Who was the famed Huji 胡姫 (Jp. Koki) who appears in Ishida Mikinosuke's 石田幹之助 Choan no Haru 長安の春 (Changan Spring) and who was celebrated in Tang poetry as the ideal of the charming woman of the Tang. Mistaken or imperfect explanations, such as that she was Persian or of Iranian extraction or less frequently that she came from one of the nomadic peoples of the north, abound even today. However, I have defined Huji as "young Sogdian woman" on the basis of the meaning of the Chinese characters that make up her appellation, and considering the historical circumstances, I would like to have her understood as "a beautiful, young Sogdian woman who entranced the world with the music and dance of the western regions during the Tang dynasty." In order to do this, I first make a comprehensive introduction of historical materials, some previously known and others heretofore unknown, to verify that the word Hu meant Sogdian during the Tang dynasty. Central to the argument here are the Bongo zomyo 梵語雜名, a dictionary of Sanskrit and Chinese vocabulary that was imported to Japan from Tang during the Heian period and a map of the Asian world written in Chinese and Tibetan. To these I have added documents in Chinese and Tibetan that have been excavated from Dunhuang and Turfan and records written in ancient Turkic found on stelae in Mongolia. Historians in post-World War II Japan who have shared the point of view of "Japan in East Asia" have drawn a rich historical portrait. There are, of course, points among their conclusions that deserve high evaluation, but in the approach of creating an "East Asian History" that is the stage for Japan, I feel there has been an overemphasis on the vision of the Tang dynasty as tilted toward the East. In my recent book Shirukurodo to Toteikoku (The Silk Road and the Tang Empire), by Kodansha, I have advocated the resurrection of the proper view of "Tang dynasty of the Eurasian continent, " rather than the antithetical view of "Tang dynasty of East Asia" and have tried to describe this view. This article supplements the arguments that were not fleshed out in that work. In other words, in order to investigate how educated figures of the Tang recognized the geography of Eurasian world, in which Asia occupied the core, I made use of a map of the Asian world recorded in Chinese and Tibetan, as noted above. Furthermore, I analyze the well-known "theory of the four lords (sons of heaven) in the world". I then bolster my argument in the book that Tang was an empire situated in the eastern portion of the Eurasian continent and its relationship with central Eurasia through the overland Silk Road was most important, and at the same time I advocate expanding our perspective beyond the framework of "Japan in East Asia" to move toward "Japan and the Eurasian world."
