Stranger King & Cosmocracy in China-Liang

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Stranger-Kingship and Cosmocracy; or,

Sahlins in Southwest China
Liang Yongj ia Liang Yongj ia is a senior research fellow, Asia
Research Inst it ut e, Nat ional Universit y of Singapore
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To cite this article: Liang Yongj ia Liang Yongj ia is a senior research fellow, Asia Research Inst it ut e,
Nat ional Universit y of Singapore (2011): St ranger-Kingship and Cosmocracy; or, Sahlins in Sout hwest
China, The Asia Pacific Journal of Ant hropology, 12:3, 236-254
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The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology
Vol. 12, No. 3, June 2011, pp. 236254
Stranger-Kingship and Cosmocracy;

or, Sahlins in Southwest China
Liang Yongjia
Downloaded by [NUS National University of Singapore] at 00:06 20 July 2011
Major works of the ninth to seventeenth centuries have described the kingship of the
Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms (6521254) of Southwest China. I argue that these
narratives may be understood in terms of the modes of identifying and assimilating the
cosmological alterity proposed by Marshall Sahlins: ‘stranger-kingship’, which depicted
the king as a stranger; and ‘cosmocracy’, which depicted him as a universal ruler*
a ‘cosmocrator’. While a stranger-king was to some extent an extra-social, guest
associated with the wild and untamed, and also partly an affine of the autochthonous
people, a cosmocrator was a supra-social, moral host, and envisaged more as a
consanguine of the subject people. These two pre-modern ideas of sovereignty are
constituent parts of Sahlins’s ‘elementary forms of the politics of life’, so that one cannot
be reduced to the other.
Keywords: Stranger-Kingship; Cosmocracy; Sahlins; Southwest China
Introduction
Kingship has been widely reported and theorised in Africa (Frazer 1994, Kopytoff
1987), in the Indo-European world (Helms 1998, Kantorowicz 1985), and especially
in Asia (Reid & Castles 1975, Tambiah 1976, Gesick 1983, Fernandez-Aresto 2000,
Caldwell & Henley 2008) and the Pacific (Sahlins 1985, Valeri 1985). Contributing to
a recent discussion, Sahlins (2008a, 2008b) conducted a global survey of ethno-
graphies and drew the ‘modest’ conclusion that ‘the elementary forms of kinship,
politics and religion are all one’ (Sahlins 2008a, p. 197) concerned with the
acquisition and assimilation of ‘the potency of alterity’ (Sahlins 2008a, p. 192).
According to Sahlins, alterity has been mistaken as the ‘supernatural’, but, he quotes
Viveiros de Castro, ‘since death exists, it is necessary for society to be linked with
something that is outside itself*and that it be linked socially to this exterior’ (1992,
Liang Yongjia is a senior research fellow, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.
Correspondence to: Liang Yongjia, 469A Tower Block, #08-03, Bukit Timah Road, 259770, Singapore. Email:
arilyj@nus.edu.sg
ISSN 1444-2213 (print)/ISSN 1740-9314 (online)/11/030236-19

# 2011 The Australian National University
DOI: 10.1080/14442213.2010.544325
The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 237
pp. 1901). In this light, Sahlins dubs stranger-kingship a manifestation of this

‘politics of alterity’:
the social incorporation and distribution of external life powers is the elementary
form of the political life, and . . . marital alliance is its experiential archetype . . . the
stranger-king polity is a developed expression of these principles, stranger-kings
being to the native peoples as affinal relatives are to consanguines. (Sahlins 2008a,
p. 184)
Sahlins’s generalisation follows the line of thought that kingship is essentially about
‘alliance’ (Hocart 1927, pp. 99112), ‘violence’ (de Heuch 1982, Dumézil 1988),
‘precedence’ (Fox 1994), and ‘separation’ (Quigley 2005, p. 4), all having something
to do with the extra-social power he called ‘stranger’. However, in addition to
stranger-kingship, Sahlins discusses another type of kingship called ‘cosmocracy’,
hinting that it may be distinctively different from stranger-kingship. In cosmocracy,
‘the cosmocrators synthesise the ontological and theological dualisms that mark
stranger-king polities to produce a distinctive system of totalised and centralised rule’
(Sahlins 2008a, p. 190). He believes that cosmocracy denies the particular authority
or ritual privilege claimed by subject people on the basis of their indigeneity, and that
by appealing to cosmology it lends local chiefs the same kind of alterity that the
stranger-kingship exemplifies, as shown in the cases of the hinterland people of the
galactic polities in Southeast Asia and the peripheral peoples of the Chinese empire.
Instead of installing a stranger inside, cosmocracy is the polity of ‘apical states’ that
radiate with power concentrated at the centre. Cosmocrators, because of their
conflicting claims to universal domination, are often at war with each other and
plagued by instability.
Although Sahlins may imply that both stranger-kingship and cosmocracy rest on
alterity, the distinctive nature of cosmocracy in Sahlins’s work has not been
adequately pursued. Nor does he directly suggest that cosmocracy is a manifestation
of ‘the elementary forms of politics of life’. Hence, I aim to fill this gap by analysing
the ninth- to seventeenth-century historical sources on the kingship of the Nanzhao
and Dali kingdoms (6521254) in Southwest China. I propose a structural difference
between the stranger-kingship and cosmocracy models for analytical purposes, a kind
of difference that Sahlins discerns at the empirical level, but ignores when it comes to
his overarching theory. I argue that stranger-kingship and cosmocracy are two
distinct pre-modern ideas of sovereignty which are both needed to support Sahlins’s
thesis on the ‘elementary forms of the politics of life’, so that one cannot be reduced
to the other and they should not be confused in the way Sahlins does. They are two
alternative ways of identifying, acquiring and assimilating alterities in narrations of
the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms, that is, the stranger-king is an amoral, extra-social
guest and more like an affine to the autochthonous people, while the cosmocrator is a
moral, supra-social host and more similar to a consanguine of the subject people.
My main concern is neither the actual occurrence of events nor the textual
genealogy of different sources. Rather, my interest is to examine the recurrent themes
238 L. Yongjia
about kingship in the historical sources, aggregated and reverberated in various

sources. These sources include the works of literature that have exerted tremendous
influence on regional history. The recurrence of kingship themes is important
because the narrations of the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms have been central to the
textual production and reproduction of regional history. Of course, these themes do
not exist in a vacuum but are related to the social context. However, what matters
more here is the fact that these alternative ways of assimilating alterity have been
persistent over a span of nine centuries, despite even the most radical social changes
after the Ming conquest in 1381 (cf. Yang 2009).
The authors of the textual sources used here include the Nanzhao and Dali
chroniclers, their counterparts from imperial China, and the historians from the
dynasties when Nanzhao and Dali had been conquered and incorporated into
imperial China. Different modes of historical production can be expected in different
styles of approach, but interestingly, as far as kingship is concerned, the authorial
difference is unimportant, as all wrote in terms of stranger-kingship or cosmocracy.
In other words, as far as Nanzhao and Dali kingship is concerned, there seem to be
only two modes of historiography.
The Nanzhao (652899) and Dali kingdoms (9371254) were two ancient polities
centred in the present-day Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture in Southwest China’s
Yunnan province. The kingdoms were consecutive in both territory and shared
ideology (Hou 2006, pp. 11839). Some historians have argued that the Nanzhao
kingdom was consolidated as a result of the imperial China’s (Tang Dynasty [618
907]) strategic containment of the Tibetan Tubo (Backus 1981, Ma 1991). The
kingship and culture in these places have been argued to be close to Chinese models,
despite the fact that the kingdoms made tremendous and steady efforts to be
politically ‘independent’, and that imperial China’s Song Dynasty (9601279) ceased
claiming any authority over the Dali kingdom. Yang (2009) proposed that the
consolidation of Yunnan should be understood in a complex, global perspective by
taking the power of distant connections beyond China into consideration. Such
opinions regard power*military or economic*as decisive. However, it can be
argued that power in a purely social sense alone cannot account for polities that
lasted for centuries, since ‘perhaps it is only lately in human history that power
became a purely social fact, as established by real-instrumental means of coercion*
the way it seems to contemporary Social Science’ (Sahlins 2008a, p. 184). It is more
important to consider the ‘power’ exterior to society more generally, as a type of
‘superhuman power’ (Riesebrodt 2009) essential to sustain the social world; the kind
of ‘power’ at once of kinship, politics and religion*the power of alterity.
The Stranger-King: Extra-Social, Guest and Part-Affine

Many sources have suggested that the founder kings of the Nanzhao and Dali
kingdoms were strangers*fratricidal barbarians and guests of the subjected people.
As such, they were seen as essentially beyond the community and beyond the
relationships of men, with their power ‘typically founded on an act of barbarism*

murder, incest, or both’ (Sahlins 1985, p. 79). The stranger-king usually forms a
marital alliance with an autochthonous female, often of royal birth. He is also said to
be the descendant of the union of an indigenous woman with a dragon from the
‘supernatural’ world. Therefore, he is like a cross-cousin born by the paternal aunt of
the autochthonous people, and thus a kind of affine. These stranger-kings can be
found in many contemporary folktales, the textual origins of which can usually be
dated back as far as the Ming Dynasty (13681644)*the first Chinese dynastic
regime that incorporated Dali and Yunnan as a whole (Yang 2009). One of the most
popular tales of the Nanzhao king, Huoshao Songming Lou (‘Burning the Pine
Brightness Pagoda’), told of how Piluoge, King of Nanzhao, committed fratricide

when he was about to annex the five kingdoms in the vicinity. The tale was regarded
as referring to a true event in a sixteenth-century chronicle, Nanzhao Yeshi (Unofficial
History of Nanzhao)*one of the most well-known texts on regional history:
Figure 1 Offerings to the Pillar (Li 1982).

240 L. Yongjia
Figure 2 Śākyamuni’s Assembly of the Buddhas (Li 1982).
. . . Piluoge appointed his qinzu (patrilineal kinsmen) to head the other five
chiefdoms. Before long, they began to disobey him. Piluoge bribed Jiannan
Governor Wang Yu [of the imperial China], requesting to be allowed to annex the
five chiefdoms. His request was approved by the Chinese imperial court. Piluoge
thus sent envoys to the five chiefs, saying: ‘you shall come on June 24 and pay
homage to our common ancestor. The one who refuses to come will be deemed
guilty’. He then decreed to have a big Pine Brightness Pagoda built, with an ancestor
shrine installed. The five chiefs arrived on time, including [the chief of Dengdan]
who worn an iron bracelet from his consort Lady Ningbei, who failed to dissuade
him from going. On the 25th, the five chiefs [and Piluoge] ascended the pagoda
and performed sacrificial rites. Afterwards, they enjoyed the sacrificial raw food and
wines till night, drunk. Piluoge came downstairs alone, set fire [to the pagoda] by
burning the paper money, and had his guards surround the pagoda. All five chiefs
were burned to death. Piluoge sent messengers to tell the consorts of the chiefs that
the burning of the paper money had caused the fatal accident, and asked them to
come and collect the remains. When the consorts arrived, nobody could identify
their husbands’ remains, except for Lady Ningbei who found hers’ beside the iron
bracelet. To the present day, the event has been commemorated by the Yunnanese
as the Torch Festival. Now that the five chiefs had been eradicated, Piluoge also
captured their consorts. Learning about Lady Ningbei’s beauty, he sent troops to
take her. Lady Ningbei said, ‘Never can I be married to a second husband!’, and
committed suicide. (Ni et al. 1990, pp. 501)
Figure 3 Images of Avalokistśvara (Li 1982).
Piluoge was nothing short of violent, lustful and barbaric. He burnt his con-
sanguines alive, together with the ancestral shrine, at a kin-binding occasion, thus
making him guilty of patricide, fratricide and blasphemy. He captured his kinspeoples’
consorts as a war trophy, thus making him guilty of incest and promiscuity. He even
attempted to rape his sister-in-law, leaving her no choice but to commit suicide. All
these deeds were appalling violations of kinship morality. By negating the moral
norms of kinship, he seized the kind of power that was not seen as inherent in
humanity, the kind of power that ‘reveals and defines itself as the rupture of the
people’s own moral order, precisely as the greatest of crimes against kinship: fratricide,
parricide . . .’ (Sahlins 1985, p. 79). The imperial Chinese court approved of this brutal
act, and legitimised it by conferring on Piluoge the title of a Duke (and then a Prince)
with a Chinese surname (Fang 2001, pp. 11936). China continued to take the newly
founded polity as a chiefdom, by continuing to use the title of ‘Nanzhao’, and the event
thereby became one of the ‘strategic sources of the rise of local chiefs and the advent of
stranger-kings’ (Sahlins 2008a, p. 191). Here we see how violations of customary
kinship norms typical of stranger-king stories are seen as fundamental to the founding
of states.
Other sources have suggested that instead of Piluoge, Luosheng, that is, Piluoge’s
grandfather, should be credited with founding the Nanzhao kingdom, not by conquest
but by appropriating a pre-existing, autochthonous polity, the White kingdom. He
‘united Nanzhao with the White kingdom’ after being bestowed with divine miracles
and marrying a princess. A ninth-century painting scroll, Nanzhao Tuzhuan (Pictorial
History of Nanzhao), provides details on how Luosheng replaced the autochthonous
242 L. Yongjia
ruler, Zhang Lejinqiu*king of the White kingdom. During a sacrificial rite to Heaven
officiated by Zhang and attended by Luosheng and other chiefs, ‘the ‘‘master bird’’
flew from the iron pillar and alighted on Prince Xingzong [i.e. Luosheng]’s shoulder’
(Li 1982, p. 140). Luosheng realised that the bird was originally his family guardian,
and King Zhang was certainly ‘very surprised’. In Baigu Tongji (Ancient History of the
Bai),1 by this event King Zhang was convinced of the supremacy of the Nanzhao king,
who was, Xinuluo, father of Luosheng, ‘so he gave up his throne, and married his
daughter to him’ (You 1989, p. 23). The Hu Wei (1775, p. 9) version of The Unofficial
History of Nanzhao tells this story in detail:
When the community were making offerings to the pillar, the bird carved out of
gold, which had formerly been at the pillar’s summit, suddenly able to fly, alighted
on Nu-lo’s shoulder. All were forbidden to move. At the end of eight days, it went
away. The crowd, astonished at the prodigy, said that Heaven was enjoining
something. Chin-ch’iu consequently married him (Nu-lo) to his (Chin-ch’iu’s)
daughter, and the whole realm obeyed him (Nu-lo).2
Xinuluo’s marriage to the princess has been narrated in numerous legends and
commemorated through a number of pilgrimages, including Gwer Sa La*one of the
most elaborate festivals in Dali (Fitzgerald 1941, Liang 2006). Like a medieval
romance, the event was about a royal alliance: Princess Jingu*Zhang Lejinqiu’s
adolescent daughter*met Xinuluo when she was running away from home after
being scolded. She had sex with Xinuluo that very night she ran away and eloped with
him the next day. This ‘shameless and hateful’ behaviour enraged King Zhang
Lejinqiu so much that all the envoys and gifts Xinuluo sent him were ‘rejected’.
Another reason for the king’s anger was that he lost his son*the legitimate successor,
who was sent to look for the princess. Meanwhile, Xinuluo did not stop sending gifts,
especially after he was ‘elected’ the chief of his people and founded the Mengshe
Chiefdom (later Nanzhao). After a lengthy process of sending and rejection between
the extraordinary son-in-law and the indigenous ruler, the king allowed the princess
to return and visit the palace in Dali. Xinuluo followed his wife because he was ‘afraid
that she would not come back’, but he hid himself before arriving at the king’s palace.
Finally, King Zhang ‘recognized the marriage’ and ‘gave his kingdom to Xinuluo’.
In these two sources, Xinuluo (or his son Luosheng) married the princess.
Regardless of whether Luosheng was given the hand of the princess or Xinuluo was
involved in illicit sex with her, the future king ends up in both versions with the status
of the royal son-in-law. Though he replaced the White kingdom with his Nanzhao
kingdom, he was known as Fuma, the princess’s husband. He was thus clearly an
affine to the autochthonous people.
In the legend of Xinuluo and Princess Jingu, Xinuluo is described as a guest from
outside. He came to the land of the White kingdom to hunt. He sent gifts and paid
visits. Being ‘ugly’ and not having been invited, he hid himself from his father-in-law.
He was treated like a guest, but an undesired one. He thought like a guest. His guest
status was reinforced by being the affine, who, by eloping with the indigenous
princess, caused the loss of the princess’s brother*the autochthonous consanguine.

The future king is thus a guest-affine.
The Nanzhao royalty’s guest status is also indicated in the Ancient History of the
Bai, where Xinuluo recognises the status of the indigenous ruler by giving King
Zhang Lejinqiu the title of Guolao, or the kingdom’s father-in-law (You 1989, p. 25).
A thirteenth stone stele, which honours a Mr Zhang as the descendant of the guojiu,
or the kingdom’s maternal uncle, reveals that both the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms
alike accorded the indigenous line of Zhang the honour of being the preceding royal
house (Yunnan Bianxiezu 1988, p. 112). Whatever privileges the Zhang may have
received, they were outweighed by the new king’s identification as a guest and affine
to the people he ruled. The Nanzhao royal house was believed to have come from the
south, and ‘Nanzhao’ literally means ‘the king of the south’. Many Chinese ‘official
histories’ (zhengshi) identify the Nanzhao kings as the ‘Black Barbarians’ (Wuman),
identified by modern historians as the Yi (Backus 1981). In popular tradition, the
royal house’s natal place was put forth as a ‘backward’, ‘barren’ and mountainous
area, in contrast with the civilised land of rice paddies (Fitzgerald 1941, pp. 2344),
and was believed to be an area of qianghan (aggressive and barbaric) people. The
Nanzhao king was a guest and an affine, but a very strange-looking one. In the story
of his union with Princess Jingu, Xinuluo was an ‘extremely ugly’ hunter dressed in
animal skins. His ugly face caused several significant episodes. For example, after
having illicit sex, the pretty princess passed out in fright the next morning with a
clearer sight of her future husband’s ‘extraordinarily ugly’ face. Also, on the way to
the White king’s palace, Jingu’s girlfriends gradually stopped singing the happy songs
because they thought Xinuluo ‘was too ugly to match the pretty princess’. Finally,
Xinuluo himself realised his ugliness and felt so ashamed that he left his wife and hid
in the mountains to wait for her while she visited the king’s palace. In other words,
his ugliness threatened his alliance, guest-hood and political career.
The ugly-face theme suggests the king’s strangeness, and the difficulty and
ambiguity of installing the ‘outside’ ‘inside’, which is typically found in many
stranger-king institutions (see, for example, Fox 2008). After all, the union was
already too ‘strange’ to fit in with any available cultural scheme, so it had to take place
in a rebellious and risky manner, that is, illicit sex and elopement.
In the founding legend of the ‘Jiulong’, to which historical grouping many lineages
ascribed their ancestry, the Nanzhao kings were also said to be affinally related to the
people they ruled over because of their origin in an alliance between an
autochthonous female and a foreign male. The ‘Jiulong’ legend has been held by
numerous sources to be the origin of the Nanzhao kingship (Hou 2002, pp. 177*
200, Lian 2007, pp. 835) as early as the late Nanzhao period (ninth century), but it
became especially popular in the Ming dynasty. Basically, it tells how in the Ailao
mountains, a girl named Shayi became strangely pregnant after witnessing an floating
log ‘moved upstream’. She gave birth to nine (or ten) boys. The log then transformed
itself into its ‘authentic form’*a dragon*and came to meet the boys that Shayi bore
him. All the sons ran away in fear except for the youngest one, who mounted the
244 L. Yongjia
dragon’s back. This boy was Xinuluo*the founder king of Nanzhao. A ninth-century
description reported that the Nanzhao kings claimed to the Chinese emperor that
their origin was from Shayi (Fan 1961, p. 68), and, as such, they not only claimed to
be legitimate rulers at China’s periphery, but also recognised their origin from the
union of a dragon of the other world with an indigenous woman. For the ‘renowned
family and big surnames’ (mingjia daxing) of the Nanzhao kingdom, claiming to be
the descendants of one of the jiulong brothers was an indication of their Hindu
origins (see, Hou 2002, p. 198), and thus, their eligibility to the kingdom’s office
(Lian 2007, p. 40). In other words, the legend was created to affirm the king was
descended from an outsider who married an insider, thus again an affine to the
underlying people.
When the founder kings of Nanzhao (Xinuluo, Luosheng or Piluoge) were depicted
as strangers, their conduct was characterised by fratricide, incest and adultery. They
were strange because of their unbelievable ugliness. In other words, they were against
humanity and in every way ‘anti-social’ in their origins. Territorially, they came from
another place, and had to remove the autochthonous rulers through miracles, gift
offerings or conquest. In other words, they were ‘guests’, sometimes unexpected. The
ways to incorporate the dominated people were either through marrying the
indigenous women or claiming to be the descendants of a marital alliance between
an extraordinary outsider and an autochthonous woman. The kingship was thus
narrated in terms of the king being the alterity of the autochthonous people, but the
kingship belonged to an order of amorality, or extra-social morality, and the king was
a guest-affine. He was, thus, a stranger-king, ambiguously filled with the auto-
chthonous people’s affections and violence, because ‘it is as if nothing foreign were
merely human to them. Endowed with transcendent powers of life and death, the
foreign becomes an ambiguous object of desire and danger’ (Sahlins 2008b, p. 10).
In this sense of identifying and assimilating alterity, ‘affines remain indispensable as
Other . . . for [their] political-ideological and cosmological legitimation and thus
[their] political viability’ (Helms 1998, p. 52).
The Cosmocrator: Enfeoffing Mountains and Rivers and Entitling the King
Most of the historical literature of the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms indicates
explicitly that the kings engaged in persistent efforts to install the ideology of the king
as the ruler of the universe. These efforts included enfeoffing mountains and rivers,
modelled after practices in the Chinese empire, as well as a much more persistent and
successful installation of the Cakravartin kingship, or Buddhist sovereignty described
by Tambiah (1976) for Southeast Asia. Contrary to the kin-killing incestuous
stranger-king, these enfeoffing kings or Cakravartin kings were represented as
morally superior and universal. These kings also represented a form of cosmological
centring of power instead of the power derived from an outsider from another
territory. Although still from outside, they were supported by supernatural authority.
As shown below, this centring of power in their persons suggests that they were the
hosts of the law (dharma) of the social world. These kings claimed to be in direct
contact with a superior source of power, and ancestors of their people. In general, the
kings were no longer portrayed as strangers, but as supra-social hosts and ancestors.
They were Sahlins’ cosmocrators.
The Nanzhao kings engaged in the well-established practice of feng wuyue sidu,
or ‘enfeoffing five mountains and four rivers’. This involved declaring the five
cosmological poles of traditional Chinese cosmology, east, west, south, north and the
middle, to be marked by five mountains and four rivers, and claiming the king’s
privileged power over this. By such enfeoffment, the king placed himself and the
capital of his kingdom at the very centre of the world. Enfeoffing the mountains and
rivers was always accompanied by solemn narrations of cosmos-recognition events

such as the founding of a new era, often the kingdom itself. In The Unofficial History
of Nanzhao, King Xinuluo is said to ‘bring order to the kingdom, and enfeoff
the mountains and rivers, installing Shenming Tianzi (the emperor god) as the
kingdom’s patron, and confer the titles of mountain gods on seventeen deceased
sages’ (Ni et al. 1990, pp. 345). In the Ancient History of the Bai, the enfeoffed
mountains and rivers were listed, following the king’s ‘sending petitions to sky and
earth, mountains and rivers and the state shrine’ (You 1989, p. 25). King Yimouxun
(r. 779808) was the first one who actually enfeoffed the mountains and rivers*a
practice adopted from the Chinese imperial court (Zhao 2008). Other Nanzhao kings
said to have enfeoffed the mountains and rivers also intended to recreate or reorient
the cosmos, especially King Longshun (r. 87797), who, ‘immediately after ascending
to the throne, changed the kingdom’s name . . . offered sacrifice to the Emperor-God
of Jinma and Biji, and installed a complete system of temples and shrines.
He also changed the capital, and offered sacrifice to mountains, rivers and the state
shrine . . .’ (Zhang 1998, pp. 6601).
Enfeoffing mountains and rivers was an important way for the Chinese emperor to
claim sole authority as Tianzi, or Son of Heaven (Granet 1932). By strategically
adopting this practice, the Nanzhao king declared himself superior to the immediate
social world, and in communication with supernatural sources of authority. He
brought about and maintained the correct cosmological order at the centre.
According to a ninth-century report (Fan 1961), the Nanzhao king had his royal
animals captured from the wild; he faced the south in court; he wore the exclusive red
and ate with distinctive golden utensils; and he was cremated, but his ears were
buried in golden urns. All these practices placed him at the centre of the world.
Most of the late Nanzhao rulers, and all of the Dali rulers, shared three titles*
Huangdi, Biaoxin and Mohe Luocuo. Huangdi (emperor) was adopted from Chinese,
meaning the Son of Heaven who rules All Under Heaven (tianxia). Biaoxin (Pyu-shin)
is said to have been adopted from the neighbouring Pyu of Myanmar whom King
Shilong conquered (Pelliot 1933, p. 28), and means ‘the monarch’ (Fang 2001, p. 624).
Mohe Luocuo is the Chinese transliteration of the Sanskrit Maharāja, meaning ‘great
king, the title for many kings in India and Southeast Asia’ (Feng 1930, p. 1). As part of
the Sanskritisation process in Yunnan (see Pelliot 1933), the title of Maharāja revealed
246 L. Yongjia
the king as claiming to be a Cakravartin. Initially applied to King Longshun, the title of
Maharāja was later used by all the Dali rulers, even after the kingdom was conquered
by Kublai Khan and the royal house was degraded to the status of governors of Dali
(zongguan) under the Mongolian Yuan empire. Indeed, the imperial Chinese Tang
court and the Tibetan Tubo kingdom had entitled the Nanzhao kings Yunnan Wang
(King of Yunnan) and Ridong Wang (King of the East Sun), but the Nanzhao kings
soon abandoned these titles, most probably because they did not designate universal
kingship, and were subject to the overarching Chinese and Tibetan claims of universal
kingship (emperor or tsenpo). On the other hand, the titles, ‘Huangdi’, ‘Pyu-shin’ and
‘Maharāja’, all indicate that the Nanzhao and Dali kings preferred and appropriated
the titles of universal kings from neighbouring polities, and used these titles to declare
themselves as universal rulers.
The enfeoffing of the mountains and rivers, together with the kings’s titles,
demonstrate that the Nanzhao and Dali kings were not seen as guests of the people
from the outside, but as cosmologically endorsed rulers, hosting the world order and
superior to the people over whom they reigned. Their sovereignty was established by
the king coming to represent a ‘supra-social alterity’ to the world he ruled.
The Cosmocrator: Cakravartin Kingship

Claims to universal rulership were manifested, particularly, in the form of Buddhist
Cakravartin kingship.3 Paralleling the expansion of the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms,
Buddhism became widely spread as a form of moral and religious life over Asia, to the
extent of forming a ‘Buddhist civilisation’, or more accurately a ‘civilising Buddhism’
(Mauss 2006, p. 70). Representing one of the developed forms of Buddhist political
philosophy, Cakravartin kingship was widely spread in South, Middle, East and
Southeast Asia during the period of the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms. A Cakravartin
king declared himself (or herself, in the case of Wu Zetian [see, Ku 2003, pp. 223324
and pp. 377424]) either as the Devarāja, that is, the ruler patronised by Buddha/
Boddhissatva, or as Buddharāja, that is, the ruler being the Buddha/Boddhisattva
himself. In Mahayana Buddhism, Cakravartin kingship was often promoted by various
esoteric traditions, especially the Vajrayāna school favoured by the monarchs in North
India, China and Southeast Asia (Ku 2003, pp. 101).
Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms were located almost at the centre of the Buddhist
polities, as Mauss (2006, pp. 701) and Ku (2003) noted, and the presence and
persistence of the Cakravartin kingship in the late Nanzhao kingdom and during the
entire span of the Dali kingdoms was firmly established (Hou 2006, pp. 2*67, Ku
2003). One strong proof of this is a 17-metre, 800-figure handscroll completed
between 1173 and 1176 (Li 1982, p. 32); this is known as The Chang Sheng-wen
Handscroll of Buddhist Images. The offering-maker (gongyangren), or the one who
had the handscroll drawn, was a Dali King known as ‘Emperor and Pyu-shin Lizhen’.
He recognised his predecessor, King Longshun of Nanzhao, as the first Maharāja
and the offering-maker of the image of Avalokiteśvara Ekadaśamukha (Li 1986).
In addition, this Dali king also appears in the ‘Śākyamuni’s Assembly of the Buddhas’,
depicted in the Huayan Jing (Buddhāvatamsaka-mahāvaipulya-sūtra)
. (Hou 2006,
p. 105), with the Seven Treasures (saptaratna) characterising a Cakravartin king (Li
1982). According to Ku (2003), the different Avalokiteśvara images in the handscroll
indicate the presence of the Cakravartin kingship, and this was particularly reflected
in the images of Avalokiteśvara Potala and Amoghapāśa, whose authentic form
of body (the dharmakāya and sambhogakāya)
. was Acaya Avalokiteśvara (Hou 2006,
pp. 267)*the most popular deity in Dali until today.
As a Cakravartin, a Nanzhao or a Dali king was no longer then an anti-social,
barbaric guest like a stranger-king. Instead, he ruled the world because he was from
another kind of alterity, a morally superior world. Instead of being an ugly and
fratricidal stranger, the king was superior and an example to his subjects in terms of
morality. He followed King Aśoka’s example of ruling by ‘Ten Virtues’, and civilised
the ‘Four Continents of the World’. He decreed that people should follow the virtues,
and freed them from the ‘Ten Evils’. He followed the ‘‘‘Ten Virtues’’ fully, and he was
called Dharmarāja (king of law)’ (Taisho Tripitaka 9, p. 272). The ‘Manual of
Standard Prayer’*written during the Dali kingdom*tells of how the Cakravartin
king was able to save the people from flood, famine, fire and war (Hou 2006, pp.
301). As such, the king endowed his subjects with Buddhist morality, and inspired
them with Buddhist philosophy and teachings. The prevalence of Buddhism in the
late Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms is well known. According to a fourteenth-century
report, the people in this area ‘upheld Buddhism. Every family, rich or poor, never
failed to install a Buddhist shrine in his house. Everybody, old or young, never failed
to carry in hand a string of chanting beads. The days of observing vegetarianism,
prohibiting meat and drink, amount to more than half a year. Countless temples have
been built along the mountains’ (Guo 1986, pp. 223).
As a Cakravartin, the king was the centre of the mundane world in both a temporal
and spatial sense. Temporally, ruling the world constituted a stage on his deferred
journey towards Nirvana. The importance and general acceptance of these ideas is
confirmed by the well-known fact that nearly half of the Dali kings abdicated and
became monks. In other words, the king was institutionally a renouncer-ruler, who
could eventually return to the transcendental world from which he originated. The
renouncer-ruler-renouncer itinerary shows that this form of kingship depended upon
the king being a mediator between the mundane and extramundane world, while the
supernatural power of the latter was brought about and concentrated by the king
throughout the mundane world. His role of mediator in this sense shows the
temporal part of his transcendental life. The figure of renouncer-king, as a version of
the Cakravartin king, was not unique to Dali. It has been demonstrated in the early
political philosophy of ancient India (Gokhale 1966) and Thailand (Tambiah 1976,
p. 43)*two polities where the flow of materials and ideas to the Nanzhao Dali
kingdom has been suggested (Li 2000, Yang 2006).
Spatially, in The Chang Sheng-wen Handscroll of Buddhist Images, the king was
placed among the pantheons of Buddha and various incarnations of Avalokiteśvara,
248 L. Yongjia
structurally contrasted with the mundane world. Luo Yong (in Fang 2001, pp.
61521) observed that the handscroll was divided symmetrically between Chinese
Zen Buddhism and ‘the Dali indigenous Buddhism’, indicating a felt division between
guest (Chinese Buddhism) and host (Dali Buddhism). In the illustrated history of
Nanzhao, King Longshun declared himself the Cakravartin king with the morality of
the earth who ‘requested to unite the four directions into one family’ (Li 1982, p.
137). The actual institutional structure of the Dali kingdom, as observed by Lian
(2007, pp. 11140), also demonstrates this predominant guest-host division by
contrasting the royal Duan family with the ministerial Gao family. The emperor lived
in the capital, spending most of his time at ceremonies and rituals of esoteric
Buddhism, officiated by the royal ritual specialists of the Dong family. One of the
esoteric rituals was the ultra-elaborate consecration (abhisecana)
. of the emperor, in
which the king was offered tribute. The ministerial Gao family, on the other hand,
was stationed in the forts surrounding the capital. It inherited the rights and titles
that controlled the office of ‘mundane’ affairs, named ‘the Eight Offices’, and wielded
the ‘real power’ of administration, including revenue, civil work, defence and
diplomacy. Contrary to the king and his ministerial families who claimed to be of
Indian origin, the Gao family were descendants of Chinese who practiced Chinese
Zen. The centre-periphery positioning, the division of power between mundane and
extramundane affairs, and the respective historical signification, all suggest that the
emperor occupied the moral centre of world, and hosted the cosmological order
within which the ministers administrated the mundane affairs under his divine
jurisdiction.
The Nanzhao and Dali kings were associated with Lord Avalokiteśvara. In a long
succession of textual traditions, Avalokiteśvara was believed to have come from India,
in different incarnations, to aid the establishment of the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms.
In these incarnations, Avalokiteśvara was said to appear in the form of an Indian
monk, who left many marks on Nanzhao landscape in a series of events where he was
mistreated by laymen. After centuries of textual reproduction, Avalokiteśvara was said
to have incarnated 18 times, each of which was related to the divine bestowal of
kingship. These events during different incarnations included promising Xinuluo the
kingdom, converting various unbelievers to Buddhism, removing a demon (Rākşasa),
and saving and assisting Duan Siping to establish the Dali Kingdom (Ji 1998[1706]).
The patronage of Avalokiteśvara also implies a host-guest relation. In these
incarnations, the kings were portrayed as natives who treated Avalokiteśvara with
courtesy and hospitality. Some episodes recount that Xinuluo’s mother and wife were
so generous that twice, while on their way to bring lunch to Xinuluo, they gave
all their food to a mendicant monk. The monk turned out to be Avalokiteśvara, and
he promised Xinuluo that the latter would become the king of Nanzhao. In other
episodes, ignorant villagers beat, burned and chopped the Avalokiteśvara-turned
monk, but they were never able to harm him. The Illustrated History of Nanzhao
(Li 1982, p. 50) claimed, in 825 AD, that an Indian monk came to the capital of
Nanzhao and said, ‘the sage (ārya) of our Lotus Sect, Acaya Avalokiteśvara, had
arrived at your Kingdom of Dafeng People from India, after travelling through all the
chiefdoms begging. Where is he now?’ We can see that the patron-client relation
between Avalokiteśvara and the Nanzhao king was narrated in terms of the host-guest
relation.
As Cakravartins, the Nanzhao and Dali royalty were believed to be direct heirs of
Aśoka, the ‘paradigmatic’ historic king of the Buddhist kingship (Ku 2003, Tambiah
1976, p. 96). Hou (2002, pp. 165200) and Lian (2007, pp. 5967) have analysed the
complex textual relations between the Dali (and Yunnan) stories about Aśoka.
A sixteenth-century document, Yunnan Tongzhi (General History of Yunnan), told
that ‘in the beginning, there was a kingdom of Aśoka in the Western Sea. Aśoka . . .
married a girl from the sky and begot three sons . . . The second son was sent to the
fief between Mountain Cang and Lake Er [meaning Dali]’ (Hou 2002, p. 170). In The
General History of the Bai and The Making of the White Kingdom, it was the third son
that King Aśoka sent to Dali. The Ni Lue version of Nanzhao Yeshi provided a ‘family
tree’ of Biaojudi, son of Aśoka:
Biaojudi, the third son of Aśoka who was the king of Magadha at the West Heaven,
married Cimengkui and begot nine sons, named the Jiulong family: the eldest was
Afuluo, ancestor of the sixteen states (India); the second was Mengjujian, ancestor
of Tubo (Tibet); the third was Mengjunuo, ancestor of the Han (China); the fourth
was Mengjuchou, ancestor of the Eastern Barbarians; the fifth was Menjudu, who
begot thirteen sons, five worthies and seven sages, ancestor(s) of the Meng (later
Nanzhao); the sixth was Mengjutuo, living in the Lion Kingdom (Ceylon); the
seventh was Mengjulin, ancestor of Jiaozhi (North Vietnam); the eighth was
Mengjusong, the ancestor of Zheng Lejinqiu of the White Cliff (the White
Kingdom); the ninth was Mengjulin, the ancestor of the Baiyi (the Tai people). (Ni
et al. 1990, pp. 178)
According to Hou (2002, p. 18494), this is one of the variations of the above-
mentioned legend of ‘Jiulong’, and ‘Cimengkui’*here was ‘Shayi’, the girl who saw a
log ‘moving upstream’. Cimengkui is then an indigenous woman who marries the son
of Aśoka, who was sent by his father to travel to Dali for spreading Buddhism. What
is curious in this legend, as in many others about kingship, is that a transformation
takes place in terms of kinship. It can be noted that while the third son of Aśoka was
an affine to the people he ruled, his sons were not. Instead, they were the ancestors of
various kingdoms, including Nanzhao, because the affinal/consanguineal relation of
Biaojudi and Cimengkui transformed into consanguineal in the second generation,
when their sons were all called ‘ancestor’ (zu). Losing affinal identity at the second
generation is also the case in the contemporary Dali kinship, which is reflected in the
funeral rites (Liang 2005). In other words, a Cakravartin king who claimed ancestry
to Aśoka would share the same origin as his subjects; he would be his subjects’
consanguine. The king and his subjects are supposed to share a consanguineal
relationship since they all descend consanguineally from the ultimate source of
authority, King Aśoka. Here alterity are depicted in terms of consanguineal relations,
not in terms of affinity.
250 L. Yongjia
In a way similar to the founding king of Nanzhao, Duan Siping*the founder of

the Dali kingdom*was also regarded, by many sources, as the descendant of the
indigenous people. While his mother conceived him miraculously, his father was not
a legendary animal, but a dead spirit; the spirit was that of a Nanzhao minister, the
White king or the Nanzhao prince. As claimed on a fifteenth-century stone stele,
Duan Siping was conceived by a female born from a plum fruit. When she bathed
in a river, a dragon-turned log touched her feet. She found the dragon was the
apotheosised general, Yuanzu*son of King Geluofeng of Nanzhao (Yunnan
Bianxiezu 1988, p. 71).
The bulk of the sources on cosmocracy demonstrate that the Nanzhao and Dali
kings were not ‘guilty’ of anti-social ‘crimes’ of adultery, incest, fratricide, patricide or
simply being ugly. Instead, they were enlightened with the noble truth of the universe,
destined to instruct the people with virtue. They were morally superior. Instead of
marrying into the kingdom, they were the ancestors of the subject people. They were at
the centre of the hierarchical world, accumulating power from all directions, and
patronised and supported by divinity. The people from all directions paid tribute and
homage to the king’s centrality, and ministers assisted him as his guests. Their
relations with their patron god were like that of a host-guest relationship.
A cosmocrator again depended on his alterity, but unlike a stranger-king, the
cosmocratic alterity was not territorial, but celestial. The cosmocrators also drew on
sources of power from the outside, but this outside-ness was transcendental,
instructive and moral. The role of a cosmocrator depended on his claim to the divine
mandate, and it was this that was supposed to bring order to the social world, in
accordance with the order of the transcendental world. In this respect, a rather
distinctive division between the transcendental and the mundane worlds was created.
The transcendental world, be it the obscure heaven or the world of Nirvana, was
abstract and inaccessible to the common people. It was this inaccessibility that deemed
the ruler not a god, but an enlightened human being imbued with moral superiority or
patronised by beings from the transcendental worlds. Therefore, as a cosmocrator, a
Nanzhao or Dali king was a moral supra-social host, and more like a consanguine to
the people he ruled, than an affinally related and amoral stranger-king.
Conclusion
In significant historical sources about the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms, written in
different times and with different perspectives, despite the heterogeneity, there is a
commonality*they all narrate the kingdoms in terms of stranger-kingship and/or
cosmocracy. As stranger-kings, the kings were anti-social guests and affines, while as
cosmocrators, the kings were supra-social hosts and similar to consanguines.
Nevertheless, both stranger-kingship and cosmocracy rest upon alterity, albeit of
two kinds.
Neither stranger-kingship nor cosmocracy is about authority over a territory,
which is a modern but narrow definition of sovereignty. They are philosophies about
the relation between the king and his people, a relation premised on the identification
and the assimilation of an alterity. In this respect, these two pre-modern ideas of
sovereignty contrast notions of morality, kinship and rights.
Stranger-kingship and cosmocracy are not mutually exclusive concepts. Instead,
they often appear in the same literature and even in the same chapters. This fact is
important because, at least to Sahlins, stranger-kingship and cosmocracy were
spatially separated and mutually generated. One of his inferences was that cosmocratic
polities were often at war because of the exclusive claim of universal kingship on both
sides (Sahlins 2008a, p. 192). This, however, was not always true. In one of the
incarnations, Avalokiteśvara ordained Xinuluo a limited sovereignty by promising
him that ‘the limit of a bird’s three-month journey and the height of a tree’s needle-
shaped leaves’ would be ‘subjected to you and your offspring’s rule’ (You 1989, p. 177).
In the genealogical constructions of the Nanzhao and Dali kings, neighbouring polities
and people were also interpreted as sharing the same ancestor*the grandson of King
Aśoka showing a consanguineal relationship to other peoples. Clearly, the Nanzhao
and Dali version of cosmocracy did not refer to the king as the sole universal ruler.
They were aware of the neighbouring polities. In addition to the division of stranger-
kingship and cosmocracy, it seems, therefore, necessary to examine the subcategories
of both.
The dichotomy of stranger-kingship and cosmocracy is nevertheless necessary
because it helps to reflect the dichotomy of the sacred and the profane, the visible and
the invisible, the affine and the consanguine, descent and alliance, and the king and
his people, all of which are themes central to the inquiry into the elementary forms of
religious life, kinship and politics. While Sahlins has provided the ‘modest’
conclusion that they are all one, we may also notice, through the lens of Nanzhao
and Dali kingship, that all of them have something to do with the separation of, and
the exchange between, selfness and the alterity, which is, as Mauss (1990) has
suggested, the elementary form of ‘the social’ itself.
Acknowledgements
The paper was presented in National University of Singapore and Yunnan University.
I am grateful to David Gibeault, Kathryn Robinson, Kenneth Dean, Lin Chaomin and
Aga Zuoshi for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.
Notes
[1] This book was written around 13841416 and has had a tremendous influence on regional
historiography (Hou 2002, p. 50).
[2] The text was translated by Helen Chapin (1944, p. 150), in which Nu-lo is Xinuluo, and
Chin-ch’iu is Zhang Lejinqiu.
[3] A Cakravartin king generally refers to the king who rules the world according to the Buddhist
Dharma, following the example of the ‘paradigmatic’ king Aśoka. Cakravartin kingship is a
totalising power with the wheel (cakka) of domination and morality. His this-worldly ruling is
252 L. Yongjia
a deterred journey to Nirvana, as a world conqueror and renouncer, with ‘seven treasures’
present. For a detailed explanation, see Tambiah (1976, pp. 3853, p. 96, and pp. 605) and
Ku (2003, pp. 1020).
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pp. 1901). In this light, Sahlins dubs stranger-kingship a manifestation of this

about kingship in the historical sources, aggregated and reverberated in various

The Stranger-King: Extra-Social, Guest and Part-Affine

relationships of men, with their power ‘typically founded on an act of barbarism*

Brightness Pagoda’), told of how Piluoge, King of Nanzhao, committed fratricide

Figure 1 Offerings to the Pillar (Li 1982).

Figure 2 Śākyamuni’s Assembly of the Buddhas (Li 1982).

Figure 3 Images of Avalokistśvara (Li 1982).

princess, caused the loss of the princess’s brother*the autochthonous consanguine.

rivers was always accompanied by solemn narrations of cosmos-recognition events

The Cosmocrator: Cakravartin Kingship

In a way similar to the founding king of Nanzhao, Duan Siping*the founder of

no. 2, pp. 13186.

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