Charter of Emperor Ping

Also Known As: Chinese Pinghuang quandie 評皇券牒; also the Passport or License for Crossing the Mountains, Guoshan bang 過山榜; Iu Mien Jie sen borngv; translated in full as Emperor Ping’s Charter for Crossing the Mountains and Protecting the People Forever
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Miao-Yao Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Objects
Mythical Attributes: A sealed imperial grant that records the Yao descent from the dragon-dog Pan Hu and, on the strength of that ancestor’s service, releases his descendants from tax, toll, arrest and the obligation to bow.
Role in Mythos: It is the founding charter of the Yao people, carrying their origin story and the terms of their standing in the world in a single document.
Relation to Humans: Yao households owned it, hid it, copied it and carried it over every border they crossed, and the men who led migrations produced it in front of foreign kings as proof of a right to settle. Its claims were also sung at weddings and read aloud at ancestral rites, so the people it governed heard it as often as they saw it.

The wrapper comes off and the paper smells of woodsmoke and old starch. It keeps unrolling after anyone expects it to stop, brittle at the folds, the colour of weak tea. Columns of brush characters run the length of it. Square red seal impressions sit at intervals down the margin like stamped bruises, and between them stand painted figures in court robes, drawn in the same manner as the household deity scrolls hanging a few feet away on the wall. For a great many Yao families this was the most valuable object in the house, and several of them owned nothing else worth carrying out of a fire.

It opens with a date and a throat-clearing. On the genuine date of the twelfth day of the twelfth month of the first year of the Jingding reign period, which is to say 1260, having pacified the twelve clans of the Yao, the charter of Emperor Ping is reissued as the preceding dynasty issued it, to be passed down to their descendants. Then the document abandons that register entirely and tells a story.

An emperor named Ping keeps a dragon-dog at his court, a metre long and mottled yellow, surnamed Pan and named Hu. The emperor wants a rival, King Gao, dead, and no minister will take the job. The dog volunteers. Asked how he expects to carry provisions across a thousand li of open sea, he gives the flattest answer in the whole text: men can take one day of hunger, but dogs withstand seven days of starvation. He swims for seven days and seven nights, arrives at the enemy court, and is welcomed as a marvel. King Gao laughs and quotes the proverb that a pig brings poverty and a dog brings wealth. Attendants are assigned to him. He is treated like pearl and jade. Then the king gets drunk on his own hospitality, and one evening the dog closes his jaws on him.

Pan Hu carries the severed head back over the water and lays it at the foot of the throne. Blood runs onto the floor of the audience hall and the great ministers hold each other upright. The emperor, who had promised a fief and a bride and had presumably expected to pay neither, offers a dukedom. The dog refuses it. He was promised a wife.

What follows is the part that matters legally. The head is burned and the ashes potted and buried in the mountains. Pan Hu is dressed in embroidered clothes to cover his shame, married to the woman, and sent off with five hundred porters, gold and silver, bolts of cloth on twelve poles and a band playing, into the Hui Chi mountains, where the court keeps him supplied out of tax revenue. Six sons and six daughters are born. The emperor names the boy Pan Hu King Pan, the first ancestor, Bienh Hungh in Mien, and rules that although the children were conceived from the semen of a dog they passed through a human womb and are therefore human. He gives them twelve surnames: Pan, Shen, Huang, Li, Deng, Zhou, Zhao, Hu, Tang, Feng, Lei and Jiang.

Pan Hu himself comes to a quiet, unheroic end. Tired of preserved food, he runs off one morning following the moon, sleeps beyond the peaks, and is found by his children at the foot of a mountain, gored to death by the horn of a wild goat. They dress the body in a good turban, a good shirt and a good pair of trousers, put it in a wooden coffin and go to tell the emperor.

The rest of the scroll is a schedule of privileges, and it is specific to the point of stubbornness. The poll tax is remitted. The twelve clans govern the mountains as they see fit. Two dozen named peaks are opened to them, from Zhongnan and Wudang down to Mount Wugai in Guangxi, to be tilled with swords and planted with fire. Travellers may not be arrested on the road. Ferrymen may not charge them. Officials need not be bowed to. Anyone who extorts them may be seized, hauled in and handed over for punishment. A Yao woman may not marry a Chinese commoner, and when she does the fine is three jars of mosquito relish, three hundred strings of copper coins, three hundred lengths of unjointed bamboo, three cubic zhang of raw gold silk and three pecks of chicken manure. Richard Cushman and Hjorleifur Jonsson, who published the translation this account follows, read that list as a joke the two sides were meant to share, a rule written so that breaking it costs nothing anyone would miss.

Nobody has found an original. Around two hundred copies have surfaced in China, with a handful more in Vietnam and Thailand, and Huang Yu compiled a hundred and five of them at the end of the 1980s. They disagree with each other in places. The older Chinese record of the same dog, in Fan Ye’s fifth-century History of the Later Han, gives the emperor as Gaoxin and the enemy as General Wu of the Rong, so the Emperor Ping of the charter is a later renaming of a story the Yao took from Chinese books and made their own. Barend ter Haar, reading it as a historian of Chinese religion, calls it a fake outright: the classical language is clumsy, the internal inconsistencies pile up, it names no office responsible for drafting it, and no Chinese government was ever going to hand a hill people a permanent tax exemption. Eli Alberts agrees the Yao made it and is less interested in the verdict, placing its origins with Yao headmen of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, quite possibly the enlisted leaders who went to court in person and came home with titles, for whom the charter worked as a script for dealing with empire.

Its power was never in being genuine. It was in being produced. Around 1880 a Mien leader called Tang Tsan Khwoen bought a copy as he set out with a large following to go to a new land, and walked it from Guangdong and Guangxi through Vietnam, Yunnan and Laos into the kingdom of Nan. The authorities there refused him permission to stay or to cut so much as a branch. He brought out the scroll, found a Cantonese to read it aloud to the king and his officials, and the king decided he could not forbid the Mien to settle. Tsan Khwoen got land at Phu Wae and the title Phaya Khiri, Mountain Chief.

That is also the limit of the thing. A charter only works where someone consents to hear it, and it protects nobody who cannot get an audience. By 1915 the governors of northern Thailand had dispossessed the highland minorities regardless of what anyone’s scroll said. And paper burns. In 1967 the Japanese scholar Yoshiro Shiratori photographed a copy in the resettlement village of Rom Yen; shortly afterwards its owner burned it, because in that decade any text in Chinese characters could get a man jailed as a communist. What the scroll could not do was stop being dangerous.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Charter of Emperor Ping?

The Charter of Emperor Ping is a Yao document, usually a long illustrated scroll, that records the descent of the Yao people from the dragon-dog Pan Hu and sets out the privileges an emperor granted them in return for his service. It is also called the Passport for Crossing the Mountains, in Chinese Guoshan bang, and in Iu Mien Jie sen borngv. Around two hundred copies are known from China, with a few more from Vietnam and Thailand.

What privileges does the Charter of Emperor Ping grant?

It exempts the twelve Yao clans from the poll tax and from land tax, opens more than twenty named mountains to them for swidden farming, and frees them from ferry tolls, from bowing to officials and from arrest on the road. It also allows them to seize anyone who extorts money from them and hand that person over to the authorities. Yao leaders are named and given titles at the end of the document.

Is the Charter of Emperor Ping a genuine imperial document?

Most scholars now take the Charter of Emperor Ping to be a Yao composition rather than a Chinese government record. Barend ter Haar calls it a fake, pointing to its clumsy classical language, its inconsistencies, and the absence of any named office responsible for drawing it up. Eli Alberts also treats it as Yao-made but traces it to Yao headmen of roughly the twelfth to fifteenth centuries who dealt directly with the Chinese court.

How was the Charter of Emperor Ping actually used?

It was produced in front of authorities as proof of a right to settle and move. Around 1880 the Mien leader Tang Tsan Khwoen carried a copy from Guangdong into the kingdom of Nan, had it read aloud to the king through a Cantonese translator, and was granted land and the title Phaya Khiri, Mountain Chief. The charter’s story was also sung at weddings and read at ancestral rites.

Who is Pan Hu in the Charter of Emperor Ping?

Pan Hu is the dragon-dog who kills the emperor’s rival King Gao, marries an imperial woman, fathers the six sons and six daughters who become the twelve Yao clans, and is posthumously titled King Pan, first ancestor. He dies in the mountains, gored by the horn of a wild goat. The older Chinese version of his story, in the fifth-century History of the Later Han, places him at the court of Emperor Gaoxin instead.