The Arabs in the ‘Comprehensive Chronicle’: Du You’s Tong dian (801 CE) and the First Chinese Portrait of Islam

بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ

"In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful."
In the wake of the Arab-Muslim conquests, as Syriac chroniclers in the West grappled with the new political reality, a parallel process of observation and documentation was unfolding thousands of miles to the East. In the sophisticated, bureaucratic heart of the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE), scholars were compiling the world's most comprehensive records of statecraft and foreign peoples. It was here, in this milieu of encyclopedic knowledge, that the first detailed Chinese portrait of the Arabs and the nascent Islamic civilization was composed.
The man behind this monumental task was Du You 杜佑 (735–812 CE), a high-ranking minister and scholar. For over three decades, he labored to expand upon an earlier work, the Zheng Dian 政典 (State Chronicle), transforming it into a colossal two-hundred-volume masterpiece presented to the throne in 801 CE: the 《通典》 Tong Dian (Comprehensive Institutions).
The Tong Dian was not merely a history; it was a practical guide to governance, a systematic exploration of the institutions that shaped civilization. As the Siku Quanshu summary elaborates, Du You organized his work into eight fundamental pillars of state:
《食貨》 (Food and Currency) – The economic foundation.
《選舉》 (Examination and Election) – The system for selecting officials.
《職官》 (Offices and Officials) – The bureaucratic structure.
《禮》 (Rites) – The social and ceremonial order.
《樂》 (Music) – The cultural and harmonious expression.
《兵刑》 (Military and Punishment) – The means of defense and law.
《州郡》 (Provinces and Commanderies) – The internal administration.
《邊防》 (Border Defense) – The management of foreign lands and peoples.
This structure was deeply philosophical. Du You argued that a state must first achieve material wealth (食貨), then establish governance (選舉, 職官), and only then cultivate culture and order (禮, 樂). This pragmatic, "state-first" perspective is crucial to understanding how the Tong Dian would later frame its description of the Arab world.
The Tong Dian’s value is immeasurable. The Qing Era Annotated Bibliography of the Four Treasuries praises it, stating:
"It broadly draws upon the Five Classics, myriad histories, as well as the writings and memorials of the Han, Wei, and Six Dynasties that are beneficial to understanding [state] successes and failures... It is detailed without being tedious, brief yet essential. It is fundamental and original, entirely consisting of practical learning useful to the world, not comparable to works that merely aid rote memory."
This "practical learning" (實學) included a vital section: the 《邊防》 Bian Fang (Border Defense). While its title suggests a military focus, it functioned as a comprehensive ethnogeography of the lands and cultures beyond the Tang frontier. It is within these sixteen volumes that we find the earliest surviving Chinese account of the Arabs, known to the Tang as Dashi 大食 (a rendering of "Tazig," the Persian term for Arabs).
In this post, we will delve into the Tong Dian's description of Dashi. We will analyze:
How Du You described the origins, customs, and religion of the Arabs.
What his account got right (e.g., monotheism, prophethood, dietary laws) and what it filtered through a Chinese bureaucratic lens
The profound significance of a Tang minister, using the state's most authoritative format, granting the nascent Islamic civilization a defined and serious place in the Chinese understanding of the world.
The Tong Dian marks the moment the Islamic world came into sharp focus for Chinese historiography. It was no longer a distant rumor from the Western Regions, but a documented, analyzed, and permanent entity on the Tang's conceptual map—a scholarly acknowledgment that would shape East Asian perceptions of Islam for centuries to come.

**I. 🏛️ The Rise of the Arabs (Dàshí 大食) in Du You’s Tong dian (801 CE)**

📜 Original Chinese

大食，大唐永徽中，遣使朝貢云：其國在波斯之西。
或云：初有波斯胡人，若有神助，得刀殺人。
因招附諸胡，有胡人十一來，據次第摩首受化為王。

English Translation

The Arabs (Dàshí 大食):
-
During the Yonghui reign of the Great Tang, they sent envoys to present tribute, saying that their country lay to the west of Persia (波斯 Bōsī).
Some say that at first there was a Persian Hu who, as if aided by divine power, obtained a sword with which he could kill men.
He thereby gathered and won over the various Hu tribes. Eleven Hu leaders came to him in succession, and by turns bowed their heads and submitted to his teaching, making him their king.

🔍 Detailed Commentary

🪶 The Name “Dàshí 大食” — A Persian Filter for the Arab World 🏺⇢🛣️⇢📜

The word Dàshí (大食) marks the first appearance of the Islamic world in Chinese records — the Tang court’s earliest attempt to describe a power newly arisen beyond Persia. Far from being an invented Chinese term, it is a phonetic echo of a Persian word already circulating across the Silk Road.

The Tong dian thus preserves not only a historical report but also a linguistic fossil: the sound of Islam’s name as it first reached the East.

The Tang term Dàshí in Middle Chinese was pronounced roughly /daɨH dʑɨk/. It is a direct borrowing from Middle Persian Tāzīg or Tāčīk (𐭩𐭠𐭰𐭩𐭪), itself derived from the Syriac Ṭayyāyē (ܛܝܝܐ), the name of the powerful Tayy (Ṭayyiʾ) tribe of northern Arabia. Over time, this ethnonym was generalized in the Near East to mean “Arab.”

Language	Term	Meaning & Context
Syriac	Ṭayyāyē (ܛܝܝܐ)	Originally the Tayy tribe; later a general term for Arabs or nomads.
Middle Persian	Tāzīg (𐭩𐭠𐭰𐭩𐭪)	Adopted from Syriac; used by Sasanian Persians to mean “Arab.”
Chinese	大食 (Dàshí)	Tang transcription of Tāzīg; denotes the Arab Empire and its people.

The linguistic chain is clear: Syriac → Persian → Chinese.

What the Tang called Dàshí, the Persians called Tāzīg, and the Syriac Christians called Ṭayyāyē. Each language, acting as a link in the chain, carried the same meaning — the Arabs who rose in the west and conquered Persia.

The etymology itself reveals a key historical truth: China’s understanding of Islam was mediated entirely through the Persian world, which served as both its geopolitical frontier and its linguistic filter. To the Tang court, the Tāzīg were the successors of Persia — and their name, once that of a tribe, now denoted the rulers of an empire.

➡️ The Tayy Tribe — From Desert Clan to Universal Name

The name’s origins lie not in a dynastic title but in the sands of Arabia.

The Tayy (Ṭayyiʾ) were a major Arab tribe of the Syrian Desert whose prominence in pre-Islamic trade and war made their name emblematic of the desert Arabs as a whole.

Syriac Christians living in Mesopotamia referred to Arab nomads generally as Ṭayyāyē — “the Tayy people.”
The Sasanian Persians, encountering the same tribes along their western frontier, borrowed the term and rendered it in Middle Persian as Tāzīg.
When the Muslim armies, composed of numerous tribes including the Tayy, overthrew the Sasanids, Persian officials naturally used their established exonym — Tāzīg — for these conquerors.
Finally, the word traveled east with merchants and envoys into Chinese, becoming Dàshí (大食).

In this way, the tribal name of a Bedouin clan became the world’s earliest cross-linguistic label for the Arab-Islamic civilization.

🗣️ The Double Meaning of Dàshí — People and Faith

By the mid-Tang era, Chinese writers used Dàshí in two overlapping senses:

Ethnic: the Arabs — the new rulers of Persia and Syria.
Religio-political: the followers of Islam — regardless of origin.

The Tang did not yet distinguish between “Arab” and “Muslim.” The word Dàshí thus denoted both a people and a faith, mirroring how the Arabs themselves conceived their early community as the Ummah — a collective bound by belief rather than blood.

In this way, Dàshí was not simply a name; it was the first Chinese concept of a transnational religious empire, a notion that astonished the Tang world, accustomed to seeing “foreigners” as fragmented and tribal.

⚔️ The Scholarly Debate — Was There an “Arab” Identity?

The history of Dàshí has become a touchstone in modern scholarship, especially in the debate over how early Muslims understood themselves.

🧭 The Universalist Argument (Donner, Webb, Hoyland)

These scholars contend that the first Muslims identified primarily as Believers (muʾminūn), not as Arabs.
The early community, they argue, was ecumenical and faith-based, embracing monotheists of many backgrounds.
The absence of the word “Arab” in the earliest Chinese sources (which instead use Tāzīg/Dàshí) supports this thesis: the emissaries did not present themselves as “Arabs” but as bearers of a divine message.

🏺 The Genealogical Rebuttal (Goudarzi and the Early Sources)

This interpretation, however, meets strong resistance from other historians, including Mohsen Goudarzi, who emphasize Islam’s Abrahamic genealogy and the persistence of Arab identity in both Muslim and non-Muslim sources.

The Qurʾān repeatedly roots the Prophet’s community in the lineage of Abraham and Ishmael.
In Qurʾān 2:124–134, Abraham and Ishmael pray:

“Our Lord, make us Muslims in submission to You, and from our descendants a Muslim community (ummatan muslimatan) devoted to You.”
This genealogical consciousness formed the spiritual backbone of the Ummah.
Early Christian and Persian chronicles clearly recognized this.
- The Armenian Chronicle (660s) opens: “I shall speak of the stock of Abraham, not of the free one but of that born of the handmaiden…” — explicitly calling the Muslims sons of Ishmael.
- Syriac chroniclers like John bar Penkāyē refer to the conquerors as bnay Hāgār (“sons of Hagar”) and bnay Īšmāʿīl (“sons of Ishmael”).
- Even the Romans used ethnic labels — Saraceni, Agarēnoi — to describe them.
- The Persians, likewise, said Tāzīg, identifying them as the Arabs of their frontier.

These testimonies make clear that the early Muslims were seen, and saw themselves, as a genealogically coherent people of prophecy, even as their mission was universal.

🧩 Resolving the “Dàshí Paradox”

Why, then, do Chinese sources never use a word meaning “Arab” or “Ishmaelite”, but only Dàshí (Tāzīg)?

The answer lies not in identity but in translation. The Chinese never heard the Arabic term ʿArab directly. The news of Islam reached them through Persian and Sogdian intermediaries, whose own vocabulary determined the Chinese record.

🏛️ The Linguistic Filter

At the Tang court, diplomacy was often conducted through writing rather than speech — what later Chinese called bǐtán 筆談 (“conversations by brush”).

The envoys of 651 CE likely carried letters written in Arabic and Persian, which were then translated by Persian-speaking officials familiar with Sasanian terminology. Naturally, they used the word they knew: Tāzīg.

The Tang scribes transcribed it phonetically as Dàshí (大食), preserving the Persian pronunciation but not the original Arabic identity.

🕌 Faith as Primary, Identity as Layered

For the early Muslims, faith preceded ethnicity. Their mission was universal, yet their genealogical self-understanding remained Abrahamic and Ishmaelite. They were Arabs, but they represented something larger — the Ummah of submission.

Thus, the Chinese learned of them through the political label used by Persians, not through their spiritual lineage. Dàshí therefore records the Persian view of Islam, not the Islamic view of itself.

🕊️ Conclusion — The Linguistic Fossil of a New World

The term Dàshí (大食) is a fossilized trace of 7th-century diplomacy — a word that crossed deserts and empires, carrying within it the echo of conquest and conversion.

It tells us not that the Arabs lacked identity, but that their identity traveled eastward through the Persian tongue, the lingua franca of the Silk Road.

For the Tang, Dàshí signified a people of astonishing vigor who had risen from beyond Persia; for us, it stands as the earliest bridge between Islamic revelation and Chinese historiography.

In that single name — Dàshí — the Tang chroniclers captured the sound of a new world order:
Arabia through Persian memory, Islam through Chinese ink.

📅 The Yonghui 永徽 Era — China and Islam Meet in the Age of Caliph ʿUthmān (r.a.)

高宗永徽二年，大食國始遣使者朝貢。
“In the second year of Emperor Gaozong’s Yonghui reign [651 CE], the country of the Dàshí first sent envoys to present tribute.”

🌙 A Meeting of Two Dawns

The Tong dian situates the Dàshí embassy during the Yǒnghuī reign (650–655 CE) of Emperor Gaozong, a span that coincides exactly with the caliphate of ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān (r.a.), the third of the Khulafāʾ al-Rāshidūn. In this narrow overlap of dates, two civilizations—the Tang Empire at its youthful zenith and the Islamic Caliphate in its first flush of expansion—glimpsed each other for the first time across the roof of the world.

Only nineteen years had passed since the death of the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ in 632 CE. The message he had proclaimed in the Hejaz had already remade the map of western Asia. By 651 CE the armies of Islam had overthrown the last Sasanian shāh, Yazdgird III, ending more than a millennium of Iranian monarchy. The Ummah now stood on the Oxus, gazing eastward toward the lands of the Turks and the far-off empire of China.

🏛️ The Embassy of 651 CE — The First Contact

The Cefu Yuangui’s entry fixes that encounter in the second year of Yonghui (651 CE). It records, with bureaucratic brevity, that “the country of the Dàshí first sent envoys to offer tribute.” Behind that neutral phrasing lay a geopolitical revolution. The envoys who appeared at Chang’an were not traders but representatives of a new world order—the heirs of the Prophet who now governed Persia and Syria.

Persian sources suggest that this delegation included Muslims operating in the former Sasanian domains. To the Tang, they were simply Hu from the western lands; to history, they were the first messengers of Islam to China. Their arrival transformed the Dàshí from rumor into fact. The “camel herders” of Persian exile lore had become an empire capable of diplomacy with the Son of Heaven.

⚖️ The Fall of Yazdgird III and the Opening of the East

The embassy’s date—just after Yazdgird III’s death in 651 CE—is no coincidence. With the Sasanian house extinguished, nothing remained to block the Caliphate’s march through Khurāsān and toward the Oxus frontier, where Tang influence overlapped with that of the Western Turks. In the same year, Tang annals record Yazdgird’s son Peroz III seeking refuge at Gaozong’s court.

Thus, within a single season, Chang’an received two embassies from the wreckage of the old and the birth of the new: one from the fallen Persians, pleading for aid; another from the triumphant Dàshí, announcing their arrival among the civilized powers. Few entries in the imperial records capture so vividly the hinge of history—the moment when Islam replaced Persia as China’s western interlocutor.

🌍 The Twin Poles of a New Eurasia

By the mid-7th century, the world’s ancient bipolar order—Rome and Iran—had been supplanted by two successors of comparable ambition: the Islamic Caliphate and the Tang Empire. Each claimed universal legitimacy, each saw itself as the center of the human realm, and each projected its power through both sword and scripture.

When Tang scribes wrote that the Dàshí “sent envoys to present tribute,” they were not recording mere ceremony; they were acknowledging, however obliquely, the rise of an equal. From this first contact in 651 CE would grow a century of intermittent diplomacy, trade, and theological curiosity—a quiet bridge across the roof of Asia linking the heirs of Heaven’s mandate in the East with the heirs of Prophecy in the West.

This single entry marks the first recorded meeting between Islam and China—between the world of the Caliph ʿUthmān (r.a.) and that of the Tang Gaozong. Persia had fallen; the Qurʾān was being gathered; the Tang were expanding westward; and at Chang’an, for the first time, the messengers of Islam stood before the Dragon Throne.

It was the year 651 CE: the end of the old world and the first spark of a new Eurasian order.

🗺️ “Their Country Lies West of Persia” — Early Chinese Geography of the Islamic World

「其國在波斯之西」
“Their country lies west of Persia.”

At first glance, this simple clause seems merely geographic, but it opens a window onto the mental map of the Tang world — a map not drawn from observation, but from the memory of Persian exiles and Central Asian traders who carried fragmented stories of the new “Arab Empire” eastward along the Silk Road.

🌏 Persia as the Pivot of the Western World

For the Tang Chinese, Persia (Bōsī 波斯) was the fixed western anchor of civilization.

Long before Islam, the name Bōsī already conjured images of imperial grandeur — Zoroastrian fire temples, Sasanian kings, and palaces shining beyond the Oxus. The Tang had direct diplomatic exchanges with the Sasanids and their remnants: envoys from Yazdgird III’s heirs and later from Peroz III took refuge at the Tang court after the Arab conquest.

Thus, when Du You’s Tong dian notes that the Dàshí realm lay “west of Persia,” it is doing something profound: it is placing Islam into the known cosmic order, beyond the last civilized kingdom. In Tang cosmology, the world radiated outward from China, and Persia stood as its farthest mirror — a counterpart of Chinese civilization to the west. The Arabs, therefore, appeared as a people who had emerged beyond even Persia, in a direction symbolic of mystery and renewal.

🧭 The “West of Persia” and the Problem of Direction

Jeffrey Kotyk has observed, however, that the statement is geographically peculiar:

“The geographical location of the Arabs relative to Persia is also peculiar, since we would expect a southern rather than western position relative to Persia, or Ctesiphon in particular, but the western direction presumably indicates the general region of Syria.”

Kotyk’s insight is crucial. In the Sasanian and early Islamic worldview, the core of Persia was Ctesiphon and Mesopotamia — modern Iraq. To say that the new power lay “west” of that center would indeed mean Syria (al-Shām), the heartland of the Umayyad Caliphate, not the Arabian Peninsula itself.

This makes perfect sense in context: by the time Chinese sources first recorded information about the Dàshí (mid-7th to early 8th century), the capital of Islam had already shifted to Damascus. Thus, when Persian refugees or Sogdian merchants told the Tang about the new rulers of Persia, they would naturally point westward, toward Syria, where the Umayyads held court.

In short, “west of Persia” does not so much describe Arabia as it describes the Umayyad realm — the Arab Empire as seen from Iran. For Persian informants living through the collapse of their world, the Arabs were not just desert nomads from the south; they were the new lords of Syria, wielding imperial power from the old Roman East.

🕍 The Tang Mental Map: From Persia to Syria to Arabia

For Tang scholars like Du You, geography was relational — peoples were known by their proximity to others.

Their map of the West, based on Buddhist pilgrimage routes and Sogdian trade, ran from China → Sogdia → Persia → “lands beyond Persia.”

Thus, when reports arrived of the Dàshí realm “beyond Persia,” the Chinese understood that a new world order had arisen past the western frontier of the known Iranian sphere.

They could not yet visualize Mecca or Medina; those were too small, too remote.

But they knew Syria — Tianzhuan (天竺西, “the Western Regions of Heaven”) — as a land of prophets and ancient kings.

To place Islam “west of Persia” was therefore to insert it into the space once occupied by the Roman Levant, a region already legendary in Chinese imagination through Christian (Nestorian) and Manichaean intermediaries.

In effect, Du You’s sentence maps Islam onto a triple axis of civilization:

Persia — the ancient empire now fallen;
Syria — the seat of the new faith’s political power;
Arabia — the spiritual origin, dimly perceived behind them both.

🕊️ Between Memory and Revelation: A Geography of Transformation

This phrase also carries moral significance in Tang thought.

In Chinese cosmology, “the West” (西) was the direction of illumination and spiritual renewal.

Buddhism had come from the West; so had the teachings of sages and monks.

To say that the Dàshí realm was “west of Persia” was therefore not just to chart a direction, but to locate the new revelation within the same sacred geography of enlightenment.

From the Buddhist kingdoms of India to the Christian lands of Syria, the West was where Heaven revealed new truths.

By placing Islam there, Chinese historians were, perhaps unconsciously, acknowledging its place in that continuum — a new light arising from the same spiritual horizon.

🕌 The Accuracy Behind the Error

Though the phrase “west of Persia” seems imprecise by modern standards, it is remarkably perceptive for its time.

The Chinese had no direct contact with Arabia in the Prophet’s lifetime.

Their knowledge came from a chain of intermediaries — Persian, Sogdian, and occasionally Turkic — whose memories were shaped by conquest and loss.

Yet through that chain, the Tang still managed to form a roughly correct spatial model: Islam lay beyond Persia, toward the lands once ruled by Rome.

In other words, they understood that the world of the Dàshí was not Indian, not Persian, but something new — a civilization occupying the far western horizon of Asia, both continuous with and transformative of the old order.

✨ In Summary

「其國在波斯之西」 — “Their country lies west of Persia.”

This quiet sentence captures the moment when China’s historical imagination met Islam’s expanding world.

Through the testimony of Persian refugees and Central Asian merchants, the Tang court came to understand that a new power had arisen beyond Persia — a faith whose capital was now Damascus, whose origin lay in Arabia, and whose reach extended across the very lands where Rome and Iran once contended.

What seems at first a geographical note — “west of Persia” — is therefore the birthmark of Sino-Islamic geography: a world newly knit together by conquest, revelation, and trade, viewed from the eastern end of the earth.

To the Tang historian, it meant simply:

“Beyond Persia, another Heaven’s decree has appeared.”

⚔️ “A Persian Hu Aided by the Divine” — The Mythic Memory of the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ

「初有波斯胡人，若有神助，得刀殺人。」
“At first there was a Persian Hu who, as if aided by divine power, obtained a sword by which he could kill men.”

🪶 The Line and Its World

In this remarkable sentence, Du You preserves the oldest East Asian interpretation of Islam’s founder — not as a prophet or lawgiver, but as a divinely inspired warrior who overturned the Persian realm. The phrase compresses into a single image what, from the Chinese perspective, was inexplicable: how a nomadic, camel-herding people could suddenly rise, destroy the empire of the Sasanids, and proclaim a new divine law.

The Tang historian’s wording is not malicious — it is an attempt to translate a world-shaking religious revolution into the language of Chinese political myth. To him, this was the birth of a dynasty by heavenly mandate, expressed through a man of foreign lands (Bōsī Húrén 波斯胡人) whose victories could only be explained as “神助” — divine aid.

🏺 “Persian Hu” — When the Arabs Appeared Through Persian Eyes

The first key phrase, 波斯胡人 (Bōsī Húrén), literally means “a Hu man of Persia.”

This identification of the Prophet as a “Persian Hu” reflects the viewpoint of Persian informants in China — Zoroastrian refugees, traders, and soldiers who had fled the Arab conquests after 651 CE. To the Tang, “Persia” (Bōsī) was the great western kingdom they had long known; the newcomers who now ruled those lands were initially described in relation to it.

As Jeffrey Kotyk observes in Sino-Iranian and Sino-Arabian Relations in Late Antiquity (2024):

“The Chinese word Hu 胡 during the Tang was a general reference to persons to the west of China, including Sogdians, Persians, sometimes Indians, and evidently also Arabs… My present sense is that Hu ren (‘men of the Hu’) likely denotes herders of camels, since in China, many Westerners were typically associated with riding camels.”

Kotyk also notes the testimony of the Korean monk Hyecho (慧超), who traveled through the Islamic world in the early 8th century and recorded Persian narratives about the Arabs:

“The Tāzīks were a house of herders of camels of the Persian king. They later rebelled and killed the king, establishing themselves as sovereign.” (大𥦽是波斯王放駝戶,於後叛便殺彼王,自立為主)

This line is crucial. It shows that Persian exiles portrayed the Arabs as once subordinate “camel-herders” — servants of the Persian crown — who suddenly revolted, killed the king (Yazdgird III), and seized power. From such stories, Chinese historians inherited the notion that Islam’s founder was a “Persian Hu” — not truly Persian, but a western nomad of Persian domain who overthrew his masters.

👑 The Shadow of Xusro II and the Shattered Pride of Iran

Behind this distorted image lies a deep historical wound. When the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ sent his letter to Xusro II around 627 CE, the Sasanid King, then at the height of his power, tore it apart in rage:

“He read the letter and tore it, saying, ‘He writes to me thus while he is my slave (ʿabdī)?!’”
(وقال : يكتب إليّ بهذا وهو عبدي؟!)

The arrogance of Xusro’s reply echoed the Sasanid sense of supremacy — Persia was the world’s empire; Arabia, its desert margin. Yet within a decade, the unimaginable occurred: the Persians who mocked the “camel herders” were overrun by them. Yazdgird III, the last Sasanid, died fleeing through the ruins of his own realm.

Many Persians, unable to reconcile this reversal, carried to China a trauma narrative: that these Arabs, once the “camel keepers of the Persian king,” had betrayed their overlord and usurped his crown. For them, Islam’s rise was not a revelation but a rebellion — not prophecy, but revolt.

Du You’s “Persian Hu with divine aid” is the echo of that displaced Persian memory, retold in a Chinese idiom of heavenly causality. The Tang historian does not question the “divine aid” — he accepts that Heaven had favored these people — but he retains the Persian assumption that the Arabs were formerly subordinates of the Shah.

⚔️ “Divine Aid” (神助) — The Heavenly Mandate of Victory

The phrase 神助 (shén zhù) — “help from the spirits” or “divine assistance” — is loaded with meaning. In Tang historiography, it often marks the birth of a new dynasty: Heaven, dissatisfied with a corrupt regime, transfers its mandate to a new chosen people.

In the Qurʾān, this idea appears repeatedly in spiritual terms:

“And victory is only from God; indeed, God is Exalted in Might, Wise.” (Qurʾān 8:10)

The Prophet’s victories — at Badr, Uḥud, and the conquest of Mecca — were understood by Muslims as signs of divine favor (naṣr min Allāh).

To the Tang observer, hearing of this through Persian intermediaries, such victories could only be described as “神助” — Heaven aiding the virtuous against the decadent.

In that sense, Du You’s line unintentionally expresses a profound truth: Islam did indeed rise through a divine mandate, though his phrasing refracts that revelation through the Confucian theory of Tianming (天命) — Heaven’s will transferring from one house to another. The fall of the Sasanids and the rise of the Arabs thus appeared, even to the distant Chinese, as a cosmic act of justice.

🗡️ “Obtained a Sword to Kill Men” — Symbolism and Misunderstanding

The final phrase, 得刀殺人, literally “obtained a sword to kill men,” might sound brutal in isolation, but within Tang historiography it symbolized the authority to punish and to rule. The “sword” (dāo 刀) was not merely a weapon — it was the emblem of Heaven’s judgment, the right to establish order through force.

For the chronicler, the “Persian Hu” was a man whose divine mandate was revealed through conquest. The Arabs’ sudden victories over Persia and Rome confirmed this interpretation. The “sword” here, therefore, represents the force of revelation made visible — the transformative energy that toppled empires and remade the moral order of the world.

In Islamic terms, this corresponds not to bloodshed but to jihad in its primordial sense — the striving in God’s cause, the outward manifestation of a divine mission. The Chinese historian, unable to grasp the theological nuance, translated this as “divine help and the sword.”

🌍 The Tang Understanding of Prophetic Power

For the Tang literati, a figure who overthrows a corrupt empire with Heaven’s help and moral virtue is the quintessential sage-king. They would have recognized in this “Persian Hu” the archetype of a world-transforming founder — someone like King Wu of Zhou, who overthrew the wicked Shang with Heaven’s approval.

Thus, Du You’s description of the Prophet, though wrapped in error, paradoxically ennobles him within the Chinese worldview. The “divine sword” is the tianming in action; the fall of Persia is the punishment of hubris; the rise of the Arabs is Heaven’s restoration of moral order.

Without knowing it, the Tang chronicler had written the first Sinicized theology of Islamic history: Heaven aids the righteous stranger; the Mandate passes to the desert people; a new age begins under divine sanction.

✨ In Summary

「初有波斯胡人，若有神助，得刀殺人。」
“At first there was a Persian Hu who, as if aided by divine power, obtained a sword by which he could kill men.”

This line, born of rumor and exile, is the Chinese echo of the Prophet’s mission — distorted through Persian resentment, yet faithful to the awe his rise inspired. It fuses the bitterness of a fallen empire with the astonishment of a watching world: a “camel-herder” who became a conqueror, a “slave” who was in truth God’s Messenger ﷺ.

In Chinese moral language, it means this:

“Heaven aided a man of the western lands, granting him the sword of justice, that he might destroy tyranny and bring a new order.”

Thus the Tong dian preserves, in the idiom of tianming, the memory of Muḥammad the Prophet, Muḥammad the Victor, and above all Muḥammad the Chosen, through whom Heaven renewed its covenant with mankind.

👳‍♂️ “He Gathered and Won Over the Various Hu” — Uniting the Tribes of Arabia

「因招附諸胡」
“He summoned and brought the various Hu into allegiance.”

This brief phrase, only five characters long, captures in miniature the Tang world’s interpretation of one of history’s greatest transformations — the unification of Arabia under the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ.

🪶 Linguistic and Political Resonance of 招附 (Zhāo fù)

The verb 招附 (zhāo fù) carries rich layers of meaning in Tang political vocabulary. Literally, it means “to call and attach,” but in practice it connoted moral persuasion and voluntary submission to a higher authority. In imperial edicts and dynastic histories, the phrase was often used for the “pacification” (安撫) of rebellious tribes or warlords — not through annihilation, but through virtue and persuasion. When a general “招附” the border peoples, it meant that he won them over without bloodshed, convincing them to accept the emperor’s civilizing order.

Thus, when Du You’s Tong dian describes the Prophet as having “招附諸胡,” it is casting him in the role of a moral unifier and civilizing teacher. The Prophet’s daʿwah, which in Islamic language is a summons to faith, becomes in Chinese historiography a summons to harmony — the transformation of unruly nomads into loyal subjects of a divinely guided king.

The Tang chronicler could only describe new movements through the moral lexicon he knew: Heaven grants the mandate (天命), a sage arises, and he “pacifies all under Heaven” (平天下) by virtue rather than force. In that sense, the Prophet ﷺ appears here as a sage-king of the western lands, a figure who brings moral order to chaos — a parallel to China’s own legendary founders, such as Yao and Shun.

🏜️ From Fragmented Tribes to a Community of Faith

Behind the Chinese phrasing lies the real history of Arabia in the 7th century. Before Islam, the Peninsula was a tapestry of independent tribes, bound by kinship but divided by vengeance, raiding, and local idols. With the revelation of the Qur’an and the Prophet’s preaching of lā ilāha illā Allāh — “there is no god but God” — these tribes were gradually united into a single moral community (ummah).

The Tang historian, hearing of this, would have interpreted it in his own conceptual framework. Where the Muslim saw divine revelation, the Chinese saw moral transformation; where the Arab saw the ummah, the Chinese saw a new dynastic order. To say “He gathered and won over the various Hu” was therefore not a dismissive description but a recognition of extraordinary charisma: this “Persian Hu” (as he mistakenly calls him earlier) had achieved what emperors dream of — to make diverse peoples one through moral persuasion.

The Tang intellectual world was saturated with the concept of “teaching transforming the barbarians” (教化夷狄), drawn from the Confucian belief that virtue radiates outward from the civilized center. Thus, “因招附諸胡” would have sounded to a Tang reader as: “He transformed the western barbarians through teaching and virtue.” What we today call daʿwah — the invitation to faith — found its Chinese analogue in the Confucian ideal of moral transformation (化), a process by which human nature is refined through contact with the Way.

🕊️ The Prophet as a Model of Virtuous Pacification

In this light, Du You’s account takes on a subtle tone of respect. He does not say that the Arabs conquered by violence, nor that they subjugated Persia by brute force; instead, he portrays their leader as 招附 — one who persuades, not compels.

This is remarkable when one considers how the Tang empire itself justified its rule. Tang emperors were heirs to the Mandate of Heaven (天命), granted not by birthright alone but by moral legitimacy. When a Tang historian says that someone “招附諸胡,” he is saying that Heaven’s virtue has manifested again — but this time, astonishingly, among the western peoples.

We can sense in this sentence the awe of a Confucian bureaucrat encountering a faith so new and yet so ancient in its moral structure. Islam, to him, was not merely another “foreign religion” but an echo of the same cosmic order that underpinned Chinese civilization: the idea that moral truth, once revealed, harmonizes the world.

🕌 The Empire of Faith and the Tang View of World Order

The chronicler concludes that by “gathering and winning over the various Hu,” the Prophet founded a new kind of empire — one based not on blood, but on belief. From the Tang perspective, this was a political miracle: nomads, long known for internal feuds and shifting loyalties, had coalesced under a single banner and were now sending embassies eastward as equals to the Son of Heaven.

Du You, writing in 801 CE, had never met a Muslim, but he grasped the essence of what he saw unfolding across Eurasia: a vast religious commonwealth, united not by walls or dynasties but by a shared conviction of divine truth. For the Tang mind — accustomed to seeing unity as the highest good — the rise of Islam appeared as the birth of a Western “Middle Kingdom”: a civilization centered on faith, ruled by virtue, and held together by belief rather than kinship.

✨ In Summary

「因招附諸胡」 — “He summoned and brought the various Hu into allegiance.”

This deceptively simple phrase encodes a profound cross-cultural perception. The Tang Chinese, trying to make sense of Islam’s explosive rise, interpreted the Prophet’s daʿwah as an act of moral pacification, the establishment of harmony where chaos reigned.

In their eyes, Muḥammad ﷺ was not a conqueror but a sage-king whose virtue united his people.

To call him one who “招附諸胡” was, in Tang moral language, the highest possible compliment — the acknowledgment that Heaven had once again sent a teacher to bring the distant lands of the West into harmony with the Way.

👑 “Eleven Hu Came One After Another” — Decoding the Mysterious Eleven

「有胡人十一來，據次第摩首受化為王。」
“Eleven Hu men came one after another, bowing their heads and accepting his teaching, and he became their king.”

The final sentence of Du You’s account has intrigued every reader of the Tong dian. It stands as one of the earliest attempts in East Asia to quantify Islamic leadership—to express, in Confucian moral idiom, the transmission of authority after the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ. The number eleven (shíyī 十一) cannot be accidental; Tang annalists were meticulous in their numerology. But what did those eleven represent?

Below are the four main explanations, ranked from most plausible to least plausible, given both the textual context and the historical possibilities open to Chinese informants around 801 CE.

1️⃣ Most Plausible: The Prophet ﷺ + the Ten Promised Paradise (الأشَرَةُ المُبَشَّرَةُ)

The hadith names ten companions—Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, ʿUthmān, ʿAlī, Ṭalḥa, al-Zubayr, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn ʿAwf, Saʿd ibn Abī Waqqāṣ, Saʿīd ibn Zayd, and Abū ʿUbaydah ibn al-Jarāḥ—whom the Prophet promised Paradise:

أَبُو بَكْرٍ فِي الْجَنَّةِ ... وَأَبُو عُبَيْدَةَ بْنُ الْجَرَّاحِ فِي الْجَنَّةِ

Ten men, plus the Prophet himself, equal eleven righteous figures.

Why is this reading convincing?

(a) The phrasing “摩首受化”—to “bow the head and receive transformation”—evokes moral discipleship, not political succession. The ten companions, revered for early conversion and loyalty, fit that description better than later caliphs or kings.
(b) Tang chroniclers loved symbolic enumeration. When they learned a new religion, they often recorded the founder plus a fixed circle of chief disciples (e.g., the Buddha and his ten da-shi 大弟子, the “ten great disciples”). The coincidence is striking: the Prophet as “teacher” and ten companions as “transformed followers.”
(c) Numerological coherence. Eleven here functions as the archetypal “full company” in Chinese narrative—one master surrounded by ten exemplars.

Hence, the phrase “Eleven Hu” can easily be a translation of a formula like “the Prophet and his ten companions,” transmitted through Persian or Sogdian intermediaries who framed early Islam in Buddhist-style categories that Chinese historians could grasp.

3️⃣ Possible but Speculative: The First Hijrah to Abyssinia (615 CE)

Your observation that eleven men and four women migrated to Abyssinia under ʿUthmān ibn Maẓʿūn (r.a.) opens a haunting possibility: perhaps oral reports of “eleven first believers who went westward” were misunderstood in Central Asia as “eleven who came successively.”

If true, this would mean that the story of Islam’s first diaspora—Muslims seeking refuge in a Christian land—traveled along the trade routes, losing its geographical moorings but keeping its number. However, this requires assuming an unlikely continuity of oral transmission over 180 years from Arabia to Tang China with no textual intermediary. The linguistic clue “據次第” (“one after another”) also suggests succession, not a single simultaneous group. Hence this interpretation, though poetically beautiful, ranks below the first two in plausibility.

4️⃣ Least Plausible: Eleven Tribal Chiefs Submitting to the Prophet

Some have read the line literally: eleven western chieftains “bowed and accepted the new teaching,” turning Muḥammad ﷺ into their king. This would interpret “Hu men” as leaders of different tribes.

While this fits the outward grammar, it conflicts with two facts:

By Tang usage, Hu (胡) already meant foreign peoples collectively, not specific named tribes.
The idea that “he became their king” (為王) following eleven tribal submissions would imply a confederacy of only eleven groups—too few for the Arabian reality and too oddly specific for Chinese sources that usually preferred round numbers like ten, twelve, or hundred.

Therefore, this literal tribal reading seems more like a surface misunderstanding than the author’s intent.

🧭 Weighing the Evidence

Rank	Interpretation	Core Idea	Fits Confucian idiom?	Historical plausibility	Overall weight
🥇 1	Prophet + Ten Promised Paradise	Eleven moral exemplars	✅ Perfectly	✅ Symbolic & doctrinal	★★★★★

🥈 2	First Hijrah to Abyssinia	Eleven early emigrants	✅ Metaphorical	❌ Transmission gap	★★☆☆☆
🥉 3	Eleven Tribal Chiefs	Local tribal confederacy	⚠️ Literal only	❌ Culturally forced	★☆☆☆☆

✨ Conclusion

The most coherent explanation, both philologically and culturally, is that the Tang chronicler heard of “the Prophet and his ten foremost companions” and rendered that report in a form his readers could understand: “Eleven Hu came one after another, bowed their heads, and accepted the transformation.”

Just as Buddhist texts spoke of Śākyamuni and his ten disciples, so too the Chinese reimagined the new Western sage and his circle of enlightened followers. In that moment, the asharat al-mubashsharah became immortalized in a Confucian sentence—an elegant testimony to how Islamic sacred memory crossed the Silk Road and was reborn in the language of Chinese historiography.

🕌 Synthesis — China’s Earliest Portrait of Islam

Taken as a whole, this brief passage presents a miniature Chinese epic of Islam’s birth. To Tang eyes, the new faith appeared as the story of a divinely inspired Western hero, a man who, through Heaven’s favor, forged unity among diverse tribes and became a king-prophet. The Chinese chronicler misread ethnic details but captured the essence: a revelation, a sword, a conversion, a kingdom.

Thus, even in its errors, Du You’s citation preserves something profoundly true: that Islam arose with astonishing speed, bound by faith rather than blood, and that its founder’s charisma united peoples who once wandered as separate “Hu.” For the Tang world, accustomed to viewing all foreign creeds through the prism of dynastic virtue, this was a revelation from beyond Persia, a mirror of their own concept of universal order.

🌍 In just a few lines, the Tongdian offers the earliest ethnographic portrait of Islam in Chinese literature—a testament to how swiftly the Prophet’s message crossed continents, transforming not only lands and languages but also the imagination of an empire that watched, from the farthest East, as a new faith rose in the West.

II. ⚔️ “The Rise and Power of the Dàshí” — The Tang Chronicle of Muslim Expansion

📜 Original Chinese

此後眾漸歸附，遂滅波斯，又破拂菻及婆羅門城，所當無敵。
兵眾有四十二萬。
有國以來三十四年矣。
初王已死，次傳第一摩首者，今王即是第三，其王姓大食。

English Translation

Thereafter, the multitudes gradually submitted to them.
They subsequently destroyed Persia, then defeated Rome (Fúlin 拂菻) and the City of the Brahmans (Póluómén chéng 婆羅門城), meeting no enemy able to withstand them, Their army numbers 420,000 men.
Since the founding of their state, thirty-four years have passed.
The first king has already died; thereafter the rule was handed down to the first “Móshǒu”; the present king is the third.
The royal clan name is Dàshí.

🔍 Detailed Commentary

🕊️ 「此後眾漸歸附」

—

“Thereafter, the multitudes gradually submitted.”

This brief line opens the second movement of the Tang account — the transition from revelation to expansion, from prophetic charisma to political unification. It follows immediately after “he gathered and won over the various Hu”, signaling that what began as a spiritual call now unfolds into the mass adherence of peoples and tribes.

The verb phrase guī fù (歸附), literally “to return and attach oneself,” carries deep ideological weight in Chinese historiography. It was not a neutral term for surrender but a moralized act of allegiance. To guīfù was to recognize the superior virtue (dé 德) of a ruler or a civilization and willingly come under its transforming influence. In Tang documents, it was used to describe non-Chinese peoples who, moved by awe or moral example, “came to submit” to the Son of Heaven.

By using this formula to describe the spread of Islam, Du You was unconsciously translating the Islamic concept of daʿwah (دعوة) — the call to God — into Confucian political language. Where the Muslim sources speak of hearts turning to īmān (faith), the Tang chronicler saw foreign tribes “returning” to the order of a newly legitimate heavenly ruler.

Thus, “the multitudes gradually submitted” does not simply mean conquest by force; it implies voluntary moral transformation — a key Confucian virtue. The adverb jiàn (漸), “gradually,” strengthens this: it evokes a process of steady assimilation, a rhythm of civilization’s spread through persuasion and example.

This mirrors the early Islamic narrative perfectly. After the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ unified the tribes of Arabia under the banner of tawḥīd (monotheism), delegation and conversion followed in waves. The Qurʾān itself records this moment in Sūrat al-Naṣr (110:2):

“And you see the people entering the religion of God in crowds.”

The Tang historian, hearing this through Persian intermediaries, rendered that same idea in the only idiom available to him — guīfù, the moral submission of multitudes to rightful authority. For Chinese readers, it would recall how the ancient sage-kings brought order to the four quarters through their virtue; for Muslim readers, it evokes the ummah’s birth under divine guidance.

In this way, these six simple characters — 「此後眾漸歸附」 — form a cross-civilizational mirror:

To the Tang, it signified the moral magnetism of a virtuous new dynasty.
To Muslims, it echoed the divine unfolding of prophecy into polity.

It is one of the most profound examples of how the Tong dian, without realizing it, translated Islamic salvation history into Chinese political cosmology — the Prophet as sage-king, revelation as moral law, and the unity of the tribes as the dawning of a new Mandate under Heaven.

🏛️ 「遂滅波斯」
—
“They subsequently destroyed Persia.”

This short yet thunderous clause captures, in just four characters, one of the most cataclysmic transformations of the ancient world — the fall of the Sasanian Empire in 651 CE at the hands of the early Muslim armies. For the Tang chronicler, this was not merely a foreign conquest but a cosmic event, signaling the extinction of an old mandate and the birth of a new one.

The verb miè (滅), “to annihilate” or “extinguish,” was reserved in Chinese historiography for the termination of dynastic legitimacy. When the Zhou fell, the Chunqiu Annals wrote “Zhou miè.” When the Sui were conquered by the Tang, official histories recorded, “Sui miè.” It did not simply denote military defeat; it marked the moral exhaustion of a ruling house, when Heaven (Tiān 天) withdrew its Mandate (Tiānmìng 天命) and bestowed it elsewhere.

By saying “They subsequently destroyed Persia,” Du You (or his source) was therefore writing Islam into the grammar of dynastic succession — the moral logic by which Heaven’s favor shifts from the corrupt to the virtuous. In this sense, the fall of the Sasanians was not only a political end but a theological realignment: Persia’s sacred fire extinguished, a new divine light — the revelation of Islam — now illuminating the West.

The Tang court was acutely aware of Persia’s fate, when Yazdgird III fled eastward before the Muslim advance, his son Pērōz III sought refuge in Tang territory. Chinese sources record his plea to Emperor Gaozong for aid and even the Tang appointment of Pērōz as “King of Persia” (Bōsī wáng 波斯王) in exile at Jiuquan.

Thus, when the Tong dian says “They destroyed Persia,” it was not abstract hearsay. The Tang had met the Persians who fled from that destruction — living witnesses of an empire unmade by an unseen power from the west. In their eyes, the Dàshí (Arabs) had done what few could: extinguished one of the world’s most venerable dynasties, heir to Cyrus and Darius.

For the Tang historian, the implications were profound. The ancient dual order of the world — Rome and Persia — had stood for nearly a millennium. With one half now obliterated, a new polarity emerged: China in the East, Islam in the West. The word suì 遂 (“thereupon, subsequently”) marks the sequence of destiny: after uniting their tribes, the Arabs “then destroyed Persia.” It implies not accident, but inevitability, as though the rise of Islam naturally culminated in the end of Persia’s house.

This mirrored how Chinese chroniclers viewed their own imperial cycles: virtue gathers the people (zhòng 歸附), unity brings power (bīng 兵), and Heaven responds by granting the Mandate. The Dàshí had, by moral and martial means, achieved what in Chinese cosmology only legitimate dynasties could do — replace the unworthy and bring new order to the world.

Within the Islamic narrative, the destruction of Persia was indeed seen as divinely decreed. The Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ had foretold:

“When Xusro perishes, there will be no Xusro after him.” (Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim)

To Muslims, the fall of the Sasanids was proof of God’s promise — the triumph of tawḥīd (monotheism) over fire-worship and idolatry. To the Tang, hearing this through Persian intermediaries, it became the tale of a Hu (western foreigner) who, “aided by divine power, took up the sword” — a Heaven-blessed conqueror extinguishing a decadent realm.

Thus, both civilizations, though divided by faith and language, interpreted the same event through a moral-theological lens: divine sanction removing a corrupt order and installing a new one.

Ironically, even as the Tang recorded “Persia’s destruction,” Persia’s cultural soul survived within Islam, transmitting its language, administration, and cosmology eastward. The very term Dàshí came to China through Persian speech; Persian scribes and merchants were the bridge between the Caliphate and the Tang court. In this way, the “destroyers of Persia” also became the heirs of Persia’s Silk Road legacy, inheriting the imperial mantle of exchange and order.

🏛️ 「又破拂菻及婆羅門城，所當無敵」

“Then they defeated Fúlǐn (Rome) and the City of the Brahmans, meeting no enemy able to oppose them.”

With this line, the Tong dian widens its lens from Persia to encompass the entire western and southern ecumene known to the Tang. Having recorded that the Dàshí (Arabs) “destroyed Persia,” Du You now extends their conquests to the Roman and Indian realms — the two other great civilizational poles of the classical world. In a single triadic formulation, the historian positions Islam’s rise within the global order as the Tang court conceived it:

Direction	Civilization	Tang Name	Modern Equivalent
West	拂菻 Fúlǐn	“Rome”	Roman Empire
Center	波斯 Bōsī	“Persia”	Sasanian Iran
East	婆羅門 Póluómén	“Brahman”	India

By asserting that the Dàshí overcame them all, Du You cast Islam not as a regional movement but as a cosmic transformation, a new civilization absorbing the total heritage of the Old World.

🏛️ Fúlǐn 拂菻

—

The Roman Realm (Hrōm, not “Byzantium”)

The word Fúlǐn 拂菻 has often been translated as “Byzantium,” yet this modern label obscures the worldview of Tang-era writers. The Chinese of the 7th–9th centuries never conceived of a separate “Byzantine” Empire; to them, Fúlǐn was simply the realm of Rome — the continuation of the same universal empire that earlier dynasties had called Dàqín 大秦 (“Great Qin”), a symbolic twin to China itself.

Philologically, Fúlǐn entered Chinese through Middle Iranian and Sogdian intermediaries. Its linguistic trail maps the journey of “Rome” across Eurasia:

Language	Term	Meaning	Transmission Path
Greek	Ῥώμη (Rhṓmē)	Rome	Original ethnonym
Latin	Roma	Rome	Root form
Middle Persian	𐭧𐭫𐭥𐭬 (Hrōm)	Rome	Sasanian imperial term

Old Armenian	Հռովմ (Hṙovm)	Rome	Loan from Greek
Chinese (Tang)	拂菻 (Fúlǐn)	Rome	Via Sogdian/Middle Persian

This phonetic chain — Rhōmē → Hrōm → Frūm → Fúlǐn — shows that Tang understanding of “Rome” was transmitted through Iranian and Sogdian commercial networks, not through direct contact with the Mediterranean. The Tong dian’s “defeat of Fúlǐn” therefore records the echo of the early Arab–Roman wars as heard across Asia: the fall of Syria (636), the capture of Alexandria (642), and the Arab seizure of Roman strongholds in the Levant.

🗺️ To Tang observers, these events appeared as the collapse of Hrōm’s eastern dominions — a world-order earthquake in which the heir of Persia was destroyed, and even Rome’s eastern provinces succumbed. Du You’s phrase “破拂菻” (“defeated Rome”) condenses that epochal shift into one moral judgment: Heaven’s mandate had moved.

💡 In Chinese cosmology, this meant the Dàshí had proven themselves Tianming zhi min 天命之民 — “a people with Heaven’s Mandate.” Just as the Tang unified China by virtue and conquest, the Arabs had unified the West by divine favor.

Thus, to render Fúlǐn as “Byzantium” is to read through modern European eyes. For Du You, it was simply Rome — the eternal empire of the West, now vanquished by a new world power rising from Arabia’s deserts.

🕉️ Póluómén chéng 婆羅門城

—

“The City of the Brahmans”

The second conquest named by Du You turns eastward, toward the Indian world.

The phrase Póluómén chéng 婆羅門城 — “City of the Brahmans” — combines phonetic transcription (Póluómén = Brahman) with metaphor (chéng 城 = “city,” the heart of a realm).

In Tang texts, Póluómén did not refer merely to a caste. It was shorthand for the entire Indic civilization built upon Brahmanical learning, Sanskrit ritual, and Vedic cosmology. To call something “the City of the Brahmans” was to name the spiritual capital of India itself, the seat of its sages and temples — a poetic stand-in for the Indian world as a whole.

Du You’s account dates to the reign of Caliph ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān (r.a.), around 651 CE — the same decade China first recorded a Dàshí embassy.

From both Islamic and non-Islamic sources, we know that Arab armies had indeed reached the borders of India by this time.

📖 Al-Balādhurī, in his Futūḥ al-Buldān, records that:

“ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb appointed ʿUthmān ibn Abī al-ʿĀṣ al-Thaqafī as governor of Baḥrayn and ʿUmān. He sent an army to Thānā (near modern Mumbai), another to Barūs, and his brother al-Mughīra to Daybul in Sind, where they met the enemy and gained victory… When ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān became Caliph, he ordered expeditions to the border of Hind.”

Though exploratory and limited, these maritime and border campaigns marked the first Muslim incursions into the Indian littoral — the very frontier the Tang chronicler calls Póluómén chéng.

Even the Armenian historian Sebeos (c. 661 CE), writing almost contemporaneously, confirms that:

“The sons of Ishmael went east from the desert of Sin… they penetrated with royal armies into Pars, Sakastan, Sind, Kirman, and Makuran, as far as the borders of India. They burned the whole land and took plunder before returning.”

To the Tang court, these eastern forays — carried by Arab fleets and armies — were interpreted as a conquest of India’s sacred frontier, symbolized in one resounding phrase: “They defeated the City of the Brahmans.”

🕌 Cosmographic Meaning: Islam Touches the Dharma’s Homeland

For the Tang world, India was not a distant kingdom — it was the holy land of Buddhism, the source of the Dharma.

To claim that the Dàshí had “defeated the City of the Brahmans” was to suggest that Islam’s dominion had reached into the sacred geography of enlightenment itself — the same soil from which Śākyamuni Buddha had once walked.

This notion would have startled and fascinated Tang readers.

The Arabs, once known as desert traders, now appeared to have subdued the spiritual homeland of the Buddha — a region that for centuries had supplied China with scriptures, relics, and monks.

Thus, in Du You’s rendering, the Dàshí were not only world conquerors, but participants in the cosmic cycle of revelation: a new faith extending over the same sanctified lands once traversed by earlier sages.

🕊️ Threefold Conquest: A Cartography of Heaven’s Mandate

Du You structures the Dàshí conquests as a triadic world-map, echoing the Tang cosmological order of the “Three Realms of Civilization”:

Direction	Civilization	Tang Term	Symbolic Meaning
🌍 Westward	Byzantium	拂菻 (Fúlǐn)	The Seat of Imperial Power
🏛️ Central	Persia	波斯 (Bōsī)	The Heart of the Old Iranian Kingship
🕉️ Eastward	India	婆羅門城 (Póluómén chéng)	The Land of Spiritual Wisdom

This tripartite scheme is deliberate. It proclaims that the Dàshí’s expansion has spanned the totality of the civilized world known to China — the political, the imperial, and the sacred.

In conquering Rome, Persia, and “the City of the Brahmans,” Islam had symbolically encompassed the three pillars of late antique civilization: Caesar’s throne, Chosroes’s fire, and the Brahman’s altar.

The inclusion of Póluómén chéng thus transforms the Tongdian from simple ethnography into sacred geography.

It records not only the military scope of early Islam, but its theological magnitude as understood through Tang cosmology.

By 651 CE, the Dàshí were no longer desert tribes.

They had become a dynasty of Heaven’s favor, whose reach extended from the Mediterranean to the Indus — from the lands of philosophy to those of revelation.

And in this triadic portrait — Persia fallen, Rome humbled, India touched — the Tang historian saw the unmistakable rhythm of Heaven’s law: that the Mandate passes from one civilization to the next, as virtue waxes and wanes beneath the stars.

⚔️ 所當無敵

—

“No enemy could withstand them.”

This closing phrase — suǒ dāng wú dí — appears throughout Tang historiography as a formula of imperial invincibility. It was applied to Tang Taizong’s conquests of the Turks, to the campaigns that pacified the Western Regions, and to other victorious dynasties blessed by Heaven. By using it for the Dàshí, Du You raises Islam to the rank of a world-dominating empire, one comparable in virtue and destiny to the Tang itself.

📜 In bureaucratic idiom, “無敵” did not merely mean military prowess; it implied moral supremacy — that no just ruler could oppose them because Heaven willed their success. Thus, in four characters, Du You captures the Tang recognition that a new empire of destiny had arisen in the far West.

🌍 The Global Frame

“They destroyed Persia, and then defeated Rome and the City of the Brahmans; none could resist them.”

This single sentence from the Tong dian compresses the entire first century of Islamic expansion into a universal panorama. The Dàshí appear as a people chosen by Heaven — rising from the deserts beyond Persia, sweeping across the heartlands of the ancient world, and transforming the order of civilizations.

From the Tang perspective, this was not merely geopolitics but the rotation of Heaven’s Mandate — the cosmic rhythm by which dynasties rise and fall. Just as the Zhou replaced the Shang, and the Tang succeeded the Sui, so too had the Dàshí supplanted Persia, humbled Rome, and reached the lands of the Brahmans.

For the first time, Chinese historiography perceived Islam not as a sect, nor as a tribal movement, but as a world-order civilization — one that rivaled the Tang in both scope and legitimacy.

Du You’s Tong dian thus marks a milestone in world historical consciousness: it is the earliest surviving Chinese text to portray Islam as a universal empire, a divinely aided people whose victories spanned the known world. In the eyes of Tang China, the Dàshí had entered the sacred circle of Heaven’s civilizations — peers in the moral, martial, and cosmic hierarchy that defined the Middle Kingdom’s view of the world.

⚔️ 「兵眾有四十二萬」 — “Their army numbers 420,000 men.”

To the Tang historian, this figure conveyed far more than a statistic — it was a statement of civilizational arrival. In Chinese political philosophy, greatness (wei 威, de 德) was measured by the ability to raise, provision, and command a disciplined standing army (bīngzhòng 兵眾). To attribute such a force to the Dàshí was to declare: these people have become a state.

By assigning the Arabs an army of “420,000 men,” Du You was not quantifying but qualifying — signaling that they had crossed the threshold from a desert confederation into a centralized empire capable of sustained warfare, taxation, and administration.

📏 Numbers as Political Rhetoric

Tang chroniclers delighted in numbers, but their function was rhetorical, not statistical. Figures such as “forty-two ten-thousands” (sìshí’èr wàn 四十二萬) were moral measures of scale, not literal tallies. To Chinese readers, such numbers framed the magnitude of a power’s virtue, resources, and Heaven-granted order.

When Du You writes “420,000,” he is adopting the bureaucratic idiom of Tang military registers, where troops were counted in tens of thousands and recorded under regional commands (zhèn 鎮, dào 道). At its zenith under Tang Taizong, the empire fielded roughly 600,000 soldiers across all frontier garrisons; to say that the Dàshí possessed 420,000 was therefore to place them within the same imperial league — a global peer, not a peripheral tribe.

The number also embodies a standard Tang historiographical formula: multiples of ten-thousand were symbols of organized grandeur. They implied not chaos, but zhì 治 — order. To sustain 420,000 men was to possess zǔzhī 組織 (organization), zhèngfǎ 政法 (governance), and liángliào 糧料 (supply). In short, it was to be an empire in full form.

🕋 The World of 651 CE — The Yonghui Embassy and the Image of Power

The figure also mirrors a specific historical moment: the year 651 CE, the second year of the Yonghui 永徽 reign of Emperor Gaozong (r. 649–683). In that year, according to both the Xin Tang shu 新唐書 and Tong dian 通典, the first embassy from the Dàshí arrived at the Tang court.

“In the Yonghui years, the Dàshí sent envoys to offer tribute, saying their country lay to the west of Persia.” (永徽中，大食遣使朝貢云其國在波斯之西。)

This was no mere trade mission. The embassy coincided almost exactly with the fall of the Sasanian Empire and the consolidation of the Rashidun Caliphate under ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān (r.a.), the “third king” of Du You’s later lines.

By 651 CE, Persia had fallen — Yazdegerd III had been killed near Merv — and the armies of Islam had extended from the Nile to the Oxus. The Tang court, suddenly encountering Arab envoys at its western border, perceived this as the rise of a new power filling the vacuum left by Iran’s collapse.

Reports brought eastward by Sogdian merchants and Persian refugees would have told of immense armies sweeping across Asia — of soldiers disciplined by faith, funded by vast war spoils, and commanded under a single “law of Heaven.” These tales, reaching Chang’an, would be translated into the bureaucratic idiom of the empire: “They have 420,000 men.”

To the Tang historian, this was both credible and symbolic — a way of Sinicizing rumor into zhèngshǐ 正史, the language of the official histories.

🏹 Symbolism of the “Imperial Army”

In Chinese cosmology, the distinction between tribe and state lay precisely in the capacity to maintain a permanent, disciplined military. Nomads raised levies; empires sustained garrisons. To record that the Dàshí commanded 420,000 men was to acknowledge that they possessed the marks of guó 國 — a state with law, hierarchy, and the Mandate of Heaven.

Du You’s wording — bīngzhòng 兵眾 — evokes the Tang’s own administrative terminology for a centralized, professional army. The chronicler thus portrays the Dàshí as a mirror-image empire: a power that, like China, had organized its people into an enduring instrument of rule.

Historically, this perception aligns with the transformation of the early Caliphate under ʿUthmān (r.a.). By 650 CE, the Muslim armies were no longer tribal coalitions but state garrisons (amṣār) established in Kufa, Basra, Fustat, and Damascus. Each garrison maintained a dīwān, a register of soldiers by lineage, rank, and pay — the bureaucratic heart of the new empire.

What the Tang called “兵眾有四十二萬” thus captured, through its own idiom, the same historical truth the Caliphate embodied: a transition from charisma to institution, from prophecy to polity.

⚖️ Admiration and Unease — A Peer Across Heaven

To the Tang court, which imagined itself as the pivot of civilization (zhonghua 中華), this revelation was both awe-inspiring and unsettling. The Tong dian’s description of the Dàshí’s military power reads as a mixture of admiration and anxiety — admiration for a people whose divine mission had produced order and discipline, and anxiety for what their rise meant for China’s own place under Heaven.

By inscribing “420,000 soldiers” into the record, Du You implicitly declared that the Dàshí now matched the Tang in scale and legitimacy. Their empire had arisen swiftly — within a generation — yet it already commanded armies comparable to those of the Middle Kingdom.

In the Tang worldview, there were only a few empires worthy of cosmic parity:

China in the East, seat of the Son of Heaven;
Fúlǐn (Rome) in the far West, civilization’s mirror;
and now, the Dàshí, Heaven’s new instrument in between.

The number 420,000 was thus more than arithmetic; it was a confession of equality — a recognition that a second axis of the world had emerged.

📅 「有國以來三十四年矣」

—

“Since the founding of their state, thirty-four years have passed.”

On 25 August 651 CE (Yonghui 2, eighth month, second day / 2 Muḥarram 31 AH), an embassy from the Dàshí 大食 (Arabs) reached the Tang court of Emperor Gaozong.

The Cefu Yuangui preserves the entry:

二年八月大食國始遣使朝貢
“In the eighth month of the second year [Yonghui 651 CE], the country of the Dàshí first sent an envoy to pay tribute.”

In Du You’s later Tongdian recension (801 CE), this moment carries a key statement:

有國以來三十四年矣。
“Since the founding of their state, thirty-four years have passed.”

At first glance, the arithmetic is puzzling.

If in 651 CE the Arabs claimed a 34-year-old polity, its foundation would fall in 617 CE — five years before the Hijrah (622 CE).

How could the Tang chroniclers have arrived at that figure?

🌙 I. The Lunar Basis: How the Hijrī Years “Stretch”

The Hijrī calendar, established under ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, counted purely lunar years of 354 days.

Thus, thirty-one Hijrī years (from 622 to 651 CE) equal only about 30 solar years.

To a Chinese official used to solar reckoning, the Muslim envoys’ “31 years” of rule would appear as roughly 34 solar years.

The Tang scribe, converting by the Sun rather than the Moon, simply rendered it:

“Thirty-four years since they founded their state.”

So far, this explains the numerical discrepancy.

But deeper meaning lies beneath the numbers.

🕋 II. The Political Sense: What “Founding the State” Meant

The Arab envoys, speaking through translators, may not have used a technical “calendar” term at all.

Their phrase — “since our dawla began” or “since God granted us power” — could refer to the beginning of Islam as a communal mission, not to the formal Hijrah.

And for a 7th-century Muslim consciousness, that beginning truly lay around 617 CE.

🌙 III. 617 CE — The Hidden Year of Transformation

While the Tang saw it as a calendrical starting-point, the year 617 CE was, in Islamic history, the crucible year when a faith became a nascent umma:

The Boycott of Banū Hāshim
Quraysh, alarmed by the Prophet’s growing influence, sealed a pact to ostracize Banū Hāshim and Banū al-Muṭṭalib.
Ibn al-Qayyim records in Zād al-Maʿād that the boycott began at the crescent of Muḥarram, seventh year of the mission — i.e., 617 CE.
The Prophet ﷺ and his kin endured nearly three years of siege in the Valley of Abū Ṭālib, suffering hunger yet remaining united.

“They swore not to marry them, not to trade with them, nor to speak to them, until they delivered the Messenger of Allah ﷺ…
So the Prophet and his family were confined in the valley from the new moon of Muḥarram in the seventh year of his mission.”

This moment marks Islam’s moral founding: a persecuted community forged in shared ordeal and loyalty.
The Battle of Buʿāth (Yathrib, five years before the Hijrah)
In the same year, 617 CE, the tribes of Aws and Khazraj fought their final, ruinous war at Buʿāth — a conflict that exhausted Medina and made its chiefs yearn for a unifying prophet.
Their reconciliation afterward created the very political vacuum that would soon welcome the Messenger ﷺ.
Within five years, those same clans would offer him the Pledge of ʿAqabah and invite him to migrate.

Thus, 617 CE stands at a double threshold:

Region	Event	Meaning
Mecca	Boycott of Banū Hāshim	Islam’s inner cohesion born through persecution
Yathrib (Medina)	Battle of Buʿāth	Arabia’s political exhaustion preparing a new order

One city suffers for faith; the other longs for peace.
Between them, the conditions for the Hijrah are born.

🪶 IV. What the Tang Heard

When the Dàshí envoys in 651 CE told the Tang that their state had existed for “thirty-four years,” they may have meant:

“It has been thirty-four years since God raised among us His Prophet.”

Translated into Chinese bureaucratic idiom, this became:

“Since the founding of their state, thirty-four years have passed.”

The Tang historians, trained to think in dynastic cycles, read this as the founding of a kingdom, not the revelation of a faith.

But in truth, the envoys’ mental calendar likely began from the first open proclamation of Islam’s mission (circa 610–617 CE) — the moment when a spiritual revelation began to transform into a polity.

🧭 V. The Convergence of Calendars and Meaning

So three different “year ones” converge upon a single span of human transformation:

Perspective	Epoch Year	Interpretation
Muslim (Hijrī)	622 CE	Flight to faith’s freedom — the Hijrah
Chinese (Solar)	617 CE	Calculated “founding” = 31 lunar + 3 solar drift
Historical Reality	617 CE	Islam’s emergence as a unified, politically conscious community

By converting the lunar to the solar, the Tang chronicler accidentally located the spiritual genesis of the Islamic polity with astonishing accuracy.

He fixed his gaze upon the very year when:

The Prophet ﷺ stood against Meccan tyranny,
Medina’s tribes sought divine mediation,
and the first outlines of an ummah began to take form.

✨ VI. The Mirror of Time

Thus the line:

「有國以來三十四年矣」
“Since the founding of their state, thirty-four years have passed.”

is not an error of arithmetic, but a reflection of two civilizations measuring the same dawn by different suns.

The Arabs counted by the Moon of Revelation;

the Chinese counted by the Sun of Empire.

Their numbers diverged, but their intuition aligned — both recognized that in that span of thirty-odd years, a new world order had risen from the deserts of Arabia to reach the palaces of Chang’an.

The Tang had received the Prophet’s people, and through their own mathematics, had dated the moment when prophecy began to transform into power.

👑 「初王已死，次傳第一摩首者，今王即是第三」

—

“The first king has died; next it was transmitted to the first Mó shǒu; the present king is the third.”

The Tang court recorded that the Dàshí (Arabs) sent their first tribute mission in Yonghui 2 (651 CE).

This was during the caliphate of ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān (r.a.), the third successor to the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ.

Thus, when the Tang scribes wrote:

“The first king has died … the present king is the third,”

they were accurately describing the historical sequence of:

Order	Arabic Title	Chinese Rendering	Modern Identification	Reign
1️⃣	al-nabī / rasūl Allāh	初王 (“the first king”)	Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ	610–632 CE
2️⃣	Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq	第一摩首 (“the first Mó shǒu”)	Abū Bakr (r.a.)	632–634 CE
3️⃣	ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb	第二摩首 (implied)	ʿUmar (r.a.)	634–644 CE
4️⃣	ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān	今王 (“the present king”)	ʿUthmān (r.a.)	644–656 CE

That alone is extraordinary: a Chinese text written within twenty years of the Prophet’s death preserves the correct ordinal count of the first three caliphs.

II. How the Tang Interpreted the Caliphate: Dynastic Transmission (傳)

📜 “次傳…” — “Then it was transmitted…”

The verb 傳 (chuán) in Tang bureaucratic usage means “to transmit” or “to hand down” a throne or office — the normal term for dynastic succession.

The Chinese court thus conceptualized the caliphal sequence not as an elective succession of amīrs but as a legitimate dynastic transmission of kingship, the way they described the Han or Tang line.

Hence:

“The first king has died; then it was transmitted to the first Mó shǒu.”
becomes, in their schema,
“After the founder’s death, his successor assumed rule.”

This framing was crucial. It confirmed, in Chinese political eyes, that the Dàshí possessed a proper lineage of rulers (王 wáng) and therefore qualified as a state (國 guó), not a nomadic or tribal confederation.

III. The Philology of “摩首” (Mó shǒu) — Between Submission and Leadership

1️⃣ Literal Meaning in Chinese

摩 (mó): “to rub, touch, bow, incline.”
首 (shǒu): “head, chief, leader.”

Together, 摩首 could literally mean “one who bows his head,” or metaphorically “the head who bows.”

This already evokes the sense of submission, humility, or pious leadership.

2️⃣ Possible Phonetic Source in Middle Chinese

In Tang-era Middle Chinese (circa 7th century), 摩首 would be pronounced approximately:

mâ ʑu / mua ʂuwX (Baxter–Sagart reconstruction: maɨ-śuʔ)

This pronunciation strikingly approximates several possible foreign sources:

Hypothesis	Foreign term	Meaning	Phonetic / Semantic fit
A. Muslim / Muslimūn	مُسْلِم (muslim, pl. muslimūn)	“one who submits”	Close in sense (“bowing head”) and sound (mó-shǒu ↔ mus-lim)
B. Maʾsūl / Maʿṣūm / Masʾūl	Various Arabic participles	“appointed / protected / responsible”	Plausible phonetically but less semantically coherent
C. Persian-influenced title	Mushāw, Mushāwar (“consulted one”)	From shūrā (consultation)	Echoes the caliph’s elective status

Of these, the first — deriving Mó shǒu from Muslim — fits best both semantically (“one who submits”) and contextually, since early Tang envoys likely heard the word muslim or muslimīn used self-referentially.

Thus 摩首 (Mó shǒu) can be read as a Tang transliteration of the Arabic root s-l-m (“to submit”), rendered through the imagery of “bowing the head.”

In other words, the Tang called the caliphs Mó shǒu — literally “the submissive ones / the Muslims” — leaders defined by piety and submission to Heaven (Allah).

IV. The Rashidūn Line Reflected in Tang Records

The sequence in the Tong dian corresponds exactly to the historical Rashidūn succession, proving that the embassy’s informants accurately represented the structure of the early Caliphate:

Tong dian phrase	Tang political analogy	Historical referent	Modern interpretation
初王已死 — “The first king has died”	Founding ruler (開國之君)	Muḥammad ﷺ	The Prophet as both spiritual and temporal founder
次傳第一摩首者 — “Then it was transmitted to the first Mó shǒu”	Heir or legitimate successor (嗣君)	Abū Bakr (r.a.)	The first Caliph
(implicit 第二摩首) — “Second Mó shǒu”	Continuation of the dynasty	ʿUmar (r.a.)	The second Caliph
今王即是第三 — “The present king is the third”	Current ruler (今上)	ʿUthmān (r.a.)	The reigning Caliph in 651 CE

This is the earliest non-Islamic document to list the Prophet and his first three successors in their correct order — confirming that by mid-century, the Tang court recognized a coherent and continuous Muslim polity.

To the Tang historian, this “threefold succession” echoed the Confucian ideal of Heaven’s Mandate transmitted through virtuous rulers (傳賢授聖).

He read Islam’s leadership as a moral kingship, legitimized by Heaven’s will and demonstrated through continuity.

By recording the Prophet as “the first king,” Du You effectively canonized Muḥammad ﷺ as a world-historical sovereign, and by recognizing two “Mó shǒu” after him, he accepted Islam’s polity as a lawful dynasty, not a mere tribal confederation.

V. The Linguistic Bridge — “Mó shǒu” as the First Chinese Reflection of “Muslim”

If “Mó shǒu” indeed reflects muslim (“one who submits”), then the Tang source preserves the oldest known sinicized form of that word — predating later transcriptions such as 穆斯林 (Mù sī lín, modern “Muslim”) by a millennium.

It also shows the early Chinese understanding of Islam not as an ethnicity but as a religious-political identity centered on submission to Heaven.

A “Mó shǒu” was, quite literally, a man who bows his head in obedience to Heaven — the perfect rendering of muslim in Tang cosmology.

VI. Synthesis — How the Tang Understood the Caliphate

The phrase compresses the entire first generation of Islamic history into a single Confucian sentence:

「初王已死，次傳第一摩首者，今王即是第三。」
“The first king has died; the throne was transmitted to the first Mó shǒu; the current king is the third.”

Within those fourteen characters, the Tang court acknowledged:

Prophethood as Kingship — Muḥammad ﷺ as the founding sovereign.
Caliphal succession — legitimate transmission (傳) of authority.
Religious submission — Mó shǒu = the one who submits (Muslim).
Continuity of rule — now under the “third king” (ʿUthmān r.a.), in 651 CE.

This is the earliest global recognition — outside the Islamic world — of Islam’s political succession and the concept of the Ummah as a State (guó 國).

VII. ✨ Conclusion — The Prophet as “First King,” the Caliphs as “Those Who Submit”

The Tong dian encapsulates the entire early Caliphate in Chinese idiom:

初王 (first king) → al-nabī, the Prophet-founder.
摩首 (those who bow the head) → muslim, those who submit to God.
傳 (to transmit) → khilāfah, succession.
第三王 (third king) → ʿUthmān, ruler at the time of contact.

Thus, the Tang historian unconsciously produced the world’s first sinicized chronicle of Islamic leadership, aligning prophethood with dynastic virtue and submission with legitimacy under Heaven.

In short:

🕋 Muḥammad ﷺ — the First King
🤲 Abū Bakr (r.a.) — the First “Mó shǒu” (the first to submit and lead)
⚖️ ʿUmar (r.a.) — the Second “Mó shǒu” (the just successor)
📜 ʿUthmān (r.a.) — the Third King (the reigning sovereign in 651 CE)

And through that understanding, the Tang court saw in Islam not chaos but order, not rebellion but transmission — a civilization that had, like their own, received Heaven’s Mandate and passed it faithfully from the Prophet to his heirs.

🏵️ 「其王姓大食」

—

“Their king’s clan name is Dàshí.”

The Tong dian concludes its description of the Dàshí (Arabs) with this formula:

「其王姓大食。」
“Their king’s clan name is Dàshí.”

At first glance, this seems like a mere statement of ethnonymic classification.

But in Tang bureaucratic and historical discourse, 姓 (xìng) is never a casual label — it is a term of cosmic and dynastic significance.

It denotes hereditary legitimacy, the root of kingship, and the mandate of a house.

To say that a ruler “has the surname Dàshí” was to affirm that the Arabs were not a nomadic tribe or a band of rebels, but a civilized, lineage-bearing dynasty (王朝 wángcháo) — a polity that had entered the moral geography of “the world under Heaven” (天下 tiānxià).

II. The Concept of 姓 (xìng) — Lineage as Legitimacy

In classical Chinese political thought:

姓 (xìng) is the ancestral clan name — the root of the ruling house.
氏 (shì) is the branch name — often tied to territorial or official titles.

Every civilized dynasty was identified by its xìng:

The Tang by the Li (李) clan.
The Zhou by Ji (姬).
The Han by Liu (劉).
The Ashina Turks by the Ashina clan name (阿史那).

Thus, to record “其王姓大食” was to declare:

“The Arabs have entered the cosmic order of rulership; their dynasty bears a surname — Dàshí — and hence a Mandate under Heaven.”

This was the highest possible recognition the Tang annalists could grant a foreign power.

III. Why “Dàshí” Became the Clan Name

1️⃣ The Phonetic Origin of Dàshí (大食)

The term 大食 (Dàshí) derives from Middle Chinese approximations of the Persian or Sogdian forms of Tāzī / Tāzik — itself from Arabic Ṭayyiʾ, a northern Arabian tribe whose name became the Persian word for “Arab” (Tāzī).

Middle Chinese pronunciation (7th century):

大食 = dʌH-ʑik (Baxter–Sagart reconstruction)
≈ Tāzīk / Tāsik — precisely the form found in early Persian and Sogdian records.

Thus, “Dàshí” = Tāzī, the “Arabs” or “Muslims.”

But Tang chroniclers, hearing the envoys identify themselves as Tāzīkān (Dàshí), assumed that this was the surname of their royal house, as every civilized people had a dynastic xìng.

Hence the entry:

“Their king’s clan name is Dàshí.”

They did not yet understand that “Dàshí” referred to an entire community (ummah), not a bloodline.

IV. The Tang Cognitive Framework: Kingdoms Have Founders and Surnames

The Tang worldview, grounded in Confucian cosmology, required four pillars for any legitimate “state” (guó 國):

A Founder (開國之君) — the one who first received Heaven’s favor.
A Lineage (姓) — the hereditary house embodying virtue and continuity.
A Capital (都) — the fixed seat of government.
A Calendar (曆) — a reckoning of time under Heaven.

When the Tang encountered Islam, they saw:

Founder: Muḥammad ﷺ (初王 “the first king”).
Lineage: Dàshí (“their king’s clan name”).
Capital: Madinah / later Damascus.
Calendar: Thirty-four years since founding (the Hijrī reckoning).

In this schema, Islam appeared as a complete dynastic civilization, parallel to the Tang itself.

Thus, Du You’s phrasing is not ethnographic—it’s civilizational legitimation.

V. The Philosophical Translation — Ummah into Xìng (姓)

The Arabs and Muslims described their polity not by blood but by faith:

“We are the Ummah of Muḥammad ﷺ.”

But the Chinese historian had no category for a faith-based polity.

In his world, all authority descended through ancestral virtue, expressed in the clan name.

So he mapped the concept of the ummah — the spiritual family of believers — into his own cultural logic of xìng — the genealogical family of rulers.

Hence, “the king’s clan name is Dàshí” is the Confucian translation of the Qurʾānic ummah.

It turns a universal religious identity into a hereditary moral lineage — a surname of Heaven’s chosen house.

This translation is profoundly revealing:

To the Muslim, the Caliphate was religious universality.
To the Tang, it became dynastic legitimacy.

VI. Dàshí as a Dynastic House in Tang Eyes

The Tong dian thus places the Dàshí alongside the world’s other great houses:

Chinese Record	Polity	Recorded “Clan Name”	Tang Political Perception
李氏	Tang	Li	The Son of Heaven of China
阿史那氏	Turks	Ashina	Steppe imperial house

大食氏	Arabs / Muslims	Tāzīk (Dàshí)	The new dynasty from the West

The Arabs had, by 651 CE, been promoted into the catalog of legitimate kings—their ruler viewed as one clan among the houses of Heaven’s world order.

This recognition was not merely descriptive: it was cosmological inclusion.

VII. What This Meant in Chinese Political Philosophy

In the Tang worldview, Heaven (天 Tiān) grants the Mandate (Mìng 命) to the virtuous.

When Heaven shifts its favor, dynasties fall, and new ones rise.

By declaring “the king’s surname is Dàshí,” the Chinese were effectively acknowledging that:

Heaven’s Mandate had passed westward, from the ruined Persian house of Sasan (安息) to the Arabs (大食).
The Dàshí now ruled with Heaven’s favor — a mirror image of the Tang’s own legitimacy.
The “surname” encoded divine selection.

Thus, this line is not ethnography but cosmic recognition — Islam’s entry into the Mandate of Heaven’s historical cycle.

VIII. The Hidden Theological Resonance

Ironically, the Chinese phrase “其王姓大食” also aligns with an Islamic truth — though by different logic.

In Islam, the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ said:

“The believers are like one body.”
“You are all from Adam, and Adam is from dust.”

No single clan defines the ummah; its “surname” is its shared submission to God.

In Chinese eyes, that unity appeared as if it were a single ancestral name, Dàshí — a surname of faith rather than of blood.

Thus, while the Tang court misunderstood the nature of Islam’s polity, their misinterpretation still grasped its essence:

that Islam was a unified house, a family of believers, whose legitimacy flowed from a founder and extended across nations.

IX. ✨ Synthesis — How the Tang Named Islam

「其王姓大食」 — “Their king’s clan name is Dàshí.”

Within this single phrase, the Tang court achieved what no other civilization of the time did:

They translated a non-dynastic, faith-based universal empire into the only conceptual language they had — lineage, legitimacy, and Heaven’s order.

To them:

“Dàshí” was the surname of a global royal house.
The Prophet was its founding ancestor.
His successors were transmitters of the throne (傳).
Their rule was cosmically sanctioned.

The result was a mirror:

To the Muslims, Islam was the Ummah of the believers.

To the Tang, it was the House of Dàshí (大食氏) — a new dynasty under Heaven.

🏜️ “The Land and People of the Dàshí” — The Tang Chronicle of Arabia

📜 Original Chinese

其國男夫鼻大而長，瘦黑多鬚鬢，似婆羅門，女人端麗。

亦有文字，與波斯不同。

出駝、馬、驢、騾、羖羊等。

土多砂石，不堪耕種，無五穀，惟食駝、馬等肉，破波斯、拂菻，始有米麵。

敬事天神。

English Translation

In that country, the men have large and long noses;

their bodies are lean and dark, and they have large beards and sideburns — they resemble the Brahmans.

The women are upright in bearing and beautiful in appearance.

They also possess a system of writing, which differs from that of Persia.

The land yields camels, horses, donkeys, mules, and goats.

Its soil is rich in sand and stone, unfit for plowing or cultivation.

They have none of the five grains; they live solely on the flesh of camels and horses.

Only after they had subdued Persia and Rome did they first come to possess rice and flour.

They venerate and serve the Heavenly Deity.

🔍 Detailed Commentary

👤 「其國男夫鼻大而長，瘦黑多鬚鬢，似婆羅門」

“The men of that country have large and long noses, are lean and dark, with large beards and sideburns, resembling the Brahmans.”

🪶 Ethnographic Context and Tang Conventions

This line stands as one of the earliest surviving Chinese physical descriptions of Arabs (Dàshí 大食), and it must be read not as a literal anthropological observation but as a Tang-era ethnonymic performance — a stylized taxonomy that transformed visual difference into moral and civilizational meaning.

The Tang world had no concept of “race” in the modern sense. Instead, as Marc Samuel Abramson has shown, Tang writers understood human difference through the overlapping frameworks of ethnicity, geography, and moral cosmology. Terms such as Hu 胡 (“Central Asian”), Fan 蕃 (“foreign, non-Han”), and Rong 戎 (“western barbarian”) reflected not fixed racial categories but gradients of civilization—modes of proximity or distance from the Sinitic cultural center (華 Huá).

Physical features — the “long nose,” “dark skin,” “thick beard” — served as what Abramson calls ethnic indicia: markers suggesting difference without constituting absolute ethnic criteria. These indicia were mobilized to construct a cultural boundary between Hua 華 (civilized) and Fan 蕃 (non-Han), not necessarily to denigrate but to situate the Other within the Tang cosmological order.

“In the Tang, racial labels did not exist as such, but physical attributes could be a significant marker of ethnic identity or at least play an important role within the ethnicized discourse of jokes and insults.”

The Arabs’ “long noses” and “abundant beards,” then, were not meant as mockery but as indices of antiquity and virtue. The Tang associated facial hair, austerity, and darkness with spiritual intensity and ascetic wisdom — qualities they already admired in Brahmans (婆羅門 Póluómén).

🕉️ “Resembling the Brahmans” — The Archetype of the Ascetic Sage

The comparison to “Brahmans” is especially telling. In Buddhist and Tang cosmological literature, the Brahman occupied an ambivalent but elevated status: a man of learning, religious devotion, and ancient lineage. By saying the Arabs “resembled the Brahmans,” Du You (or his source) was not racializing them but moralizing them — placing the Dàshí in a category of southern or western ascetics who, though foreign, possessed access to divine truth.

This comparison reveals two key patterns in Tang ethnographic thought:

Classification through analogy:
When encountering a new people, Tang authors defined them by likeness to a known type — in this case, Indian sages. To call the Arabs “Brahman-like” was to anchor them in a moral geography already mapped by Buddhism.
Elevation through spiritual association:
In Tang discourse, “Brahman” evoked dignity, religious discipline, and transcendence — not barbarism. The Arabs, like the Brahmans, were “blackened by the sun” and “lean through abstinence,” traits associated with devotion and piety. Their “many beards” connoted maturity and patriarchal authority.

Thus, this short sentence encodes the Tang’s recognition of Islam’s moral gravity—its monotheism, law, and prophetic ethos—translated into the idiom of Buddhist India.

🌍 Ethnicity, Moral Geography, and Civilizational Placement

Abramson reminds us that ethnicity in Tang China was not biological but civilizational: a rhetorical system through which the Chinese center defined its moral relation to the world. Within that system, the Dàshí were not “barbarians” but outer-civilized peoples (外化 wàihuà), bearers of law, writing, and divine worship.

Tang sources deployed two conceptual poles:

華 (Huá) — the cultured, moral center (often equated with the Han).
蕃 (Fan) — the civilized periphery, including Persians, Indians, and Arabs.

Between these poles lay a spectrum of refinement. The Dàshí, literate and God-fearing, stood nearer to the Huá than to the Di 狄 or Man 蠻 (“northern and southern tribes”).

As Abramson observes:

“The Tang sources reveal much more about attributions of identity to others than they do about self-assertions of identity, but they nevertheless betray shifting attitudes about the nature of ethnic difference that reflect the boundaries of the mostly Han authors’ own identities.”

By describing the Arabs as physically akin to Brahmans but morally upright and religious, the Tong dian situates them as liminally civilized — different yet dignified, desert ascetics rather than nomadic barbarians.

🕋 The Desert Aesthetic — Asceticism as Civilization

“The men are lean and dark” (瘦黑 shòu hēi) was not merely observation; it was moral geography. Tang writers, accustomed to the concept of climatic virtue (氣候之德 qìhòu zhī dé), believed that extreme environments produced extreme characters.

Hot, sun-scorched lands yielded resilience, austerity, and spiritual intensity.

The Dàshí thus embodied what one might call a moral ecology of the desert — a people tempered by deprivation, purified by heat, and sustained by faith rather than luxury. This echoes what Abramson terms “the idealization of the ethnic Other”: the romantic projection of virtues (honesty, purity, discipline) onto distant peoples as a critique of one’s own civilization.

“One of the key features of ethnic discourse in the Tang is the extent to which it attributes not only negative but also positive qualities to non-Han… often assigning to them technological mastery or religious expertise as a critique of the Han self.”

By portraying the Arabs as Brahman-like men of lean devotion, Du You’s chronicle not only acknowledges Islam’s strength but subtly contrasts it with the moral decadence of Tang elites themselves.

🧭 Synthesis: Ethnography as Recognition

In the single clause 「似婆羅門」 — “resembling the Brahmans” — Du You performs what Abramson calls ethnicization through admiration: the absorption of a new foreign category into China’s moral-cosmic map.

To the Tang court:

The Brahmans represented ancient, sacred wisdom.
The Arabs were new conquerors professing a heavenly faith.

To liken the latter to the former was to canonize Islam as a civilized revelation, the western echo of India’s spiritual south.

Thus, Du You’s physiognomic sketch is not a caricature but a recognition — that the Dàshí, though alien in face and hue, belonged among the world’s teachers of Heaven’s Way (天道).

✨ Concluding Reflection

「似婆羅門」 — “They resemble the Brahmans.”

This phrase, read through Abramson’s lens, is not about skin or nose but about moral likeness.

It reveals a Tang consciousness capable of situating Islam not as a barbarian eruption but as a continuation of sacred civilization — a people of scripture, austerity, and divine reverence, written into the Tang world order as the western counterpart of India’s priestly sages.

🌸 「女人端麗」

“The women are upright and beautiful.”

🌺 The Phrase in Tang Ethnographic Context

At first glance, this brief observation seems like an ornamental note — a traveler’s casual remark on foreign beauty. Yet in Tang ethnographic rhetoric, “beauty” (端麗 duānlì) was not an aesthetic triviality but a moral verdict.

The adjective 端 (duān) signifies “uprightness,” “propriety,” and “refined bearing,” while 麗 (lì) means “graceful” or “lovely.” To call a woman duānlì was to assert that she possessed both outer beauty and inner virtue — physical form harmonized with moral decorum. In Tang thought, such women did not simply ornament a society; they reflected its ethical order.

Thus, when the Tong dian states that “the women are upright and beautiful,” it implies that the Dàshí — the Arabs — lived in a cultured, regulated society, where gender roles, familial conduct, and propriety followed recognizable moral norms.

For the Tang historian, beautiful women were not just a mark of prosperity, but of civilization (文 wén): only ordered societies produced graceful, virtuous women.

🏛️ Beauty as a Measure of Civilization

Tang ethnographers often equated female refinement with the moral harmony of a nation. Barbarian tribes were described as having coarse, ugly, or immodest women — signals of chaos and moral disorder. By contrast, societies with duānlì women were read as possessing stable family structures and ritual propriety (lǐ 禮).

In this logic, the Dàshí stood not with the nomads of the steppe but with the civilized peoples of the south and west — India, Persia, Rome. To admire their women was, therefore, to acknowledge the moral refinement of Islam’s social order.

The Tang historian was not describing appearance alone; he was reading virtue through form — translating family ethics into physical aesthetics.

📜 Tang Gender Ideology — Hinsch’s Framework

Bret Hinsch’s Women in Tang China provides crucial context for this moralized perception of femininity. Tang writers, he notes, routinely linked beauty with righteousness, marriage, and the stability of social hierarchy:

“Tang writers often referred to lofty sentiments when discussing marriage.
Some emphasized the shared commitment of spouses to venerate the husband’s ancestors… Others stressed the importance of using righteousness (義 yì) to regulate the interactions of wife and husband.”

For the Tang elite, womanhood was an ethical institution. Marriage was not merely personal union but a microcosm of cosmic order. The upright wife, obedient yet educated, embodied the Confucian virtue of yì (righteousness) and sustained the ritual fabric of the state.

To describe the women of Dàshí as duānlì was to affirm that their civilization shared these moral foundations — that their family life, like China’s, was ordered by righteousness and decorum rather than by animal instinct or nomadic promiscuity.

💍 Women as Mirrors of Moral Order

Hinsch shows that Tang law and ritual explicitly used marriage and womanly virtue as measures of social order:

“Tang law embraced this key Confucian virtue and employed it to recast marriage and the family along manifestly ethical lines…
Government ministers wanted to make patriarchal primacy a fundamental principle of law and administration.”

In Chinese eyes, societies that practiced marriage according to law, lineage, and propriety were civilized. Nomads, who took wives by capture or exchange, were not. The observation that Dàshí women were “upright and beautiful” therefore encoded a political judgment: the Arabs had law, ritual, and family structure — hallmarks of a true guó 國, not a tribal horde.

The Tang chronicler saw in Islam’s marital ethics — its emphasis on chastity, lineage, and family sanctity — something profoundly familiar: the Confucianized order of lǐ (ritual) and yì (righteousness) transposed into a western idiom of divine law.

🕊️ Beauty as Political Aesthetics

In Tang political aesthetics, feminine virtue reflected the cosmic health of the realm. Emperors and historians often used women’s grace or disorder to symbolize the state’s moral state.

Thus, when the Tong dian describes the women of Dàshí as duānlì, it affirms that the entire Arab polity was properly ordered — that even in its domestic sphere, the harmony of Heaven and Earth was preserved.

In this sense, beauty was a diplomatic idiom: Du You’s praise for Dàshí women implies that Islam had achieved wenhua 文化 (civilized transformation). The Arabs, like the Tang, governed through order, virtue, and family propriety.

🧭 Cross-Cultural Convergence — Islam and Confucian Family Ethics

Islamic law (sharīʿah) and Tang Confucianism shared a striking moral symmetry: both defined beauty through modesty, discipline, and family harmony.

The Chinese observer, seeing veiled or modestly dressed Arab women of noble bearing, would have read this not as oppression but as ritual propriety — the visible manifestation of social virtue.

Tang chroniclers did not need to understand ḥijāb to appreciate duānli: it was the same ideal of ordered femininity they prized in their own wives and empresses.

Hence, the Dàshí women’s “upright beauty” symbolized a polity that had mastered both the moral and aesthetic dimensions of civilization — an empire where Heaven’s Law governed both battlefield and household.

✨ Synthesis

「女人端麗」 — “The women are upright and beautiful.”

To the Tang historian, this was not a trivial remark but a civilizational compliment.

It meant: Their women are decorous; their families are ordered; their nation is civilized.

By recording the Dàshí women as duānlì, Du You placed the Arab Caliphate among the ranks of refined societies — Persia, India, Rome, and Tang itself — all characterized by moral beauty, marital order, and ritual propriety.

Through this single phrase, the Tang world affirmed Islam not only as a power of conquest but as a culture of virtue — a civilization whose women embodied the same harmony, righteousness, and grace that defined the Confucian vision of the world.

📜 「亦有文字，與波斯不同。」

“They also have writing, different from that of Persia.”

✒️ Linguistic and Cultural Translation

This deceptively brief observation is one of the most revealing lines in the entire Tong dian passage. It demonstrates that, by the mid-7th century, Tang scholars and envoys had already encountered Arabic script — whether through manuscripts, coins, or Persian intermediaries — and had consciously identified it as distinct from Pahlavi writing.

The phrase “亦有文字” (“they also have writing”) signals a crucial threshold in Chinese ethnography.

In Tang historiography, to have writing (yǒu wénzì) was to be civilized — part of the wenming 文明, the “illuminated” or “cultured” peoples who preserved law and lineage through the written word.

To note that the Dàshí possessed writing was, therefore, not merely descriptive — it was a declaration of their entry into the moral geography of the civilized world.

🖋️ “Different from that of Persia” — A Conscious Distinction

The phrase “與波斯不同” (“different from that of Persia”) is extraordinary.

It means that Tang observers — or the Persian and Sogdian interpreters who mediated for them — had visually distinguished Arabic script from Pahlavi.

This shows a sophisticated level of recognition:

the Tang court understood that the Arabs, although inheritors of Persian territory, were not Persians.

They had their own religion, rulers, and now, their own script.

In the Tang worldview, this was the highest sign of sovereignty.

Each great civilization was known by its script lineage:

The Tang ruled under Chinese characters (Hanwen 漢文);
The Persians under Pahlavi;
The Roman under Greek;
The Indians under Sanskrit;

To say that the Dàshí “also have writing, different from that of Persia” placed them alongside these cultural universes — a peer empire, not a nomadic successor.

🧠 Writing as the Measure of Civilization

In Chinese thought, writing (wén) was not a neutral technology — it was the visible sign of moral order.

From the Zhou dynasty onward, literacy symbolized the harmony of Heaven, Earth, and Humanity; the ability to encode law and ritual in characters was proof that a people possessed li 禮 (ritual propriety) and yi 義 (righteousness).

Thus, Du You’s phrase “亦有文字” did more than record an ethnographic detail.

It elevated the Arabs into the Confucian cosmology of order: they, too, were capable of recording their scriptures, laws, and contracts — the markers of a morally ordered polity.

📚 Tang Stereotypes and the Power of Literacy

Marc Abramson notes that Tang discourse was saturated with ethnic stereotypes, serving as a mechanism for defining the Chinese “Self” in contrast to the non-Han “Other.” Among the most enduring stereotypes was that non-Han peoples were illiterate, incapable of mastering the moral refinement encoded in writing.

“Another casual stereotype was non-Han illiteracy…
The stereotype was most commonly applied to Sogdian and Turkic Inner Asians… because literacy was the basis of bureaucratic authority, Confucian elites emphasized the illiteracy of frontier peoples to protect their monopoly on the written word.”

To ascribe literacy to a foreign nation was, therefore, an act of moral and political recognition.

It meant that the Dàshí were not barbarians to be pacified but junzi 君子 among nations — rulers who governed by text, law, and ritual, just as the Tang did.

In this context, the statement “they have writing” is the antithesis of a stereotype — a conscious refutation of the usual Tang view of the frontier as illiterate and lawless.

Du You was not repeating prejudice; he was overturning it.

By contrasting the Arabic and Persian scripts, he distinguished two civilizations of the pen — a comparison the Tang rarely made.

🌍 Ethnographic Consciousness — Beyond the Steppe

Most Tang ethnographies divided the world into three categories:

Civilized (有文字) — possessing writing and ritual.
Barbarized (有法無文) — having law but lacking script.
Savage (無文無禮) — without writing or propriety.

By declaring that the Dàshí also have writing, Du You placed Islam firmly in the first category — the realm of the civilized.

It also distinguished them sharply from the Turks (Tujue 突厥) and Tibetans (Tubo 吐蕃), whose literacy was often doubted or dismissed by Tang elites.

Thus, this sentence situates the Dàshí as part of a textual world order — a realm where power derived not from the sword but from the written word.

✨ From Literacy to Legitimacy

In Tang moral philosophy, wén (writing, culture) and zhì 治 (governance) were inseparable.

To possess a script was to possess the means of ruling by law (fa 法).

Hence, Du You’s note implies that the Arabs had attained the highest form of civilized statehood: a bureaucratic empire governed through scripture and documentation — exactly like China itself.

This recognition likely stemmed from Arabic papyri arriving through Persian intermediaries.

Arabic inscriptions — geometric, precise, and saturated with Qur’anic invocation — would have struck Chinese observers as both alien and sacred.

They represented a civilization where Heaven’s Law was written, not spoken — mirroring the Confucian belief that the written word binds the moral universe.

🕊️ The End of the Illiteracy Stereotype

Abramson’s broader point — that Tang stereotypes created a moral geography of Self and Other — helps us see how radical Du You’s sentence really was.

By affirming the Dàshí’s literacy, the Tang historian collapsed the traditional hierarchy separating the literate Han from the illiterate frontier.

He extended the boundaries of civilization westward to include Arabia.

The Arabs, once seen as the military destroyers of Persia, were now recognized as a people of the pen — heirs to a new, divine literacy that rivaled the classics of China.

✨ Synthesis

「亦有文字，與波斯不同。」
“They also have writing, different from that of Persia.”

This single line quietly revolutionizes Tang ethnography.

It tells us that the Chinese had not only heard of Islam — they had begun to recognize its cultural infrastructure: script, scripture, law, and learning.

In an age when literacy defined civilization, Du You’s acknowledgment placed the Dàshí alongside Rome, India, and China itself — as one of the world’s great civilized states (文明之國).

Through the lens of the Tong dian, we see a moment when Chinese bureaucrats and Muslim scholars — heirs of Confucius and the Qurʾān — met across the desert of misunderstanding and recognized in each other the same sacred act: the governance of the world through the written word.

🐫 「出駝、馬、驢、騾、羖羊等。」

“Their land produces camels, horses, donkeys, mules, and goats.”

🌍 Translation and Context

Here the Tong dian turns from political history to geographic ethnography — the traditional Chinese cataloguing of a land’s animals, crops, and climate as mirrors of its moral and economic nature. In Tang administrative geography, such lists were never mere zoological curiosities: they expressed a people’s essence, the cosmic equilibrium between Heaven, Earth, and Humanity.

To record that “their land produces camels, horses, donkeys, mules, and goats” situates the Dàshí (Arabs) within the Western Regions’ ecology — a domain of deserts, caravan routes, and hardy beasts rather than the agrarian abundance of the Chinese heartland. The Tang historian is not describing Arabia; he is translating its ecology into a moral geography: a land where Heaven grants endurance, mobility, and power, not rice or silk.

🏜️ The Camel — Emblem of the Desert and Commerce

The first creature, the camel (駝), signals immediately that this is a civilization of trade and transit.

In Chinese environmental typology, the camel was the beast of the Western Regions (西域) — the living symbol of Silk Road commerce and imperial communication. Since Han times, caravans of camels had linked China to the Tarim Basin, Sogdiana, and Persia. To the Tang mind, the camel was the animal of endurance and wealth, carrying tribute and scripture alike through the sands.

Edward Schafer reminds us that by the Tang, “the domestic form of the two-humped Bactrian camel had been used by the northern Chinese for at least a thousand years… treasured for their reliability in transporting men and merchandise through the high desert wastes of Gobi and Tarim.”

Thus, to “produce camels” (chū tuó) was to belong to the same transcontinental economy that sustained the Tang’s own imperial frontiers. Arabia, by implication, was the mirror of China’s westernmost provinces — barren, mineral, and mobile, yet central to the flow of the world’s wealth.

🐎 The Horse — The Measure of Empire

The horse (馬) follows naturally.

In Chinese statecraft, the horse was more than an animal — it was the sinew of empire. Schafer notes that Tang rulers regarded horses as the foundation of their dominion:

“Horses are the military preparedness of the state; if Heaven takes this preparedness away, the state will totter to a fall.” (Golden Peaches of Samarkand, p. 58)

The horse symbolized civilization’s reach. Tang emperors measured their power by the size of their state herds, which exceeded 700,000 animals by mid-century. To the Tang chronicler, the Arabs’ horses confirmed that they, too, possessed the infrastructure of conquest — speed, discipline, and command of the steppe’s martial arts.

Yet beyond the bureaucratic ledger lay a mythic layer.

Chinese poets revered the “dragon-horses of the West” (龍種馬) — divine steeds said to descend from heavenly dragons. Schafer recounts that even Li Bo imagined,

“The Horses of Heaven come out of the dens of the Kushanas,
Backs formed with tiger markings, bones made for dragon wings.”
These “blood-sweating” Farghanan horses, and later Arabian breeds, embodied cosmic vitality — qi given form.

When the Tong dian enumerated horses among Arabia’s gifts, it was not simply noting livestock. It was acknowledging that the Dàshí, too, rode dragon-blooded steeds — bearers of Heaven’s mandate across the sands.

🫏 Donkeys, Mules, and the Politics of Burden

The donkey (驢) and mule (騾) reflect a world of labor, mobility, and endurance.

For the Tang, these were animals of the frontier bureaucracy — beasts that carried grain, silk, and tribute to the edges of empire. Their inclusion signals a recognition that the Dàshí lands were part of a caravan ecology, where movement itself was the economy.

As Schafer observed, donkeys and mules were so indispensable that armies could be mounted on them when horses were scarce: “By T’ang they were so common that it was possible to mount an army on mules in a province deficient in horses.”

The chronicler’s phrase “their land produces donkeys and mules” thus marks the Dàshí as a people of logistical mastery — a mobile civilization whose endurance mirrored the Tang’s own vast supply networks.

To the Tang reader, these animals embodied gong 功, “functionality,” a Confucian virtue: diligence without ostentation. In this way, the Arabs’ beasts of burden became moralized symbols of industrious virtue.

🐐 Goats and the Economy of Hardship

The final creature, the goat (羖羊), completes the ecological portrait.

In Chinese symbolic ecology, the goat belonged to rugged mountains and dry plains — a creature of thrift and resilience. Its inclusion signifies a land where Heaven provided not abundance but sufficiency — the moral virtue of surviving on little.

Goats, as Schafer reminds us, were among the “valuable domestic animals of the northern marches,” providing wool, milk, and flesh to frontier peoples. To the Tang bureaucrat compiling the Tong dian, their presence in Arabia reinforced a vision of the Dàshí as a frugal, austere people shaped by the desert’s discipline — a virtue admired in the Confucian moral cosmos.

⚔️ Geography as Moral Economy

The Tang historian’s list — camel, horse, donkey, mule, goat — is more than taxonomy. It is a hierarchy of civilization:

The Camel — commerce and empire.
The Horse — war and nobility.
The Donkey and Mule — work and administration.
The Goat — endurance and thrift.

Each animal represents a virtue translated into ecology.

Collectively, they define the Dàshí realm as one of mobility, discipline, and divine energy — an empire of riders and traders, not tillers.

The note that their land is “full of sand and stone, unfit for cultivation” (as the next line reads) reinforces this idea: the Dàshí thrived where ordinary men could not, blessed by a Heaven that favored strength over fertility. In Tang cosmology, that made them a people of destiny.

🏇 Tang Perception — Arabia as the Mirror of the Steppe

To Tang readers, these lines would have evoked both fascination and familiarity. Arabia was understood through analogy: a second Turkestan, yet more refined; a land of deserts, yet rich in faith and order.

Just as the Tang measured their own virtue by their horse herds and caravans, they saw in the Dàshí an empire whose strength came from the same divine equilibrium — the harmony of the beast, the soldier, and the sage.

Through this zoological lens, Du You was not describing an alien world — he was writing the Arabs into the Chinese map of civilization, where every great dynasty had its animal omens and every empire its herd beneath Heaven.

✨ Synthesis

「出駝、馬、驢、騾、羖羊等。」
“Their land produces camels, horses, donkeys, mules, and goats.”

A single line, yet it carries the Tang world’s entire vision of geography and virtue.

By listing the beasts of Arabia, Du You transformed the desert into a moral landscape — one of endurance, mobility, and heavenly mandate.

Edward Schafer’s Tang poets saw in the horse the breath of dragons; in the camel, the endurance of saints. The Tong dian saw both — and in the Dàshí, a mirror of China itself: a people who rode Heaven’s creatures across the earth, binding deserts and empires with the sinews of their beasts..

🏜️ 「土多砂石，不堪耕種，無五穀，惟食駝、馬等肉。」

“The soil is full of sand and stone, unfit for cultivation, and they have no five grains; they eat only the meat of camels and horses.”

Du You describes the land of the Dàshí (Arabs) in stark environmental contrast to China’s agrarian core. Arabia, to their eyes, was a world of sand and stone—a landscape alien to the zhongtu (中土), the “Central Lands” where the five grains (五穀)—rice, millet, barley, wheat, and beans—sustained moral and social order.

To say “their soil is full of sand and stone, unfit for cultivation” was not a neutral observation. It was a cosmological statement. Geography in Tang thought was inseparable from morality: fertile lands produced propriety and ritual, while barren lands produced endurance and martial virtue. The Arabs, by living righteously in desolation, inverted the Chinese hierarchy of virtue — Heaven favored them through scarcity.

🏔️ The Geography of “Inner” and “Outer”

As Marc Abramson notes in Ethnic Identity in Tang China, Tang writers organized the world through the fundamental dichotomy of inner (內) and outer (外). China was the inner realm—the Central Kingdom (中國, zhongguo)—and all lands beyond its agrarian heartland were “outer” by both geography and morality.

The deserts of Arabia, described here as “sand and stone,” belonged to that outer world, the realm of extremity and transformation. Yet in Tang cosmology, the “outer” was not merely inferior — it was potent. Abramson writes:

“Han elites associated extreme distance with magical potency and often envisioned distant realms as possessing particular virtues… as a means to hold them up as a mirror to their society.”

Thus, to the Tang, Arabia’s desolation was both proof of its distance and evidence of Heaven’s strange favor. The Dàshí were beyond the agrarian moral geography of China, yet Heaven had granted them victory over Persia and Rome. The barren became the blessed.

🌾 “無五穀” — “They have no five grains”

In classical Chinese cosmology, the five grains were the foundation of civilization (文, wen). The possession of agriculture signified harmony between Heaven, Earth, and ruler; its absence was usually a sign of barbarism.

Yet the Tong dian records this deprivation not with scorn, but with awe. The Dàshí had “no five grains,” yet they conquered the great empires of the West. This contradiction forced the Tang historian to reinterpret their place in the world order.

Here Du You implicitly elevates the Arabs from the category of waiyi (外夷, “outer barbarians”) to that of tianyou (天有, “those favored by Heaven”). Like Di Renjie’s memorial on the barbarians — that Heaven separated them by deserts and seas — the Dàshí occupied the most distant, divinely bounded lands, yet emerged as an imperial power.

In Tang eyes, such reversal could only mean one thing: Heaven had shifted its Mandate westward.

🍖 “惟食駝、馬等肉” — “They eat only the meat of camels and horses”

Tang writers habitually contrasted meat-eating, nomadic cultures with grain-eating, agrarian ones. In the Confucian schema, meat symbolized the realm of the wu (武) — martial strength and raw vitality — while grain symbolized the wen (文) — civility and ritual propriety.

But here again, Du You’s phrasing is descriptive, not derisive.

To “eat only camel and horse meat” is presented as a testament to endurance.

In Tang thought, those who thrived on flesh and hardship embodied Heaven’s pure virtue (清德) — a paradoxical moral purity arising from the austerity of their world. The Dàshí, therefore, represented a new moral geography: virtue without abundance, faith without agriculture.

The same association appeared in Tang frontier poetry, where steppe peoples who lived without grain were both feared and admired. As Abramson observes, “Han elites… associated distance and harsh environments with both danger and magical potency.” Arabia, in Tang imagination, was the farthest “outer domain” — a land where Heaven’s raw power, unmediated by civilization, had forged an empire of faith.

🕌 The Moral Geography of Scarcity

To the Confucian mind, the desert was a land outside the civilizing circle of the Five Domains (五服) described in the Tribute of Yu. Yet Tang cosmology also allowed that virtue could manifest beyond the center.

Buddhist apologists in the Tang used the term zhongzhou (中州, “central lands”) to claim that Buddhas only appeared in civilized regions — yet Du You’s record of the Dàshí quietly subverts this. Here was a new revelation, a prophet born not in the Central Plains or in India, but in a land of sand and stone.

The Tang chronicler, reading through his own cosmology, might have seen in Islam’s emergence a divine inversion: the sacred erupting from the outermost periphery.

Scarcity itself became sanctified — a mirror of the Islamic concept of zuhd (ascetic renunciation).

To live amid stones yet obey Heaven’s command was proof not of backwardness, but of destiny.

🏛️ Arabia as “Outer Centrality”

By the 8th century, the Dàshí were no longer a distant curiosity.

Their embassies reached Chang’an; their merchants thrived in the Tang capitals; their faith was known to the court. Yet in the Tong dian, Du You situates their homeland at the furthest edge of the known world — a land defined by sand and meat, not grain and silk.

This is precisely the Tang conception of outer centrality (外中).

Even from the margins, a people might manifest Heaven’s design, challenging the supposed monopoly of the “Central Kingdom.”

The paradox is powerful:

The Tang ruled from the world’s center but feared moral decline.
The Dàshí ruled from the desert’s edge yet radiated divine vigor.

Thus the barren geography of Arabia became a moral mirror.

Where China’s fertility bred decadence, the Arabs’ desolation bred faith.

Where the Tang held grain, the Dàshī held Heaven.

✨ Synthesis

「土多砂石，不堪耕種，無五穀，惟食駝、馬等肉。」
“The soil is full of sand and stone, unfit for cultivation, and they have no five grains; they eat only the meat of camels and horses.”

This brief description fuses geography with theology.

To the Tang court, Arabia was the furthest “outer domain,” the mirror opposite of the fertile Central Plains — yet Heaven had raised there a people of unbending strength, nourished by flesh and faith.

Marc Abramson’s inner–outer cosmology helps decode the subtext: the Dàshí’s barrenness was the geography of transcendence.

From the Chinese heartland, they seemed deprived of every material blessing. Yet to Heaven, they were purified through scarcity — a people of the periphery chosen to renew the moral order of the world.

🌾 「破波斯、拂菻，始有米麵。」

“After conquering Persia and Rome, they first obtained rice and flour.”

🏛️ Translation and Immediate Meaning

This short line is astonishingly loaded.

To the Tang chronicler, the Dàshí (Arabs) had lived in a barren land — “full of sand and stone, unfit for cultivation” — and only after their conquests did they “obtain rice and flour.”

On the surface, this is a simple record of agricultural diffusion.

But read in the Tang idiom of moral geography, it becomes an allegory of civilization’s ascent: a transformation from desert austerity to imperial plenty — from meat to grain, from tent to city, from faith to empire.

🌍 From Desert to Sown: The Civilizational Arc

The phrase “after conquering Persia and Rome” (破波斯、拂菻) situates the Dàshī’s transformation within a classical Chinese model of cultural ascent.

Persia (波斯) and Rome (拂菻) were, in Tang cosmology, the archetypes of the “civilized West” — the great outer centers of law, grain, and writing.

Thus, to “obtain rice and flour” was not merely to gain new foods, but to inherit the mantle of civilization.

The Tang historian portrays the Arabs as a people who began at the edge of the world and, through divine momentum and conquest, entered the domain of the wenming (文明) — the “civilized and cultured.”

The transformation is agricultural, economic, and metaphysical:

Agricultural: from pastoral subsistence to agrarian empire.
Economic: from scarcity to surplus, from camel to caravan.
Moral: from the purifying hardship of the desert to the order of the sown.

In the Tang mirror, the Dàshī were Western counterparts of the Tang themselves — frontier conquerors who rose from martial austerity to rule the heartlands of grain and silk.

🌾 The Tang View of Rice and Flour

To a Chinese chronicler, rice (米) and flour (麵) were not just foods — they symbolized the essence of civilization. The five grains (五穀) were the moral foundation of empire; their cultivation marked a society’s passage from sheng (raw, wild) to shu (cooked, cultivated).

That the Dàshī “first obtained rice and flour” after conquest implied their entry into the moral economy of Heaven. In Confucian cosmology, Heaven’s Mandate manifested not only in virtue but also in abundance — the blessing of grain.

Hence, this phrase reads almost like a benediction:

Through victory and divine favor, the desert people were admitted into the granary of the world.

🐪 The Archaeological Reality: Rice and Wheat Before Islam

Michael Decker’s archaeological synthesis deepens this Tang image.

He notes that rice and wheat were long familiar in the lands that became the heart of the early caliphate — Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt — centuries before Islam’s rise.

“During the Sasanian era rice was an important crop in Lower Mesopotamia... ranked behind only wheat and barley as staples... it was the only cereal, besides those two, that the Sasanians taxed.”

Rice, in fact, had flourished in the Amuq Plain near Antioch, the Jordan Valley, and Lower Mesopotamia since Roman and Sasanian times.

The Tang author, writing from the farthest East, did not know this. To him, Arabia was barren; thus, the acquisition of rice and flour symbolized civilizational absorption — not agricultural inheritance.

Likewise for wheat:

“Cereal grains, especially wheat or barley, provided most of the calories in traditional Mediterranean diets... Hard wheat (durum) spread widely through the Middle East and the Muslim Mediterranean.”

Tang observers, hearing that the Arabs “obtained” these grains only after conquest, interpreted it not as a transfer of crops, but as a transfer of cosmic status — as if Heaven had granted them the abundance once reserved for Persia and Rome.

🌌 Tang Cosmology and the Geography of Abundance

Marc Abramson’s “inner–outer” model explains this perfectly.

In Tang thought, the Central Plains (中原) represented the cosmic axis where Heaven’s order was manifest through agriculture and ritual. Lands of scarcity — deserts, steppes, highlands — were outer realms, morally ambiguous yet spiritually charged.

When such a people conquered the inner lands of abundance, Tang chroniclers saw Heaven’s mystery at work: the Mandate migrating outward, to a new chosen people.

Thus the Dàshī, once “without the five grains,” emerged as heirs of the civilized West, inheritors of Sasanian irrigation, Roman milling, and Nile fertility. Their victory re-enacted the oldest Chinese drama — the rise of the frontier to restore Heaven’s balance.

🕌 From Pastoralism to Empire

The line also encodes an ethnographic metaphor.

The Dàshī’s transition “from meat to grain” mirrors the Tang’s own imperial self-image — born from northern cavalrymen who tamed the agrarian south.

In both cases, martial peoples of the periphery seized the instruments of civilization — script, agriculture, taxation — and fused them into new imperial orders.

The Dàshī thus became the “mirror Tang” of the western world:

Both emerged from steppe or desert frontiers.
Both unified vast territories through conquest and belief.
Both transformed raw geography into cosmic legitimacy.

Where the Tang united China under Heaven (天下), the Dàshī united the lands under God (dār al-Islām).

🍚 The Symbolism of Grain in Cross-Cultural Perspective

The Tang chronicler’s statement carries a deeper symbolism when placed alongside both Confucian and Islamic ideas.

In Islam, grain and bread often symbolize divine provision and communal equality — rizq (sustenance) given by God.

In Confucian China, grain symbolized Tianming (Heaven’s Mandate) — the ruler’s moral alignment with Heaven manifested through abundance.

Thus, for the Tang, the Dàshī’s conquest of grain-lands — Persia and Rome — meant that Heaven had transferred its agricultural qi (氣), its vital essence, to a new people.

The Arabs, though born in sand, were now bearers of Heaven’s bounty.

Their “obtaining of rice and flour” was not mere subsistence; it was a cosmic endorsement.

✨ Conclusion: The Grain of Empire

「破波斯、拂菻，始有米麵。」
“After conquering Persia and Rome, they first obtained rice and flour.”

In these eight characters, the Tang historian encapsulated the transformation of an entire civilization.

The Dàshī, born of dust and faith, became emperors of the fertile crescent.

What began in scarcity culminated in abundance — and in the eyes of the Tang, this was not history but moral geography made visible: Heaven’s favor migrating westward, just as grain once flowed east.

Michael Decker’s archaeology reminds us that the Tang did not record agricultural fact but civilizational perception — reading ecology as theology.

Where the Tong dian saw deserts turning to fields, the Tang saw the outer world entering the circle of Heaven’s order.

☀️ 「敬事天神。」

“They revere and serve the Heavenly Deity.”

🌄 The Climactic Vision

This final sentence of the Tongdian account is deceptively simple.

After describing the Dàshí’s land, people, and conquests, Du You ends not with geography or economy but with worship — a moral and cosmological statement.

The Tang chronicler, writing from a Confucian–Buddhist–Daoist worldview, concludes his ethnography with the phrase:

“They revere and serve the Heavenly Deity (Tiānshén).”

Here Tiānshén (天神) does not refer to one among many gods but to a singular, transcendent principle — Heaven’s deity, the highest spiritual authority recognized in Chinese cosmology.

Thus, Du You’s rendering of Allah was not a misinterpretation, but an adaptation: Islam’s universal monotheism reframed through the Tang lexicon of cosmic legitimacy.

🏛️ The Tang Lexicon of Faith

In Tang bureaucratic historiography, every foreign state was described according to its fengsu (風俗) — its “customs,” a term encompassing religion, morality, and daily life.

As Marc Abramson notes, Tang chroniclers viewed fengsu as both a marker of civilization and a measure of moral refinement. Religions were described not as competing faiths, but as cultural systems shaping a people’s virtue and relation to Heaven.

In this sense, “to revere and serve the Heavenly Deity” placed the Dàshí among the ranks of Heaven-worshipping civilizations, akin to the Persians with their Zoroastrian fire-temples or the Romans with their Christian churches.

But crucially, unlike the Manichaeans or Zoroastrians—whom Tang sources describe as dualist or ritualistic—the Dàshí are depicted with a moral simplicity: they honor one divine source, without idols.

🌌 Heaven and God: Conceptual Equivalence

The Tang historian thus accomplished a profound act of translation:

He rendered tawḥīd (divine unity) into the Chinese cosmological idea of Tiān (Heaven) — the supreme, impersonal order governing the universe.

To say the Dàshī “revere and serve the Heavenly Deity” was to affirm that:

Their worship was directed upward, not toward idols or spirits.
Their devotion was moral, not magical.
Their religion possessed cosmic legitimacy within the Tang worldview.

In Chinese terms, the Dàshī had achieved Heaven’s favor — aligning their faith with the universal axis of moral order (Dao 道).

Islam was thus recognized not merely as foreign worship, but as Heaven-centered religion (敬天之教) — akin to the Tang’s own Confucian reverence for Tianming (Heaven’s Mandate).

⚔️ The Sword and the Mandate

This reverence for Heaven was not only spiritual; it was also martial.

Earlier in the Tongdian, Du You reports:

「或云：初有波斯胡人，若有神助，得刀殺人。」
“Some say: at first there was a Persian Hu who, as if aided by divine power, obtained a sword to kill men.”

This line — almost mythic in tone — describes the Prophet’s divine empowerment in language familiar to Tang readers.

The “sword obtained by divine aid” (shén zhù 神助) encapsulated Heaven’s Mandate in martial form: just as the founding emperors of China received Heaven’s sanction to restore order, so too did the Dàshī’s founder wield Heaven’s power to subdue chaos.

By pairing this with “they revere and serve the Heavenly Deity,” Du You creates a full theological arc:

Divine assistance (神助) validates the Dàshī’s rise.
Heavenly worship (敬事天神) legitimizes their rule.

In Tang eyes, this was not missionary zeal (dàwǎh), but Mandate politics — Heaven granting a frontier people both sword and sanction to govern the West.

🕌 Islam as a “Heavenly” but Not “Named” Faith

Jeffrey Kotyk’s revisionist insight is essential here: Tang sources never mention “Islam” (伊斯蘭), “Muslim” (穆斯林), or even the Qur’an.

As Kotyk observes,

“We do not observe any explicit references to Islam or the Qurʾān... The Tang sources do not indicate that anyone attempted to introduce or even describe a new religion of the Tāzīks.”

This absence is not ignorance, but classification.

The Tang court viewed the Dàshī not as missionaries introducing a doctrine, but as an embassy representing a Heaven-worshipping state — a polity, not a creed.

Unlike the Christian embassy of 635, which explicitly translated scriptures and sought imperial recognition for a religion, the Dàshī delegation came as envoys of a conquering empire.

Thus, Du You’s text does not record religious transmission but theological recognition: the Chinese saw that these envoys, though foreign and martial, worshipped Heaven in the moral sense.

Islam, at this stage, entered the Tang world not as jia 教 (a doctrinal “teaching”) but as guo 國 (a divinely ordered state).

Only later, in the Da Shi Fa (大食法, “Law of the Arabs”), would the faith itself be conceptually separated from the empire.

🕊️ Religious Geography and Ethnic Identity

Marc Abramson’s work illuminates how Tang urban policy and religious pluralism structured this understanding.

Religions like Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam existed primarily within foreign quarters (fanfang 蕃坊) of major cities such as Chang’an and Luoyang.

These communities were not proselytizing missions but ethnic enclaves whose temples doubled as administrative centers.

“The position of religious leader and head of the local ethnic community... was often combined, as in the case of the Zoroastrian sabao and the Muslim imam, further reinforcing the link between religious practice and ethnic identity.”

Therefore, when Du You wrote “They revere and serve the Heavenly Deity,” he was describing not a doctrine to be preached but a communal ethic — a mode of public virtue that justified diplomatic respect.

In Tang ethnography, reverence for Heaven was a mark of civilization, distinguishing the Dàshī from idolaters or shamanic tribes.

🌠 Comparative Cosmology

Confucian parallel: Heaven (Tian) as the moral source of legitimacy.
Buddhist parallel: Dharma as the cosmic order sustaining kingship.
Islamic parallel: Tawḥīd — the oneness of God as the foundation of justice and rule.

By using Tiānshén, Du You mapped Allah onto the existing Chinese framework — not diminishing but translating divine unity into the universal language of Heaven.

This act of translation, rather than distortion, is how early Tang scholars understood all foreign faiths: through analogical cosmology, not lexical precision.

🏵️ Synthesis

「敬事天神」 — “They revere and serve the Heavenly Deity.”

This line seals the Tongdian’s portrayal of the Dàshī with spiritual grandeur.

In Tang eyes, the Arabs were not mere conquerors, nor missionaries, but Heaven’s chosen people of the West — a dynasty born in austerity, empowered by divine favor, and ruled under Heaven’s command.

Du You’s image here, therefore, is not ethnography but theology:

a desert nation transformed into a moral empire, whose king wields Heaven’s sword and whose people bow to Heaven’s Deity.

Through this phrase, Islam entered the Tang world not as a new religion, but as a confirmation of Heaven’s universality — the same Heaven that ruled China, now worshipped in another tongue..

🌊 “The Voyage Beyond the Western Sea” — The Tang Chronicle of Dàshí Marvels

📜 Original Chinese

又云：其王常遣人乘船，將衣糧入海，經涉八年，未極西岸。

於海中見一方石，石上有樹，枝赤葉青，樹上總生小兒，長六七寸，見人不語而皆能笑，動其手腳，頭著樹枝。

人摘取，入手即乾黑。

其使得一枝還，今在大食王處。

English Translation

It is also said:
Their king frequently sends men aboard ships, taking with them clothing and provisions, and they sail into the sea.
After journeying for eight years, they have not yet reached the western shore.
Amid the sea they beheld a square-shaped stone, upon which grew a tree — its branches red, its leaves green.
On that tree were born many tiny infants, each six or seven inches long; when they saw people, they did not speak but all could smile, moving their hands and feet, their heads attached to the branches.
When people plucked them, they immediately dried and turned black in the hand.
One envoy obtained a branch and brought it back; it is now kept by the King of the Dàshí.

🔍 Detailed Commentary

🏝️ 「其王常遣人乘船，將衣糧入海」

“Their king frequently sends men aboard ships, taking with them clothing and provisions, and they sail into the sea.”

→ Maritime Imperial Curiosity and the Birth of the Dàshí Thalassocracy

This simple yet profound line inaugurates the Tongdian’s “marvels of the Dàshí” — the moment when Tang historiography looks westward, away from the sands of Arabia and toward the sea of the Arabs (阿剌伯海).

Far from portraying the Dàshí (Arabs) as mere desert conquerors, Du You’s chronicler presents their ruler — Caliph ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān (r. 644–656 CE) — as a seafaring monarch, a sovereign who commands fleets to explore the limits of Heaven’s waters. This reflects a real and revolutionary moment in Islamic history: the construction of the first Islamic navy.

⚓ The Caliphal Navy under ʿUthmān (r. 644–656 CE)

During the very decade when the Tang received the first Dàshí embassy (Yonghui reign, 651 CE), ʿUthmān authorized the creation of a permanent Muslim fleet. As recorded in Arabic sources such as al-Ṭabarī and al-Balādhurī, governors in Syria and Egypt — Muʿāwiyah ibn Abī Sufyān and ʿAbd Allāh ibn Saʿd ibn Abī Sarḥ — launched great naval expeditions from ʿAkkā (Acre), Alexandria, and ʿAyn al-Shams, culminating in the famous Battle of the Masts (Dhat al-Sawārī) in 655 CE, where the nascent Muslim navy decisively defeated the Romans.

Thus, when the Tongdian says “their king often sends men into the sea”, it is not hyperbole — it is a distorted echo, transmitted through Persian and Sogdian intermediaries, of the first caliphal naval policy.

🌊 “The Sea” — The Western Ocean of the Arabs (西海 Xīhǎi)

Hyunhee Park notes that the “Western Sea” (西海 Xīhǎi) in early Tang sources referred not to the Atlantic but to the northwestern Indian Ocean — encompassing the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea, and Red Sea. In classical Chinese geography since Sima Qian, the Western Sea marked the outermost boundary of the known world — the limit of civilization and Heaven’s reflection.

To Tang readers, this phrase meant venturing beyond the imperial order; to the Arabs, it described their home waters — the cradle of trade, pilgrimage, and power.

In short, both cultures imagined the same body of water — but from opposite shores.

For the Tang, it was the sea of mystery.

For the Muslims, it was the sea of destiny.

🕊️ “Often Sends Men” — 常遣人 (cháng qiǎn rén)

This phrase conveys institutionalized exploration.

It implies that maritime expeditions were not singular adventures, but state-sponsored enterprises — launched by royal command, sustained by logistics, and motivated by curiosity or profit.

For the Tang bureaucrat, “常遣人” would immediately evoke the empire’s own missions to Annam, Srivijaya, and Dvāravatī — voyages sent under imperial seal to chart distant lands.

In Arabic reality, this paralleled the early Muslim naval structure emerging from Basra and the Persian Gulf, where maritime activity was coordinated by caliphal governors and the dīwān al-jihād (naval bureau).

Du You, therefore, unconsciously mirrors the image of an imperial navy akin to China’s own — bureaucratized, exploratory, and divinely sanctioned.

🍶 “Taking Clothing and Provisions” — 將衣糧 (jiāng yīliáng)

This small but vivid phrase is crucial. It anchors the mythical voyage in the language of bureaucratic realism.

In Tang texts, yīliáng referred to rations for long campaigns — the logistical sinew of empire. The chronicler, writing centuries later, likely drew on maritime reports that emphasized the enormous provisioning required for Indian Ocean voyages.

Dionisius Agius’s research confirms that by the 7th century, Arab and Persian fleets provisioning from Basra, Bahrain, Oman, and Hadramaut were already linked to annual sea fairs. Ships carried textiles, grain, and dried dates — clothing and food — as standard trade and survival cargo.

The Tang writer’s mention of 衣糧 thus reflects a genuine awareness of Arab maritime infrastructure — a world of harbor networks and seasonal trade winds, not mythic seas alone.

🐪 From Desert to Deep Sea — The Expanding Horizon of Islam

The transformation of Arabia from a land of camel caravans to a maritime power was one of the great revolutions of the 7th century.

As Agius writes, “Sea-borne trade and trade through the desert routes was the wealth, strength, and glory of Islam.”

From Basra, founded in 638 CE, the Arabs inherited the Sasanian maritime legacy, transforming the head of the Persian Gulf into a naval base linking the Tigris to the Indian Ocean.

By ʿUthmān’s reign, ships sailed from Oman to India, Sindh, and Abyssinia, while Muslim pilgrims embarked from Jeddah to Mecca — a fusion of commerce, conquest, and faith.

The Tongdian, with characteristic Chinese economy of language, compresses all of this history into one line:

“Their king sends ships into the sea.”
Behind those five characters lies the entire maritime awakening of Islam.

For the Tang court, to sail the open sea was to claim a share of Heaven’s mandate.

In Chinese cosmology, the “outer seas” marked the frontier between civilization (huá) and the chaotic beyond (yí).

Thus, when Du You records that the Dàshí “常遣人乘船,” he is not describing reckless voyages, but recognizing the Dàshí as a civilized power capable of maritime order — an empire that had mastered the sea just as the Tang mastered the land.

Where Tang envoys crossed the South Seas toward Java and India, Arab fleets crossed the Western Sea toward Sindh and China.

Each, in their own hemisphere, extended the dominion of Heaven — one with the Dragon Throne, the other with the Sword of Revelation.

Together, they marked the birth of a connected Afro-Eurasian world — and the sea became its bridge.

🌊 「經涉八年，未極西岸。」

“After journeying for eight years, they have not yet reached the western shore.”

→ The Endless Voyage — From the Indian Ocean to the African Rim

This line is among the most haunting in the Tongdian’s record of the Dàshí.

To the Tang chronicler, the image of ships sailing “for eight years without reaching the western shore” evoked both cosmic infinity and imperial perseverance. Yet, far from being a fantasy of the Atlantic, this phrase almost certainly describes the western expanse of the Indian Ocean — the long voyage along the southern Arabian and African coasts, toward the lands of Zanj (東非 / East Africa) and Punt.

🌍 Reinterpreting “The Western Shore” (西岸 Xī àn)

Hyunhee Park has clarified that in Tang geographical thought, the Western Sea (西海 Xīhǎi) often referred to the northwestern Indian Ocean — a space bounded by the Red Sea, Arabian Sea, and Persian Gulf.

When Du You writes of “not yet reaching the western shore,” he therefore records reports of ships sailing from Basra or Oman across the Indian Ocean, past Aden, Socotra, and the Horn of Africa, without ever reaching the farthest coast known to Arab sailors.

To Tang cartographers, this region marked the edge of the world’s western waters. To Muslim geographers, it was part of a real and thriving trade system connecting Arabia, East Africa, and India.

⛵ An African-Bound Voyage — The Route to the Zanj Coast

Dionisius Agius’s research (Classic Ships of Islam) traces precisely this maritime network:

“The Arabian Peninsula is surrounded by three seas — the Persian Gulf on the east, the Arabian Sea on the south, and the Red Sea on the west. For centuries it has been an established centre for trade with the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.”

By the 7th century CE, Arab ships regularly followed the southbound monsoon from Basra and Oman to Hadhramaut, Aden, and the Zanj coast — encompassing modern Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania. These voyages could last for years, as sailors waited for favorable winds or established seasonal trading posts along the way.

For Chinese readers, such an eight-year voyage seemed mythic; for Arab navigators, it was arduous but real. The Dàshí sailors had indeed entered the westernmost waters known to their world — the coast of Africa, where the “western shore” could never be finally reached.

🧭 “After Journeying for Eight Years” — A Measure of Endurance and Empire

The number “eight” (八 bā) was not chosen at random. In Tang numerology, it symbolized cosmic totality — the “Eight Directions” (八方) that encompass Heaven’s domain.

To journey for eight years thus expressed not literal duration alone but the full circuit of Heaven’s compass — the Dàshí as a people exploring the limits of Earth.

At the same time, it alludes to the length and rhythm of monsoon navigation. A full circuit of the Indian Ocean — sailing out with the southwest monsoon and returning with the northeast — took nearly two years. Multiple such expeditions, involving coastal trade, ship repair, and overwintering, could easily stretch into the Tang chronicler’s “eight years.”

Thus, “eight years without reaching the western shore” is both an idiom of cosmic immensity and a realistic reflection of intercontinental sailing time between Arabia and East Africa.

🌅 Maritime Cosmography — The Tang Vision of Infinity

For the Tang world-view, all oceans encircled the central landmass of civilization. In both Buddhist and Daoist cosmography, the seas were “the outer ring” — the fluid boundary between the human and the divine.

Thus, to “sail eight years and not reach the shore” carried metaphysical weight. It symbolized a voyage to the edge of the cosmos, a confrontation with the unknown. The Dàshí’s ships, in this sense, became vessels of cosmic daring — probing the limit where Heaven and Earth dissolve into water.

In Chinese eyes, such a voyage elevated the Dàshí to the rank of a worldly civilization: only Heaven’s appointed empires — the Tang and the Dàshí — had the audacity to send their people into the sea of mystery.

🐚 From Myth to History — Echoes of Ancient Maritime Memory

Agius reminds us that this Indian Ocean enterprise was no innovation of Islam alone.

Long before the Prophet ﷺ, Arabian, Persian, and East African sailors had crossed these waters since the third millennium BCE — trading timber, copper, pearls, and incense between Dilmun (Bahrain), Magan (Oman), and Meluhha (the Indus Valley).

By the time of Islam, this maritime legacy had matured into an unbroken chain of ports — Sohar, Dabba, Basra, Ubulla, and Aden — each a node in the world’s first global sea network. The Dàshí inherited this oceanic tradition and, under caliphal patronage, pushed it farther west and south than ever before.

The Tang description thus preserves not mere fable, but a deep memory of Arabian navigation along Africa’s coast — a voyage that merged trade, faith, and curiosity into one.

💫 Synthesis

“After journeying for eight years, they have not yet reached the western shore.”

In Tang cosmology, this was a myth of endless ocean.

In Islamic history, it was a record of real exploration — the Arab world’s first sustained encounter with the African sea frontier.

Both visions meet in Du You’s pen:

For the Tang, it was proof that the Dàshí had entered Heaven’s western waters, voyaging beyond the known.
For the Muslims, it was the living rhythm of the monsoon — years of travel between Arabia and Zanj, trading gold, ivory, and faith.

This single sentence thus bridges metaphysics and geography, China and Islam, and myth and maritime science. It tells of an empire that sought the edge of the world — and of another that already sailed upon it.

🌳 「於海中見一方石，石上有樹，枝赤葉青」

“Amid the sea they beheld a square-shaped stone, upon which grew a tree — its branches red, its leaves green.”

🌅 → The Mirage and the Mangrove: Decoding an African Coastal Marvel

At this point, the Tongdian transforms from geography into mythic natural history.

Yet behind this vivid imagery lies a kernel of ecological truth — a distorted reflection of the East African mangrove coast, as witnessed by Arab navigators and retold through Tang cosmography.

🧭 The “Square Stone” — Coral Table, Tidal Island, or Heavenly Geometry

「一方石」 — “A square stone.”

To the Chinese eye, this is an extraordinary sight — a geometrically perfect shape amid the chaos of waves. But to the seafarers of Arabia and Oman, this may have been a familiar feature of the coral-rag coasts of Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania.

Ecological reality:

The intertidal flats of the Swahili coast are dotted with limestone and coral shelves, eroded into flat, squared platforms that rise abruptly from shallow lagoons. During low tide, these appear as “stone islands,” gleaming white and symmetrical against the horizon.

Navigational function:

For sailors, such a landmark would serve as an ʿalam (عَلَم, “marker” or “signpost”) — a fixed reference for dead reckoning along the open-water route between Aden, Socotra, and Zanj. Arab pilots like those described by Dionisius Agius and Ibn Majid relied on such visible cues to triangulate their bearings when celestial measurements were impossible due to monsoon haze.

Symbolic dimension:

In Chinese cosmology, the square (方) signifies Earth itself — the domain of order, civilization, and the known. To describe a stone in the midst of the sea as “square” is to impose cosmic geometry upon chaos, to declare: Even here, beyond the empire’s horizon, Heaven’s order endures.

Thus, the chronicler transforms a coral outcrop into a microcosm of the world, the stable axis amid the rolling abyss.

🌴 “A Tree with Red Branches and Green Leaves” — The Mangrove of Zanj

This arresting image — red branches, green leaves — is unlikely to be pure invention.

It matches, with uncanny precision, the Red Mangrove (Rhizophora mucronata), one of the dominant coastal trees of East Africa and the Arabian littoral.

Botanical detail:

Red branches (枝赤): The Red Mangrove’s aerial prop roots and lower branches are strikingly reddish-brown to crimson, gleaming in sunlight and reflected in tidal pools like molten copper.
Green leaves (葉青): Its upper canopy is a dense, luminous green — smooth, waxy, and vividly contrasting with the red below.
Habitat: It thrives directly on saline rock, coral debris, and mudflats — literally a tree growing upon stone in the sea.

For sailors approaching from offshore, these red-rooted trees could appear to rise from the very surface of the ocean, as if rooted in a stone that floats upon the waves.

🌀 From Observation to Myth — The Logic of Maritime Marvels

The transformation from ecological reality to symbolic wonder followed the natural current of oral transmission:

Arab Observation: Sailors describe an islet covered with red-stemmed mangroves.
Persian Mediation: Translators or merchants retell the scene to Sogdian intermediaries — emphasizing its strangeness.
Tang Recording: The chronicler, working within Chinese cosmology, converts the report into a cosmic allegory — a square stone with a bicolored tree.

This process — from report to representation to revelation — is the same by which dragons, phoenixes, and qilin emerged from descriptions of crocodiles, peacocks, and giraffes.

The result is not falsehood but transformation: the world rendered through wonder.

🪶 The Inverted World — Red, Green, and the Colors of Heaven and Earth

In Tang color symbolism, red (赤) represents yang, fire, and Heaven’s vitality, while green (青) corresponds to yin, wood, and Earth’s renewal.

A tree with red branches (the celestial force) and green leaves (the terrestrial life) visually reverses the cosmic hierarchy — Heaven rooting itself in the sea, Earth growing from its branches.

Such inversion is the essence of a border marvel: it exists where the ordinary order of things collapses — where fire and water, Heaven and Earth, merge.

To the Tang reader, this image signified not confusion but revelation: that the Dàshí had reached the liminal point where the world turns upside down — the edge of Heaven’s map.

🐚 The African Echo — The Mangrove Isles of Zanj

Dionisius Agius describes this maritime belt as one of “mangrove-fringed lagoons and tidal archipelagos,” inhabited by traders, pearl divers, and fishermen from Arabia and East Africa.

Archaeological finds in Kilwa, Lamu, and Pate confirm thriving Muslim trade settlements by the 8th century CE — exactly the period of Du You’s report.

To Tang ears, such a place would sound otherworldly: a land where trees grow from the sea, stones breathe, and the horizon itself never ends. Yet to Arab navigators, these were the living coasts of the Zanj — the frontier of Islam’s maritime reach.

💫 Synthesis — Between Nature and Heaven

“Amid the sea they beheld a square stone, upon which grew a tree — its branches red, its leaves green.”

This is no mere fable. It is a cross-cultural compression of lived geography into mythic geometry:

The square stone: a coral islet, fixed and symmetrical, signifying the axis of Earth amid endless water.
The red-branch tree: the mangrove, the living bridge between sea and land, its colors shimmering like a divine emblem.
The scene itself: a sailor’s memory, refracted through Persian intermediaries and rendered by Tang chroniclers into the grammar of the cosmos.

For the Arab sailor, this was a navigational landmark.

For the Tang historian, it was proof that the Dàshí had reached the edge of Heaven’s waters, where reality bends into miracle.

In that single image — the tree on the stone — we see the exact meeting point of science and symbolism, Islamic navigation and Chinese cosmology, the coral shore and the cosmic axis.

It is the perfect emblem of what the Tongdian’s account achieves:

a geography so far beyond the known world that it transforms into revelation.

👶 「樹上總生小兒，長六七寸，見人不語而皆能笑，動其手腳，頭著樹枝。」

“On that tree were born many tiny infants, each six or seven inches long; when they saw people, they did not speak but all could smile, moving their hands and feet, their heads attached to the branches.”

🌱 → The Viviparous Mirage: How a Mangrove’s Propagules Became ‘Tree-Born Infants’

This is the most arresting line in the Tongdian’s Dàshí section — the instant when geography yields to miracle. Yet, remarkably, the miracle rests upon a real biological foundation: the viviparous reproduction of the Red Mangrove (Rhizophora mucronata), native to the western Indian Ocean and the East African coast.

What reads like fantasy is, in fact, a perfectly accurate field observation, filtered through a chain of translation, metaphor, and cosmology.

🧬 「樹上總生小兒」

—

“On that tree were born many infants.”

→ The Biological Reality: Vivipary

The Red Mangrove is one of the few trees in the world that gives literal birth to its offspring.

Unlike ordinary trees that drop seeds to germinate in soil, the mangrove embryo germinates while still attached to the parent branch. The seedling, called a propagule, elongates into a slender green cylinder while hanging downward — alive, photosynthesizing, and growing for months before it detaches and floats away to root elsewhere.

🌊 In sailor’s eyes, this was a tree that produced living young from its own limbs — an image of maternal fertility so vivid that “born children” became the natural metaphor.

To the Tang chronicler, who lacked a conceptual category for viviparous flora, this phrase was taken literally: the tree gives birth to small children (生小兒).

📏 「長六七寸」 — “Each six or seven inches long.”

→ Empirical Observation: Tang Precision Meets Indian Ocean Botany

A Tang cùn (寸) measured roughly 2.4–3.1 cm; six to seven cùn equals 15–22 cm (6–9 inches).

The propagules of Rhizophora mucronata indeed grow to 15–30 cm, sometimes longer before falling.

💡 This level of quantitative accuracy — across languages, across oceans — shows that Du You’s informant (likely based on Du Huan’s Jingxing ji, c. 762 CE) preserved an empirical datum. It demonstrates that the Chinese description was not invented from imagination but from observation transmitted through multiple witnesses.

Thus, behind the marvel stands a scientist’s precision — a botanical note encoded in myth.

👁️ 「見人不語而皆能笑，動其手腳，頭著樹枝。」

“When they saw people, they did not speak but all could smile, moving their hands and feet, their heads attached to the branches.”

→ Anthropomorphism and Pareidolia

Here, biology melts into wonder. Every clause can be traced to a visual or kinetic feature of the mangrove propagule:

「頭著樹枝」 — “Heads attached to the branches.”
The propagule’s base, shaped like a bulb or cup, remains joined to the parent by a small calyx. Seen from below, this indeed appears as a head affixed to a body.
「動其手腳」 — “They moved their hands and feet.”
In tidal winds, hundreds of propagules sway simultaneously, pivoting like limbs in motion. The illusion of coordinated movement gives the eerie impression of animation.
「能笑」 — “They could smile.”
The propagule’s tip, slightly rounded and indented, resembles a face with a gentle curve — a “smile.” Glinting sunlight on the glossy green surface enhances this expression.
「不語」 — “They did not speak.”
Silence becomes a narrative choice: in Chinese zhiguai (志怪, “accounts of the strange”) literature, the mute creature signifies innocence, a being of nature untouched by human corruption — an idealized pre-linguistic humanity.

What began as a natural observation became, through poetic misunderstanding, a moral tableau: creatures that live, smile, and move, yet remain silent — life before language.

🔄 The Chain of Transmission — From Coastal Sailors to Tang Scholars

The metamorphosis of a mangrove seedling into a smiling infant can be reconstructed step by step:

Observation (Arab & Swahili sailors):
They encounter the mangrove islets of Zanj — trees that “give birth to children that hang until they drop into the sea.”
Metaphorical Description (Persian & Sogdian intermediaries):
“The trees bear living young that dangle like babies.” Such figurative speech was natural in Arabic and Persian nautical storytelling.
Translation (Tang envoys or translators):
Chinese officials, lacking the vocabulary for vivipary, render the image literally: “trees on which grow small infants.”
Literary Codification (Du You’s historiography):
The compiler refines the description into balanced clauses, adding moral detail (smiling, moving, silent) consistent with Tang natural-marvel style.

Thus the Tongdian preserves not a fantasy but a cross-linguistic fossil of scientific observation, fossilized in moral allegory.

🏛️ The Intellectual Context — From Natural History to Moral Cosmology

Tang scholars like Du You approached foreign marvels through the dual lenses of Buddhist cosmology and Confucian moralism.

Creatures “born of trees” existed at the border between sentient and insentient life — echoing Buddhist tales of rebirth and Daoist myths of spontaneous generation.

🌿 The image of smiling but speechless infants could be read allegorically:

Smiling: Harmony with Heaven.
Speechless: Purity before civilization’s corruption.
Bound to the branch: Dependence upon the cosmic tree — a metaphor of all beings sustained by the Dao.

In this way, a report of mangrove propagules became a moralized cosmogram of the world’s natural order.

🌍 Synthesis — A Tangle of Roots and Realities

The Tree of Infants fuses three simultaneous truths:

Layer	Reality	Expression
Botanical	The Red Mangrove’s viviparous propagules, accurately measured and observed.	“Infants six or seven inches long, hanging by the head.”
Maritime	Sailors’ metaphorical storytelling along the Zanj coast.	“A tree that gives birth to its children.”
Philosophical	Tang natural theology and zhiguai aesthetics.	“They smile but do not speak” — beings of innocent vitality.

⚖️ In a single image, empirical observation becomes theological metaphor.

The Tongdian passage thus records one of history’s earliest cross-cultural descriptions of East African coastal ecology — rendered not in the idiom of science, but in the poetics of awe.

✨ Conclusion — The Moment Where Nature Turns to Myth

“They saw small infants upon the tree, moving and smiling, their heads attached to the branches.”

These “infants” never lived, yet the mangroves they describe still breathe along the shores of Lamu, Kilwa, and Zanzibar.

In this single sentence, the Tongdian captures a miracle of perception: how the meeting of two civilizations — the seafaring Islam of ʿUthmān’s caliphate and the cosmographic imagination of Tang China — transformed biological fact into metaphysical revelation.

It is not the world that is strange, but our way of seeing it.

Between the coral and the cosmos, the mangrove stands — forever giving birth to life that smiles, sways, and speaks only through silence.

✋ 「人摘取，入手即乾黑。」

“When people plucked them, they immediately dried and turned black in the hand.”

⚖️ → The Metaphor Solidifies: A Moral and Botanical Memento Mori

After pages of wonder and vivid vitality — smiling infants, red branches, green leaves — the Tongdian brings the episode to an abrupt, almost tragic halt. The transformation from life to death, from green to black, encapsulates both a natural law and a philosophical warning.

It is the moment of grasping, when curiosity becomes possession, and the marvelous — once seized — dissolves into dust.

⚖️ 「人摘取」

—

“When people plucked them...”

→ The Human Act as Transgression

The verb zhāi qǔ (摘取) implies deliberate action — to pluck, to pick, to seize with intent. It is not passive observation; it is conquest. In Tang political idiom, such verbs carried undertones of imperial expansion, as in “plucking barbarians” (摘夷) or “taking tribute” (取貢). Here, the act is symbolic on three intertwined levels:

Imperial Overreach:
The Tang, as masters of the known world, sent embassies and explorers to measure, name, and classify foreign realms. This gesture — “plucking” the infant of the miraculous tree — mirrors the act of empire itself: the desire to turn the unknown into the known, the foreign into the archived.
Violation of Cosmic Order:
In Chinese moral cosmology, each thing has its place in the balance of Heaven (天), Earth (地), and the Ten Thousand Beings (萬物). To remove a living being from its appointed sphere — the tree’s branch, the sea’s edge — is to violate that harmony. The word zhāi carries the nuance of plucking sacred fruit, an echo of mythic transgression — an act both curious and profane.
Theological Paradox:
Within an Islamic frame, this could also evoke the Qurʾānic idea that life is sustained by divine permission. The sailor who severs the infant from its source enacts a microcosm of humanity’s dependence upon the Creator. Once cut off, life withers — a lesson mirrored in the Qurʾān’s metaphors of the dead earth revived by rain and the plant that perishes when denied it.

💀 「入手即乾黑」

—

“They immediately dried and turned black in the hand.”

→ The Collapse of Life into Symbol

This short phrase completes the moral parabola: curiosity ends in decay. What was vibrant, smiling, and alive becomes black and brittle at human touch. The transformation is both literal and allegorical.

Instantaneous Death (即 jí):
The adverb jí — “immediately” — grants this miracle a moral immediacy. In the Tang worldview, Heaven’s retribution was often sudden: to transgress the natural order was to be punished without delay. The marvel refuses commodification; it dies the moment it is grasped.
Drying (乾 gān):
The term gān signals the departure of life-force (qì 氣). To “dry” is to lose vitality. In both Daoist and medical language, moisture (shui) sustains life; its absence denotes exhaustion. The drying of the “infant” is the loss of its breath, its qì, its spiritual substance.
Blackening (黑 hēi):
The color black in Tang symbology carries layered meanings. It is the hue of the northern direction and of water, but also of death, dissolution, and return to the primordial. In moral allegory, it signifies the inevitable end of all corporeal beauty — the conversion of vitality into void.

🕯️ In miniature, this is a moral vanitas scene: the sailor holds in his palm the corpse of wonder, a literal memento mori. What was a marvel of nature becomes an emblem of impermanence.

🌿 The Botanical Core — The Science beneath the Symbol

Beneath the poetry, the observation remains botanically impeccable.

The “infant” is, in fact, a viviparous propagule — a living seedling of Rhizophora mucronata. When detached prematurely:

It loses connection to the nutrient flow of the parent branch.
The tender green hypocotyl dries within hours under tropical sun and saline air.
The color shifts from bright green to dark brown or black as lignin oxidizes — precisely as the Tongdian describes.

Modern field botanists along the Swahili and Hadhramaut coasts confirm the same: if handled and removed, mangrove propagules shrivel and blacken within a day.

The “miracle” of instant death was not metaphor at all — it was empirical observation of a delicate ecological truth.

🧭 A Navigator’s Taboo, A Scholar’s Parable

The phrase likely carried dual functions for its transmitters:

Maritime Warning:
Among Arab and Swahili sailors, mangroves were essential waypoints — protecting coasts, marking shallows, and providing wood and fresh water. “Do not pluck the tree’s children” may have served as an ecological taboo, preventing damage to crucial coastal ecosystems. The superstition protected the navigator’s environment.
Moral Allegory for the Tang Court:
For Du You and his readers, the line resonated with zhiguai (志怪) and Daoist parables, the mangrove infant embodied a lesson:
the sacred cannot survive the grasp of the worldly.

The story thus bridged worlds — a sailor’s practical taboo became a Confucian-Buddhist moral of restraint.

🕊️ Cross-Cultural Theology — The Law of Context

In Islamic cosmology, every creature (makhlūq) thrives only within its ordained balance (mīzān). When humans exceed that balance, corruption (fasād) ensues — the Quranic principle that “when men’s hands act upon the earth, disorder appears in land and sea” (Q 30:41).

The sailor’s “plucked infant” is a perfect image of fasād: life that perishes the instant man tries to dominate it.

Du You’s chronicler, working within Tang Confucian categories, arrived at the same intuition through different terms: the Mandate of Heaven does not extend beyond the moral bounds of harmony.

Thus, across cultures, the meaning converges — a metaphysics of restraint.

💫 Synthesis — The Limit of Grasp, the Death of Wonder

This single line — 「人摘取，入手即乾黑」 — serves as both epilogue and epitaph for the entire Dàshí narrative.

🧠 Epistemological Boundary: It defines the limit of human inquiry — what can be observed, but never possessed.
🕰️ Temporal Boundary: It dramatizes impermanence — the instant transformation of life into relic.
⚓ Cultural Boundary: It separates observer from observed, Tang from Dàshí, Heaven’s center from the world’s edge.

The “blackened infant” is the corpse of curiosity — a symbol of how all empires, when they reach too far, find only the death of the thing they seek to understand, the explorers return not with treasure, but with a relic — the husk of a miracle.

And yet, that husk preserves something enduring: a record of precise observation, ecological sensitivity, and philosophical humility. It is a mirror of humanity’s eternal encounter with the unknown:

each time we try to seize the living mystery of the world, it turns to history in our hand — beautiful, brittle, and blackened by our touch.

🌿 「其使得一枝還，今在大食王處。」

“One envoy obtained a branch and brought it back; it is now kept by the King of the Dàshí.”

With this closing sentence, the Tongdian moves from marvel to inventory, from wonder to record. The miracle of the “tree of infants” is no longer an ephemeral vision on the edge of the world — it becomes a material object, entered into the archives of empire.

A branch (yī zhī 一枝), once living, now severed, lies preserved in the palace of the Dàshí King. The tone is bureaucratically exact: a single specimen, properly obtained (dé 得), brought back (huán 還), and now housed (zài 在) within the royal court. The wonder has completed its passage through the machinery of empire.

🌿 「一枝」 — The Branch as Fragment of Infinity

The “one branch” is both literal and symbolic — a perfect microcosm of the entire voyage.

Empirical Fragment:
The phrase yī zhī was a technical term in Tang administrative prose, used in descriptions of tribute objects, botanical samples, and imperial curiosities. It evokes the exactitude of a field report: not a myth, but a specimen.

In naturalistic terms, the envoy may indeed have returned with a piece of Rhizophora wood — hard, salt-soaked, red-brown, and aromatic — a plausible relic of the coastal tree that inspired the tale.
Cosmic Fragment:
In classical Chinese cosmography, the branch is an emanation of the cosmic tree, the axis that joins Heaven and Earth.
To possess one branch of such a tree is to hold a piece of Heaven’s design — a symbol of dominion over the farthest reaches of creation.
Thus, the Dàshí king becomes, in Chinese eyes, not merely a ruler of men, but a custodian of a heavenly relic.
The Relic as Proof:
By recording that “the envoy obtained one branch,” Du You transforms legend into fact. The relic validates the narrative — a physical proof inserted into the archive. The miraculous has been domesticated into evidence.

🕌 「今在大食王處」 — The Caliph’s Custody of the Marvel

The final clause — “it is now kept by the King of the Dàshí” — carries immense symbolic weight. It fixes the story within the framework of global kingship.

To Tang chroniclers, every true monarch was both keeper of the world’s order and curator of its mysteries. The Caliph, by holding the branch, assumes the role the Chinese reserved for the Son of Heaven.

Parallels of Sovereignty:
The Tang emperor preserved relics of sacred mountains, Buddhist stupas, and auspicious creatures brought as tribute. Similarly, the Caliph now preserves the relic of a divine tree from the world’s edge.
In this subtle parallel, Du You’s narrative acknowledges the Dàshí as a civilization equal in ritual gravity to the Tang: both collect fragments of Heaven to legitimize their earthly rule.
Relic as Legitimacy:
In the logic of medieval kingship, to hold such an object is to receive Heaven’s recognition. The Caliph’s possession of the branch becomes a token of divine sanction — a reminder that his authority, like the emperor’s, extends over creation’s mysteries.
Islamic Context:
Within Islamic sacred geography, relics of nature were not worshipped but contemplated as signs (āyāt) of God. A mangrove branch from the edge of the known world, once seen as miraculous, would be understood as one of God’s innumerable signs — a proof of His creative power across the seas.
Thus, even in translation, the symbol resonates in both faiths: for the Tang, Heaven’s Mandate; for the Muslims, God’s Ayah.

🧭 From Miracle to Monument — The Cycle of Knowledge

This last line encapsulates the entire trajectory of the story:

Stage	Domain	Symbol
1️⃣ Observation	Maritime (Arab sailors)	The Tree of Infants — the living wonder
2️⃣ Transmission	Diplomatic (Envoy)	The verbal report — myth becomes narrative
3️⃣ Collection	Bureaucratic (Caliphal court)	The physical branch — myth becomes specimen
4️⃣ Preservation	Historiographic (Du You’s Tongdian)	The written record — specimen becomes scripture

Each stage reduces the living to the archived. The tree becomes a branch, the branch becomes a relic, the relic becomes a sentence. Yet with each reduction, the symbol’s power deepens — it becomes portable, transmissible, immortal.

🕊️ The Diplomatic Mirror — Tang and Dàshí as Twin Empires of Wonder

For Tang readers, this closing gesture would have felt deeply familiar. At Chang’an, court chroniclers recorded the arrival of white elephants from Champa, lions from Persia, and coral trees from the South Seas — all proofs that the empire’s virtue had moved the world.

Now, in the mirror-empire of the Dàshí, the same pattern repeats. The Caliph, too, receives the world’s marvels, catalogues them, and keeps them as divine symbols.

Thus, the Tongdian closes the cultural distance between the two superpowers of the eighth century. Both are cosmic courts, both gather wonders from the edges of the earth, and both treat those wonders not as curiosities, but as refractions of Heaven’s moral order.

📜 From Relic to Revelation — The End of the Tale

In literary terms, this is the story’s perfect closure. The marvel has passed through three transformations:

Seen — as miracle.
Touched — as death.
Preserved — as relic.

The first belongs to the sailor; the second to the sinner; the third to the sovereign.

Each stage reveals a different human response to the divine: wonder, transgression, and stewardship.

By ending with the Caliph’s custody of the branch, the Tongdian assigns the final moral not to the explorer or the chronicler, but to the ruler — the only one capable of containing, rather than consuming, the miraculous.

The Dàshí king’s possession of the branch is therefore not a theft, but an act of cosmic curation — preserving what others destroyed by touch.

💫 Synthesis — The Relic as the Limit of Empire

The closing sentence —

「其使得一枝還，今在大食王處。」
“One envoy obtained a branch and brought it back; it is now kept by the King of the Dàshí.”

— condenses the entire philosophy of Tang universal history:

To know the world is to collect its fragments.
To rule the world is to preserve its mysteries.
To preserve is to accept the boundary between knowledge and sanctity.

The branch thus becomes a liminal object — halfway between specimen and scripture, science and myth, Earth and Heaven.

It marks the point where curiosity stops and reverence begins.

And in that pause — in the stillness of the Caliph’s treasury where the branch rests, darkened and silent — the story of the Dàshí tree finds its end:

a dead twig that still breathes the memory of the living sea,

a relic that outlives the voyage,

and a mirror in which two empires — Tang and Dàshí — see reflected their shared hunger for the infinite.

🏁 Conclusion — The Dàshí in the Eyes of the Tang

Du You’s chronicle stands as one of the most profound and haunting Chinese depictions of the early Islamic world. In a few compact lines, the Tongdian captures the sweep of a civilization — its founder, its faith, its conquests, its script, its people, its lands, and even its oceans.

The Dàshí (Arabs, Muslims) appear not as raiders or nomads, but as a new world-order, a polity whose rise mirrored the great dynastic cycles of China itself. From the unification of tribes under a divinely aided founder, to the succession of “Móshǒu” (Caliphs), to the conquest of Persia and Rome — Du You recasts the Rashidun Caliphate into the recognizable grammar of Chinese legitimacy: Heaven’s Mandate transmitted through righteous kingship.

In Tang eyes, Islam was already a civilization — disciplined, hierarchic, universal. The Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ becomes “the First King”; Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, and ʿUthmān his rightful successors; and the Dàshí kingdom, “a state thirty-four years old,” a rising empire beneath Heaven’s gaze.

Du You’s account is a cartography of wonder.

He situates Arabia — “to the west of Persia” — in the farthest known lands, yet fully within the Tang cosmological sphere.

The description of the people — dark, lean, and noble; their script distinct from Persian; their reverence for the Heavenly Deity — shows how the Chinese historian translated an utterly foreign civilization into the moral and visual vocabulary of his own world. Even the barren land, “full of sand and stone, without the five grains,” becomes an emblem of moral austerity, a geography of purity forged by faith and conquest.

The Arabs’ triumph over Persia and Rome is not framed as accident or violence, but as destiny: the moral consequence of Heaven’s shifting favor.

Through Du You’s eyes, we glimpse how the Tang court understood the Islamic conquests — as the rebirth of virtue beyond the western horizon.

And then the chronicle leaves the earth.

Arab envoys, “sailing into the sea for eight years without reaching the western shore,” cross from geography into mythology.

To Chinese readers, this meant the sea of infinity — the cosmic ocean encircling the world. To us, it evokes the Indian Ocean voyages of Arab sailors, perhaps along the Swahili or Malagasy coasts.

The square stone and tree with red branches and green leaves, the tiny laughing infants, and the blackened relic — these are not mere fantasies. They are echoes of real ecology — the coral islet, the red mangrove, the viviparous propagules — transmuted through the Tang imagination into symbols of life, death, and cosmic mystery.

Through these marvels, the Tongdian achieves what no earlier Chinese text had done: it turns Islamic navigation into metaphysics.

The Dàshí are not just conquerors of land — they are explorers of the edge of the world, touching the divine through the sea.

The final image — the branch preserved in the Caliph’s court — is perfection.

The voyage ends not in conquest, but in curation. The living tree becomes a relic; the miracle becomes a record. The Dàshí King, like the Tang Son of Heaven, collects and preserves the wonders of creation as proof of divine favor and cosmic order.

This line transforms the tale into an imperial mirror: two empires, Tang and Dàshí, each gazing across the world at the other, both believing that Heaven’s mandate shines upon their rule.

It is not a story of East and West, but of two centers of civilization acknowledging one another across the world’s vast ocean — each reading in the other’s rise a reflection of its own destiny.

🌅 THE END

Works Cited

-

Primary Sources

Al-Balādhurī, Aḥmad ibn Yaḥyā. History of the Arab Invasions: The Conquest of the Lands (Futūḥ al-Buldān). Translated and annotated by Hugh Kennedy, I.B. Tauris, 2022.

Ibn al-Qayyim, Muḥammad ibn Abī Bakr. Zād al-Maʿād fī Hady Khayr al-ʿIbād. Muʾassasat al-Risālah, 1998 (1418 AH).

Khalīfah ibn Khayyāṭ, Abū ʿAmr. Tārīkh Khalīfah ibn Khayyāṭ. Edited by Akrām Ḍiyāʾ al-ʿUmarī, 2nd ed., Dār al-Qalam, Muʾassasat al-Risālah, Damascus and Beirut, 1977 (1397 AH).

Sebeos. The Armenian History Attributed to Sebeos. Translated and annotated by R. W. Thomson, with historical commentary by James Howard-Johnston and assistance from Tim Greenwood, Liverpool University Press, 1999.

Tong dian 通典. SKQS vols. 603–605. Alternate edition: Shanghai: Shangwu Yinshu Guan, 1935.

Xin Tang shu 新唐書. 20 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1975.

Jiu Tang shu 舊唐書. 16 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1975.

Secondary Sources

Abramson, Marc S. Ethnic Identity in Tang China. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

Agius, Dionisius A. Classic Ships of Islam: From Mesopotamia to the Indian Ocean. Brill, 2008.

Chen, Huaiyu. In the Land of Tigers and Snakes: Living with Animals in Medieval Chinese Religions. Columbia University Press, 2023.

Duke, Norman C., Kathiresan, K., Salmo III, S. G., Fernando, E. S., Peras, J. R., Sukardjo, S., and Miyagi, T. “Rhizophora mucronata.” IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, 2010.

Hinsch, Bret. Women in Tang China. Rowman & Littlefield, 2020.

Kennedy, Hugh, and Fanny Bessard, editors. Land and Trade in Early Islam: The Economy of the Islamic Middle East 750–1050 CE. Oxford University Press, 2025.

Kotyk, Jeffrey. Sino-Iranian and Sino-Arabian Relations in Late Antiquity: China and the Parthians, Sasanians, and Arabs in the First Millennium. Brill, 2024.

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Shaddel, Mehdy. “Periodisation and the Futūḥ: Making Sense of Muḥammad’s Leadership of the Conquests in Non-Muslim Sources.” Arabica, vol. 69, 2022, pp. 96–145. Brill.

The Arabs in the ‘Comprehensive Chronicle’: Du You’s Tong dian (801 CE) and the First Chinese Portrait of Islam

I. 🏛️ The Rise of the Arabs (Dàshí 大食) in Du You’s Tong dian (801 CE)

📜 Original Chinese

大食，大唐永徽中，遣使朝貢云：其國在波斯之西。或云：初有波斯胡人，若有神助，得刀殺人。因招附諸胡，有胡人十一來，據次第摩首受化為王。

English Translation

🔍 Detailed Commentary

🪶 The Name “Dàshí 大食” — A Persian Filter for the Arab World 🏺⇢🛣️⇢📜

➡️ The Tayy Tribe — From Desert Clan to Universal Name

🗣️ The Double Meaning of Dàshí — People and Faith

⚔️ The Scholarly Debate — Was There an “Arab” Identity?

🧭 The Universalist Argument (Donner, Webb, Hoyland)

🏺 The Genealogical Rebuttal (Goudarzi and the Early Sources)

🧩 Resolving the “Dàshí Paradox”

🏛️ The Linguistic Filter

🕌 Faith as Primary, Identity as Layered

🕊️ Conclusion — The Linguistic Fossil of a New World

📅 The Yonghui 永徽 Era — China and Islam Meet in the Age of Caliph ʿUthmān (r.a.)

🌙 A Meeting of Two Dawns

🏛️ The Embassy of 651 CE — The First Contact

⚖️ The Fall of Yazdgird III and the Opening of the East

🌍 The Twin Poles of a New Eurasia

🗺️ “Their Country Lies West of Persia” — Early Chinese Geography of the Islamic World

🌏 Persia as the Pivot of the Western World

🧭 The “West of Persia” and the Problem of Direction

🕍 The Tang Mental Map: From Persia to Syria to Arabia

🕊️ Between Memory and Revelation: A Geography of Transformation

🕌 The Accuracy Behind the Error

✨ In Summary

⚔️ “A Persian Hu Aided by the Divine” — The Mythic Memory of the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ

🪶 The Line and Its World

🏺 “Persian Hu” — When the Arabs Appeared Through Persian Eyes

👑 The Shadow of Xusro II and the Shattered Pride of Iran

⚔️ “Divine Aid” (神助) — The Heavenly Mandate of Victory

🗡️ “Obtained a Sword to Kill Men” — Symbolism and Misunderstanding

🌍 The Tang Understanding of Prophetic Power

✨ In Summary

👳‍♂️ “He Gathered and Won Over the Various Hu” — Uniting the Tribes of Arabia

🪶 Linguistic and Political Resonance of 招附 (Zhāo fù)

🏜️ From Fragmented Tribes to a Community of Faith

🕊️ The Prophet as a Model of Virtuous Pacification

🕌 The Empire of Faith and the Tang View of World Order

✨ In Summary

👑 “Eleven Hu Came One After Another” — Decoding the Mysterious Eleven

1️⃣ Most Plausible: The Prophet ﷺ + the Ten Promised Paradise (الأشَرَةُ المُبَشَّرَةُ)

3️⃣ Possible but Speculative: The First Hijrah to Abyssinia (615 CE)

4️⃣ Least Plausible: Eleven Tribal Chiefs Submitting to the Prophet

🧭 Weighing the Evidence

✨ Conclusion

🕌 Synthesis — China’s Earliest Portrait of Islam

II. ⚔️ “The Rise and Power of the Dàshí” — The Tang Chronicle of Muslim Expansion

📜 Original Chinese

English Translation

🔍 Detailed Commentary

🕊️ 「此後眾漸歸附」

—

“Thereafter, the multitudes gradually submitted.”

🏛️ 「遂滅波斯」 — “They subsequently destroyed Persia.”

🏛️ 「又破拂菻及婆羅門城，所當無敵」

🏛️ Fúlǐn 拂菻

—

The Roman Realm (Hrōm, not “Byzantium”)

🕉️ Póluómén chéng 婆羅門城

—

“The City of the Brahmans”

🕌 Cosmographic Meaning: Islam Touches the Dharma’s Homeland

🕊️ Threefold Conquest: A Cartography of Heaven’s Mandate

⚔️ 所當無敵

—

“No enemy could withstand them.”

🌍 The Global Frame

⚔️ 「兵眾有四十二萬」 — “Their army numbers 420,000 men.”

📏 Numbers as Political Rhetoric

🕋 The World of 651 CE — The Yonghui Embassy and the Image of Power

🏹 Symbolism of the “Imperial Army”

⚖️ Admiration and Unease — A Peer Across Heaven

📅 「有國以來三十四年矣」

—

“Since the founding of their state, thirty-four years have passed.”

🌙 I. The Lunar Basis: How the Hijrī Years “Stretch”

🕋 II. The Political Sense: What “Founding the State” Meant

**I. 🏛️ The Rise of the Arabs (Dàshí 大食) in Du You’s Tong dian (801 CE)**

大食，大唐永徽中，遣使朝貢云：其國在波斯之西。
或云：初有波斯胡人，若有神助，得刀殺人。
因招附諸胡，有胡人十一來，據次第摩首受化為王。

🏛️ 「遂滅波斯」
—
“They subsequently destroyed Persia.”