Preliminary Investigation Of The Institutional Imitation Of Tang Dynasty In Local Administration System By Silla

The history of Tang Dynasty is particularly seductive in the ancient history of China. During this period, the political, economic, cultural and military forces had reached a so advanced level that people from many different countries around traveled to China in succession, forming a spectacular event of "Universal consciousness toward Chang’an", thus made China walk in the forefront of the world. Especially, the Korean Peninsula showed great admire to the advanced culture of Tang Dynasty and was deeply influenced by that, making it an important part in Han culture circle. In this dissertation, we choose the reform of the place names of Xinluo area as the theme to investigate the influence of culture of Tang Dynasty on Xinluo local culture.The dissertation consists of5chapters.The first chapter is introduction. In which we summarize the achievements and shortages of research on the relationship between Tang and Silla by the scholars at home and abroad, and then we put forward the research train of thought in this dissertation. There have been plenty of researches about the relationship between Tang and the Korean Peninsula in the academic circles, most of which pay more attention to the political level, mainly focusing on the policy of Tang to the Korean Peninsula, the role Tang played in the process that Silla unified the Korean Peninsula, the Fan Fang system of Tang to Silla, the advanced system and cultural absorption of Silla from Tang, and so on. The analysis in these researches is mainly in the aspects of macroscopic. Taking the advanced system and cultural absorption for example, the study is conducted mainly according to the four key elements of the East Asian cultural circle of Chinese characters proposed by Xidao Dingsheng, with rare cases of study in depth on one special thesis. There was a Chinesization reform of local place names throughout the whole territory of Silla in the16th year of Jingde King (757A. D.), which has attracted the attention of the academic circle, however, just as a case of cultural absorption of Silla from Tang without enough regards. In the second chapter we mainly introduce the development of the relationship between Tang and Silla. During the Tang dynasty, the Korean Peninsula experienced the three Kingdoms era and finally unified into a kingdom by Silla partially located in the southeast, and China played the key role. Before the unification, even the national security of Silla was placed in jeopardy because the national power was far weaker than that of Kuguryo and Paekche. Considering the situation, Silla spared no effort to develop active diplomatic affairs with China and set up military alliance with Tang, owing to which the two kingdoms destroyed Paekche and Kuguryo successively. After the demise of Kuguryo, the interests of Tang and Silla came to be in conflict. Silla took the opportunity to provoke a war that lasted for more than seven years with Tang to achieve the unification of the Korean Peninsula, which produced a rift between the two countries. Even so, the Silla after unification dissolved the rift through positive "Pro-Tang" policies to meet the urgent demand of experiences of governing a great country from Tang, and finally became the most important vassal state of Tang.In chapter3, we chiefly introduce the cultural absorption of Silla from Tang. The long-term stability of the close relationship between these two countries provided a convenient condition for Silla to learn the advanced cultural system from Tang, which was very favorable for the development of Silla. In the central political system, Silla formed centralized authority according to the actual situation and reformed the corresponding official names, consulting the system of three provinces and six ministries of Tang. In the local administrative system, Silla formed a state-prefecture-county three levels administrative system, and took the office set and official names of Tang as reference. In the field of characters, Silla had always been using Chinese characters as the official document language and continuing to make series of incentive policies to promote the dissemination of Chinese characters over the Korean Peninsula. In the aspect of Confucianism, Silla set up related courses to promote the spread of Confucianism, making the future generations benefit more from the thoughts of Confucianism.In chapter4we mainly describe the details of Chinesization reform of local place names in the16th year of Jingde King (757A. D.). To make it more intuitive, we show the name changes before and after in the form of tables and summarize six principles of the Chinesization according to that, which are unified name format, homophonic substitution, Confucianism nomenclature, important history event nomenclature and geographic nomenclature. The ultimate criterion these principles conformed to was to make the place names of Silla more Chinese characteristics by reducing and even eliminating the use of the national language of Silla in the name of places. The reform of place names was also very cautious to make the names show more refined features with fully utilizing of the semantics of Chinese characters.Chapter5is the conclusion. The Chinesization reform of local place names throughout the whole territory of Silla by Jingde King was deeply influenced by the culture of Tang Dynasty especially by Confucianism. Owing to the long-term stability of the close relationship with Tang, Silla could make great progress in politics, economic, culture and other aspects, so that achieved the national development in a peaceful and stable environment.In the process of writing this paper, we consulted a lot of literature and philosophy references and made detailed analysis of the cultural absorption reflected from the reform of place names. One small detail that may be ignored by the academic circle will initially come out.