Four Barbarians
| Four Barbarians | |||||||||
| Chinese name | |||||||||
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| Chinese | |||||||||
| Literal meaning | four barbarians | ||||||||
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| Korean name | |||||||||
| Hangul | |||||||||
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| Japanese name | |||||||||
| Kanji | |||||||||
| Hiragana | しい | ||||||||
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| Transcriptions | |
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| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | sìyí |
| Wade–Giles | ssu-i |
| Transcriptions | |
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| Revised Romanization | sai |
| McCune–Reischauer | sai |
| Transcriptions | |
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| Revised Hepburn | shii |
Four Barbarians was a derogatory Chinese name for various peoples bordering ancient China, namely, the Dongyi 東夷 "Eastern Barbarians", Nanman 南蠻 "Southern Barbarians", Xirong 西戎 "Western Barbarians", and Beidi 北狄 "Northern Barbarians".
The Chinese mytho-geography and cosmography of the Zhou Dynasty (c. 1046–256 BCE) was based upon a round heaven and a square earth. Tianxia 天下 "[everywhere] under heaven; the world" encompassed Huaxia 華夏 "China" (also known as Hua, Xia, etc.) in the center surrounded by non-Chinese "barbarian" peoples. See the Hua–Yi distinction for details of this literally Sinocentric worldview.
The Four Barbarians construct, or a similar one, was a logical necessity for the ancient tianxia system. Liu Junping and Huang Deyuan (2006:532) describe the universal monarch with combined political, religious, and cultural authorities: "According to the Chinese in the old times, heaven and earth were matched with yin and yang, with the heaven (yang) superior and the earth (yin) inferior; and the Chinese as an entity was matched with the inferior ethnic groups surrounding it in its four directions so that the kings could be valued and the barbarians could be rejected." The authors (2006:535) propose that Chinese ideas about the "nation" and "state" of China evolved from the "casual use of such concepts as "tianxia", "hainei"( four corners within the sea) and "Four Barbarians" 四夷 (barbarians in four directions)."
Located in the cardinal directions of tianxia were the sifang 四方 "Four Directions/Corners", situ 四土 "Four Lands/Regions", sihai 四海 "Four Seas", and Four Barbarians 四夷 "Four Barbarians/Foreigners". The (c. 3rd century BCE) Erya (9, Wilkinson 2000: 710) defines sihai as " the place where the barbarians lived, hence by extension, the barbarians": "九夷, 八狄,七戎, 六蠻, 謂之四海" – "the nine Yi, eight Di, seven Rong, and six Man are called the four seas".
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