Ny Wang
13th centuries political entity
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- 3 chapters
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Through Polity
Two kinds of reading have been offered. On one, the name belongs to a particular polity, and Haripuñjaya has been proposed for it; on the other, the Chinese phrase describes a form of inheritance found widely in the region rather than any one state.
Chinese record
The Man Shu (蠻书), compiled by Fán Chuò (樊绰) in the 9th century, gives the name as 女王 and records that the country was attacked by 20,000 Man but prevailed. Man (蠻) was a general Chinese term for the non-Chinese peoples of the south, used pejoratively; in this instance the attackers were probably troops of Nanzhao.
Four centuries later, Ny Wang joined the Lavo Kingdom in sending an embassy to the Yuan dynasty in the reign of Kublai Khan in 1289.
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Location
Its exact location remains unclear. The Chinese record places Ny Wang ten day-stages west of Huan-chou, near present-day Hà Tĩnh in Vietnam, and more than thirty stages from the Chên-nan chieh-tu on the Nanzhao frontier, possibly in what is now central Yunnan. Its southern border is said to meet Chenla. Gordon Luce places it in the middle Mekong valley at the great bend east of Vieng Chan, while Kanokporn Numtong argues for northern Thailand.
Interpretations
The records describe a country ruled by a queen, which has been taken to indicate an Austric-speaking population among whom matriarchal regimes are attested. The joint embassy of 1289 has led Thai scholars to propose that Ny Wang was Haripuñjaya, which its own foundation tradition has ruled at the outset by Jamadevi, a princess of Lavo, whereas Luce takes Haripuñjaya to be the K'un-lun of the Man Shu.
Tatsuo Hoshino reads the same records as evidence of a widespread practice rather than of one polity. He notes that the Yunnan Zhi, another name for the same 9th-century work, compiled in Chinese-controlled Vietnam, places a land of women in the Mekong valley as well, and connects the notices with an inheritance system he describes as still current in the region, in which the youngest married daughter inherits the family house together with adjacent land and paddy fields, her husband managing it for a generation before the pattern repeats. On that reading the king, heir apparent, princes and commanders may have been the temporary managers of a country whose land the women held, and he compares Minangkabau society in Indonesia, where the men migrate away from and later back to the ancestral lands of their women.