# Jie people

The Jie (Chinese: 羯; pinyin: Jié; Wade–Giles: Chieh$^2$; Middle Chinese: [ki̯at]$^{:246}$) were members of a tribe of northern China in the fourth century. In historiography, they are regarded as one of the Five Barbarians during the Sixteen Kingdoms period. Under Shi Le and his family, they established the Later Zhao dynasty which dominated northern China for most of its existence from 319 to 351. The Jie ceased to play a role in Chinese history after Ran Min's culling order and the wars that followed the collapse of Later Zhao, although some historians believe that certain prominent figures from later periods such as Hou Jing and Erzhu Rong may have been descendants of the Jie.

## Name and origins

There are widely differing accounts of the exact ethnic origins of the Jie, with two theories uncertainly suggesting that the Jie language was either Turkic or Yeniseian. According to Sinologist Mark Edward Lewis, the Jie were of Indo-European origin (probably Iranian).
According to the Book of Wei (6th century AD), the name Jie was derived from the Jiéshì area (羯室, modern Yushe County in Shanxi province), where the Jie resided.$^{:6,149}$
According to the Book of Jin, the ancestors of Shi Le were a part of the multi-ethnic Southern Xiongnu tribe known as Qiāngqú (羌渠), although by the 4th-century, Shi Le and his people were classed separate from the Xiongnu as a "miscellaneous hu" (雜胡; záhú) group. Edwin Pulleyblank believes the Qiangqu represent the Kangju state of Sogdia.$^{:247}$ Although Pulleyblank suggested that they might have been Tocharian in origin, most scholars believe that Kangju was constituted by an Eastern Iranian people. Some have linked the names Shi (石) and Jie (羯) to a Sogdian statelet known as 石國 Shíguó (literally, "Stone Country", at Chach Zhěshí 赭時, now Tashkent, also meaning "Stone City" in Common Turkic). Also, An Lushan, a Tang rebel general, had a Sogdian stepfather and was called a Jiehu.
The name of the parent house of Turko-Mongol Barlas and Borjigin clans (house of Genghis Khan and Timur) was Kiyat, almost identical to the Middle Chinese pronunciation of the name Jie, /ki̯at/.
Others claim that the Jie were an ancient Yeniseian-speaking tribe related to the Ket people, who today live between the Ob and Yenisey rivers—the character 羯 (jié) is pronounced /kiɛt̚/ in Hokkien, /kʰiːt̚/ or /kiːt̚/ in Cantonese, /ciat̚/ in Hakka and ketsu in Japanese, implying that the ancient pronunciation might have been fairly close to Ket (kʰet). The root 羯 may be transliterated as Jié- or Tsze$^2$- and an older form, < kiat, may also be reconstructed. This ethnonym might be cognate with the ethnonyms of Yeniseian-speaking peoples, such as the Ket and the Kott (who spoke the extinct Kott language, but their ethnonym is believed to have Buryat origins). Pulleyblank (1962) connected the ethnonym to Proto-Yeniseian *qeˀt/s "stone". Vovin et al. (2016) also pointed to *keˀt "person, human being" as another possible source. Alexander Vovin also suggests that the Xiongnu spoke a Yeniseian language, further connecting them with the Jie people.
Among the Yeniseian languages, Jie is hypothesized to be Pumpokolic. Vovin, Vajda, and de la Vaissière have suggested that Jie shares the same idiosyncrasies with the Pumpokol language, and the two are therefore closely related. This argument is strengthened by the fact that in northern Mongolia, Yeniseian-derived hydronyms have been demonstrated to be exclusively Pumpokolic, while influence from other Yeniseian languages is only found further north. This therefore lends credence to the theory that the Jie are a Pumpokolic-speaking tribe, and confirms that the Pumpokolic-speaking Yeniseians existed in the core territory of the Xiongnu state.
Other sources link the Jie to the Lesser Yuezhi (Xiao Yuezhi 小月氏), who remained in China as vassals of the Xiongnu and then the Han dynasty.
According to Chen Yong, while Shi Le and his biological family were ethnically Jie, the other recorded "Jie" in history were from a wide array of miscellaneous hu tribes in Bing province and Hebei, who only adopted the label during the rise of Shi Le and Later Zhao. Chen asserts that Shi Le, due to the small population of the actual Jie in contrast to the numerous other hu that made up his power base, undertook ethnic policies to unite the assortment of people under a common "Jie" or "guoren" (國人; countryman) identity, which would explain the sudden spike of the Jie population around this time. He also adds that a considerable number of these hu were from the Western Regions, citing the claim of their high noses and full beards, and that there were instances of the Han Chinese becoming part of the Jie.

## History
### Sixteen Kingdoms

Most of what is known about the Jie people comes from the Later Zhao dynasty, one of the Sixteen Kingdoms that existed in the first half of the 4th-century. The earliest recorded Jie was Shi Le, a minor chieftain from Wuxiang County in Bing province (roughly modern-day Shanxi) under the Western Jin dynasty. However, his name was not originally "Shi Le", as it does not appear that the Jie had family names; Instead, his original name was either Bei (㔨) or Fule (匐勒). He became chieftain by succeeding his father Zhouhezhu (周曷朱) and grandfather Yeyiyu (耶奕于) before him. When a famine struck Bing in 303, he and many other Jie and hu people became displaced. The Jin provincial inspector, looking to fund his military for an ongoing civil war, had them captured and sold into slavery. The Jie and hu were scattered around the Hebei and Shandong regions, with Shi Le himself becoming a slave.
After attaining his freedom, Shi Le became a bandit and later a rebel leader with his Han Chinese friend, Ji Sang, who gave Shi Le his name. When their rebellion was defeated in 307, Shi Le joined the Xiongnu-led Han-Zhao dynasty, where he quickly rose through the ranks and became a key commander in their war against the Western Jin. He was also effectively a powerful warlord who controlled the eastern parts of the empire and made the city of Xiangguo (襄國, in modern Xingtai, Hebei) his capital. In 319, Shi Le broke away and established the Later Zhao. He conquered his former state in 329, and while some areas remained independent, the Later Zhao became the hegemonic power of northern China, reaching a stalemate with the Eastern Jin and Cheng-Han dynasties in the south.
During his reign, Shi Le issued a ban on the word "hu", replacing it with the word "guoren" (國人; countryman) when referring to the Jie and other miscellaneous hu tribes. Shi Le's family also had an unusual practice of heavily adopting people into their clan. His brother, Shi Hu, for example was a distant cousin who was adopted by his father during their tribal years. Shi Le continued this practice during his rise to power, adopting the likes of Shi Hui (石会), previously Zhang Beidu (張㔨督) of a different hu tribe, as well as Shi Kan and Shi Cong, who were Han Chinese. The adopted members were turned into powerful princes and military generals. However, after Shi Le died, Shi Hu violently seized power from his biological son, Shi Hong and ascended the throne in 334.
Shi Hu shifted the capital to Ye and ruled over northern China for roughly 15 years. Records describe him as a brutal tyrant who oppressed the common people through his excessive building projects, concubine collection and military campaigns. By the end of his reign, he was troubled by a succession crisis, and after his death in 349, his family members engaged in an internecine struggle over the throne. During the course of the conflict, Shi Hu's adopted Han Chinese grandson, Shi Min, was promised the role of Crown Prince, but soon took control of the emperor and capital by force after his promise was reneged upon. The Zhao state then split into two parts when Shi Zhi, a son of Shi Hu, formed a faction against Shi Min in the old capital of Xiangguo.
After surviving multiple assassination attempts, Shi Min suspected that he could not trust the Jie and tribespeople in Ye. In 349, he ordered the killing of every Jie and hu people, identifying them by their high noses and full beards. Shi Min personally led his soldiers to massacre the tribes in Ye while his generals purged their armies of tribesmen. According to some sources, more than 200,000 of them were slain, but a large portion of them were also Han Chinese who were mistaken due to their facial features. Regardless, the culling order appears to have had an adverse effect on the Jie population. Later that year, Shi Min massacred the Shi clan in Ye, changed his name to Ran Min and proclaimed himself Emperor of (Ran) Wei. He also reversed the genocide policy to avoid causing more tribesmen to join Shi Zhi's side.
In 351, the final ruler of Later Zhao, Shi Zhi and his family were massacred in Xiangguo, bringing the dynasty to an end. The last member of the Shi clan fled to the Eastern Jin in Jiankang, but was executed upon his arrival. The remaining Jie people eventually became subjects of the Xianbei-led Former Yan, who defeated Ran Min and conquered the Hebei and Shandong regions.

### Later history

Hereafter, the Jie people seemingly faded into obscurity. Despite this, there were several figures in later history who may have been of Jie ethnicity. Gai Wu, a rebel during the Northern Wei dynasty, is described in the Book of Qi as a Jiehu (羯胡), although the Book of Wei states that he was a Lushuihu instead. Both Erzhu Rong and Hou Jing, two famous warlords of the Northern Dynasties, were identified as Qihu (契胡) and Jiehu respectively, and modern scholars have suggested that they could have been be related to the Jie. The Tang dynasty rebel, An Lushan was also called a Jiehu, and according to the unearthed epitaph of Shi Chonggui, the Shi clan of Shatuo origin that ruled the Later Jin (936–947) claimed that they were descendants of Shi Le.

## Religion

Both Shi Le and Shi Hu endorsed Buddhism by granting the Kuchean monk, Fotu Cheng a privileged position within their government. Buddhism was at first restricted to government officials, but as the religion became increasingly popular among commoners as well, Shi Hu promoted religious freedom, stating that his people have the right to worship the Buddha, who was a "foreigner" like him. Under Later Zhao, Fotu Cheng's teachings spread, and many Buddhist temples were built in northern China.
The Jie practiced cremation, which was notably a custom in the city-state of Chach in the Western Regions. Scholars have speculate that the Jie believed in Sogdian Zoroastrianism, stating that there was a temple or altar in Ye called "Hutian" (胡天), which was the Chinese name for the Zoroastrian god, Ahura Mazda. Due to the veneration of fire in Zoroastrianism, another example they cite is the giant lamp that was built in Shi Hu's palace for his crowning ceremony as Heavenly King.