by John Man
The sources record Li Guang at his most effective in the summer of 144 BC:
The Xiongnu enter through the Yanmen Pass, the main entry through a section of the Great Wall that runs through north Shanxi. Surrounded by the towering Heng and Wutai Mountains, it gives way 150 kilometres further south to the rich plains of central China.
I was there once, on a drab autumn day with a Mongolian-Chinese friend, Jorigt. We drove uphill on a back road, hemmed in by coal-trucks keen to avoid motorway tolls, through a village guarded by beacon towers, and up past a baffling maze of walls and terraces and fields towards misty hills. A wild area of ravines and boulders and dripping trees led to a dead-end at a stream. An abandoned bridge had been turned into a drying floor for a shaggy mat of corn stalks. Beyond lay a rough track. Up we went, through slowly swirling mist, into a stone-built village. It seemed abandoned, until two damp camels with drooping humps proved it wasn’t. Further on a small house turned out to be a guide hut, with – to my astonishment – a guide, Miss She Yifeng. It turned out that this was a major tourist attraction in summer, the most important pass in Shanxi. Two hundred people a day came here, she said. We had missed the summer season, but she was still on duty. She led the way steeply upwards into deepening fog, until a wall loomed up, damming the head of the valley. An arch at its base carried the path onwards. This being the only way over the mountains, the Xiongnu must have come here, making short work of the Wild Goose’s predecessor fortress. Today’s pass, with a well-restored pagoda on top of the wall, was once commanded by a great general named Yang Ye, who kept the ‘barbarians’ – Jurchens from Manchuria – at bay in the time of the Song Dynasty (AD 960–1127). ‘Invincible Yang’, they called him. Two stone lions and a slender pillar formed a memorial to him.
‘What were the Jurchens doing attacking up here?’ I asked. ‘Surely it would have been easier to attack down on the plain?’
‘No,’ said Miss She. ‘Down there we could see them coming, and the wall was strong. If they could break through here, the way was open,’ avoiding the forces arrayed below.
The landscape and the strategic purpose of the fortress had not changed for 1,000 years. Back in 144 BC, though, there had been no equivalent of General Yang to stop the marauders. The story continues. The Xiongnu gallop on for another 140 kilometres to the Yellow River, through low hills where farmers have been making terraces and cutting cave-houses from the hillsides for millennia, and make off with all the horses they can find. This may well have been the purpose of the raid, because some of the emperor’s new stud farms had been in existence for ten years, with a capacity of, on average, some 8,000 each. Not that they would have needed horses for themselves, but the loss would severely weaken the Han cavalry. The Xiongnu are said to have killed over 2,000 government soldiers, which is possible given that the farms employed an average of 800 each. These ballpark figures point to a huge operation. It takes about 10 hectares to feed a horse, so each farm would have been about 8 square kilometres in size. Imagine tens of thousands of horsemen rounding up between 10,000 and 20,000 horses, which would then have to be herded back several hundred kilometres into Mongolia – at a speed of 30 to 40 kilometres a day – with the bulk of the force guarding the retreat.
A few days later, a eunuch from a contingent commanded by General Li Guang is out in the countryside with two dozen horsemen when they are spotted by three Xiongnu riders. The three Xiongnu start to circle the eunuch’s force, firing arrows, picking the Chinese off one by one – proof of their supreme ability as horseback archers – until the eunuch is the sole survivor. Wounded, he barely makes it back to base with the news. At this Li Guang says, ‘They must be Eagle Hunters!’ – hunters who use eagles, not who shoot them – gathers 100 cavalrymen and heads out to track down the three Xiongnu.
Suddenly Li Guang and his little contingent come face to face with the main force of several thousand Xiongnu on horseback. The Xiongnu, experts in ambushes and feigned retreats, hold back, suspecting a trap. Li Guang’s men are extremely nervous, ‘their faces turning a deadly pallor, eager to make a run for their lives’. But Li Guang keeps his nerve. We’re far from home, he says, and we have only 100 men. If they see us flee, they’ll come after us, and we’re doomed. If we stay cool, they will fear an ambush, and not attack. So he orders ‘resume normal marching formation’. When they get closer to the curious but suspicious Xiongnu, he tells his men, ‘Dismount and undo your saddles!’
‘But there are too many of them, and they are almost on top of us!’ his men protest. ‘What will we do if they attack?’
‘They expect us to run away,’ Li Guang replies. ‘But now if we undo our saddles, and show them we have no intention of fleeing, they will be more convinced than ever that there is something afoot.’
A Xiongnu scout on a white horse separates from the main force, presumably hoping to see if there is a hidden Chinese army somewhere. Li Guang takes ten men, gallops after the scout and shoots him dead. By now, night is coming on. Li calmly returns to his men, and orders them to settle down to rest. The Xiongnu warriors are in a quandary: they should attack, but dare not, because they fear a Han army is waiting for a chance to ambush them. They blink. By dawn, the Xiongnu are gone, and Li Guang leads his men safely home.
Two years later, the Xiongnu invaded again through Yanmen, and this time managed to kill the region’s commander, an incident that Sima Qian fails to mention, giving the impression that all was peaceful on the frontier for fifteen years.
His message is that peace worked. Han China was not in constant panic-stricken disarray. Things were improving across the land. Despite ‘minor’ disasters – floods, sandstorms, locustplagues, droughts, famines, the occasional revolt – basically, as Sima Guang said in a review of the first sixty years of the new dynasty, ‘the average citizen was able to live a comfortable life’. Indeed, there was so much grain stored for so long in the state granaries that it began to putrefy, and so many strings of cash in the treasury that the strings which held the coins began to rot. And ‘the populace had become so affluent that they began to keep horses’.
But whatever impression Sima Qian gives, the Xiongnu and their raiding was a major problem, to which no one had an answer.
1 Tamara Chin, ‘Defamiliarizing the Foreigner’, in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies (see Bibliography).
2 Sergei V. Danilov and Natalya V. Tsydenova, ‘Ceramic Roof Tiles from Terelzhin Dövölzhin’, in Brosseder and Miller (eds), Xiongnu Archaeology.
3 A millennium later, Kublai Khan had about 20 overnight places built for his spring and autumn journeys between Beijing and his summer capital, Xanadu.
4 Denis Ramseyer and Marquita Volken, ‘The Staking Tools from the Xiongnu Settlement of Boroo Gol’, in Brosseder and Miller (eds), Xiongnu Archaeology. Oil-tanned leather, with the fur left on, made superb cold-weather undergarments.
5 The actual estimated figure was 7 per cent of the Han national income – one-fourteenth – but that was not nearly enough to win control of the Xiongnu.
6 Sima Guang, quoted in Yap, Wars.
7 A campaign in winter was unusual. Possibly they were driven by bad weather, which for a decade in the 160s BC brought droughts and famines to China.
8 Sima Qian’s account was a major source for Sima Guang in the eleventh century. Here, both sources are used.
8
THE WAR, THE WALL AND THE WAY WEST
FOR 150 YEARS, UNTIL THE MIDDLE OF THE FIRST CENTURY BC, the Xiongnu dominated the steppe. Nothing like their empire had existed before, and nothing like it would again until Genghis Khan’s empire 1,000 years later.
This is how they managed it:
The secret – the economic foundation for their empire – was the exploitation of China. The Xiongnu had worked out how to run a national protection racket. They were master predators. They had to be, because in steppe societies there was no other way to accumulate wealth. In China, power depended on grain surpluses and taxation and an enduring bureaucra
cy; on the steppe, wealth depended on animals, which might vanish overnight in a blizzard or a raid, and loyal chiefs who might suddenly become disloyal and vanish over the horizon. Lasting success meant extracting wealth from China by raiding or trading or receiving ‘gifts’. That was the chanyu’s purpose in life. He was the capo di tutti capi, the one who negotiated a new deal with Chang’an. How he did it – whether he made unrefuseable offers, like demanding a princess in exchange for restraining his violent underlings, or whether he insisted on high-status receptions for his envoys – wasn’t important. The point was that he did whatever it took to lever wealth from China.
For this to happen and go on happening, the chanyus needed stability, which was ensured by the two principal elements introduced by Modun: the power structure and the laws of succession.
The chanyu, with a staff of ‘marquises’, acted as an autocrat in dealing with vassal tribes and other foreign powers, principally China, but internally it was a confederacy, based on duality: the two commanders, the Wise Kings of the Right and Left, with their twenty-four ‘Leaders of Ten Thousand’, each of whom was responsible for military commanders of thousands, hundreds and tens, matched by political officials who looked after administration. The system stopped the chanyu becoming oppressive, and stopped those below him turning into warlords. An ambitious local leader – a tribal chief, say – had three unattractive options: to flee westwards (available only to those in the west), rebel (with little chance of success), or defect to China (an easier life, but as an inferior). Most chose to remain, choice being the key element in the relationship, as events in 60 BC proved. A lesser noble tried to seize the throne by executing the rightful heir and imposing family members to rule all the twenty-four ‘Ten Thousands’. That inspired a two-year civil war, revealing what happened if any chanyu tried to seize more power than tradition allowed. Local autonomy, national autocracy – that was what worked.
Secondly, stability was guaranteed by the system of succession, which worked well from Modun’s time for 150 years and ten heirs. Each chanyu chose his heir, a son (usually the eldest) who was made the Wise King of the Left. If he was too young or incompetent, he could be replaced by the chanyu and his commanders. This system avoided the possibility of a child-king, always a problem in China, where a young heir was under the control of his mother or a top adviser, opening the way to power struggles and civil war. To start with, sons succeeded fathers, and later brothers succeeded brothers. Subsidiary families, intermarrying with the chanyus, had a vested interest in preserving the status quo. The system had only one major hiccup. In 126 BC, Ichise took power, probably because he was an established warrior, and forced the official heir, the younger, less experienced Yutan, to flee to China. Even so, there was no civil war. Other disputes also ended peacefully. In 85 BC, for instance, a queen acting for her son had a junior wife’s son assassinated. To heal the ensuing rift, the chanyu named his brother as heir, but on his death, the queen, ignoring her husband’s death-bed instructions, persuaded the sub-commanders to name her son as heir. From then on, the rival half-brother never came to court, but at least did not rebel, for the system and the need for a chanyu who would deal with China trumped everything else.
What did success mean, exactly? Not enough for everyone to get a share, but enough to fund a lavish lifestyle for the top people. The grain sent from China would have fed about 140 people for a year, or 700 people if it was an addition to the normal Xiongnu diet.1 They had food enough anyway, as Mongolia does today, because the steppes produce meat way beyond what the population can eat. Drink, though, was a different matter. They had their kumiss, but Chinese grainbased ‘wine’ gets you drunker quicker, as anyone wandering the streets of Ulaanbaatar can testify. The Chinese sent the Xiongnu about 200,000 litres of the stuff every year, enough for 1,000 feasts of 200 guests each. The aim, as Nikolai Kradin says, was to turn the nomads into drunkards.2 Then there was the real wealth, silk, which was used as currency. Coming in approximately 17-metre rolls or ‘bolts’, the Xiongnu received almost 170 kilometres of it every year (10,000 bolts, each weighing about 2.4 kilos). It sounds a lot, but China produced silk in prodigious amounts: in AD 301, the court recorded that the treasury stored 4 million bolts (almost 10,000 tonnes, about 70,000 kilometres).
These gifts were not, as the Chinese court seemed to believe, to feed the chanyus’ greed. Most went to subordinates in displays of generosity that bought their loyalty. Far from undermining the Xiongnu, the luxuries in fact strengthened the political system, guaranteeing that when the gifts ran low, there would be more raids followed by more demands. Not much of it would have trickled down to ordinary herdsmen; hence the need for frontier markets, where the Xiongnu and their vassals could trade camel hair and Siberian furs for rice, pottery and other Chinese-made goods. This was a way for the Xiongnu to get their hands on iron, which was officially banned because it could be turned into arrow-points and swords, but was available on the black market.
For over a century, the Chinese response to the demands of their insatiable, aggressive neighbours had been bribery and despair. Now, at last, came a new policy: bribery and all-out war.
The man who took on the Xiongnu was Emperor Wu (reigned 141–87 BC): a brilliant mind, autocrat, strategist, visionary, and with almost enough time in his fifty-four-year reign to make his vision a reality. His conquests would define China from then on, especially in the north-west. Five decades of war would not quite break the Xiongnu, but they would prepare the ground for victory.
It took Wu a while to find his feet, because he was only fifteen when he succeeded to the throne. Then he focused on the realm’s most urgent matter: finding a final solution to the Xiongnu problem. His first thought was to find allies – tribes to the west, beyond the Xiongnu, so that he could open a war on two fronts. No one had yet penetrated the expanses of Central Asia, but there was at least one tribe which would surely hate the Xiongnu: the Yuezhi, expelled by the Xiongnu from Gansu three decades previously and now somewhere deep in the heart of Asia. Where exactly no one knew, but once contacted the tribe would surely make a valuable ally.
In 138 BC Wu sent off a 100-strong expedition headed by a leader noted for his strength, generosity and charismatic leadership, Zhang Qian, who was to become one of the nation’s most romantic figures, a hero of exploration. He set out with instructions to persuade the Yuezhi to return, become allies of the Han empire and help destroy the Xiongnu.
This highly dubious venture foundered almost at once when Zhang was captured by the Xiongnu. This event began a series of adventures which turned him into a sort of Chinese version of Lewis and Clark, the explorers who crossed North America in the early nineteenth century. As an eminent official with no hostile intent, he was treated well by the Xiongnu – perhaps also because he had a Xiongnu companion, Ganfu – and he stayed with them for ten years, taking a local wife. Then he escaped, with his wife and Xiongnu companion, and resumed his journey westward. Two thousand kilometres further on, he found the Yuezhi, who were in today’s Uzbekistan on a long migration to north-west India,3 and had no interest in going to war with their old enemies, the Xiongnu; it would mean returning over the Pamir and Tian Shan Mountains, not to mention the Taklamakan desert and the Desert of Lop. Instead of going home with this bad news, Zhang continued his explorations, visiting many of the great cities of Central Asia, even picking up information about India and the eastern Roman empire, before finally returning home after an absence of twelve years – having lost all his entourage except his Xiongnu wife and the faithful Ganfu.
After Zhang Qian vanished into the wilderness, and without any barbarian allies, Emperor Wu tried diplomacy. The peace-and-kinship treaty having fallen out of use for many years, Wu and the Xiongnu signed a new one.
And instantly the Xiongnu broke the terms with another invasion.
Wu called a cabinet meeting to discuss how best to respond. A huge row between pro- and anti-war ministers broke out. War would be a disaster, said one: the
Xiongnu ‘move around like a multitude of birds’ and can never be defeated, so best stick to bribery. No, countered another, Han had the strength now and the Xiongnu are ‘like an abscess which must be burst’, not by invasion but by trickery – draw the chanyu to the border and capture him there. The debate ended with the young emperor’s decision: it would be war. Except that it wouldn’t be, not yet, because war was expensive, high-risk and above all ineffective unless the total destruction of the Xiongnu could be guaranteed. It would take a few years before Wu could find the strength of mind and the resources to commit to all-out war. Meanwhile, raids continued. In the spring of 133 BC Emperor Wu issued an outraged proclamation: Despite having sent a princess for the chanyu and given him gold, silk and ornamental embroidery, the chanyu had responded with disrespect, ‘he has invaded and plundered … If now we wish to raise troops and attack him, how would that be?’ He’d tried peace; he’d tried war; he’d tried a bit of both; and still he didn’t know how best to proceed.
