2018/04/23 by Kaiqi Hua · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Chinese history and philosophy #Japanese History and Culture #China's Ethnic Minorities and Relations #Buddhism #China #Emperor #Reign #Ancient history #Prestige #History #Politics #Geography #Philosophy #Archaeology #Law #Political science
paper · doi:10.1163/9789004366152_008
openalex publication_date 2018/04/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
During Mongol rule in China and Tibet, especially under the reign of Qubilai Qan (1215–1294), the Mongol rulers had established the unspoken tradition of banishing for political reasons disliked Chinese and Korean royal family members to Tibet, and Tibetan and Mongolian royal family members to South China. These two areas were both culturally alien and geographically remote to the recipients of exile orders. But destinations of exile such as Sakya and Hangzhou had religious prestige in Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism respectively. The paper scrutinises the life of the last Song Emperor Zhao Xian 趙㬎 (1271–1323), who had travelled extensively across China and Tibet, and became a Tibetan Buddhist monk then known as Lhatsün (Tib. Lha btsun). From various sources in different language and literary forms, we are able to not only reconstruct Zhao’s travel routes and identity transformations, but also learn the motives and processes of Buddhist exile for the royals during the Mongol Yuan元Dynasty (1271–1368) through physical migration in space and textual reproduction in time. This paper demonstrates the role Buddhism played in cross-cultural and cross-regional contacts in the lives of individual migrants.