>>10271062 >>10274595,1 >>10274595,2 >>10274595,3 >>10274595,4 >>10274595,5 >>10274595,6 >>10274595,7 >>10274595,8 >>10274595,9 >>10274595,10 >>10274595,11 >>10274595,12 >>10274595,13 >>10274595,14 >>10274595,15 >>10274595,16 >>10274595,17 >>10274595,18 >>10274595,19 >>10274595,20 >>10274595,21 >>10274595,22 >>10274595,23 >>10274595,24 >>10274595,25 >>10274595,26 >>10274595,27 >>10274595,28 >>10274595,29 >>10274595,30 >>10274595,31 >>10274595,32 >>10274595,33 >>10274595,34 >>10274595,35 >>10274595,36 >>10274595,37It is apparent here that Han’er, “man of Han,” means inhabitants of the Central Plains, that is, Chinese. Hanren also shows up in a discussion of Buddhism in the Weishu:
From now on, if anyone dares to serve the Hu gods by making statues of clay and bronze, they will be executed along with their entire family. Although they are said to be Hu gods, when you ask Hu people today, they say they have no such gods. This [the spread of Buddhism] all owes to those Han scoundrels of former times, Liu Yuanzhen and Lü Boqiang and their followers, who invoked the absurd sayings of those Hu beggars [i.e., Buddhists], embellished by the falsehoods of Laozi and Zhuangzi. None of it is true.40
In his study of the emergence of the ethnonym Han, Shaoyun Yang has found other evidence to suggest that Northern Wei literati were aware of this meaning of Han and that they used it in speaking about their language, that is, as Hanyu.41 Certainly this was the impression held by scholars during the Song dynasty. In Zizhi tongjian, Sima Guang refers to the wish of the Northern Wei ruler to remove the crown prince because “he is no longer like us and has taken on the qualities of the Han.” In his commentary, Hu Sanxing (1230–1302) explained to the reader, “The Xianbei called the people of the Central Country ‘Han.’”42
So it seems that the adoption of Han as a term for “the Chinese” was indeed well under way by the mid-sixth century. By virtue of these semantic shifts, Hua could also not conveniently be used by northerners to talk about Chinese in the south, so a new word, Nanren (Southerner), was introduced around this same time as a means of speaking about them.43 Southerners, on the other hand, continued to refer to themselves freely as Hua and to nomads (former nomads, really), as Yi; the term Beiren (Northerner) also emerged, but as a purely regional referent, applicable to anyone, Chinese or Särbi.44 The long life enjoyed by all these words which remained part of the Chinese political vocabulary for centuries, is testament to the fundamental divide between north and south, a divide eventually papered over by Han.
