Original debut article / Dong Yuanben (Suqian, Jiangsu)
【Press】 "Dong Yuanben's History" is written in historical chronological order, and each article is about 2,000 words. This is the sixth part of "Tang Zhongzong to Xuanzong Period (705-756)", and the original rights and interests are protected by the headline rights protection mechanism and the national rights protection supervision system.
(Photo 1: Scenery of Onion Ridge)
Zizhi Tongjian, vol. 212: "(In the eighth year of the new century), in the fourth month of Xia, At noon, (Emperor Xuanzong of Tang) sent envoys to give wuchang wang, king bone, and juju king. The Three Kingdoms are all in the west of the Great Food, and the Great Appetite tempts the Rebellion of the Tang Dynasty, and the Three Kingdoms do not obey, so they praise it. This passage says that the three kingdoms of Wuchang, Bone, and Juju are geographically west of the Great Eclipse, which Yuan Ben believes is obviously wrong.
Dashi was a term used during the Tang and Song dynasties for the Arab Empire and the Arabs. The Arab Empire in the eighth year of the new century (720) coincided with the period of the Umayyad Dynasty and the prosperity of the empire. Founded in 661 AD, the early Tang Dynasty of Emperor Gaozong in China, the Umayyad dynasty made the caliph a hereditary monarch, and Arabia moved from a religious empire into a secularized period of geographical expansion. By the eighth year of the reign of Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty (720), the Western Flank of the Arab Empire had expanded to present-day Spain and Algeria on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar, with the Byzantine Empire, the Peninsula of Asia Minor, the Arabian Peninsula to the south, and the Green Ridge (present-day Pamir Plateau) to the east and the northern part of the South Asian subcontinent. At that time, the Tang Empire was competing with Tubo and the Later Eastern Turks for the right to rule the Onion Ridge region, and the Arab Empire came to insert a lever and confronted the Tang Empire. In the eighth year of the New Century (720), the Tang Dynasty had just entered the kaiyuan heyday, and its national strength had not yet reached its peak, and it had not yet taken the initiative to attack the arab imperial army facing each other, until the tenth year of Tianbao (751) when Tang Xuanzong sent Gao Xianzhi to lead an army of 30,000 deep into the territory of the Arab Empire for seven hundred miles, and fought fiercely with the Arab army in the city of Tanros in Central Asia (present-day Jambul City, Kazakhstan) for five days.
(Picture 2: Onion Ridge controlled during the Tang Kaiyuan period)
During the Kaiyuan Period, the Tang Dynasty basically controlled the entire Onion Ridge, but to the west and slightly further south of the Onion Ridge were the areas controlled by the Arab Empire, that is, the present-day Amu Darya River Valley, eastern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, which were naturally the areas where the Tang Empire confronted the Arab Empire and later erupted in military conflicts. Since the three kingdoms of Wuchang, Bone, and Juju were once "tempted to rebel against Tang" by the Great Eclipse, it can be seen that the three kingdoms should be in the area of confrontation between the Tang and the Arab Empire. So, where is the specific location of the Three Kingdoms?
Wu Changguo, the Eastern Jin Dynasty monk's "Records of the Buddha Kingdom" called it the Wuchang Kingdom, the Eastern Wei Yang Qiangzhi's "Luoyang Jialan Record" called it the Wuchang Kingdom, the Tang Dynasty monk Xuanzang's "Records of the Western Regions of the Tang Dynasty" called it the Wuzhan NaGuo, and other Chinese texts also have the title of Wu Chang Na Guo. Although there are many names for Uchangguo, in fact, they are all different transliterations of Sanskrit, meaning garden. In the southern slopes of the Onion Ridge, in the territory of Swat County in present-day Khyber-Pashtun Province, Pakistan, the tropical air currents of the Northern Indian Ocean are easily reached here, so the crops in The Country are very luxuriant, so it is called a garden. The geographical environment of the Wuchang Kingdom contrasted greatly with the high cold and relative desolation on the Onion Ridge, and the Arab Empire coveted the Uchang State, because the Uchang State could be called a springboard and military supply place for the Arab Empire to invade the Tang Empire's Onion Ridge region.
The State of Bone, also known as the State of Kejuluo in ancient Chinese texts, is located on the western slope of the Onion Ridge. The New Book of Tang and the Biography of the Western Regions say: "(Bone) Is vast and long, with many good horses and red leopards, and there are four major salt mountains, and the mountains produce black salt." The area of rule of the bone is the upper reaches of the present-day Amu Darya River, southeastern Uzbekistan and the border area of northeastern Afghanistan, which is far from reaching the level of "vast and thousands of miles", and the territory is mountainous and not rich. However, due to the fact that the bone state of "Duoliangma", "there are four major salt mountains", and located in the core area of the southwest of the western region of the early Tang Dynasty, surrounded by dawan, Kangju, Yueshi, Shufeng, Xiuxian and other minority cities under the control of the Tang Dynasty, the strategic location is very important, Tang Gaozong once set up a high-attached capital governor's palace in the first year of Longshuo (661) to implement military management of neikuru and its surrounding cities. Of course, it is precisely because of the very important geographical location of the bone country that the Arab Empire will compete with the Tang Empire for this place. In the eighth year of the New Century (720), the Tang dynasty still controlled the Bone Ju State, but by the middle of the KaiYuan Dynasty, the Bone Ju State and the cities inhabited by the above-mentioned ethnic minorities around it were occupied by the Arab Empire, so the Tianbao Decade (751) Gao Xianzhi's crusade against the Arab Empire was the Tang Empire's self-defense war against the Arab Empire, however, the Tang army was defeated, the 30,000 Tang army only ran back more than a thousand people, and several cities inhabited by the Bone Ju State and its surrounding ethnic groups did not return until the fall of the Tang Dynasty.
The specific geographical location of the juju state is unknown in the history books, but there is a sentence in the New Book of Tang and Persian Biography that "(Jubei) People often help Xiao Bolu to be a Chinese candidate". Little Buru was located on the southern edge of the Green Ridge and northwestern Kashmir, with its capital in present-day Gilgit, Pakistan. To the south of the border of The Little Bolu is the Uchang Kingdom on the southern slopes of the Onion Ridge. In the early tang dynasty, Xiao Bolu was controlled by Tubo, who used Xiao Bolu as a base and often invaded the Tang-controlled Onion Ridge region to the north. Since the Juwei State often assisted Xiao Bolu, that is, its suzerainty Tubo, in carrying out military operations against the Tang Dynasty, when it was known that the Juju State was on the border with Xiao Bolu and Wuchang, it could be preliminarily determined that the Juwei State was the Secret Protector State on the southwestern edge of the Onion Ridge, because in the early Tang Dynasty, only the Protectorate State had the geographical conditions to attack the Tang Army on both sides with Xiao Bolu. The core area of the Protectorate was at the source of the present-day Amu Darya River, in the northeastern foothills of the Hindu Kush Mountains, northwest of present-day Wakhan Corridor in Afghanistan.
(Figure 3: Bone, Club and Wuchang Situation in the Kaiyuan Period)
The northwest of the Ju dynasty is the bone state, the southeast is the Wuchang state, and the three kingdoms are in a northwest-southeast posture around the onion ridge, which is the strategic buffer zone between the Arab Empire and the Tang Empire for the onion ridge, and it is also the reason for the so-called "rebellion of the three kingdoms of the three kingdoms" in the "Zizhi Tongjian" volume 212 mentioned by Yuan Ben earlier. Since this is the case, the geographical location of the three kingdoms of Wuchang, Bone, and Juju is not the "three kingdoms are all in the west of the great food" as stated in volume 212 of the Zizhi Tongjian, but the three kingdoms are actually in the east of the great food.
【Extended reading headline original article Dong Yuanben History】Tang Zhongzong to Xuanzong period of the third to fifth article:
Dong Yuanben's History (179) Sheng Tang Dynasty Courtization
Dong Yuanben's theory of history (180) made the system a troublemaker
Dong Yuanben 's theory of history (181) was good at advising Li Chengqi
【About the Author】
Dong Yuanben, born in 1971, is a traditional culture scholar, a higher education worker, and a well-known writer on the Internet.
(Editor: Dong Yao)