Hu (people)

Hu (Chinese: 胡; pinyin: Hú; Wade–Giles: Hu; IPA: [xǔ]), Huren (胡人, "Hu people") or Huzu (胡族, "Hu clans"), was a rather vague umbrella term used in Ancient China to describe non-Sinitic peoples, particularly steppe nomads, from Inner Asia. The Hu were usually tribal confederations from the great grasslands of the Mongolian plateau and the Western Regions, with a nomadic pastoralist lifestyle and a strong militant horse culture specializing in mounted archery and cavalry warfare.^[2]

According to Hill (2009):

The term hu 胡 was used to denote non-Han Chinese populations. It is, rather unsatisfactorily, commonly translated as 'barbarian'. While sometimes it was used in this general way to describe people of non-Han descent, and carried the same negative overtones of the English term, this was not always the case. Most frequently, it was used to denote people, usually of Caucasoid or partial Caucasoid appearance, living to the north and west of China.^[3]

According to Di Cosmo, the Chinese considered the Hu as "a new type of foreigner" and that "this term, whatever its origin, soon came to indicate an 'anthropological type' rather than a specific group or tribe, which the records allow us to identify as early steppe nomads. The Hu were the source of the introduction of cavalry in China."^[4]

Historical records from Bronze Age Chinese dynasties such as the Shang and Zhou dynasty, the latter of which included the Spring and Autumn and the Warring States periods, recounted numerous encounters with the non-Huaxia tribes beyond the authority of the Son of Heaven. At that time, the preferred term to designate non-Sinitic peoples, whom the ancient Chinese regarded as culturally backward and barbaric, was "Four Barbarians" (Chinese: 四夷; pinyin: sìyí), each of which was named for a cardinal direction relatively to the Central Plains: the Dongyi (東夷, "Eastern Barbarians"), Nanman (南蠻, "Southern Barbarians"), Xirong (西戎, "Western Barbarians"), and Beidi (北狄, "Northern Barbarians").^[5]

During the Qin dynasty (before 221 BCE) period, the term "Hu" came into designated usages to specifically describe the Xiongnu,^[6] who would be classified under the aforementioned Beidi concept. For example, the Xiongnu prince Jin Midi (134–86 BCE), a naturalized prisoner of war later promoted as a confidant of Emperor Wu of Han, would be described as both a Hu person^[7] and a Yidi (夷狄).^[8] To the east of the Xiongnu were Proto-Mongolic people known as the Donghu (東胡; Eastern Hu), whose descendants became the Xianbei and Wuhuan after the Xiongnu destroyed their confederation.

Increasing raids, lootings and abduction of civilians for slavery by the Xiongnu was a primary reason for the construction of elongated defensive walls (precursors of the Great Wall of China) by various ancient Chinese states such as Yan, Zhao and Qin, which culminated in a Qin expeditionary campaign in 215 BC that dealt heavy blow to the Xiongnu in the Hetao region around the Yellow River's Ordos Loop. However, during the civil wars after Qin's collapse, Xiongnu was united into a powerful nomadic empire under Modu Chanyu, who defeated and purged rival steppes confederacies (such as Donghu and Yuezhi, the latter being permanently evicted into Central Asia) and also re-invaded the Hetao region, thus becoming a prominent threat to the Guanzhong heartland during the early Western Han dynasty. This prompted Emperor Gaozu of Han to sortie against the Xiongnu at the Battle of Baideng, but he was ambushed and trapped and only escaped after bribing the chanyu's wife. The Han Empire was then forced to pay Xiongnu tributes for the next seven decades in so-called "marriage alliance", a situation that lasted until the reign of Emperor Wu, the seventh Han emperor, who successfully waged a war against Xiongnu that tipped the geopolitical landscape in favor of the Han, allowing new trade routes (i.e. the Northern Silk Road) and power projection into the Western Regions via the Hexi Corridor, which were previously monopolized by the Xiongnu.

Subsequent Han emperors such as Emperor Xuan and Emperor Ming further capitalized on the strategic advantages gained under Emperor Wu and established the Protectorate of the Western Regions and later the Chief Official of the Western Regions, the latter of which lasted until two centuries after Han dynasty's collapse. The Han hegemony in Inner Asia led many of Xiongnu's prior vassals and tributary states in Central Asia to turn against them, coupled with attacks from resurgent old foes such as the Donghu, causing the Xiongnu to fall into civil wars and fragmentate into two, namely the Northern Xiongnu and Southern Xiongnu. The Southern Xiongnu later subjected to the Han Empire as a vassal, while the Northern Xiongnu remained hostile and was evicted further west from Central Asia in 151 CE, eventually disappearing from historical records, leading many historian scholars to suspect them as the ancestors of the Huns.

The fall of the Eastern Han dynasty during the turn of the 3rd century coincided with the disintegration of the Southern Xiongnu vassal state on the northern frontier. From then on, the Xiongnu identity gradually disappeared as their descendants were referred to as "Hu" instead. These miscellaneous Hu people (雜胡; záhú) were loosely grouped based on their shared geography or characteristics, such as the Lushuihu (盧水胡; "Black River Hu") in northwestern China and Shanhu (山胡; "Mountain Hu") in the mountainous regions of Shanxi.^[9]

Hu was also used in a broad sense to refer to the non-Han groups that inhabited northern China during the Jin dynasty (266–420 CE) and Sixteen Kingdoms period, which later gave rise to the term "Five Barbarians". While the term first appeared in an edict in 357 CE, the most popular interpretation of the Five Barbarians only came about in the 13th century, that is they represented the Xiongnu, Jie, Xianbei, Di and Qiang. The origins of the Jie is still unclear (one theory suggests they originated from Sogdia in Central Asia), but they likely arrived in China through the Southern Xiongnu. The Di and Qiang, both Tibeto-Burman peoples from the Tibetan Plateau and Hexi Corridor in the west, were typically not referred to as Hu during their time.^[6][10]

Many tribes of Five Barbarians had settled into the northern frontiers and Guanzhong heartlands by the Western Jin period, and took advantage of the political chaos after the War of the Eight Princes to launch rebellions in northern China from 304 to 316, culminating in the Disaster of Yongjia in 311 CE where the Xiongnu Han-Zhao state captured and sacked the Jin capital Luoyang. This Upheaval of the Five Barbarians caused the surviving Jin royal court to relocate to Jiankang (modern-day Nanjing) on the south bank of the Yangtze River and establish the Eastern Jin dynasty. The Five Barbarians then established the Sixteen Kingdoms, among whom total wars and ethnic cleansings were frequent until they were finally all conquered and unified under the Northern Wei in 439 CE, beginning the Northern and Southern dynasties period.

The Rouran Khaganate, a multi-ethnic tribal confederation comprising primarily Xiongnu and Donghu, was founded in the Mongolian plateau in 330 CE. They were involved in royal intermarriages (heqin) with the Northern Yan, the Northern Wei dynasty and Wei's warring successors Eastern Wei and Western Wei, before being overthrown by the Göktürk First Turkic Khaganate in 555 CE.

Later, "Hu" was also used to include various groups of Iranic peoples from Central Asia who settled in in China for trade, especially the Sogdians. The Tang dynasty conquered the Eastern Turkic Khaganate and defeated the Western Turkic Khaganate, creating a hegemony in Inner Asia with the establishment of the Protectorate General to Pacify the West. Central Asian trading caravans and tributary convoys became common, and Central Asian cultural practices that spread into Tang heartlands would then be qualified as "Hu", such as their dance the "Huteng" (胡腾, "barbarian hopping"), or the Huxuan (胡旋, "barbarian whirling", also 胡旋舞, Húxuănwǔ, "barbarian whirling dance"),^[11][12] but known as "Sogdian Whirl dance" or simply "Sogdian whirl" to Western scholars.^[13] The "Jihu" (稽胡) were indigenous inhabitants of Shaanbei and western Shanxi in the 7th century CE.^[5]

During the Sui and Tang dynasty, "Hu" also included Turkic peoples along the Silk Road such as Göktürks, Uyghurs and Shatuo, in addition to the Sogdians. Some of these Hu people had been sinicized so much that they became a significant part of Tang court politics, taking over prominent military and administrative roles such as fanzhen jiedushi, allowing them to become powerful warlords and oligarchs that the Tang relied upon heavily to manage other Hu threats.

The defection of the Turkic Karluk mercenaries were instrumental to the Abbasid Caliphate and the Tibetan Empire defeating the Tang at the Battle of Talas in 751, which subsequently led to the loss of Tang control over Transoxiana and most of the Western Regions. Two naturalized Sogdian warlords, An Lushan and Shi Siming, waged a massive rebellion in 755 that almost toppled the Tang dynasty. As a result, the heavily sinicized Shatuo people were instead entrusted to guard the Tang Empire's northern borders, and one such clan was even bestowed the surname Li as a token for their loyalty, with Li Keyong being rewarded heavily for his contribution defeating the Huang Chao Rebellion in 884.

After Tang dynasty's collapse in 907, three of the Five Dynasties that ruled over northern China (Later Tang, Later Jin and Later Han) were headed by Shatuo sovereigns, who by this point were so completely sinicized that they were no longer regarded as Hu people, rather as Han Chinese. The "Hu" name was instead given to the newly arrived nomads to the north, the Khitans.

The mountainous Sixteen Prefectures of Yan–Yun, which commanded the most important natural barriers that shielded the North China Plain from northerly invasions, were ceded to the Khitans in 938 by Later Jin founder Shi Jingtang in exchange of Khitan military aid in his selfish rebellion against his brother-in-law, Emperor Li Congke of Later Tang. The loss of this strategic region from Han Chinese control gave the Khitans a solid staging area for invading southwards, which proved decisive when the Khitan army under Yelü Deguang invaded and conquered the Later Jin in 947. In 958, Emperor Guo Rong of Later Zhou attempted to recapture the Sixteen Prefectures via a northern expedition while taking advantage of political chaos within the Khitan Liao dynasty, but despite many victories, his campaign had to be abandoned after he fell ill and died in 959.

After Later Zhou general Zhao Kuangyin usurped the throne of Guo Rong's 7-year-old heir Guo Zongxun to establish the Song dynasty in 960, he chose to wage war against the Ten Kingdoms to the south instead of continuing the late Guo Rong's northern campaign to reclaim the Sixteen Prefectures. However, by the time his brother and successor Zhao Guangyi finally decided to deal with the northern threat, the Khitans had already ended the two decades of infighting and stabilized politically. The Liao dynasty decisively defeated the Song dynasty's campaigns to recapture the Sixteen Prefectures twice in 979 and 986, but Liao's attempt to invade south was also defeated in 1004, resulting in the signing of the Chanyuan Treaty in 1005.

Due to the Song dynasty's inability to recapture either the Sixteen Prefectures or the Hexi Corridor, Han Chinese no longer had access to the Western Regions or the Liao region, and the only northern non-Sinitic peoples they knew for the next century and a half were the newly risen Tibeto-Burman Tanguts from the northwest, who occupied the Hexi Corridor and founded the Western Xia; and the Para-Mongolic Khitans from the northeast, who founded the Liao dynasty. These peoples became the new "Hu" peoples, even though they had little ethnolinguistic relations to the previous Hu groups in Chinese history. Frequent border disputes, raids and invasions would occur between the Song, the Liao and the Western Xia, most often waged by the latter two to extort tributes from the former. Song and Liao ceased large-scale military conflicts with each other after the Chanyuan Treaty (though favoring the Liao, who received annual tributes and still continued small-scale border raids), while open conflicts between Song and Western Xia persisted.

In 1114, the Tungusic Jurchens from Northeast Asia rebelled against the Khitans to establish the Jin dynasty. Seeing an opportunity to settle old grudges, the Song court made an Alliance Conducted at Sea with the Jurchen leadership in 1120 to attack the Liao together, resulting in the Jin conquering the Liao in 1125. However, seeing how poorly the Song army performed in battle, the Jurchens' ambition grew and the Jin–Song wars soon started. Now faced with a new and far more aggressive Hu threat, the Song court acted indecisively and cowardly, resulting in the humiliating Jingkang incident in 1127 that collapsed the Song dynasty. Surviving Song court who fled the capital Kaifeng established a rump state south of the Huai River based at Lin'an called the Southern Song dynasty. The loss of territories north of the Huai River also meant that Song no longer bordered its bitter rival Western Xia, who was defeated by the Jin dynasty and instead became a vassal state to the Jurchens. Despite a counteroffensive by General Yue Fei in 1140 almost successfully recapturing all lost territories, Emperor Gaozong and grand chancellor Qin Hui forcefully ordered Yue's retreat and later executed him under fabricated charges in order to sign the Treaty of Shaoxing. The Song and Jin then reached an uncomfortable stalemate across the Qin–Huai Line for the next nine decades.

In 1205, the newly established Mongol Empire led by Genghis Khan invaded Western Xia, and openly rebelled against the Jin dynasty in 1211. Genghis died three days before completing the conquest of Western Xia in 1227, and his son Ögedei Khan made an alliance with the Song in 1232 to attack the Jin together. This turned out to be a repeat of the strategic mistake that the Song made with the Liao dynasty, as the Ögedei soon turned against the Song after conquering the Jin in 1234. Now facing an even more ferocious Hu threat, the Southern Song dynasty would resist the Mongols bitterly for the next 45 years, defeating and allegedly killing Möngke Khan at the Siege of Diaoyucheng in 1259, until it was finally conquered by Kublai Khan in 1279.

After Yuan dynasty was established by Kublai, the Mongols now ruled over all of China and implemented a "four-class" sociopolitical system where the Mongols occupied the upper class, followed by the "Semu" peoples (the various older Hu peoples from Central Asia, who subjected to the Mongol conquest the earliest), the "Han" people (Han Chinese who were already ruled by the Liao and Jin dynasties) and the "Southerner" (subjects of Southern Song dynasty, who surrendered the last). This type of systemic racial discrimination and oppression further fueled ethnic tensions between the Han Chinese and all those Inner Asian ethnic groups that ruled above them, culminating in numerous rebellions and eventually the overthrow of the Yuan dynasty by Zhu Yuanzhang's Ming dynasty in 1368. By this point, the term "Hu" had already fallen out of popular usage, while the word "Tatars" (鞑靼) or "Dazi" (鞑子) had become the new derogatory generic term for nomads in the north.

Due to the historical interaction with the Hu people, the character "Hu" has become a somewhat catch-all term in the Chinese language that can be used to describe many things of foreign origin. For example, many Chinese string instruments that were originally introduced from the Western Regions became collectively known as huqin (Chinese: 胡琴), literally meaning "Hu zither", the most famous example being the erhu. The black pepper, an Indian spice introduced into China in large quantities during the Tang dynasty, is still known as hujiao (胡椒) or "Hu pepper" today.

The sesame, an oilseed introduced via the Silk Road earlier during the Han dynasty, was once known as huma (胡麻) or "Hu hemp", and the sesame-topped shaobing was once known as hubing (胡饼) or "Hu flatbread", both later renamed due to naming taboos during the Sixteen Kingdoms period when Hu peoples were the upheaved rulers of northern China. Similarly, the cucumber, also introduced during the Han dynasty, was once known as hugua (胡瓜) or "Hu melon" and later renamed due to naming taboos.

Many Chinese words and idioms also use "Hu" to describe messy, unruly or dishonest behaviors,^{[note 1]} similar to the derogatory use of "Man" (蛮) to describe impulsive, reckless violent acts.

• Four Barbarians (四夷), a term used during the Shang and Zhou dynasty to describe various non-Huaxia peoples in the Far East.
• Fan (番), a Chinese term originally used to describe semi-agrarian mountain peoples from the south and southwest, now used as a term for "foreign" or "aboriginal".
• Tatars (韃靼 or 韃子), a Han Chinese ethnic slur for the Mongols during the late Yuan dynasty and the Ming dynasty, later also used to describe the Manchus during the early Qing dynasty.
• Yangren (洋人, lit. "ocean people") or derogatorily Yang guizi (洋鬼子, lit. "ocean devil-spawn"), a Modern Chinese term for foreigners, especially Westerners who historically came via maritime trade.
• Laowai (老外, lit. "old foreigner"), a Mandarin Chinese slang for foreigners.
• Gweilo (鬼佬, lit. "ghost boy"), a Cantonese slur for white people.