by John Keay
Han Gaozu, when not chastising his kings (several of whom had indeed fled ‘northward to the Xiongnu’), had led a personal crusade to expel the Xiongnu in the winter of 200 BC. It did nothing to redeem his military reputation and ended in disaster. Frost-bitten and outmanoeuvred by the Xiongnu rough-riders, the Han forces had been surrounded at Pingcheng, a place near Datong on the Shanxi/Inner Mongolia border. The emperor himself would have been captured but for the intercession of Shanyu Maodun’s queen, who urged clemency as a basis for negotiation. Gaozu and his forces were permitted to beat an ignominious retreat, and after further defections and incursions, the first in a series of treaties that would last for sixty years had been signed in 198 BC.
Known as ‘peace-through-kinship’ (heqin) treaties, their terms were unflattering to Han sensibilities. The Xiongnu were accorded equal, or ‘brotherly’, status; and in return for an undertaking to curtail their incursions, the shanyu was to receive an imperial bride and an annual gift of silks, grain and ‘other foodstuffs’. Effectively tribute, these gifts could also be supposed a bribe or even an investment in that the Xiongnu might become addicted to Chinese products, then dependent on them. Likewise scruples over the export of an imperial princess were stifled by hopes of her giving birth to a half-Han shanyu, or at least exerting a favourable influence on Xiongnu policy. Face could always be saved; but the facts spoke for themselves. In retrospect, imperial China’s first international commitments in the second century BC bear an uncanny resemblance to its last in the nineteenth century AD; though ostensibly between equal parties, both were decidedly ‘unequal treaties’.
With each treaty renewal, the size of the annual tribute/bribe payable to the Xiongnu increased; gold, ironware and liquor were added, while the grain and silk components soared to astronomical proportions. Nor did the Xiongnu incursions in fact cease. They were on a lesser scale but just as frequent, those responsible often being Han renegades or tribal affiliates over whom the shanyu exercised little control. Han resentment grew proportionately. It had peaked in 192 BC when a communication from Shanyu Maodun to the Dowager Empress Lü mischievously suggested that, since both had been widowed and were of a certain age, they might find agreeable consolation in one another’s company. This was too much for the dowager empress, who was all for calling out the army. Cooler counsels prevailed, however; indeed, the final response from one of a normally vain and vindictive disposition plumbs the depths of abasement:
My age is advanced and my vitality is diminished [wrote the dowager empress]. Both my hair and teeth are falling out, and I cannot even walk steadily. The shanyu must have heard exaggerated reports [of me]. I am not worthy of his lowering himself. But my country has done nothing wrong, and I hope that he will spare it.4
Another reading of the shanyu’s original letter interprets his desire ‘to exchange the things that I have for the things that I do not have’ as referring not to caresses but trade.5 If this is correct, it introduces a factor that would soon become central to Han–Xiongnu relations. For the Han policy of making the Xiongnu reliant on Chinese produce was paying off. In subsequent negotiations, access to the markets that had sprung up along the frontier is mentioned among the Xiongnu demands as often as tribute, and its refusal would become highly provocative.
Despite frequent setbacks, Han Wendi and Han Jingdi had continued the ‘peace-through-kinship’ policy. Nostalgia for a Han golden age in the first half of the second century BC would owe much to this costly calm before the storm. Meanwhile Shanyu Maodun’s successors greatly extended their Xiongnu empire, especially to the west, where the Yuezhi people were driven out of the Gansu corridor and Xinjiang to beyond the Pamirs. This prompted a suggestion, credited to the teenage Wudi, for a Han envoy-explorer to try to make contact with the Yuezhi and sound them out about an anti-Xiongnu alliance. A palace official called Zhang Qian volunteered for the task and in c. 138 BC, accompanied by a servant who was good at bringing down game, plus a small military escort, this explorer Zhang disappeared into the desert sunset. He was soon intercepted and taken captive by the shanyu’s troops. How would the emperor feel, asked the shanyu, if the Xiongnu sent emissaries traipsing across China to open diplomatic relations with Nanyue? The mission was an affront to Xiongnu sovereignty and Zhang was to be detained by them indefinitely.
He would in fact escape, but not until ten years later. Resuming his journey, explorer Zhang then vanished into the unknown a second time. He had probably been completely forgotten when in 126 BC, thirteen years older, geographically wiser than any contemporary and lately escaped from yet another spell in Xiongnu captivity, he and his huntsman-companion came trotting back into Chang’an. By then Han–Xiongnu relations had plummeted into all-out war. Nothing would be more timely than central Asian intelligence from an intrepid traveller who deserves recognition as both the pioneeer of the ‘Silk Road’ and the first to play the ‘Great Game’.
On the other hand, nothing would be more challenging than discoveries with a shock value comparable to those that awaited Columbus. For according to explorer Zhang, Han China was not alone in the world: out there, there were other ‘great states’, as he called them. Their people lived in cities; and they too ‘kept records by writing’, an extraordinary revelation. They ‘made their living in much the same way as the Chinese’; and shockingly, they were quite unaware that zhongguo, now taken to mean ‘the Middle Kingdom’, was anywhere near the middle.
EXPLORER ZHANG AND THE WESTERN REGIONS
After coming of age, in 135 BC Han Wudi had signed another ‘peace-through-kinship’ treaty with the then shanyu. The matter had sparked a heated debate in Chang’an, and this had flared again in 134 BC when, with Xiongnu suspicions disarmed by the latest tribute bonanza, prospects for a surprise counter-strike, not to say a perfidious one, seemed particularly favourable. Old arguments were rehearsed, revenge of Gaozu’s defeat at Pingcheng was reinvoked, and Wudi now sided with the hawks; an elaborate plan was approved for luring the shanyu into an ambush in the town of Mayi (in northern Shanxi).
This time there was no disaster, just dismal failure. The Xiongnu got wind of the trick, wheeled about, vanished into the steppe, and repudiated the treaty. Five years of ‘phoney war’ ensued. Xiongnu raids continued but so did the frontier markets, at which cross-border trade flourished as never before. It was all part of the plan. In autumn 129 BC, when the markets were at their busiest, Han armies swooped on four of them. Despite the element of surprise, only one attack was moderately successful. Xiongnu losses were put in the hundreds, Han’s in the thousands, and Pingcheng remained unavenged. But two years later Wei Qing, brother of the emperor’s favourite consort and one of half a dozen charismatic generals to emerge at this time, redeemed the Qin First Emperor’s conquests by retaking the Ordos. It was ‘the first major setback for the Xiongnu since the days of Maodun’.6 Qin’s ‘Great Wall’ defences were reoccupied and settlements re-established on either side of the Yellow River’s northern bend.
This brought retaliation from the Xiongnu both east and west of the new salient and was followed by devastating countermoves from the Han. Throughout the 120s BC scarcely a year passed without ever larger Han expeditions probing ever deeper into Xiongnu territory. By 119 BC they were pushing north right across the Gobi desert into Outer Mongolia and north-west through Gansu to Ningxia. Han armies were now matching the Xiongnu for mobility and could support themselves in the field for several months. New commanderies, crammed with labour camps and soldier-settlers, ensured the security of the ‘Great Wall’ frontier, while Xiongnu losses, especially of livestock and pasturage, induced dissent within the nomadic confederation. The consequent defections may partly account for the improved performance of the Han forces as these new allies were deployed against their erstwhile comrades.
Success was real, but the price high. Sima Qian follows official practice by ‘scoring’ each engagement as if it were a rubber of bridge, or an exam paper. From his totting up of the hundreds of thousands of t
roops involved, the tens of thousands slain, the numerous generals and chieftains captured, and the vast herds of sheep, cattle and horses corralled, it appears that, for the Han, acceptable losses ran as high as 30 per cent and sometimes reached 90 per cent. If anything, the Xiongnu fared better in this respect – and they needed to; for while Han resources of manpower and provisions were practically inexhaustible and constrained only by the logistics of deployment, nomadic numbers were finite, their livelihood in terms of flocks and herds was vulnerable, and their only asset lay in the limitless terrain.
Having reclaimed the northern frontier and scattered the enemy, the Han might have scaled down their operations after 119 BC. That they would do no such thing looks to have been due to the intelligence-gathering of explorer Zhang. For although the exact chronology is uncertain, it seems to have been at about this time that his information on central Asian affairs was reviewed, he himself re-examined, and a new direction given to Han’s expansionist momentum. Instead of pushing ever farther north into the unrewarding wastes of Mongolia, Chang’an’s troops would veer west and set their sights on the flourishing states of central Asia, as reported by Zhang.
Initially Zhang’s discoveries had served as a distraction. In the course of his western odyssey, the explorer had crossed the deserts of Xinjiang, scaled the bleak Pamirs and descended to both the Syr Darya (Jaxartes River) and Amu Darya (Oxus River). The region along the former was called ‘Dayuan’, otherwise Ferghana and now eastern Uzbekistan, that along the latter ‘Taxia’, otherwise Bactria or northern Afghanistan. Since the Yuezhi had just overrun Bactria, they showed no interest in returning east of the Pamirs to oblige Chang’an in its feud with the Xiongnu. Their future lay south of the Himalayas, where they would be known as the Kusana (Kushan), would found one of northern India’s greatest empires, and in the first century AD would repay Zhang’s visit by sending to China the first Buddhist missionaries. But as yet ignorant of ‘the Enlightened One’, the Yuezhi in the early 120s BC opened explorer Zhang’s eyes only to the importance of the strange world into which he had blundered.
Had it not been for his decade-long detention by the Xiongnu, Zhang would have found Greek-speaking kings with names like Euthydemus and Menander still ruling in Bactria. Relics of Alexander the Great’s expedition, these Bactrian kings had been ejected by the Yuezhi in 130 BC, just months before Zhang’s arrival. Their magnificent gold and silver coinage was still in circulation and surprised Zhang by its novel use of portraiture. Each coin, he reports, ‘bore the face of the king [and] when the king died, the currency was immediately changed and new coins issued with the face of his successor’. Such a practice had never been known in China; since it could be construed as ennobling commerce and demeaning the sovereign by association with it, nor would it be.
West of Bactria stretched the great kingdom of ‘Anxi’, otherwise Parthia or Persia (Iran), where the Seleucids, also legatees of Alexander’s empire, had earlier been overthrown by the Parthian Arsacids; this Anxi extended to what Zhang calls ‘the western sea’, which is thought to be the Gulf rather than the Mediterranean. East of Bactria, the kingdom of ‘Shendu’ was of more interest. While exploring the Bactrian bazaars, Zhang had noticed ‘cloth from Shu [Sichuan] and bamboo canes from Qiong [also in Sichuan]’, both of which were said to have been imported via ‘Shendu’. Although some of explorer Zhang’s place-names are hard to identify, there is no question that ‘Shendu’ was India; its inhabitants ‘rode elephants into battle’ and even the Romans knew the country as ‘Sindu’ (after the Sind, or Indus, River). Since it was said to be several thousand kilometres east of Bactria, Zhang reasoned that it must ‘not be very far away from Shu’. Silk cloth and bamboo canes must therefore be reaching India direct from China’s extreme south-west.
Of all Zhang’s revelations, this was the one that had at first excited the most interest in Chang’an. As his ten years of Xiongnu captivity had demonstrated, access to central Asia was as yet fraught. Across the deserts of Xinjiang the Xiongnu controlled the route north of the ‘Great Swamp’ (nowadays the salt desert of Lop Nor), while Xiongnu allies, the proto-Tibetan Qiang, controlled that south of it. Only the cane-and-silk route from Sichuan to India and Bactria looked to offer a way of circumventing both. When Zhang had proposed that he lead a secret expedition to explore it, ‘the emperor was delighted’.
This must have been in c. 125 BC, the year after Zhang’s return from ‘the western regions’; for by 123 BC the explorer was back again, the south-western route having proved a cul-de-sac. There was indeed some unofficial trade between Sichuan and India; and Zhang stressed the importance of an intervening kingdom called ‘Dianyue’, whose people also rode elephants; it was probably Burma. But the hillsmen of Yunnan, between Sichuan and Burma, had been unimpressed by the affable Zhang, opposed his progress and murdered his colleagues. Further efforts would require military support, and this would not be forthcoming until twelve years later. Coinciding with the storming of Panyu (Canton) and the subjugation of Nanyue, Han troops would then force their way into Yunnan. Sima Qian, the ‘Grand Historian’, accompanied them, certainly as far as the now provincial capital of Kunming. But farther to the south-west their progress was halted in the vicinity of the Lancang (upper Mekong) River. The perpendicular terrain, as much as the population, would in fact keep the silk-and-cane trail shrouded in mystery for centuries. Only with the construction of the Burma Road in the run-up to the Second World War would a serviceable trade route finally link China and India over the dripping passes at this extremity of the eastern Himalaya.
Meanwhile Han operations against the Xiongnu had continued. In 121 BC they had been rewarded with the surrender of one of the shanyu’s subordinate kings, who brought with him 40,000 men and control of the Gansu corridor. Then known as Hexi (‘west of the [Yellow] river’), this vital neck of cultivation was secured, settled (700,000 were compelled or induced to remove there) and fortified over the next few years to as far as the Jade Gate (Yumen), the terminal of the extended ‘Great Wall’ near Dunhuang. The Han now had the equivalent of ‘a covered way’ leading into Xinjiang. It was this that led to explorer Zhang’s recall from obscurity in c. 119 BC (in the interim he had been demoted and nearly beheaded as a scapegoat for a recent defeat by the Xiongnu), and to his again being quizzed about ‘the western regions’.
According to Zhang, all the kingdoms of the far west so valued the produce and political endorsement on offer from Han China that they could be induced to accept some kind of feudatory status. The more martial peoples of Ferghana and other northern states would be keen to join the Han against their common Xiongnu enemy; and the more commercial peoples of Bactria, Parthia and India would comply with tributary conventions if they could be assured of Chinese trade. In this way, argued Zhang (or perhaps the Grand Historian on his behalf), all could be brought within the Han scheme of things. The emperor would be gratified by a constant stream of exotic products and visitors, ‘his might would become known throughout all the lands within the four seas’, and in time their rulers would ‘acknowledge themselves our foreign vassals’.7
It is noteworthy that neither trade nor alliance was seen as an end in itself; arguably they never would be, at least for as long as the Chinese empire lasted. Both were perceived as inducements whereby the lands discovered by explorer Zhang could be satisfactorily fitted into a traditional scheme of sino-centric geography. Modelled on the cosmos, this conceived of ‘All-under-Heaven’ being disposed in rings of concentric dependency that radiated outwards from the universal sovereign (that is, the Han emperor) and which shaded from the directly administered commanderies of the empire itself to its less directly ruled kingdoms, various indirectly ruled tributary states on the frontier, and finally feudatory dependants beyond it.
Resourceful as ever, in c. 119 BC Zhang responded to the emperor’s renewed interest with another master plan. Bactria this time took a back seat in it. The priority was to secure Xinjiang and its transit routes. Deprived of Chi
nese grain and manufactures, the Xiongnu had been resupplying themselves from Xinjiang’s oases. Each a small city-state, the oases had made Xinjiang what Zhang called ‘the right arm of the Xiongnu’. It must be ‘cut off’, and he knew just the people to do it. They were the Wusun, a tribe that had fallen out with the Xiongnu and, like the Yuezhi, been displaced by them. Now established somewhere in the north of Xinjiang (perhaps in the vicinity of modern Urumqi), they would be flattered by Han overtures and easily bribed into an offensive alliance. ‘The emperor approved of this suggestion,’ reports Sima Qian.
Reinstated in high office, in 115 BC explorer Zhang readied himself for a last odyssey into the land of ruddy cheeks and bushy beards, of fat-tailed sheep and shaggy camels with wobbly humps. To the emperor it must have sounded like a realm of make-believe, albeit an expensive one. Gifts comprising ‘gold and silks worth a hundred billion cash’ and ‘tens of thousands of cattle and sheep’ were entrusted to Zhang, along with an escort of 300 and a staff sufficient to supply ambassadors to all the countries beyond.
As an arena for imperial expansion, inner Asia has somewhat improbably been called ‘the rough equivalent of the Mediterranean Sea’ in Graeco-Roman history.8 Though as dry as the Mediterranean is wet and as harsh as it is balmy, the sands of what was later known as Turkestan glowed at sunset like ‘the wine-red sea’ and did indeed produce grapes; Zhang had earlier noted that they were fermented into a fine liquor that improved with age; and it was from Xinjiang that the vine would speedily be introduced into China. More to the point, the trading oases lay strung around the desert like an archipelago of islands. Inexperienced voyagers could safely navigate from one to another; and autonomous but vulnerable, they could then serve as ports of call and supply or as permanently garrisoned strongholds. The key to the wider world beyond lay in securing the ‘sea-ways’ of Xinjiang.
