Japanese Missions to Tang China (630–894): The Kentōshi

The Japanese missions to Tang China, known in Japanese as kentōshi, were official embassies sent by the Japanese court to China between 630 and 838, with a final mission planned and cancelled in 894. Carrying diplomats, students and Buddhist monks, they were the main channel through which Japan absorbed the law, religion, learning and arts of the Tang dynasty. Their influence can still be seen in Japanese Buddhism, writing and the layout of its old capitals.

Background

Japan’s rulers in the Asuka period had already sent embassies to the Sui dynasty, in 600 and 607, the second led by Ono no Imoko. These visits followed the reform programme associated with Prince Shōtoku, which looked to China for models of centralised government and Buddhist culture.

When the Tang replaced the Sui, the court of Emperor Jomei sent the first mission to the new dynasty in 630, led by Inukami no Mitasuki. It returned in 632 accompanied by a Tang envoy.

Organisation and voyages

A mission included an ambassador and deputy ambassadors, officials, interpreters, doctors, diviners, craftsmen and sailors, together with students and student monks who might stay in China for years. In the seventh century missions usually used two ships; from the eighth century four ships were standard, and a single mission could carry more than 500 people.

Early missions followed the coast of the Korean peninsula to Shandong. After Japan’s defeat by Tang and Silla forces at the Battle of Baekgang in 663 and later tensions with Silla, ships increasingly sailed straight across the East China Sea from Kyushu to the mouth of the Yangzi. This route was faster but far more dangerous, and storms wrecked or scattered many ships. From the coast, only a small party of envoys was allowed to travel on to the capital, Chang’an.

Missions were not regular. After several in the 650s and 660s there was a gap of more than thirty years, and the mission that reached China in 702 is the first known to have presented the country under the name Nippon, “Japan”, instead of the older name Wa.

What the missions brought home

The missions helped shape almost every area of Japanese state and culture in the seventh to ninth centuries:

• Law and government: the ritsuryō codes of 701 and 718 drew directly on the Tang Code and Tang statutes, following the centralising Taika Reform.
• Cities: the grid plan of Heijō-kyō, the capital at Nara from 710, was modelled on Chang’an.
• Buddhism: monks returned with sutras, images and new schools of teaching.
• Learning and arts: Confucian classics, histories, calendars, medicine, music and luxury goods, some of which survive in the Shōsōin storehouse in Nara.

The returning missions also brought foreign visitors. The Chinese monk Jianzhen (Ganjin) reached Japan in 753 aboard a returning embassy ship after several failed attempts, and founded the Tōshōdai-ji temple in Nara.

Famous travellers

Abe no Nakamaro (698–770) went to China in 717 as a student, passed the Tang examinations and served the court of Emperor Xuanzong, befriending the poets Li Bai and Wang Wei. His attempt to sail home in 753 ended in shipwreck on the coast of Annam, and he died in China.

Kibi no Makibi (695–775), who sailed on the same mission of 717, returned in 735 with books on ritual, music, astronomy and military science and later rose to the post of Minister of the Right. The monk Genbō, also returning in 735, brought around 5,000 scrolls of Buddhist texts.

The 804 mission carried the monks Kūkai and Saichō, who founded the Shingon and Tendai schools on their return. The monk Ennin travelled with the 838 mission, the last to reach China, and his diary of nine years in China describes the anti-Buddhist persecution of 845.

The end of the missions

By the late ninth century the Tang was weakened by rebellion, and private Chinese and Korean merchants now carried goods and travellers between the two countries. In 894 the scholar-official Sugawara no Michizane was appointed ambassador of a new mission, but he advised the court to suspend it because of disorder in China and the dangers of the voyage. It never sailed, and the Tang fell in 907.

Timeline

• 600 and 607: Japanese embassies visit the Sui court.
• 630: Inukami no Mitasuki leads the first mission to Tang China.
• 663: Japanese forces are defeated at Baekgang.
• 702: A mission reaches China after a gap of more than thirty years.
• 717: A large mission carries Abe no Nakamaro, Kibi no Makibi and Genbō.
• 753: A returning mission brings the monk Jianzhen to Japan.
• 804: Kūkai and Saichō sail with that year’s mission.
• 838: The last mission to reach China departs, with the monk Ennin.
• 894: A new mission is cancelled on Sugawara no Michizane’s advice.

Why it matters

The kentōshi were among the most deliberate cultural borrowings in history. Over two and a half centuries they gave Japan the tools of a centralised state and a mature Buddhist culture, which Japan then adapted into distinctive forms of its own.