Introduction
This article analyzes the intricacies of gender and migration in early medieval China by exploring women's long-distance mobility from the fourth century to the sixth century, when what is now known as China was divided by the Northern Wei (386–534 CE) and a succession of four southern states—the Eastern Jin (317–420 CE), Liu-Song (420–479 CE), Southern Qi (479–502 CE), and Liang (502–557 CE). This period is known as an era of mass migration. Fleeing man-made and natural disasters, more than a million people left their hometowns in the Yellow River basin and settled in the Yangzi River regions and further south.Footnote 1 This population movement gradually transformed South China from an area that had been traditionally considered marginal to the ruling elites of North China into a new political, economic, and cultural center. Similarly, various regimes in North China, most founded by Inner Asian groups, initiated cross-border resettlements of war captives and relocated hundreds of thousands of subjects from old power bases to the new imperial capitals. Some scholars have suggested that the high rates of population movement in this period might have paved the way for the emergence of the unified Sui (581–618 CE) and Tang empires (618–907 CE).Footnote 2
Given its large scale and far-reaching impact, migration in the early medieval period is a critical chapter in Chinese history. However, there are only a few discussions of this subject in English-language scholarship,Footnote 3 and research on women migrants is almost nonexistent.Footnote 4 Women, nonetheless, made up a considerable number of the migrants in China during this period, and their experiences of migration will undoubtedly enrich our understanding of gender and mobility in this era. Accordingly, this article seeks to shed light on some basic questions about female migrants. Who were the women who moved? Why did they move? How were their lives shaped by migration?
Although studying female migration in early medieval China is important, many, if not most, references to women migrants in our sources are too fragmentary for interpretation. I thus focus on three types of female migration that are most attested to in the sources: war-induced migration, family reunification, and religious journeys. During this period of political fragmentation, interstate warfare and frequent dynastic transitions displaced countless southern women, many of whom were either relocated with their relatives or abducted to the Northern Wei. Numerous families were also separated during this era, but many of the women who were left behind in the south managed to cross the border in the hope of reuniting with their husbands who had earlier switched their allegiance to the Northern Wei. Moreover, the flourishing of Buddhism in this era brought some women a life-changing opportunity: those who chose to enter religious life could leave home and travel within areas controlled by the Southern dynasties, and some even crossed the border, either to learn with various masters or to spread Buddhist beliefs and practices.
Through an analysis of these women's migration experiences, this article examines two related questions. The first is about the connection between migration and the state. As some studies have shown,Footnote 5 the state was a major driver of migration of this era. It often encouraged and even forced people to move while at the same time restricting unwanted population movement. However, it is unclear what role the state played in women's spatial mobility. More specifically, I am interested in—although I might not be able to fully answer in this article—how the state shaped every stage of female migrants’ migration experience, from the conditions that preceded migration to the period of adjustment to a new land.
Another question is about textual representations of migrants. Although female mobility was not uncommon during this period,Footnote 6 women have low visibility in the dynastic histories. The reason is likely that the compilers of official histories were male elites and their main concern was the activities of emperors, princes, high officials, and famous intellectuals. When the authors did include traveling women in their works, the texts are usually written in an anecdotal manner—they serve as background information for a selected event or a male relative.
Thus, to open a view different from official history and enhance the visibility of women, this study also employs funerary inscriptions and Buddhist hagiography. With the increasing number of excavated funerary epitaphs in recent decades, a great deal of new information on women has come to light, some of which is about female migrants. Biqiuni zhuan 比丘尼傳 (Biographies of Buddhist Nuns), too, is significant for this study. It is the earliest extant hagiography of Buddhist nuns, reportedly compiled by a southern monk named Shi Baochang 釋寶唱 (ca.466–?) in the early sixth century CE. It is also the main source of information about Buddhist nuns from the early fourth century to the early sixth century, since the other sources are fragmentary. This work includes contextual details and historical facts about nuns and their journeys derived from epitaphs, eulogies, and the compiler's interviews with the elders.Footnote 7 Biqiuni zhuan, therefore, merits investigation.
It is noteworthy that while ancient writers paid little attention to women's activities outside the household, the three forms of female migration discussed in this article—war-induced migration, family reunification, and religious journeys—appear frequently in our sources. This study will examine how early medieval authors described these moves and why they do so.
War-induced Migration
Although we have no indication of the numbers involved, it is certain that countless early medieval women left their homes as a consequence of warfare between the Northern Wei and the southern state (be it the Eastern Jin, Liu-Song, Southern Qi, or Liang). Some women moved north with male relatives who surrendered to the Northern Wei once they were defeated. For example, not long after Lady Cui 崔氏 visited her birth family in the Lu commandery 魯郡 (the administrative seat was in present-day Zoucheng, Shandong province),Footnote 8 her father, then the Liu-Song Governor of Lu commandery, surrendered to the Northern Wei. Afterward, Lady Cui left for the Northern Wei capital Pingcheng 平城 (modern Datong, Shanxi province) with her son and was separated from her husband for nearly two decades, before the three finally met again in 450 CE.Footnote 9
Large numbers of southern women who went to the Northern Wei were war captives. They were resettled en masse in Pingcheng and the Sanggan 桑乾 area (southwest of Pingcheng) with some or all of their family members. The long treks were hardly comfortable. Two female transportees were said to look “old, sick, thin, and pallid” upon their arrival at Pingcheng.Footnote 10 Yet those who arrived were the fortunate ones. Reportedly a third of forced migrants from Tongwan city 統萬城 (in Shaanxi province) died on the way to Pingcheng in 427 CE.Footnote 11 Given this situation, it would be unsurprising if some of the women from the south did not make it safely to their destination.
Although many war captives came from elite families, they were likely obliged to leave their possessions behind, and the Northern Wei government does not appear to have supported the migrants with material resources once they reached their destinations. The dynastic annals Wei shu 魏書 (History of the [Northern] Wei Dynasty) thus often highlight the hardships they endured in the early years in their new homes, and descriptions such as “lived in poverty”Footnote 12 and “cold and hungry for decades” are common.Footnote 13 Fortunately, many migrants had extended family networks upon which they could rely. The ancestors of these migrants originated from great clans in the north and had migrated southward in the late fourth century.Footnote 14 Despite the distance and the passage of time, the migrants’ families had maintained ties with their northern relatives. Some of the migrants therefore used such family connections to avoid starvation after they arrived in Pingcheng.
A Northern Wei official named Lu Dushi 盧度世 (419–471 CE), for instance, was admired by his contemporaries for having cared for two forced migrants coming from Shengcheng 升城 (west of Jinan, Shandong province) in 468 CE. One of the migrants, Lady Fu 傅氏, was Lu's maternal step-grandmother's brother's daughter-in-law. Although their kinship was distant, Lu served the old lady as though she were his own mother. It is reported that “when he made visits, he kneeled and asked after her” and that he often sent “cloth, blankets, and food” to help her endure the hardships of her early years of relocation.Footnote 15 Not everyone received a welcoming hand, however. One southerner who was relocated with his adoptive mother also reached out to a distant cousin. He was rejected because his cousin felt ashamed of their poverty.Footnote 16
Some women faced an even more dire situation—they were abducted to the Northern Wei and were usually forced into slavery. Lady Huangfu 皇甫氏 (n.d.), a Liu-Song official's wife, was abducted during a war when she was nearly sixty years old. She was bestowed upon a eunuch as a maid. Only when her husband managed to ransom her was she finally able to reunite with her family.Footnote 17 Similarly, when fifteen-year-old Zhang Fengji 張豐姬 (d. 522 CE), a Southern Qi official's daughter, was preparing for her wedding, the Northern Wei army suddenly invaded her hometown Xuancheng 宣城 (in modern Anhui province) and brought her back to the capital Pingcheng. Because of her excellence in spinning and weaving, she was forced to work in the imperial workshop as a weaver, making clothes for noble men and women. In the north, Zhang Fengji lived in fear. According to her epitaph, she “was extremely cautious as if walking on ice and fire.”Footnote 18 Unlike Lady Huangfu, Zhang Fengji never returned to the south.
One more example is Lady Xu 徐氏, the mother of Liu Xiaobiao 劉孝標 (462–521 CE), the famous annotator of the fifth-century anecdotal collection Shishuo xinyu 世說新語 (A new account of tales of the world). She first traveled with her husband from present-day Shandong to Guangdong, the remote south of the Liu-Song empire. After her husband died suddenly in office, Lady Xu returned with her two young sons to the Liu family's hometown in Shandong, and it is likely that she managed to bring back her husband's remains for burial as well. Lady Xu's journey did not stop here, however. In 469 CE, in the midst of a war between the Northern Wei and the Liu-Song, Lady Xu and her children were abducted. Both mother and sons were taken northwest to Zhongshan 中山 (in modern Hebei province) and sold into slavery. Although they were later ransomed by a local rich man who pitied them, misfortune still lurked around the corner. Not long afterward, they were relocated by the Northern Wei government to the Sanggan area when it was discovered they had relatives south of the border.Footnote 19 Even worse, without the support of government and family, Lady Xu and her children reportedly suffered from poverty in the north. Eventually, they shaved their heads and took shelter in a Buddhist temple.Footnote 20
While Lady Xu became a nun, many southern women, as the cases of Lady Huangfu and Zhang Fengji show, served in the palace. The majority were female servants in the inner court, performing services related to their masters’ physical wellbeing. Evidence suggests that most of these women came from elite families and that their fathers and/or grandfathers had served as officials in the south. If a woman was young, like Zhang Fengji, she would be assigned to a job according to her skills, such as sewing or cooking; if she was elderly, like Lady Huangfu, she would be bestowed upon either a eunuch or an official as booty. Many of these women served for life, but some in our sources were married off after several years in the palace. Lady Shen 申氏 (n.d.) was transported north after her hometown Licheng 歷城 (in modern Shandong province) was taken over by the Northern Wei in 469 CE.Footnote 21 It is unclear how long she served in the inner court, but she was eventually married to a Northern Wei official of Gaoche 高車 origin,Footnote 22 and she raised her stepson after her husband died.Footnote 23 Likewise, Zhang Fengji married a certain man surnamed Zhao 趙 after she was permitted to leave the palace. She bore two sons and three daughters before her death at age thirty-three. Lady Xiao 蕭氏 (n.d.), once a Liu-Song official's wife, was taken to Pingcheng after her city surrendered to the Northern Wei. It is again unknown how long she stayed in the palace, but she is said to have later married a powerful eunuch.Footnote 24
Several captives-turned-palace-women are known to us mainly because they rose to high positions at the Northern Wei court. One of them, Lady Yang 楊氏 (d. ca. 521 CE), was granted an inscribed stele, produced by an imperial commission, to publicly recognize her meritorious service after her death. She entered the Northern Wei palace at age sixteen, when her hometown, Licheng, surrendered to the Northern Wei.Footnote 25 According to her funerary inscription, Lady Yang's last post was Director of the Palace Women Offices (Neisi 內司), a rank that was equivalent to that of Imperial Secretary (Shangshu ling 尚書令, Rank 1B),Footnote 26 and she was even granted a noble title.Footnote 27 Some female migrants also held high-ranking posts, but their epitaphs were privately produced. In one case, it was the deceased's colleagues who sponsored the production of the inscribed stone commemorating their sisterhood.Footnote 28
Working in the palace, these once-displaced women inevitably, though to different degrees, became involved in Northern Wei politics. Lady Xiao, mentioned earlier, even served as Emperor Xiaowen's 孝文帝 (r.471–499 CE) advisor when the emperor sought to reform the palace women's official dress. Lady Xiao was chosen because, coming from a Liu-Song consort family, she was familiar with ancient ritual scriptures and imperial protocol.Footnote 29 There are many such instances, but none is as dramatic as the story of Lady Li 李氏 (d. 456 CE).Footnote 30 When the Northern Wei army seized Shouchun 壽春 (in modern Anhui province) in 450 CE, a Northern Wei prince, serving as general in charge of the army, met Lady Li and took her back to the north.Footnote 31 We hear nothing further about what happened between the prince and Lady Li. She was mentioned again in the Wei shu only after the prince was executed for rebellion three years later. Lady Li was transferred to the imperial palace because of the principle of collective responsibility. Yet upon Lady Li's arrival in the palace, the emperor was reportedly dazzled by her beauty and had sexual relations with her. Lady Li later gave birth to a boy. While her son was appointed the heir apparent in 456 CE, Lady Li was put to death based on an old practice—the Northern Wei enforced compulsory suicide by the mother of the heir apparent in an attempt to prevent harem women and their relatives from intervening in court politics.Footnote 32 It is worth noting that while the Northern Wei emperors usually had harems populated with large numbers of captured women and female members of allied families, women from the south rarely achieved high status at court, not to mention marriage into the imperial family. Lady Li appears to have been the only exception.
Family Reunification
While a significant number of southern women went north against their will, some women appear to have taken the initiative to embark on long journeys in the hope of rejoining husbands who had earlier switched their allegiance to the Northern Wei. One example is Lady Xie 謝氏 (n.d.), a Southern Qi court official's wife. She and her husband Wang Su 王肅 (464–501 CE) belonged to the two leading elite families in the south.Footnote 33 Her life, however, took an unexpected turn in 493 CE, when her father-in-law was executed for revolt, after which her husband fled to the Northern Wei, leaving Lady Xie and her young children behind. Little is known about how she dealt with this mess while at the same time raising her children; she may have asked for help from her natal family. Nonetheless, eight years later, she went northward with three children,Footnote 34 probably from the southern capital Jiankang to Luoyang, the last Northern Wei capital.
In the absence of records in her own voice, it is unclear why Lady Xie waited years and then suddenly decided to undertake such a long journey. However, it is worth mentioning that the Southern Qi was overthrown by Xiao Yan 蕭衍 (r. 502–549 CE), who later founded the Liang dynasty in 502 CE, the same year Lady Xie and her children went north. This detail was ignored by authors of the funerary inscriptions for Lady Xie's eldest daughter Wang Puxian 王普賢 (487–513 CE) and her son Wang Shao 王紹 (492–515 CE). Instead, Wang Puxian's epitaph says that she had been feeling sad about failing to fulfill her duty as a filial child due to a temporal and spatial separation from her father, and she was thus determined to “take the risk to go to the peaceful lands, in order to ease her mind.”Footnote 35 A similar reason is noted in Wang Shao's funerary inscription.Footnote 36 In other words, the epitaphs’ authors chose to highlight filial piety as the foremost reason for Lady Xie's children's border crossing. While the journey certainly played a role in the lives of Wang Puxian and her brother, the epitaph authors apparently selected it intentionally to remind readers of the dangers and hardships Wang Puxian and her family faced on the road. In this way, both epitaphs emphasize the deceased's meritorious accomplishments and virtuous deeds.
It is imaginable that Wang Puxian and Wang Shao anticipated their reunion with their father, but, upon their arrival, they must have been stunned by the realization that their father was dying, so much so that their epitaphs called the situation an “extreme punishment”Footnote 37 by Heaven. To Lady Xie, to reunite with Wang Su only on his deathbed, after years of separation, was surely a heavy blow, but she may also have been hit hard by the news that Wang Su had wed a Northern Wei princess. Northern Wei emperors usually bestowed princesses on high-ranking southern border crossers, including Wang Su, to reward the latter's surrender and to secure their loyalty. Doing so, however, often created the touchy issue of two wives,Footnote 38 and the situation was especially difficult when a migrant's southern wife and children also came to the north. If a man kept two women as his spouses concurrently,Footnote 39 and did not specify which was his principal wife, his sons by the two women would likely compete over the inheritance of his royal title and family property. Therefore, the migrants’ southern wives and children often found themselves unwelcome upon their arrival in the north. In the case of Lady Xie, the Wei shu and other sources are silent on what happened when Lady Xie met Wang Su's new wife, but the Luoyang qielan ji 洛陽伽藍記 (Record of the monasteries of Luoyang), written by a sixth-century Northern Wei official, offers an anecdote in which, we are told, Lady Xie wrote Wang Su a poem to express her feelings for him, yet the princess replied with a poem on behalf of Wang Su in which she implied that the past is the past.Footnote 40
Regardless, Lady Xie was fortunate in one respect: the princess was childless. Therefore, Lady Xie's son did not need to fight for his inheritance rights. Moreover, perhaps because her daughter Wang Puxian later became Emperor Xuanwu's 宣武帝 (r.500–515 CE) imperial consort, Lady Xie was recognized by contemporaries as Wang Su's principal wife. One funerary epitaph dedicated to Shi Sengzhi 釋僧芝 (d. 516 CE), an influential Buddhist nun at the imperial palace, designates Lady Xie Wang Su's wife (furen 夫人) and records that Lady Xie was Sengzhi's disciple, together with Emperor Xiaowen's two consorts and other imperial women, evidence of Lady Xie's recognition in the circle of Northern Wei aristocratic women.Footnote 41
Other women who joined their husbands, however, had very different experiences. To give one example, Fu Yong 傅永 (434–516 CE), a native of Qing province 青州 (in modern Shandong province), initially married Lady Jia 賈氏 (n.d.), but took Lady Feng 馮氏 (n.d.) as a concubine after surrendering to the Northern Wei. Years later, Lady Jia went to Pingcheng to join her husband. What she might have hoped would be a happy reunion turned out to be the beginning of a disaster. Although a concubine, according to social custom and the classical rites, should have respected the principal wife, Lady Feng showed no reverence for Lady Jia, because Lady Feng had borne a son to Fu Yong and Lady Jia had only one daughter. Lady Feng's attitude also influenced her son, who was said to disrespect Lady Jia. As a result, the family was full of resentment.
The situation worsened after Fu Yong's death. Lady Feng's son hoped to bury Fu Yong at Mount Mang 邙山, north of Luoyang, in accordance with Fu Yong's final wishes, yet Lady Jia opposed his suggestion. She even brought this issue to the Northern Wei court and appealed to Empress Dowager Ling 靈太后 (d. 528 CE), who had been sympathetic to distressed women and often stepped in and settled their troubles for them.Footnote 42 The empress dowager did not disappoint Lady Jia, who eventually won the case and buried Fu Yong in his fief, the place she favored. Moreover, Lady Jia relocated the remains of Fu Yong's parents, which were originally interred in the ancestral graveyards of the Fu family, to a spot near Fu Yong's tomb. The Wei shu tells us that Lady Feng's son, Fu Yong's only heir, died not long after Fu Yong's parents were reburied, hinting that his untimely death was due to a ruined geomancy and, albeit implicitly, to Lady Jia's jealousy.Footnote 43
Despite the drama, Lady Jia's story is the only example in our sources in which a concubine with a male heir confronted an heirless principal wife and disputed the location of a burial site. Many of the two-wives cases during the Northern Wei period, as mentioned earlier, involve two wives and their respective sons quarreling over the right to the title of the deceased. At the core of these quarrels was the ambiguous marital status of the two women involved. Classical ritual texts prescribed that a man could have only one principal wife, whose status would determine the legitimacy of her son. The marital status of the two women he married was therefore crucial. If this problem could not be settled properly, it could confuse the household order and ultimately tear the family apart.
Realizing the dangers of the two-wives issue and the resulting inheritance disputes, the Northern Wei government intervened. In one precedent (gushi 故事),Footnote 44 the Northern Wei government states: “Even though the first wife had a son, the son of the bestowed second wife is the legitimate one.”Footnote 45 This can be attested in the case of Sima Chuzhi 司馬楚之 (390–465 CE), an Eastern Jin imperial clansman who defected to the Northern Wei in 419 CE. Although Sima Chuzhi's southern wife and eldest son went with him to the north, it was his son by his second wife, a Northern Wei princess, who inherited the noble title.Footnote 46
The Northern Wei precedent seems to have applied only to bestowed wives and their offspring. In other surviving records, husbands usually chose to set up a separate house for each woman instead of divorcing one of them, but they did not specify who was the principal wife. Consequently, in one example, after the husband died, “his two wives and their respective children treated the other like enemies.”Footnote 47 In another case, the deceased's children resented each other to the point that they both “carried knifes and swords to protect themselves as if they were enemies.”Footnote 48 Ambivalent attitudes on the part of the husbands did not bring harmony, but instead created more trouble for the families.
Religious Journeys
Not all female migration in the early medieval era took the form of movement as the result of warfare or movement to rejoin family. Though their exact number will never be known, many women in this period were religious travelers. Buddhism, which arrived in China in the late first century CE and had since gradually changed the religious lives of the Chinese, offered its female devotees a role beyond those of daughter, mother, and wife: women could now become Buddhist nuns. This new identity gave women of the early medieval era an alternative to marriage or remarriage, an unprecedented opportunity to leave home.
Indeed, of the sixty-five Buddhist nuns whose lives are chronicled in the Biqiuni zhuan, nearly one third of them engaged in significant travel: eleven crossed the north–south border and nine traveled within areas controlled by the Southern dynasties.
In the cases of border crossing, for example, one traveled from Gaoping 高平 (in present-day Shandong province) and one from Yanmen 雁門 (in northern Shanxi province), and they both went southward to Jiankang 建康 (modern Nanjing). One made the journey from Nanpi 南皮 (in southeastern Hebei province) to Guangling 廣陵 (in central Jiangsu province), and one from Chang'an 長安 (modern Xi'an) to Jiangling 江陵 (in southern Hubei province). One nun even took a longer trip from Dunhuang to Chang'an and finally arrived in Wu commandery 吳郡 (southeast of Jiankang). As for itinerant nuns in southern China, two were from Pengcheng 彭城 (in northern Jiangsu province) and Jingzhou 荊州 (in Hubei province) respectively, and they both headed to Jiankang. One nun in Guiji 會稽 (modern Shaoxing, Zhejiang province) traveled southward to Guangzhou 廣州 (in modern Guangdong province) and eventually settled in Jiankang. Moreover, a nun from Chengdu 成都 (in modern Sichuan) traveled eastward first to Guangling and then to Jingzhou. These cities, Jiankang and Jingzhou in particular, were Buddhist centers of the time.Footnote 49 Notably, some nuns traveled only once in their lifetime, and some made multiple journeys. Most of them never returned to their home regions.
Regardless of the differences in distance, all of the traveling nuns in the Biqiuni zhuan embarked on their journeys during either the Eastern Jin period or the Liu-Song era. This pattern may reflect the temporal boundaries of the source, but what is worth noting is that it coincides with the majority of the southbound migration that occurred during the Eastern Jin and Liu-Song periods. In the eleven cases of border crossing, most of those who traveled from the north to the south during the Eastern Jin wanted to escape warfare,Footnote 50 and only one went to preach the Dharma.Footnote 51 By contrast, nuns crossed the border in the Liu-Song era for different purposes: three fled from war, two left on study tours to receive the teachings of different masters,Footnote 52 and two were invited by an emperor.Footnote 53 In nine cases of domestic travel (i.e., travel within the realm of the southern state), all of which occurred during the Liu-Song period, some nuns moved from place to place to spread the Dharma,Footnote 54 and some traveled to meet and study with famous monks and nuns of their time.Footnote 55 Additionally, two nuns visited Buddhist temples before they entered religious life.Footnote 56
Travel had already been a pivotal factor in the history of Chinese Buddhism. Without the ceaseless travel of numerous monks from Central and South Asia, Buddhism would not have been introduced to what is now China in the first place. Studies of early medieval Chinese Buddhist statuary inscriptions (zaoxiang ji 造像記) and statuary stelae (zaoxiang bei 造像碑) have also pointed out that contemporary monks traveled “through the countryside [and] not only converted villagers [but also] led them in various forms of Buddhist ritual and practice.”Footnote 57 Thanks to these itinerant monks’ efforts, Buddhism was established and gradually penetrated down to the grassroots level of society in northern China.
Like their male counterparts, nuns were central to the transmission of Buddhism. In 429 and 433 CE two groups of fully ordained nuns reportedly came to the Liu-Song capital Jiankang from what is now Sri Lanka, and with their guidance, the proper dual ordination for nuns could finally be performed in China.Footnote 58 Likewise, many nuns documented in the Biqiuni zhuan traveled throughout the country and facilitated the circulation of Buddhist beliefs and practices, attracting local nuns and laywomen from near and far. Moreover, while warfare displaced countless people, it, too, brought a number of nuns with novel ideas to new lands and established links between the north and the south. We are told that ten northern nuns crossed the Yangzi River together and built the earliest nunnery in Jiankang in the early Eastern Jin.Footnote 59 The traveling nuns were undoubtedly the main agents of connection between different peoples and different regions. Yet connectivity is not limited to the physical movement of human beings. It also encompasses the symbolic connections established by travelers through the transfer of religious objects.Footnote 60 This may explain why a copy of the Sūtra spoken by the Buddha on the bodhisattva Universal-Saint 佛說觀普賢菩薩經, transcribed by a Southern Qi Buddhist nun in 483 CE, was found in Dunhuang.Footnote 61 By asking others to travel on their behalf, Buddhist nuns acted as facilitators of connectivity over long distances.
Many Buddhist women mentioned in the Biqiuni zhuan did not travel with male relatives, but were accompanied by either female relatives or fellow nuns. Moreover, they had large numbers of female followers. For example, when the nun Tanhui 曇暉 (422–504 CE), a native of Chengdu, went eastward to Jingzhou, she was welcomed and honored as a teacher by twelve hundred persons, male and female, religious and lay.Footnote 62 Similarly, during her time in Jiankang, the nun Fajing 法淨 (409–473 CE) reportedly received numerous letters from as far away as Jing-Chu 荊楚 areas (mostly in modern Hubei and Hunan), all written by nuns and elite women who sought to make her acquaintance. Those who consulted her about precepts and norms amounted to seven hundred people.Footnote 63 In addition, Buddhist nuns established nunneries and supported their communities with imperial and aristocratic female patronage.Footnote 64
These nuns did interact with men, mainly emperors and imperial princes,Footnote 65 officials,Footnote 66 and monks.Footnote 67 Men in the former two categories generally provided patronage for nuns, but at times they acted as prime catalysts of Buddhist nuns’ travels. One Liu-Song official brought a nun with him from the capital Jiankang all the way to Guangzhou, the southern margins of the empire, where he took a new post as regional inspector (cishi 刺史).Footnote 68 A Southern Qi prince also invited a nun in Jingzhou to accompany him to the capital.Footnote 69 In these cases, traveling with famous nuns was important for royals and officials in enhancing their prestige. Likewise, through networking with the upper class of society, these nuns gained political recognition as a leader of the southern Buddhist community, thereby consolidating and most notably expanding their influence among Buddhists and laymen. For this reason, some of them were able to interfere in political affairs.Footnote 70 One notable example was the nun Miaoyin 妙音 (fl. 372–396 CE), who persuaded the Eastern Jin Emperor Xiaowu 孝武帝 (r. 372–396 CE) to choose someone she favored to fill the critical position of regional inspector of Jingzhou (Jingzhou cishi).Footnote 71 In addition to participation in politics, Buddhist nuns “engaged in most of the activities monks did, including doctrinal exegesis, meditation, asceticism, and ritual.”Footnote 72 Many nuns also preached the sutra or lectured on the Dharma in public.Footnote 73 All of these activities suggest that the nuns enjoyed higher status and more freedom than did their non-religious female contemporaries. Nevertheless, according to the Biqiuni zhuan, it was usually monks who gave precepts to the nuns,Footnote 74 who taught nuns the Buddhist scriptures,Footnote 75 and who were the nuns’ monastic hosts.Footnote 76 That nuns needed the guidance and protection of monks demonstrates that the two groups had an unequal relationship. This inequality appears as early as in the eight gurudharma (Eight standard rules 八敬法), the disciplinary rules reportedly made during the time of Buddha, which attempted to define nuns as dependent on monks and thus hierarchically subordinate.
It is notable that despite living in an era of political fragmentation, nuns, and monks as well, appear to have enjoyed relative freedom of movement compared to their lay contemporaries. The reason may have been that the northern and southern states of this era, under the influence of Buddhism, granted Buddhist specialists many privileges, not the least of which was free movement. One may wonder, however, whether their movement was ever regulated. If so, then how? We have evidence that the Northern Wei government did attempt to control wandering Buddhist monks and nuns. In 472 CE, Emperor Xiaowen decreed that “villagers shall not harbor unregistered monks” and “as for those who for the sake of Buddhism travel among the people and convert them, those in the countryside shall carry an official letter from the provincial overseer (cn: weina 維那; skt.: karmadāna), while those in the capital areas shall bear an ordination certificate from the chief overseer or some other such clerical official.”Footnote 77 Nonetheless, these edicts, as Liu Shufen suggests, may have had little effect, because Emperor Xiaowen's successor faced the same problem. This can be seen from a memorial to Emperor Xuanwu in 510 CE, which states that “some [monks] do not fix themselves in temple abodes but travel among the people. Such behaviors violate precepts and cause problems. If there are violators, let them be disrobed and returned to secular life.”Footnote 78 Moreover, many Buddhist statuary inscriptions reveal that itinerant Buddhist monks and nuns spread out among the common people in north China in the sixth century,Footnote 79 which confirms that the state's effort to regulate the movement of Buddhist specialists had been in vain.
The situation was much the same in the south. Huan Xuan 桓玄 (309–404 CE), the military leader and de facto ruler in the late Eastern Jin, once attempted to bring Buddhist monks and nuns onto the official registers in order to regulate their activities. His efforts to accomplish this task caused great anxiety among the monks in the capital area. They expressed their concern in a letter to Huan Xuan, arguing that “the Buddhist monk dwelling in the world is like an empty boat on the ocean. His coming has no specific reason, and his leaving also takes place according to his (own) free will. Within the four seas he has no fixed abode for himself: when the country is in chaos he travels alone with his cane; when the Way prospers (the monks) crowd happily together.”Footnote 80 It is unknown how effective Huan Xuan's plan was. Sources suggest, however, that no similar attempt was made afterward.Footnote 81
Piecing together numerous tales of traveling nuns in the early medieval period has allowed a picture of their lives to emerge. And yet little is known about these nuns’ sentiments. How did they perceive travel before taking to the road? How did they view themselves in comparison to other women, who seldom had the chance to undertake long-distance journeys? These questions are neglected in the sources, possibly because the compiler of the Biqiuni zhuan did not regard them as important for his purposes. Like other Buddhist writers, he had a religious agenda that shaped his choice of materials and his portrayals of ideal nuns. Given this circumstance, we should be curious about why the hagiographer mentions certain nuns’ journeys. In other words, what role does the theme of travel play in Buddhist hagiographical narratives?
In my view, the Biqiuni zhuan compiler Shi Baochang used the nuns’ travels for specific rhetorical goals. Travel, like birth and death, was a life crisis event for many nuns in the Biqiuni zhuan, and it therefore functioned as a turning point in their lives—the “before” and “after” states are clearly indicated. Before taking the trip, they were ordinary laywomen or Buddhist nuns; because of travel, some chose to devote themselves to Buddhism and some were able to leave their usual life in temples and spread Buddhist teachings far and wide. Although some nuns encountered dangers on the road, such as bandits and wild animals (mostly tigers), these hindrances either demonstrate their virtue or serve as good omens to reward their unshakeable faith.
As a Buddhist monk, Shi Baochang also attempted to persuade readers that Buddhism had a wide reach. Lily Hong Xiao Lee has observed that in the Eastern Jin and Liu-Song periods, the proportion of nuns in the Biqiuni zhuan from the north was very high, and many of them later migrated to the south. This pattern is consistent with “the fact that Buddhism was introduced to the northwest of China first, and moved gradually to the southeast.”Footnote 82 The itinerant nuns not only moved to the southern capital, Jiankang, but also traveled to major cities in the upper and middle reaches of the Yangzi River. One nun even went as far southward as the modern Guangdong area and is said to have gradually changed the rough customs of the region.Footnote 83 The descriptions of their travels from northern China to southern China, from urban centers to the periphery of the southern empire, were used to attest that Buddhism was omnipresent and influential.
Shi Baochang was not only a Buddhist but also a southern monk. It is likely that by compiling the Biqiuni zhuan, he aimed to argue that southern Buddhism was superior to its northern counterpart. Therefore, we see in this unique hagiography that most nuns in earlier periods fled from the north as a result of warfare, but over time, more and more women traveled to meet and study with famous monks in the southern lands. To make his point, Shi Baochang at times dramatizes the choices his subjects made and the changes in their role performance, a strategy that is well illustrated in the tale of the Liu-Song nun Jingcheng 靜稱 (n.d.).
Jingcheng was probably not from a gentry family, because little is said of her family background in the Biqiuni zhuan. While she is portrayed as a nun with numinous power (a tiger therefore became her follower and guardian and threatened Jingcheng's fellow nuns if they slackened in their devotion), what distinguished her among Buddhist nuns of her time—thus qualifying her story to be included in the Biqiuni zhuan—was two journeys. The first was made by a northern woman surnamed Chou 仇 whom Jingcheng encountered one day when she emerged briefly from her seclusion. Chou recounted that she was a devoted Buddhist and therefore, upon learning that Buddhism was flourishing in the south, she had taken the great risk of crossing the border and going southward. The second trip was undertaken by Jingcheng and Chou. After Chou became a nun, the two led an austere life together. Their reputation for strict asceticism spread far and wide, even reaching the Northern Wei capital. The northern emperor thus sent a messenger to invite them over. However, we are told that Jingcheng and Chou “did not like the margins of the Buddhist world (bianjing 邊境),” so they intentionally “besmirch[ed] their own reputation by being bold in action while conciliatory in words”; moreover, whenever the emperor “had prepared for them a meal of fine delicacies, they gorged on everything.”Footnote 84 Their behavior clearly went against the northern ruler's expectation of virtuous nuns; therefore, Jingcheng and Chou were eventually allowed to return to the south. After this trip, Jingcheng's story again retreats into silence.Footnote 85
The travel to the north was certainly the climax of Jingcheng's story. During the journey, she and Chou met the northern emperor and became his guests, which hints at the prospect of eminent status and wealth for the rest of their lives. But as southern Buddhists, they refused to bow to the secular power, as advocated by the Eastern Jin monk Shi Huiyuan 釋慧遠 (334–416 CE).Footnote 86 This turn of events is even more surprising when considering this story from a gender perspective: Jingcheng and Chou—two women—refused to submit to the emperor, the highest authority in a patriarchal society. By constructing these binary oppositions, the Biqiuni zhuan compiler affirms the superiority of southern Buddhism over its northern counterpart.
Conclusion
In painting a picture of the diversity of women's long-distance travel between the fourth and sixth centuries CE, I have tried to avoid reducing women who moved to mere names or numbers. While tracing the realities of women's mobility in the period under discussion is no easy task, given that the relevant sources are few and highly selective, the available primary materials open a window onto the multiple roles women played outside the household. They remind us that we cannot speak of migration history exclusively in terms of men's experiences. They also point out that migration was experienced differently not only by men and women,Footnote 87 but also by women of different backgrounds.Footnote 88
Four observations from the discussion above can be summarized as follows. First, the major limitation of this study is the sample size. Although I have pieced together all available evidence from dynastic histories, funerary inscriptions, and the Buddhist hagiography Biqiuni zhuan, it is difficult to say how representative the results are. For example, the journeys of elite women are recorded in the most detail in our sources. This does not necessarily mean that such abductors sought out such women, or that the elite in general had greater mobility than the lower social classes. More likely, elite women make up a numerically tiny but very high-profile group of female travelers in literary sources because of their family background or the status of their male kin. Moreover, given that gravestone epitaphs and interment rituals were expensive to produce, the information the funerary epitaphs provide is largely about elite women. We need to bear in mind that what is missing in the sources is records of ordinary people, who are usually poorly documented, although they made up a majority of the population.
Second, like their male counterparts, women in the early medieval period migrated for a variety of reasons. The state certainly played a part in determining why women moved, but this study has shown that the state was not the sole driver of women's mobility: other reasons, such as family and religion, sometimes prompted women to make long trips. Even so, the state influenced women's migration experiences in a number of ways. For instance, in two-wives cases, the family status of southern wives of migrants could be challenged and even reversed by the northern state after the wives rejoined their husbands in the north. Moreover, the state treated male and female migrants differently. One example is the many female war captives assigned to work either in the palace as maids or in the imperial workshop as weavers while their male counterparts were sent to the front as soldiers.Footnote 89
Third, there were many differences between male and female migrants in the early medieval period. The difference that seems most explicitly related to gender is the reasons for travel. Many women moved great distances because of their male kin: some accompanied their husbands or fathers to the north, and others rejoined husbands who had defected to the Northern Wei. Another difference is that the records rarely mention women traveling alone. Female exiles and war captives usually moved to the new country with family members. The only exception appears to be Buddhist nuns, many of whom moved from one place to another without male relatives as companions. Even so, they were often accompanied by other Buddhist women. Perhaps surprisingly, there is nothing in our sources that indicates specific challenges that early medieval women might have faced when traveling, and thus one gains the impression that there was no distinct gendered travel risk. Bad weather, bandits, illness, and wild animals were common dangers that confronted male and female travelers alike in the period under investigation.
Fourth, migration has been considered, whether consciously or not, a distinctly male activity largely because of the visibility of men in the literary sources. If it indeed was a largely male activity, a question arises: Why were the three forms of female migration discussed in this article—war-induced migration, family reunification, and religious journeys—documented by early medieval authors? The answer appears to be that these activities were those the male authors deemed acceptable. While the references to women's traveling activities appear to be grounded in reality, the reasons these women were chosen to be included in the texts and the ways their mobility was represented were influenced by traditional gender ideology, social norms, and different authorial agendas. The first two types of migration were the consequence of a chaotic age, and female war captives and left-behind wives often traveled with or for their family members. Moreover, while Buddhist nuns usually enjoyed relatively freedom of movement compared to their lay sisters, they travelled for religious purposes. Studying how early medieval texts represented these women and their migration experience, therefore, not only reveals nuances in perceptions of womanhood at the time but also elucidates the contexts within which long-distance travel became possible for women.
Acknowledgments
The author is grateful to the participants of the Conference “State and Migration in Chinese History” for their comments and questions. In particular I would like to thank Anthony Barbieri, Patricia Ebrey, Anke Hein for their valuable feedback. Meanwhile, I thank Robin D.S. Yates and Griet Vankeerberghen for their helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this article. The final version has benefitted from the kind and useful comments of the two anonymous reviewers. The research for this article was generously supported by the Institute of History and Philology at Academia Sinica, Taiwan. All errors are solely my own.
