qin times, the people of Ba and Shu were called Southern Yi, a type of Southern Yi. After Qin conquered Ba, it established Ba Commandery, Nan Commandery, and Qianzhong Commandery in the areas where the Ba people had originally lived. Yan Shigu of the Tang Dynasty said in his Commentary on the Book of Han: "Qianzhong—present-day Qianzhou is its territory; the people there were originally Ba." Han changed Qianzhong Commandery to Wuling Commandery. Thus historical texts generally referred to the ethnic minorities active in this region as the "Man of Ba and Nan Commanderies" and the "Wuling Man." Besides the Ba people, the "Wuling Man" also included the ancestors of the present-day Miao, Yao, and Zhuang-Dong language-family peoples. In the Western Han, a Tian-surnamed leader called the "Wuxi Yi" already appears in historical records. Liu Xiang of the Western Han, in his book Shiben, possibly based on the Ba people's own accounts of their ancient history, called the Ba people the "Linjun stock" by their ethnic type, and clearly pointed out the ancestral relationship between the "Man of Ba and Nan Commanderies" and the "Linjun stock." The Ba people living in present-day eastern Sichuan were also called the "Lai people" because they called "taxes" lai. Qiao Zhou of Shu Han recorded in the Record of the Three Ba: "The Yi people paid cong money annually, forty per person, and were called the Cong people." Later the "Cong people" were also called the "Ban Dun Man" or "Weak-headed Tiger Boys." Because the weapons they used were quite distinctive—"tiger-skin garments and shields," "covering shields with tiger skin, and devoting themselves especially to shooting white tigers." Some Ba people worshipped the tiger as a totem, while others hunted tigers as prey; this seemingly contradictory phenomenon is commonly seen in the early activities of many peoples. In the Eastern Han, the activities of leaders surnamed Xiang, Tian, and Qin among those called "Wuling Man," "Lizhong Man," "Louzhong Man," and "Lingyang Man" were already recorded in the annals. These powerful clans and great surnames are in direct line with the major surnames that have been passed down among the Tujia. The areas of activity of these powerful clans and great surnames largely coincide with the distribution of the Ba people in these regions and with the Tujia settlements of the Ming and Qing periods.
During the Three Kingdoms period, the Wuling Man were also called the "Five Streams Man," named after the five rivers Xiongxi, Tuoxi, Chenxi, Wuxi, and Youxi. There have always been various explanations of the Five Streams in historical texts. However, it is certain beyond doubt that the basins of two of them, the Youxi and Chenxi, were the dwelling places of the Tujia ancestors. Therefore, among the Five Streams Man there were not only Tujia ancestors but also the ancestors of the Miao, Yao, Dong, and other peoples. The descendants of the Ba people who lived in Jingzhou were also called "Jingzhou natives." In the Eastern Han, the Ba people who migrated from eastern Sichuan to the Jiangxia area (present-day Yunmeng County, Hubei) developed greatly, and their power reached northeastern Hubei and southeastern Henan; because of their area of activity and the rivers there (namely the Ba River, Qi River, Xi River, Chiting River, and Xigui River), they were called the "Yuzhou Man," "Youyang Man," or "Five Rivers Man," and their ethnic stock was that of the "Linjun" descendants. Those living in the Wuling region were called the "Five Streams Man," "Louzhong Man," and "Youxi Man"; those in the Xiajiang region were called the "Jingyongzhou Man" and "Jianping Man," "Bajian Man," "Yidu Man," and "Tianmen Man." These descendants of the Ba people living within Wuling territory were nonetheless listed by the Book of the Later Han as "descendants of Panhu." From then on, records became confused and continued unbroken through the histories. In the Southern and Northern Dynasties, Shen Yue's Book of Song also classified the Ba descendants of the Xiajiang region as "descendants of Panhu." Later historical texts almost all followed this explanation, as if the Ba people who had lived in this region since ancient times no longer existed and had completely merged into the peoples who worshipped Panhu. These records are clearly untrue; they neither accord with the historical reality of the Ba people and their descendants being active in this region over the long term, nor do they match the current distribution of the Tujia. Later, in the Book of Zhou by Linghu Defen, although he followed the Book of Song in classifying the "Man" active in the Xiajiang region as "descendants of Panhu," the activities he recorded of the Ran, Xiang, Tian, and other clans who "stationed themselves in the Three Gorges and cut off the water routes" were precisely the powerful clans and great surnames among the Tujia, not those among the peoples who venerated Panhu. The surnames recorded in the Book of Zhou correspond exactly to the powerful clans and great surnames found in historical records of the Jin and Southern and Northern Dynasties periods and called "Youxi Man," "Lingyang Man," "Louzhong Man," "Jianping Man," "Bajian Man," "Youyang Man," "Yidu Man," "Shidi Man," and so on. From these records it is not hard to discover that the error of broadly classifying the "descendants of Linjun" as "descendants of Panhu" is obvious.
During the Tang and Song periods, because of changes in administrative divisions, the Tujia ancestors living in the border zone of Hunan, Hubei, Chongqing, and Guizhou were successively named after different regions as the "Kuizhou Man," "Xinzhou Man," "Pengshui Man," "Shizhou Man," "Chenzhou Man," "Shimen Man," "Xizhou Man," "Tiancizhou Man," "Gaozhou Man," "Luopu Mosuo Man," and so on. Du You of the Tang Dynasty clearly pointed out in his Comprehensive Institutions: "Those in the Xiazhong Ba-Liang area are descendants of Linjun." In some Song historical texts, the ethnic minorities living in the Yuan River basin were generally called the "Man of the Northern and Southern Rivers." The area north of the You River was precisely the main area of activity of the Tujia ancestors, the "Northern River Man" among the "various Man." In the same period, historical books also saw names such as "native soldiers," "native people," and "native able-bodied men" that distinguished this region from other ethnic groups. These appellations prefixed with the character "tu" (native) should refer specifically to the Tujia, and appeared in order to distinguish them from the neighboring Miao. For "Miao" had already appeared as a specific ethnic designation in the Song Dynasty, and there was no need to call the "Miao" "tu" any longer. Therefore, it can be said that "tu" is a variant designation of "Man."
From the Yuan to the early Qing, the native chieftain system was established in Tujia areas, and records naming the ethnic group with "tu" appeared in large numbers; appellations such as "native soldiers," "native able-bodied men," "native people," and "native Man" emerged endlessly in historical texts and local gazetteers. But there were also those named by region, such as "Youyang Man" and "Nine Streams and Eighteen Caves Man."
After the Eastern Han, in our country's historical texts through the ages, there appeared quite a few confused records concerning the ethnic affiliation of the Tujia ancestors; some said they were Liao or Yao, and some called them Miao. None of these appellations accord with the historical reality of the Tujia. Among them, many were themselves broad references by the literature to the ethnic minorities of the south.
The emergence of "Tujia" as an ethnic designation was directly related to the migration of Han Chinese into their territory. After the Song, Han Chinese gradually migrated into Tujia areas, and especially after the Qing policy of replacing native chieftains with regular officials, Han Chinese migrated in large numbers; thus distinctions arose between "native people" and "guest people," and between "native registration" and "guest registration." In order to distinguish themselves from the newly arrived outsiders who were not of their own ethnic group, the term "Tujia" began to appear; they called themselves "Tujia" in Chinese, called the incoming Han Chinese "Kejia" (guest families), and called the neighboring Miao "Miaojia" (Miao families). Records distinguishing ethnic groups with different characteristics appeared in large numbers in the relevant gazetteers of the Qing Dynasty.According to the Xianfeng County Gazetteer:"Now, considering the clans of this county, they are broadly divided into two types: Tujia and Hakka. The Tujia are descendants of the native officials.……The Hakka, since the Ming dynasty, whether as officials or merchants, settled in this land and their descendants multiplied to become prominent clans of the county."Here,"Tujia"said to be"descendant of the Tusi"is not accurate. It should be said that while there were descendants of the tusi, the majority of the people should be the commoners under tusi rule. The Lichuan County Gazetteer also records eight surnames."Tujia"record. Enshi County"Residents of the city were divided into native households and settler households. Native households were all indigenous people from previous dynasties."; "Yongshun is at the extreme border of Chu, where Tujia people, Miao people, and Han Chinese live together."The Draft Gazetteer of Longshan County says:"There are dozens of villages in Longyigang, where Tujia and Miao people live together, and occasionally outsiders have settled there and become Hakka."These records fully demonstrate that"Tujia"The ethnic name only emerged after a large influx of Han Chinese.