Empire of Horses

by John Man

  But rivalry undermined them. An heir apparent named Bi (actually, Khailoshi-Jodi, renamed on the insistence of the Chinese, who had passed a law that people should have only a single name, a Chinese one) was pushed from the succession in AD 48 and took off with his followers to Ordos, where he was recognized as chanyu. He should have returned to claim the throne, but he remained, in security and comfort. His action split the Xiongnu into a northern, Mongolian branch and a southern, Chinese-based one, which became one of several ‘barbarian’ hordes living inside the Great Wall.

  The northern branch – wealthy with Han gifts, their aristocrats burying each other in lavish Han-style graves – lived on, in obscurity, because no one in China thought them worth recording. For forty years, chanyus came and went, occasionally raiding, once again becoming an affront to the Han, more so now that the southern Xiongnu were family members inside the Great Wall. In AD 87, a chanyu stepped briefly from the shadows. His name was Youliu, and the only other thing known about him is that the up-and-coming tribe from Manchuria, the Xianbei, reached his capital, caught him, beheaded him and skinned him.

  That was the beginning of the real end. Tens of thousands of Xiongnu fled south. In Chang’an, a ten-year-old, He, had just become emperor. It happened that an ambitious and arrogant general, Dou Xian, brother of the empress dowager and the boy-emperor’s uncle, was in prison after being implicated in an assassination. To regain his freedom and influence, he offered to crush the Xiongnu and end a 300-year menace for good and all. His sister agreed. In AD 89, he headed north with a huge army of Han, Southern Xiongnu, Xianbei and several other barbarian contingents.

  What happened next is worth telling in detail, because the campaign was well recorded and because hard evidence for it recently emerged. Almost always, historical sources are marred by distortion and exaggeration. But here the source is backed by an inscription discovered in 2017. So the story is actually two stories: the events and the discovery.

  To record his coming victory, Dou Xian had with him Ban Gu, imperial librarian and the most eminent historian of his time. At fifty-seven, Ban Gu had been working on his monumental Han Shu (Book of Han), his history of the previous dynasty, for thirty years. History was a delicate business. Earlier in his life, he had been imprisoned just for starting his work, but he had deeply impressed the emperor and been encouraged to continue. He would eventually die in prison, accused by a jealous rival, but right now he was at the height of his prestige, acting as historian-at-large.

  He could not have been thrilled at the prospect. His advice was exactly the reverse of what was happening. The way to deal with the Xiongnu was to maintain ‘hostile vigilance’: keep clear, but if you have to deal with them, be tough. Here is his uncompromising opinion: Those who live beyond the Wall …

  … are greedy and desirous of gain; they wear their hair down their backs and fasten their garments on the left; they have human faces but the hearts of wild beasts … They are separated from us by mountains and valleys and cut off by the desert. By these means did Heaven and Earth divide inner from outer. Therefore the Sage Kings treated them like birds and beasts, neither concluding treaties with them, nor going forth and attacking them. To conclude agreements with them is to waste gifts and suffer deception. To attack them is to exhaust our armies and provoke raids. Their land cannot be cultivated so as to produce food; their people cannot be made subjects and tamed. For these reasons they are kept outside and not taken as relatives, they are kept distant and not accepted as kin.

  Yet here he was, crossing what ought not to be crossed, attacking a people who had often been treated as kin, and recording an invasion that should not have been. He kept quiet, and did what his emperor wanted.

  Things worked out well. Advancing in three columns across the Gobi in the summer of 89, Dou Xian first met the Xiongnu east of the Three Beauties range, where the Altai Mountains dip into gravel, sand and gnarled saxaul bushes.5 There are few details, but the allies sent the Xiongnu, under a chanyu named Bei (note the Chinese-style name) in headlong retreat north-west. Dou Xian pursued them for 180 kilometres, out of the Gobi, across grasslands into the Khangai Mountains. The Xiongnu regrouped on gently billowing plains near a 140-metre hill named Yanran. Again, a great victory; again, no details, except that it was great.

  To mark the victory, Dou Xian ordered his tame historian, Ban Gu, to write a memorial and have it inscribed in stone on a cliff face near the top of the nearby hill. When Ban Gu got home, he recorded what he had written: an account of the battle ending in a formal, traditional verse of five lines and seven characters per line.

  This is the account that he wrote:6

  In the first year of Yung Yuan’s reign [Emperor He as he became], in the autumn [actually July], the National Maternal Uncle, Dou Xian, was appointed the Commander-in-Chief to show the power of Han over the Xiongnu. Among his subordinate generals – as powerful as eagles and tigers – were troops from the Southern Xiongnu, Tenger Khan [the chanyu of the Southern Xiongnu]7 and Shi, Rong and Di khans. The 30,000 horsemen and 3,000 chariots divided into four parts. When the troops were on the march, the dust covered the sky and the earth, flags flying, their armour outshining Heaven. They came to the Gobi, and killed many of the enemy, so that their bodies lay scattered here and there. Then passing mountains and rivers, they came to Yanran Mountain. They followed the footprints of the Xiongnu and set fire to their tents wherever they found them, expressing their anger against them. They comforted the souls of their ancestors, and fortified their rule so it could be passed down to their descendants, expressing the power of the whole land. This one victory assured peace for ever. Thus Our victory is inscribed on the rock of this mountain top, as an expression of Our royal power and virtue.

  The verse, reproduced in the fourth-century Hou Han Shu (Book of the Later Han), roughly translates as:

  The fine Sovereign’s armies campaigned into the desolate remote [regions],

  Destroyed the fierce and cruel, brought order to beyond the seas,

  Far-reached those distant [places], joined the territories and borders,

  Made feng [offerings] at Spirit Mount, erected a glorious tablet,

  Recorded the splendour of the Emperor, renowned for ten thousand generations.8

  An inscription was not enough. This victory needed a spiritual dimension. That meant ritual sacrifices, the feng rituals mentioned in the poem. Sima Qian devotes a long chapter to the subject. These hugely significant rites, usually linked with others known as shan, were performed from the earliest times, since at least 2200 BC. Unfortunately, rulers had to qualify to perform them, as Sima Qian writes: ‘When each dynasty attains the height of its glory, then the feng and shan are celebrated, but when it reaches a period of decline, they are no longer performed.’ So there had been long gaps of hundreds of years, or even ‘as many as a thousand’, between enactments of these rites, with the result that ‘the details of the ancient ceremony have been completely lost’. Never mind. There was a sacrifice of some kind to mark the height of Han glory, which was enough for it to be called feng.

  The Yanran Inscription became famous as a memorial to the final, stamping-on-the-head-of-the-snake end of the Xiongnu menace. There was one problem: no one knew where the Yanran Mountain was, so no one could check that Ban Gu’s record was a true copy of the inscription. Perhaps the cliff recorded a different version of events. There were several attempts to find it, with no success. In 1990, two herders avoiding a rainstorm sheltered beneath the cliff, noticed the inscription and reported their find. But Mongolia was embroiled in the collapse of Communism. No one could do anything. But at least Mongolian scholars knew the position. Now they needed Chinese involvement to help with the language.

  In 2014, they contacted Professor Jakhadal Chimeddorj, an archaeologist and Vice-President of the Inner Mongolia University in Hohhot. In July 2017, a joint Chinese and Mongolian expedition went to the spot and took rubbings. The following month, Chimeddorj and other team members from Chingg
is Khan University in Ulaanbaatar announced that they could read 220 of the 260 legible characters (another 32 having been eroded away), and yes, the one recorded in historical sources was the same as the inscription devised by Ban Gu, almost to the day 1,928 years previously.

  Actually, it wasn’t quite the end for the Northern Xiongnu. The so-called ‘last of the chanyus’ was killed in 93. ‘So-called’ because sources do not agree on his name, and Mongolian sources list a further dozen pretenders to the title, on into the third century. But sixty years before that, by the mid-second century, the Xianbei ruled Mongolia, and if any northern Xiongnu remained free, they were nothing but robber bands. The rest had vanished into the hidden heart of Central Asia, never to be heard of again – until two hundred years later, on the far side of the continent, there appeared a tribe with a similar lifestyle and a strangely similar name. That’s another story, told in the next chapter.

  But the Southern Xiongnu remained. After the Han dynasty ended in 220 and China collapsed into a muddle of ministates (between the third and the fifth centuries), they briefly (311–349) took much of north China. Almost a century later, to revive and extend this mayfly empire, a Xiongnu leader founded a new kingdom.

  His name was Helian Bobo, chanyu of a state he called Da Xia (Great Xia, after an ancient dynasty, and also a name taken on 600 years later by the Tangut empire of West Xia). His claim to fame is that he built the only known Xiongnu city, in 413–19, a few years after the formation of Da Xia in 407. Standing on the south-east border of Ordos, it is called Tong Wan Cheng (Ruling Ten Thousand Cities). Today, the area is part of Shaanxi, but only because in the 1940s the provincial boss was in debt to the top man in Shaanxi, so he simply claimed a slab of Ordos, transferred it to Shaanxi and redrew the border. History, however, tells us that this is really an Ordos story.

  Actually, it is two stories. The first belongs to the city, the second to the guide who met me in the car park, a large one, for this place is beginning to attract a lot of visitors. The car park overlooked an impressive sight – an off-white tower and a wall hundreds of metres long. Looking for information, I glanced at a stall selling tourist items. Nearby stood a fine-looking old man with a weather-beaten face and short-cropped grey hair. He introduced himself as Ma Junwang, local resident all his life, and author of a pamphlet on the history of the city. There it was, for sale on the stall. He was the perfect guide.

  The ruins – the 40-metre watch-tower, the 30-metre wall, the bulwarks known as ‘horse-faces’ – had the colour of whipped cream. That, Mr Ma explained, was because Bobo’s capital, built by 40,000 labourers, was not made of bricks but of layer upon layer of quartz sand and white clay, turned into a sort of cement with rice flour. This was the local equivalent of the rammed earth used to build the Han Great Wall, the ruins of which you can still see today weaving across southern Ordos.

  It had survived the last 1,600 years pretty well. ‘Yes,’ said Mr Ma as we were about to go inside, ‘that’s because the Red Guards didn’t blow it all up during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was part of the campaign against old things. The Red Guards blew up some of the wall over there, and found some cannonballs, so they became afraid and left the rest alone.’

  This was fascinating. Why would they become afraid? And if Ma had been in this area all his life, did he see them do it?

  He seemed a little embarrassed to go on. Intrigued, I pressed him to describe his experience, and his story became more and more extraordinary. ‘We were living in a cave at the time, and …’

  ‘Living in a cave?’

  ‘Yes, lots of families did that. In caves we had dug at the bottom of the wall. This place was our home. The grass in the city was good pasture. We had two caves. We kept pigs in the other one.’

  In 1967, their lives were interrupted by the local effects of the Cultural Revolution. Red Guards arrived. As a poor farmer, aged only twenty, he was not going to fight these badly educated teenagers revelling in their power to destroy.

  ‘They made me join them, so I saw it all. They discovered these cannonballs, and the leader thought they had better tell the authorities. Archaeologists came and said it was probably the arsenal, and told them to leave it alone. So they did.’

  As we walked up the slope to the entrance, Ma finished his story. He went on living in the ruined city, and developed such an interest in it that he became the local expert, and eventually the guide.

  By now we were inside the city, on a raised platform which may have been used by Bobo to review his troops. A few buried cannonballs broke the surface. From there you could see the whole city, a square of walls and corner-towers that measured 6 kilometres around. That’s where his family’s cave had been, Ma said, pointing to a far wall, beyond the trees and shrubs that covered the undulating ruins. Once, 100,000 people had lived here, around a long-gone lake, and continued to do so for many generations after Bobo’s short-lived realm was conquered in 431 by Northern Wei, a ‘barbarian’ state controlled by the Xianbei, one of the half-dozen kingdoms of a divided China. Da Xia lasted only twenty-four years, but the Xiongnu inhabitants remained there for another four hundred years, after which the city was abandoned and forgotten and the last of the Xiongnu merged with local populations and finally faded from view.

  Ma led the way, winding between slender trees to the West Gate, unearthed in 2008. The excavation made an 11-metre pit, around which I picked my way precariously in search of a good angle for a picture. Other than the towers and the walls, it was about the only sign of the city’s former glory.

  Its rediscovery dates from 1845, when a Ming general came and called the place the White City, which is what locals sometimes call it today, Tsagaan Balgasun in Mongolian. No one knows what the city was called originally, because Da Xia did not record its history. It was the first scholars, arriving in the 1950s, who named the place Tong Wan Cheng, picking it up from a phrase in a Chinese source about Bobo’s ambitions to rule 10,000 cities.

  As Ma guided us back to the car park, a crowd of tourists came past, clicking cameras and picking up bits of roof tiles, a hint of growing interest in a site that will soon, surely, get the attention it deserves as the last and grandest memorial to the Xiongnu.

  1 Seventy-two kilos is the top estimated weight of Argentavis magnificens, the biggest bird so far discovered. It became extinct between about 7 and 11 million years ago. Some large pterosaurs may have weighed more, but estimates vary too widely to be accepted.

  2 The first man-carrying glider was built by Sir George Cayley in 1804.

  3 Now in Ye County, Pingdingshan Prefecture, Henan.

  4 Miller, Power Politics.

  5 Near the Three Beauties is the canyon of red sandstone known as Bayan Zag, ‘Rich in Saxauls’. Here, in 1923, the American explorer Roy Chapman Andrews and his team discovered the dinosaur fossils that are now in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He called the place the Flaming Cliffs.

  6 With thanks to Alatan, Professor of English, Inner Mongolia University of Technology, for his translation.

  7 This was his title, Heavenly Khan. His name was Xiulan Shisu-quuti (in pinyin), Syuulan Shiju-Khoudi (in Mongolian); he ruled 88–93.

  8 Translation by Miller in Power Politics.

  13

  FROM XIONGNU TO HUN, POSSIBLY

  MEANWHILE, SOME (PERHAPS MOST) OF THE NORTHERN Xiongnu had vanished into the depths of Central Asia. Or possibly not. For, two hundred years later, there emerged from the great sweep of grassland on the other side of Central Asia a tribe with a similar lifestyle – tent-dwellers with wagons, supreme mounted archers – and a similar name: the Huns, who, a century later still, would be a major force in the collapse of the Roman empire. It is a process worth looking at in detail, because it was a mirror image of what had been going on in China, a repeat of the old confrontation between mobile, acquisitive barbarians and stable, rich urbanites. The difference between the two confronta
tions is that China hit back and survived; Rome couldn’t and collapsed.

  Did the Xiongnu become the Huns? Chinese historians make no distinction between the two, and both are ‘Hunnu’ in Mongolian, so in China and Mongolia there is no doubt. Others are less certain.

  For centuries, no one in Europe had any idea of where the Huns came from. As Rome declined and fell, people said their homeland was somewhere beyond the edge of the known world, east of the Maeotic marshes – the shallow and silty Sea of Azov – on the other side of the Kerch Straits that link this inland sea to its parent, the Black Sea. But otherwise, all was a blank, filled by folklore. They were sent by God as a punishment. Or they had fought with Achilles in the Trojan War. They were any of the Asian tribes named by ancient authors, ‘Scythian’ being the most popular option. Any or all of these.

  Come the Enlightenment, a French Sinologist, Joseph de Guignes, filled the hole. De Guignes – as he is in most catalogues; or Deguines, as he spelled himself – usually appears in academic footnotes, if anywhere. He deserves more, because his theory about Hun origins started the controversy.

  Born in 1721, de Guignes was still in his twenties when he was appointed ‘interpreter’ for oriental languages at the Royal Library in Paris, Chinese being his particular forte. He at once embarked upon the monumental work that made his name. News of this brilliant young polymath spread across the Channel. In 1751, at the age of thirty, he was elected to the Royal Society in London – one of the youngest members ever, and a foreigner. He owed this honour to a draft of his major work, displaying, as the citation remarks, ‘everything that one might expect from a book so considerable, which he has ready for the press’. Well, not quite. It took him another five years to get his work on the press, and a further two to get it off; his Histoire générale des Huns, des Turcs et des Mogols was published in five volumes between 1756 and 1758. His big idea was to prove that all eastern peoples – Chinese, Turks, Mongols, Huns – were actually descendants of Noah, who had wandered eastwards after the Flood. This became an obsession, and the subject of his next book, which sparked a sharp riposte from sceptics, followed by an antiriposte from the impervious de Guignes. He remained impervious up to his death almost fifty years later.