92 xavier tremblaythat these “Sogdians” did not come from Sogdiana at all, long since left
by their families, but from China proper.^77 From the Han epoch onward,
numerous Sogdians settled in China where they often became part of
the gentry.^78 These “Sogdians” from China were probably polyglots,
and at least some of them were Buddhists, but one cannot extrapolate
from them to Sogdiana’s culture.
In this context, attention should be drawn to the earliest translator
of Buddhist texts, the famous translator An Shigao , who settled
at Luoyang in 148 AD, and who is often said to have been a Parthian
since his name, An, is an abridgment of Anxi < Arak, the dynastic
name of the Arsacids. Forte (1995) has shown that the Chinese texts
mention An Shigao in two totally different contexts: (1) rather precisely,
as the son of a king, sent as a hostage to the court of China, where
he founded a family of foreign merchants and high of cials which still
furnished ministers in the seventh century and (2) rather vaguely in
Buddhist accounts, as the son of the king of An, who ew to China
and became something of a astrologue who initiated the translation of
Indian literacy. No sources make him de nitely a monk (Forte 1995,
pp. 74ff.) and the fact that he had offspring, although it constitutes no
rm proof, does not point towards this direction. An Shigao cannot
have originated from the imperial family of Parthia, who had no regu-
lar relations with China^79 and was separated from it by Sogdiana or
the Kua empire. The assumption that An Shigao would issue from
Parthian petty kingdoms (e.g., the Surens in S stan?) is hardly more
satisfying, since the geographical distance remains enormous and no
diplomatic relations are attested. An Shigao’s connexion with putative
Indo-Parthians^80 is completely speculative.
An Shigao’s name actually may point to Central Asia or Bactria.
In fact, the sources say that Shigao was no name, but his title or style
(zi), while his personal name was Qing. Shigao represents Old
Chinese (OC) * ps/ b^81 -kau (> Early Middle Chinese (EMC) *iajh(^77) See also Grenet 1996a, pp. 67ff.
(^78) Pulleyblank 1952, pp. 41ff.; p. 134 n. 7. An Shigao’s family is a further example
(cf. infra).
(^79) The evidence has hardly grown since Hirth 1899; cf. Leslie & Gardiner 1996,
pp. 251f.; Posch 1998.
(^80) Such a hypothesis was expressly formulated by Aramaki & Kominami 1993, pp.
229–230 n. 30.
(^81) Pulleyblank 1962, p. 234, corrected along the lines of Pulleyblank 1973, p. 120.
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