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The Secret History of the Mongols: some fresh revelations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2009
Extract
As is well known, the Secret History is the only surviving source on the rise of the Mongol empire produced by the Mongols themselves, yet controversy continues to surround its value, its purpose, even its date. The fullest and earliest attested version of the text does not even survive in the Uyghur script employed by the Mongols, but only in a transcription into Chinese characters, accompanied by Chinese translation; a transposition carried out at an unkown date under circumstances which are not entirely clear. Chinese sources, it is true, have been used to throw a certain amount of light on the transmission of the Secret History, notably in a lengthy and detailed article published forty years ago by William Hung,1 but as the summary by F. W. Cleaves of the problems surrounding this evidence in the introduction to his translation of the Secret History makes abundantly clear,2 much has remained a matter for conjecture.
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- Information
- Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 55 , Issue 1 , February 1992 , pp. 115 - 119
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- Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1992
References
1 Hung, William, ‘ The transmission of the book known as The Secret History of the Mongols ’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 14, 1951, 433–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On the author of this piece, see Chan, SusanEgan, A latterday Confucian: reminiscences of William Hung (1893–1980) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies, 1987)Google Scholar.
2 Cleaves, Francis Woodman, The Secret History of the Mongols, Vol. I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. xvii–lxv.Google Scholar This summary stands out for its clarity, concision and caution; I have preferred to follow it below, rather than try to relate my own account to Hung's more extended discussion
3 Note Hung's remarks at the end of his n. 16 on p. 441 of his study.
4 Cleaves, Secret History, p. xxiii, provides the passage in Chinese.
5 Cleaves, p. liv.
6 Cleaves, pp. lviii–lxix.
7 Cleaves, pp. xxiv, lv–lxiii.
8 Cleaves, p. xxv, again provides the Chinese text.
9 As pointed out by Cleaves, Secret History, p. xxvi.
10 Following the listing in Cleaves, Secret History, p. lx.
11 For Ch‘iu, see Goodrich, L. Carrington and Chao-ying, Fang, Dictionary of Ming biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 249–52,Google Scholar and for Lu, Shang, pp. 1161–3Google Scholar.
12 His views are touched upon in survey, Jao Tsung-i'sChung-kuo shih-hsüeh shang chih chengt'ung lun (Hong Kong: Lung-men shu-tien, 1977), 43, 154–6Google Scholar.
13 On this incident, which took place in 1449, and on its severe political repercussions, see Ph De Heer, , The care-taker emperor (Leiden: Brill, E. J., 1986).Google Scholar Two studies of the historiographic consequences are mentioned in the Introduction to Langlois, John D. (ed.), China under Mongol rule (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 For a brief survey of this episode and its background, see Ch‘en, K., Buddhism in China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 421–5,Google Scholar and note the literature listed on pp. 541–2: this has been expanded over recent yeaers, most notably by Loon, P. van der, Taoist books in the libraries of the Sung period (London: Ithaca Press, 1983), 55–6Google Scholar.
15 On this prince, see the Dictionary of Ming biography, 305–7.
16 Chün, Ch‘iu, (ed.) Hsin, Kuo
and Lu Ta-chieh 
, Shih-shih cheng-kang (Ching-ch‘ üan: Kuo-shih chia-shu, 1936), 31.19aGoogle Scholar.
17 Hsiang-mai, , Pien-wei lu, p. 751c, in ed. of Taishō Canon, vol. 52.Google Scholar
18 The only such listing I have encountered so far is the Sonkeikaku bunko kanseki bunrui mokuroku (Tokyo: Sonkeikaku bunko, 1934), 151Google Scholar, which only gives the date a s ‘ Hung-chih 
period’. This may show that the library held the first edition, since a postface to the Shih-shih cheng-kang which has been transmitted with it (reprinted also in Jao, Cheng-t’ung lun, p. 157) dating to 1488, the first year of that period, indicates that the work had not been printed up to that point. It is, of course, also possible that the work was printed more than once in the Hung-chih period.
19 T'ung-chien chieh-yao, hsü-pien, 18.32b. This work entered the library from Japan in the early 1960s (it bears a certain amount of manuscript annotation by a Japanese); it is not the different work under the same short title preserved in the library of Sir Thomas Wade, which is a Korean print.
20 See, respectively, pp.101 and 100 of Chung-min, Wang, Chung-kuo shan-pen-shu t'i-yao (Shanghai: Shanghai ku-chi ch‘u-pan-she, 1983).Google Scholar As T‘ang’s entry in the Dictionary of Ming biography, 1252–6, makes clear, his reputation did attract a certain number of false attributions. Though in this case it would seem hard to judge whether or not T‘ang was involved in the work’s compilation in any meaningful sense, the original editing must have taken place during his lifetime for the attribution to be plausible.
21 Note that the preface of the Hua-i i-yü distinguishes the Uyghur writing used by the Mongols as‘ Kao-ch‘ang chih shu’ 
and reserves the term used here for the ’Phags-pa script: Hua-i i-yü (Ssu-pu ts‘ung-k‘an, series 3 reprint of 1918 Shanghai Han-fen-lou edition), preface, lb.
22 See de Heer, , Care-taker emperor, 139,Google Scholar for this, and note also the mention of Ch‘iu, on pp. 144, 146.Google Scholar Though earlier scholarship linking the Hua-i i-yü with the Secret History has surmised that the existing Chinese version was produced as a translation exercise or exemplar, the hypothesis that Ch‘iu found it in the Grand Secretariats’s historical archive entails the corollary that the specific document he saw had been preserved for its historical rather than its linguistic value.
23 In both versions of Ch‘iu’s remarks that I have consulted, he uses Mathews's no. 6688, rather than no. 6686, which is in all the texts of the Secret History as well as in the Ta-Ming i-t'ung chih. It is at least conceivable that this substitution may simply mark a pedantic correction by Ch‘iu himself.
24 This date is given e.g. by Tseng-hsiang, FuTs‘ang-yüan ch‘‘ ün-shu ching-yen lu (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1983), 516Google Scholar.
25 See the preceding note, and also Sonkeikaku bunko kanseki bunrui mokuroku, p. 150, for some prewar listings, and Pei-ching t'u-shu-kuan ku-chi shan-pen shu-mu (Peking: Shu-mu wen-hsien ch‘upan- she, n.d.; preface 1987), 1151,Google Scholar and Kuo-li chung-yang t‘u-shu-kuan shan-pen shu-mu (revised ed., Taipei: National Central Library, 1967), 403,Google Scholar for current holdings.