Hanpu

Hanpu (Chinese: 函普; pinyin: Hánpǔ) or Hambo (Korean: 함보), later Wanyan Hanpu, was a leader of the Jurchen Wanyan clan in the early tenth century. According to the ancestral story of the Wanyan clan, Hanpu came from Goryeo (Korea) when he was sixty years old, reformed Jurchen customary law, and then married a sixty-year-old local woman who bore him three children. His descendants eventually united Jurchen tribes into a federation and established the Jin dynasty in 1115. In 1136 or 1137, Hanpu was retrospectively given the temple name Jin Shizu (金始祖), or "first ancestor of Jin."

Chinese historians have long debated whether Hanpu was of Silla, Goryeo, or Jurchen ethnicity. Since the 1980s, they have chiefly argued that he was a Jurchen who had lived in Silla, the state that had dominated the Korean peninsula until it was destroyed by Goryeo in 935. Western scholars usually treat Hanpu's story as a legend, but agree that it hints to contacts between some Jurchen clans and the states of Goryeo and Balhae (a state located between Jurchen lands and Silla until it was destroyed in 926) in the early tenth century. In Korea, a recent KBS history special treated Hanpu as a native Silla man who moved north and settled in Jurchen lands during the demise of Silla.

Name

Hanpu is known under different transliterations in Chinese sources. He is called Kanfu (龕福) in the Records of Things Heard in Songmo (松漠紀聞; after 1155), the memoirs of a Song Chinese ambassador who was forced to stay in Jin territory for more than 10 years starting in 1131. The Shenlu Ji 神麓記, a lost book cited in the Collected Documents on the Treaties with the North during Three Reigns (三朝北盟會編; c. 1196), refers to him as Kenpu (掯浦), whereas Research on the Origin of the Manchus (滿洲源流考; 1777) calls him Hafu (哈富).

Ancestor of the Wanyan clan

Because the early Jurchens had no written records, the story of Hanpu was first transmitted orally. According to the History of Jin (compiled in the 1340s), Hanpu arrived from Goryeo at the age of sixty and settled among the Jurchen Wanyan clan. Other sources claim that Hanpu was from Silla, the state that had ruled the Korean peninsula but was annexed by Goryeo in 935. The same story recounts that when Hanpu left Goryeo, his two brothers remained behind, one in Goryeo and one in the Balhae area. Because the Jurchens considered Hanpu to be the sixth-generation ancestor of Wanyan Wugunai (1021–1074), historians postulate that Hanpu lived in the early tenth century, when the Jurchens still consisted of independent tribes, or sometime between the founding of Goryeo in 918 and its destruction of Silla in 935.

The Wanyan clan then belonged to a group of Jurchen tribes that Chinese and Khitan documents called "wild", "raw", or "uncivilized" (shēng 生). These "wild Jurchens" lived between the Changbai Mountains in the south (now at the border between North Korea and Northeast China) and the Sungari River in the north, outside the territory of the rising Liao dynasty (907–1125) and little influenced by Chinese culture.

To resolve an endless cycle of vendettas between two clans, Hanpu managed to make both parties accept a new rule: from then on, the family of a killer would compensate the victim's relatives with a gift of horses, cattle, and money. Historian Herbert Franke has compared this aspect of Jurchen customary law to the old Germanic practice of Wergeld. As a reward for putting an end to the feuds, Hanpu was married to a sixty-year-old woman who then bore him one daughter and two sons. A lost book called the Shenlu Ji states that Hanpu's wife was 40 years old. Hanpu and his descendants were then formally received into the Wanyan clan.

Hanpu's ethnicity

Chinese scholars have debated the ethnicity of Hanpu. They usually agree that Hanpu's "coming from Goryeo" does not mean he was of Goryeo ethnicity, since the Goryeo territory was populated by several ethnic groups. The people of the time did not always distinguish between state and ethnic group, so that in modern terms Hanpu may have been a Jurchen from the state of Silla, a man of Goryeo, or a Silla man.

It has been proposed that Hanpu was not even from the Korean peninsula, instead what really happened was that a power on the peninsula ruled the Jurchen tribe he came from, or that he was from the Eastern Jurchens (Changbai Mountain Jurchens) who did not live in the Korean peninsula, according to historians on the Jurchen.

Chinese historian Jin Yufu (1887–1962) was aware that historical documents claim that Hanpu was either from Goryeo or from Silla, and found both views worthy of consideration. Many historians have accepted the claim found in Records of Things Heard in Songmo and other sources like Ma Duanlin's Wenxian Tongkao (1317) that Hanpu was "a man of Silla". The annals of king Yejong (r. 1105–1122) in the History of Goryeo report that Wanyan Wugunai's son Yingge (盈歌; 1053-1103) considered Goryeo as his "parent country" (父母之邦) because his clan's ancestor Hanpu had come from Goryeo. However, such a statement may have been part of the Jurchens' diplomatic efforts to obtain Goryeo's help in fighting the Khitan Liao.

Historian Sun Jinji has claimed that Hanpu's surname was already Wanyan before he moved from Goryeo, and that he was therefore a Jurchen whose family had lived in Silla and then Goryeo before moving back to Jurchen land. Chinese historians Menggutuoli and Zhao Yongchun both argue that Hanpu's ancestors were Jurchens who had lived in Silla and had been absorbed into Goryeo after the latter defeated Silla.

Western scholars usually consider Hanpu's story legendary. Herbert Franke explains that this Jurchen "ancestral legend" probably indicates that the Wanyan clan absorbed immigrants from Goryeo and Balhae sometime in the tenth century. Frederick W. Mote, who calls this account of the founding of the Wanyan clan a "tribal legend", claims that Hanpu's two brothers (one who stayed in Goryeo and one in Balhae) might have represented "the tribe's memory of their ancestral links to these two peoples."

Legacy

Aguda, eighth-generation descendant of Hanpu, founded the Jin dynasty in 1115

The Wanyan clan rose to prominence among the Jurchens after 1000 CE. Hanpu's sixth-generation descendant Wanyan Wugunai (1021–1074) started to consolidate the dispersed Jurchen tribes into a federation. Wugunai's grandson Aguda (1068–1123) defeated the Jurchens' Khitan overlords of the Liao dynasty and founded the Jin dynasty in 1115. By 1127, the Jin had conquered all of north China from the Song dynasty.

In 1136 or 1137, soon after Emperor Xizong of Jin (r. 1135–1150) had been crowned, Hanpu was given the posthumous name "Jingyuan Emperor" (景元皇帝) and the temple name "Shizu" (始祖), or "first ancestor." In 1144 or 1145, Hanpu's burial site was named "Guangling" (光陵). In December 1145 or January 1146, his posthumous title was augmented to that of "Yihui Jingyuan Emperor" (懿憲景元皇帝).

Family members

Hanpu's wife posthumously received the title of Empress Mingyi 明懿皇后 in 1136. The History of Jin, an official history that was compiled by Mongol scholar Toqto'a in the 1340s, lists Hanpu's family members as follows:

Children:

• Wulu 烏魯 (eldest son and successor)
• Wolu 斡魯 (second son)
• Zhusiban 注思板 (daughter)

Siblings:

• Agunai 阿古廼 (elder brother, who is said to have liked Buddhism and to have stayed in Goryeo when Hanpu left)
• Baohuoli 保活里 (younger brother)

References

Works cited

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