Brief Information on the Black Tatars (Heida shilüe)
Two Song envoys' eyewitness report on the Mongols, whom they call Black Tatars, 1233 to 1236.
Full title Brief information on the Black Tatars (Heida shilüe), Russian translation, Problemy vostokovedeniia 1960 no. 5
Краткие сведения о черных татарах (Хэй-да ши-люэ)
Peng Daya and Xu Ting, Song envoys
Peng Daya and Xu Ting were envoys of the Southern Song court who visited the Mongols in 1233 and in 1235 to 1236. Their report, dated 1237, is a Chinese eyewitness sketch of Mongol society at the court of Ögedei under the name Black Tatars. It is a direct contemporary witness for the Tatar name. The atlas does not hold the text: the corpus knows it from a 1960 Russian translation (web text), and the Chinese original survives only in later Chinese compilations.
- How they knew
- Eyewitness
- Who “Tartar” means here
- Here Black Tatars means the Mongols themselves, at the court of Ögedei. Song writers used Tatar as a wide label for the peoples of the northern steppe.
- Why read it
- A Chinese witness from the 1230s who was actually there and who uses the Tatar name for the Mongols, before European travellers reached them.
- Watch out
- The text survives only in later Chinese compilations, and the Russian translation is the only European-language full version apart from a German one. The atlas quotes nothing from this work.
What it says
No quotes from this one yet. Its text is out of reach for now, or the scan could not be read.
The fine print
How we know
firsthand The author saw the places or people described.
firsthand observation by two Southern Song envoys to the Mongols 1233 and 1235-1236
Research notes
- Text survives in later Chinese compilations; Russian translation is the only European-language full version besides Olbricht-Pinks German.
Why it matters
Chinese eyewitness ethnography of the Mongols in the 1230s using the name Black Tatars, a direct contemporary witness for the Tatar ethnonym.
Places named
Mongolia; northern China
Peoples named
Mongols (Black Tatars); Ögedei court; Jin remnants