The Great Fusion of Northern Peoples

From the Wei and Jin on, the Xiongnu, Xianbei, Jie, Di, Qiang and other peoples who had moved inward lived interspersed with the local Han and gradually settled. They learned farming from the Han and shifted from herding to agriculture, while the Han learned herding from the northern peoples and took up their food, clothing and implements; the hu bed, hu cake and hu dress entered the Central Plains. Rulers of the Sixteen Kingdoms and Northern Dynasties mostly cooperated with Han scholars and kept the existing ways of governing the Central Plains. Ethnic relations at times flared into conflict and even war, but the overall trend was that barriers gradually dissolved and relations eased. After Emperor Xiaowen's reforms of the Northern Wei, fusion quickened. By the late Northern Dynasties northern China saw a great fusion of peoples: they were in close contact economically and influenced one another in culture, customs and language; intermarriage grew common, and many who had moved inward merged into the Han, while the Han took in the blood and culture of other peoples and became more vigorous. Northern Dynasties folk songs such as the Ballad of Mulan and the Song of the Chile are products of this blending; the lines “The Chile plain, beneath the Yin Mountains, the sky like a dome covers the four fields” vividly depict the northern steppe, originally in Xianbei and later translated into Chinese. The imperial houses of the Sui and Tang, the Yang and Li, had close blood ties with Xianbei nobles. The great fusion of northern peoples laid the basis for unity and prosperity in the Sui and Tang and promoted the pattern of diversity in unity of the Chinese nation.