Donghu People - Name

Name

The Chinese name Donghu compounds dong 東 "east, eastern; owner; host" and hu 胡 "non-Han-Chinese, foreign, 'barbarian'; reckless; dewlap; whiskers (hu 鬍); surname". The "Eastern" Donghu exonym compares with "Western" Xihu 西胡 "non-Chinese peoples in India, Persia, Turkestan, etc." and "Five" Wu Hu 五胡 "five northern nomadic tribes involved in the Wu Hu uprising (304-316 CE)". Hill (2009:59) translates Xihu as "Western Hu" and notes,

The term hu 胡 was used to denote non-Han Chinese populations. It is, rather unsatisfactorily, commonly translated as 'barbarian'. While sometimes it was used in this general way to describe people of non-Han descent, and carried the same negative overtones of the English term, this was not always the case. Most frequently, it was used to denote people, usually of Caucasoid or partial Caucasoid appearance, living to the north and west of China. (2009:453)

The usual English translation of Donghu is "Eastern Barbarians" (e.g., Watson, di Cosmo, Pulleyblank, and Yu), and the partial translation "Eastern Hu" is occasionally used (Pulleyblank). Note that "Eastern Barbarians" also commonly translates the Chinese exonym Dongyi 東夷 "ancient peoples in eastern China, Korea, Japan, etc.".

The ancient Chinese Sinocentric worldview differentiated central Hua or Huaxia 華夏 "China, Chinese" and peripheral Yi 夷 "barbarian, non-Chinese, foreigner" (see Hua-Yi distinction). Many names besides Hu originally had pejorative "barbarian" meanings, for instance Nanman 南蠻 ("southern barbarians") and Beidi 北狄 ("northern barbarians"). The sinologist Edwin G. Pulleyblank explains:

At the dawn of history we find the Chinese, self-identified by such terms as Hsia and Hua, surrounded and interspersed by other peoples with whom they were frequently in conflict and whom they typically looked down upon as inferior beings in the same was the Hellenes looked down on the barbaroi and, indeed, as human we-groups have always looked down on their neighbors.

The historian Nicola di Cosmo concludes:

We can thus reasonably say that, by the end of the fourth century B.C., the term "Hu" applied to various ethnic groups (tribes, groups of tribes, and even states) speaking different languages and generally found living scattered across a wide territory. Their fragmentation, however, could be turned, when the need arose, into a superior form of political organization (a "state"). This explains why hu appears often preceded by a qualifier that we may take for a specific ethnic goup, as with the Lin Hu and the Tung Hu. Whether or not it had originally been an ethnonym, such a designation had been lost by the Warring States period.

In Modern Standard Chinese usage hu has lost this negative connotation and typically means "foreign; imported" in words like erhu 二 胡 (lit. "two foreign") "Chinese two-string fiddle", hutiao 胡桃 ("foreign peach") "walnut", and huluobo 胡萝卜 ("foreign radish") "carrot".

The modern Chinese Dōnghú 東胡 and Mongolian language Tünghu pronunciations historically differ from the Old Chinese pronunciation, which roughly dates from the Warring States Period (476-221 BCE) when Donghu was first recorded. Old Chinese reconstructions of Dōnghú include *Tûngγâg, *Tungg'o, *Tewnggaγ, *Tongga, and *Tôŋgâ.

The etymology of Donghu is "unknown". The traditional explanation, going back to the 2nd-century Han scholar Cui Hao 崔浩, is that the Donghu were originally located "east of the Xiongnu" (who were one of the Wu Hu). A modern politically correct explanation is that Chinese Donghu or Mongolian Tünghu was an ethnonym transcription and did not literally mean "Eastern Barbarian".

Some dictionaries confuse Donghu 東胡 with Tungus; Tungusic people (Chinese Tonggu 通古). This "chance similarity in modern pronunciation", writes Pulleyblank, "led to the once widely held assumption that the Eastern Hu were Tungusic in language. This is a vulgar error with no real foundation."