THE ACTUAL NAME OF PYU PEOPLE

DID THEY CALLED THEMSELVES AS

TU – lo – chu OR PEOPLE OF SRI
KESTRA?

The one who claimed that Pyu called
themselves as Tu – lo – chu was
English historian G H Luce. He made
that claim in his paper “ The Ancient
Pyu “ in 1937 and quoted “New Tang
History” as follow “ ...``The Pyu were
formerly...Chu - po(*t´siu pua)…`` in
Chinese they are called Piao. They
call themselves Tu - lo -chu.´´The
Javanese call them Tu - li - chu´´…”
• His claim that Pyu called
themselves Tu – lo – chu and
Javanese called them Tu – li – chu,
without any examination ; has been
accepted as historical fact for 80

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years. So we need to examine
whether or not his claim is accurate.
As we are about to examine his
claim ,we have to follow one of the
norms of The Oriental Studies ; that is
as U Yi Sein demonstrated in his
paper “ The Names of Pyu Kingdom
As Chinese Knew of Between 2nd
Century BC and 4th Century AD “ that
one of the tradition of Oriental
Studies, official Peking (Beijing)
pronunciation has to be used to read
the names in ancient Chinese
historical records. In other word local
Peking pronunciation shall be used.

According to above extract, we come

to know one of the rules of Oriental
Studies that Old Chinese
pronunciation shall not be used to
read Old Chinese names . We have to
use official modern Mandarin
pronunciation instead.

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This is very clear now that the
pronunciation of the terms "Tu - lo -
chu´(ထုေလာ္က်ဴး)" as Pyu people called
themselves and "tu - li - chu´(ထုလီက်ဴး)"

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as Javanese called Pyu are modern
Mandarin pronunciations.

Here arises the inevitable question.
Are "old Chinese pronunciation the
same as modern standard Mandarin
pronunciations? The answer is given
by U Yi Sein himself in his very paper “
The Names of Pyu Kingdom As
Chinese Knew of Between 2nd
Century BC and 4th Century AD “ as
follow
"Modern standard Mandarin
pronunciations are very much
different from that of Old Chinese.
Therefore the researchers whose
specialisation are Southeast Asian
history including that of Myanmar
have to be very cautious about that."

So I would like to reiterate that this is

very imporyant to note that modern
Chinese pronunciations are very
different from Old Chinese
pronunciations.

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 Though the term Pyu is pronounced
as "ေဖ က္" (P´iao)" in modern standard
Mandarin pronunciation , that was
"ပ်ဴ /ဖ်ဴ (Piu)" in ancient Chinese.

Therefore tu - lo - chu (ထုေလာ္က်ဴး) and

tu - li - chu (ထုလီက်ဴး) are
pronunciations of modern standard
Mandarin and then that is out of the
question they are very differently
pronounced in ancient Chinese.

Here again arise one more question.

Were there any Old Chinese
pronunciations of "tu - lo - chu and tu
- li - chu ? "
The answer is yes. British historian G
H Luce mentioned in his book
"Phases of Pre-Pagan" (1985, Oxford
University Press, p 47) as follow;
"The Piao were formerly Chu - po(*t'
śiu- puâ).In Chinese they are called
P´iao.

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They call themselves tu - lo -chu
(* t´wet - lâ - tsiu ).The Javanese
callthem t´u - li -ch´u (*d uo - lyi -
tśiwät ).

According to above extract, ancient

Chinese pronunciation of modern day
" tu - lo - chu" is " * t´wet - lâ - tsiu ”
and mentioned in the bracket after it ;
that of "tu - li -chu" is " *d uo - lyi -
tśiwät ” in the bracket after it too.
So this is very clear that Pyu never
called themselves using modern
Mandarin pronunciation as ``tu - lo
-chu´´(ထုေလာ္က်ဴး). Likewise this is very
sure that Javanese did not called Pyu
people using the name equivalent to
modern day Madarin pronunciation as
``tu - li - chu´´(ထုလီခ်ဴး).

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G H Luce's claim that Pyu called
themselves as "tu - lo - chu" and
Javanese called them as "tu - li - chu"
using modern standard Mandarin
pronunciation is greatly incorrect.

"So his faulty claim of Pyu as "tu - lo -

chu" using modern standard
Mandarin pronunciation is dismissed
here definitely.

This complete dismissal bring

another one more question; what is
actual name of Pyu ? Or what is the
ancient Chinese pronunciation of the
term "tu - lo - chu"?

To answer this question, we need to

find out ancient Chinese
pronunciation of " * t´wet - lâ - tsiu "
accurately. Because this is ancient
equivalence of " tu - lo - chu ".

Only the person who know great

knowledge about ancient Chinese
literature and phonology can find out
this ancient pronunciation precisely.
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This need to be taken very cautiously.

French professor Paul Pelliot

( Sinologist, Orientalist) was very
brilliant and competent scholar and
Luce himself gave him great credit.
This brilliant professor Pelliot
revealed that ancient pronunciations
of ``tu - lo - chu´´(ထုေလာ္က်ဴး) and
``tu - li - chu´´(ထုလီက်ဴး) were equivalent
to Burmese pronunciation "Tharay
Khit Taya (သေရေခတၱရာ)".

But amazingly U Yi Sein (Chen Yi

Sein) rejected Paul Pelliot's finding
without any reasonable ground.

To be continued;

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 : Naing Win, U; Associated
Professor, History Department,
.
Mawlamyine University, Myanmar

Translation: Kyaw Thwin_Modernist,

MNJ

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