by Faun Rice
the borders of the Middle Kingdom. Chinese monks and other religious figures
also traveled early and far. Chinese military might has been demonstrated pe-
riodically on the northern frontiers; and regarding the southern borderlands of
particular interest here, the Mongol invasion and famous voyages of the Ming
admiral Cheng Ho penetrated deep into Indonesia. Yet the Greater East Asian
Galactic Polity centered in the imperial capital has endured longer in time and
space than the presence of any Chinese coercive force.
In ad 484, a petition reached the Southern Qi imperial court from the ruler
of the original Khmer kingdom in the lower Mekong Delta, a distant Cam-
bodian place that had never known the presence of the Chinese arms it now
solicited (Pelliot 1903). True, northern Vietnam had been successfully invaded
by Chinese forces in Han times, but in Cambodia, as Keith Taylor comments,
there was no experience with the soldiers and officials of a neighboring empire,
nor the awareness of boundaries, in terrain and culture, that such an experience
produced among the Viets and Chams. Information about the outside world
arrive to Khmer leaders as news about Hindu gods and forms of Buddhist and
Hindu devotion as well as cosmological notions of political space that were ex-
pounded in the Sanskrit language. (1993: 157)
Still, King Kaundinya Jayavarman of the Khmer realm the Chinese knew as
“Funan” must have been aware of the Son of Heaven’s might when he complained
364
ON KINGS
to him about a certain “slave” who had rebelled against his own authority and
enlisted support from a neighboring kingdom (“Lin-yi,” evidently the predeces-
sor regime of Champa in southern Vietnam). The Chinese ruler in question was
probably the Emperor Wu of the short-lived Southern Qi dynasty. The mission
is recorded at the beginning of the sixth century in The history of the Southern Qi
dynasty, and accordingly presents a Chinese—indeed Confucian—perspective
on what transpired. Jayavarman did not lead the embassy in person, although
some Funan kings did so act; he sent a Hindu bonze as his representative. His
petition begins properly with a profession of submission to the sage and saintly
Celestial Emperor. “Your subject, Jayavarman,” it reads, “bows his forehead to
the earth and fulsomely praises the divine civilizing virtue” of the “saintly mas-
ter,” wishing him all kinds of happiness, including that “the concubines of the
six palaces be perfectly beautiful”; and voicing confidence that earth will know
peace, harmony, and prosperity “because of the brilliant civilizing influence
of your majesty.” Such is the preamble to King Jayavarman’s complaint about
his “slave” rival, followed by the offering of “meager presents” in tribute to the
“saintly and virtuous” majesty, including a golden image of the king of dragons.
Jayavarman asks the emperor for troops to put down the rebel, promising in
return to aid the imperial throne in “repressing the realms that border the sea.”
Or if not an army, would the Divine Majesty issue a special edict authorizing a
small number of Chinese troops to join his own forces in order to “exterminate
this nefarious lowly one”? The emperor’s response is equivocal. Taking note of
his benevolence, his reform of Buddhism, and his own resemblance to Indra,
king of the gods, the emperor declares that: “For me, it is only by culture and
virtue that I attract the distant peoples; I do not wish to have recourse to arms.”
However, considering that King Jayavarman “comes from afar and with a loyal
heart to ask for the aid of the imperial forces,” the emperor will refer the matter
to his tribunal—where, as far as I can determine, the request for military aid
died. Apparently it was soft power from beginning to end.
In ad 252, the Chinese military did intervene in Yunnan: an event that
was inscribed in ritual memories and tribal polities for many centuries beyond,
even as its political impulses also rippled further than the actual extent of the
invasion. The famous Shu Han minister and strategist Zhuge Liang led the
campaign in the aim of restoring the imperial authority that had lapsed with the
decline of the Han dynasty. Sensing he could not rule what he had conquered,
Zhuge withdrew, leaving the area in charge of the leaders of indigenous ethnic
groups on whom he had bestowed Chinese offices and surnames—a practice
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF CORE–PERIPHERY RELATIONS 365
of letting “barbarians rule barbarians” apparently in effect since Western Zhou
times, later commonly known as the “bridle and halter” policy, and, since Yuan,
as the tusi system. For centuries after Zhuge’s withdrawal, he was numbered
among local deities in temples built in his honor. As late as the twentieth cen-
tury, Bai peasants, reputed to be the aborigines of Yunnan, were using a carry-
ing yoke whose design was attributed to Zhuge, claiming their ancestors had
learned the style when serving in his armies. Other longstanding traditions of
local non-Han peoples related that their chieftains’ bronze drums—not merely
a “symbol” of their authority, as often reported, but an active-animistic agent
thereof—had been given their predecessors by Zhuge. Richard van Glahn tells
that when a drum of this kind was forcibly surrendered to an invading Ming
army in 1573, the chief lamented, “with two or three of such drums, one could
proclaim himself king. Striking the drum at the summit of a hill will cause all
the tribes to assemble. But now, all is lost” (1987: 15). Various signs and tradi-
tions of Zhuge’s conquests were long preserved in central Yunnan, some into
modern times, although his forces had never reached that far. And in a phenom-
enon of the kind frequently recorded in the Sino-Southeast Asian borderlands,
important chiefs of non-Han peoples in the areas he did pacify were known to
convert their Chinese surnames into claims of Han ancestry (cf. Backus 1981;
Giersch 2006; Took 2005). Stranger-kingship: the cultural politics of core–pe-
riphery relations have real-political effects.
GALACTIC MIMESIS: UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT IN
CORE–PERIPHERY SYSTEMS
“Barbarian” chiefs of Chinese ancestry; New Guinea vil agers who adopt clans,
totems, ancestors, and rituals of their dominant neighboring peoples; Cam-
bodian or Javanese kingdoms ruled in Sanskrit terms by Hinduized kings;
Indonesian rulers become Islamic sultans who assume a Portuguese lifestyle:
in sum, a recurrent impulse of upward mobility—more exactly upward nobil-
ity—runs through these galactic systems, no less at the peripheries than at
the center, as well as among the several secondary and tertiary societies in-
between. Even the kingdoms at the apex of the regional hierarchy aspire to a
hegemony of yet higher order—a project that also engages them with exotic
hinterland groups, thereby opening prospects of grandeur at the underdevel-
oped galactic margins.
366
ON KINGS
The world over, would-be kings of kings would institute something ap-
proaching a cosmocratic regime by laying cla
im to ancient or current prede-
cessors of widespread and exalted renown: whether by descent, incarnation, or
other privileged association; and whether these paragons be great gods such as
Shiva, world-historical heroes such as Alexander, fabled cities such as Rome, or
mighty empires such as the Chinese. Buddhist rulers in Southeast Asia invoke
Ashoka. West African Islamic rulers and their nearby pagan counterparts trace
their dynasties to Mecca: the former often to descendants of the Prophet, the
latter to his reputed enemies. The Gauls and Spartan kings come from Her-
akles, although after the Roman conquests some Gaulish chiefs had Julian or
Augustan ancestors. The kings of the Banyoro, Baganda, and several other East
African realms claim to be heirs of the Bachwezi rulers of the fabled Kitara
empire. Later Mexica emperors overlaid their barbaric Chichimec origins with
an exalted Toltec identity by importing a ruler of known descent from that
legendary civilization and its renowned god-king Quetzalcoatl. Aeneas of Troy,
stranger-king of the Latins, became the ancestor of Roman emperors through
Romulus, and thereby of the Holy Roman emperors and the Habsburgs, among
others; whereas the Greek heroes who returned from the Trojan War, the Nos-
toi, particularly Odysseus, gave rise to the ruling aristocracy in city-states of
northern Greece, Italy, and Sicily. Enough said, except that the ambitions of ga-
lactic sovereigns which thus impel an upward cosmic reach are complemented
by a policy of outward expansion through war, trade, and diplomacy, going even
beyond the strategic material returns with the aim of encompassing the potent
animistic powers of the barbaric wild.8
These upward and outward ambitions were interrelated: everything happens
as if the appropriation of the diverse earthly powers of the galactic hinterlands
would thus validate the claims of universal hegemony entailed in the ruler’s
privileged relations to transcendent cosmic authorities. Consider, for example,
Lorraine Gesick’s description of Southeast Asian galactic orders:
Linked with the conviction that living things were ordered along a continuum
from the bestial to the sacred, we found a circular conception of space in which
politically charged centers were thought to radiate power outward and downward
8. To document some of the most marvelous claims, see C. C. E. Brown (1952) on
Alexander the Great, Malkin (1998) on the Nostoi, Tanner (1993) on Aeneus, and
Drinkwater (1978) on Romanized Gauls.
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF CORE–PERIPHERY RELATIONS 367
toward the less charged peripheries . . . . In the landscape, palaces, temples, sacred
mountains, and capital cities were similarly surrounded by secondary and tertiary
centers and villages, all of which participated in and reflected, in varying degrees,
the power of the center. Finally, at the extreme periphery, civilized, cultivated
lands and villages gave way to jungles and mountain ranges—“wild” territory
beyond the reach of the center’s power. These territories were by no means im-
potent; on the contrary, they were filled with power; but it was anarchic, chaotic,
primeval. Only a person who was extremely “civilized” in himself could, by medi-
tation and self-discipline, subdue these forces. (1983: 2)
Underlying it all, the reach for both celestial and terrestrial powers beyond
the cosmocrater’s own, is the alterity of the sources of human life and death,
and thereby of the welfare of the social totality. Speaking of “traditional so-
cieties” in general, Mary Helms refers to a “cosmologically-charged outside”
from which are drawn materials, intangible energies, and original knowledge
and culture “that allow the production of human life and social being” (1993: 7).
And among a series of astute observations on the dynamics of core–periphery
systems in general, Helms notes that in taming the wild hinterlands with their
cultivated exports, the civilizing mission of dominant centers has a counterpart
in the centers’ acquisition of “naturally endowed” imports that increase their
“ideological and political potency by virtue of the autochthonous forces believed
to be inherent in that which is exotic, curious, or different” (ibid.: 180). Here
again is a real-politics of the marvelous, in the course of which the untamed
forces of the periphery are transformed into the potency and prosperity of the
center. As Helms describes, by trade and tribute from the hinterlands come rare
animals, strange foreigners, precious stones and minerals, rare woods, spices, and
drugs, and the horns, tails, furs, and feathers of exotic beasts and birds. One is
of course reminded of the Celestial Emperor’s mission of bringing order to All
Under Heaven, and particularly of the demonstration of his virtue ( te) by incor-
porating the tributary wonders and monsters brought from afar by the barbarian
inhabitants of fabulous countries. So likewise would the tribute-bearing peoples
be culturally transformed, domesticated, and civilized by coming into the im-
perial presence and thereby under its power as manifested and transmitted by
his person: that is, bodily as well as ritually, architecturally, and in the banquets,
gifts, and honors the outlanders receive and consume. The overall effect is a
two-way traffic in animistic potencies, political and wild, in which the subjective
368
ON KINGS
forces of things endow vitality on both the central and outlying societies—and
notably elevate and empower their leaders.
The center “desires the resources, the potency and the potentiality, the ‘alien
powers’ of the periphery, the wild, the forest. Both center and periphery seek to
restore ‘vitality’ in the exchange of powers” (Turton 2000: 25–26). So Andrew
Turton describes the exchanges between lowland Shan states and the hill peo-
ples they call kha, “serfs” (or “slaves”)—although typically the hill peoples are the
residual autochthonous “owners” of the fertile lowlands. For their part, the Shan
states, historically tributary to Burmese or Chinese potentates, were included
in the Greater East Asian Galactic system that stretched southward from the
Middle Kingdom into Malaya, Sumatra, Java, and beyond.
Edward Schafer tells that the aromatics and other exotica from Southeast
Asia that reached China “partook of the godly and the beneficial, and at the
same time the deadly and the devilish” (1967: 193). The animistic force was not
merely a Chinese sense of the exotic; it was quite familiar to the tribal people
who collected these potent things. Something like the divine and the deadly
were already ensouled in the camphor crystals and other aromatics sought out
by the indigenous peoples of the Indonesian forests. In his useful compendium
of Malay magic, Walter William Skeat (1900: 212ff.) relates that camphor was
controlled by indwelling spirits who had to be propitiated so that it could be
discovered and harvested. Communication with these metapersons, moreover,
required a special language, ordinary Malay being taboo. Transmitted thence to
the Chinese court, the ensouled forces of the Malay wild redoubled the political
&
nbsp; animism of the emperor. As Schafer observed, incense from Southeast Asian
aromatics “marked the presence of the royal afflatus, breathing supernatural wis-
dom through the worlds of nature and human affairs” (1963: 156). In imperial
levees of the T’ang ministers, a table of these aromatics was placed before the
Son of Heaven. Inhaled then by the court officials, the scent of camphor from
Malaya or sandalwood from Borneo insinuated the emperor’s virtue into the
persons of his officials, whereupon it could be realized in statecraft and dissemi-
nated through the world—to ultimately subdue and civilize the barbarians who
had originally appropriated these powers. (That was long before Marx talked of
the surplus value that returned in fetishized form to rule its producers.)9
9. I have discussed this use of Southeast Asian aromatics by T’ang emperors in much
the same terms elsewhere (Sahlins 2010).
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF CORE–PERIPHERY RELATIONS 369
On being informed that the Chinese protector-general had been chased
from Vietnam by a rebellion, an imperial court official and poet wrote:
Remember when the North was on good terms with the Yueh [the Viets]. For a long
time both were nourished by the southern fragrance.
All the same, the ensuing Ly dynasty (1009–1225), having established an inde-
pendent Dai Viet state, proceeded to organize the kingdom on basic principles
of the Chinese imperium: a “Vietnamized version of Chinese political theory,”
as Keith Taylor characterized it, with a “southern emperor” counterposed to the
Chinese “northern emperor,” ruling his “southern kingdom” by the grace of his
own “mandate of heaven” (1999: 147). Chinese sources identify the third Ly
ruler, Ly Nhat Ton (r. 1054–72), as the first Viet king who had the presumption
to claim imperial status; Vietnamese sources corroborate that he “adopted many
of the formalities of China’s imperial court, from the official name of the realm,
to the attire of his officials, to the ranks and titles conferred upon officials, upon
members of the royal family, and upon the royal ancestors” (ibid.: 144). For all
that the Dai Viet opposed imperial China, they did so by replicating it—just
as certain Maluku rulers took on Chinese, Portuguese, or Dutch attributes; the
