by John Keay
Khitan Liao and Tangut Xia had set up dualistic states, their rulers being both emperors and qaghans; there was one administration for their steppe subjects, another for their Han subjects. The Jurchen went further. Taking over the Khitan Liao empire and the northern half of the Song, their Jin empire (not to be confused with that of the Western/Eastern Jin of the third and fourth centuries AD) would claim to be Song’s successor. While retaining its native military structure, it would so embrace all the Confucian trappings of a Han-type administration as to be widely adjudged the legitimate Celestial Empire. Like those Vikings who, having settled in France and become thoroughly acculturated, were currently resuming their farranging exploits as the French ‘Normans’ (a mere variant of ‘Norsemen’), the Jurchen Jin provided an object lesson in what might be called ethnic overlay.
The Jurchen’s origins are as obscure as those of the Turks or Khitan. But unlike the proto-Mongol-speaking Khitan or the proto-Tibetan-speaking Tangut, the Jurchen (sometimes Jurchid, Juche, Ruzhen, etc.) spoke a language belonging to the Tungusic family, so named after a people called the Tungus, who are now, and were perhaps then, associated with eastern Siberia. By the time they made their documented debut in the eighth century, the Jurchen were established along the Heilongjiang (Amur), Wusuli (Ussuri) and Songhua (Sungari) rivers in the far north-east of Manchuria. They lived simply, hunted in the forests, fished in the rivers, raised oxen and horses, grew crops where feasible, fought hard, drank heavily, and endured the bitter winters in felts and furs. Their clans were many, but their common language and their custom of frequent assembly for open decision-making conferred a strong sense of common identity and purpose. Partially incorporated within the Khitan Liao condominium of Chinese-speaking cultivators and far-flung Turkic- and Mongol-speaking nomads, they may have felt themselves an anomaly. Resentment over their treatment by the Khitan fuelled autonomous sentiment in the eleventh century; and in the early twelfth a dynamic Jurchen leader at the head of a powerful clan fanned this sentiment, rallied a few hundred mounted supporters and, winning a succession of engagements, attracted enough followers, Jurchen and non-Jurchen, to challenge Khitan Liao itself.
His name was Aguda (r. 1113–23), and as with the Khitan founder Abaoji or the Tangut Yuanhao Weiming – or indeed the Mongol Temujin (aka Chinggis Khan) – success swept him to empire with indecent haste. Succeeding to the leadership of the Jurchen on the death of his brother in 1113, Aguda fought a Liao border force in 1114. Convincing victory left little chance of accommodation and less desire for it; Aguda declared himself a serious rival by proclaiming his own Jin dynasty. In 1115, leading a force reckoned now at 100,000, he defeated the Khitan Liao emperor at the head of an army supposedly seven times as numerous. The Khitan Liao empire lay exposed and Aguda pressed south, out of the wastes of northern Manchuria into Liaoning. The Khitan Liao had five capitals, one for each compass point plus another at the centre. The eastern capital (in Liaoning) fell to the Jurchen in 1116, the northern capital (in Inner Mongolia) in 1120, and the central capital (in northern Hebei) in 1122. Later the same year the Jurchen also took the southern capital (the now Beijing).
Whether these dramatic developments owed anything to Khitan Liao’s distraction by Song sabre-rattling along its southern frontier is unclear. Song statesmen like Cai Jing, ever hopeful of regaining the long-lost northeast, had entertained the idea of a Jurchen alliance against Khitan Liao as early as 1115. Contacts were made by sea to avoid crossing Liao territory, and under the pretext of buying horses from the Jurchen, formal negotiations opened in 1117. These progressed only fitfully, bedevilled by issues of suzerainty and protocol and constantly overtaken by the speed of the Jurchen advance. A plan for Song forces to take the Liao southern capital (Beijing) had eventually brought into the field a strong Song army under the veteran eunuch-general Tong Guan. But in 1121 Tong Guan was recalled to take care of a rebellion in Zhejiang and in 1122 he was soundly defeated by a Khitan Liao army. Thus, later that year, it was Aguda himself who added the future Beijing to his clutch of captured capitals. The Khitan Liao court fled west to Datong (northern Shanxi), their one remaining capital. More wrangling over a Jurchen–Song alliance followed, then in 1123 brought a new treaty. Its ill-defined terms merely served as a basis for further acrimony between the would-be allies, which eventually turned to war.
In the same year, 1123, Aguda died. Inside a decade, he had created out of nothing an empire that covered all of what is now north-east China. He had commissioned a Jurchen script which, based on that of the Khitan, evinced dynastic and administrative intent, though it was never as widely used as the Khitan and Tangut scripts. He had established an extremely effective system of mobilising and controlling subject peoples by grouping them into units, each headed by one of his trusted kinsmen, who was made responsible for raising 1,000 fighting men; the kinsmen in turn appointed members of their own kin over units each of 100 families and 100 fighting men. Standardised yet capable of indefinite expansion, the system cleverly rewarded tribal loyalty, ensured the submission of conquered peoples and brought their instant mobilisation. As a result Aguda also left an apparently irresistible fighting force now numbering nearly a million.
In accordance with Tang and Song dynastic practice, Aguda would be posthumously entitled Jin Taizu, and his younger brother, who succeeded him, would be Jin Taizong (r. 1123–35). The latter resumed the Jurchen advance with scarcely abated urgency. By way of preparation for an onslaught on the Song, in 1124 the ‘Great State of White and High’, or Tangut Xia, was bullied into rejecting its nominal allegiance to the Song and acknowledging itself an ‘outer vassal’ of the Jurchen Jin. Meanwhile the remaining Khitan Liao forces were driven off into the Gobi desert and their last emperor was captured. By 1125 the Jurchen Jin had supplanted the Liao and dispersed the Khitan, secured the neutrality of Xia, and were ready to take on the Song.
At this point it is worth noting that the Khitan Liao, though soundly defeated, were by no means finished. Another century of dominion elsewhere in Asia awaited this most persistent of peoples. While often treated as an inconsequential postscript to two centuries of China-based empire, the second Khitan imperium deserves better. It would, if anything, be even more extensive than the first. And by exposing the vulnerability of cities and peoples far beyond the steppe to fast-riding armies that had mastered the logistics of long-range warfare, it would set a telling example. Assuming the future Chinggis Khan took note of recent history, the Khitan achievement in central Asia may well have provided more inspiration than the sudden Jurchen success in China.
By the time of Aguda’s death in 1123 some Khitan had already defected to the Jurchen. Others had headed off into Mongolia as fugitives and there re-formed, along with the Liao garrisons in Mongolia, under a surviving member of the ruling Khitan Liao family. This Yelü Dashi declared himself emperor in 1131 and, turning his back on both Mongolia and the Jurchen, led his men far to the west. They followed the trail through northern Mongolia once taken by the Kyrgyz and other Turkic peoples. Reaching Lake Balkhash in what is now Kazakhstan, the empire-less emperor halted and began constructing anew in central Asia the lost empire of Khitan Liao. It would soon extend over a vast area north of the Oxus (Amu) River and include all the great cities of Sogdiana, Ferghana and Xinjiang. Heavily influenced by long association with northern China, well served by Han followers and fluent in Chinese, the Khitan rulers of this new empire contributed to the dissemination of the cultural and administrative norms encountered during their previous existence in China; indeed, they could easily be mistaken for Chinese themselves. For the purposes of distinction, their empire was known as ‘Western Liao’ and its people as the Kara Khitai (‘Black Khitan’), a term which thirteenth-century visitors from Europe would transcribe and then apply to all of northern China. As ‘Cathai’ or ‘Cathay’, it was duly adopted by Marco Polo. The Western Liao never abandoned hope of regaining their previous empire, but when pushing back eastwards, they came up against the Xia in G
ansu and got no farther. The ‘Great State of White and High’, long accustomed to Khitan threats emanating from the direction of the sunrise, may have been surprised to find the same menace mysteriously translated to the sunset; but they held firm. For the rest of the twelfth century, says one authority, ‘the [Kara Khitai] Western Liao, the [Tangut] Xia, the Jin empire of the Jurchens, and the Southern Song dynasty in [southern] China were the four great mainland powers of eastern Asia’.23
Northern Song had abruptly become Southern Song when the Jurchen, continuing their inexorable southern advance, crossed the Yellow River and, at their second attempt, captured the Song capital of Kaifeng in early 1127. The Song’s great eunuch-general Tong Guan had been disgraced after the first attack; and Cai Jing, the ministerial reformer who had anticipated modern methods of self-corrrection, corrected himself by committing suicide. Experience, like troops, deserted the Song in their hour of need, and stout resistance proved hopeless. When Kaifeng fell, two emperors were taken prisoner; the dilettante Song Huizong plus the irrelevant Song Qinzong (r. 1126–27), in whose favour Huizong had just abdicated. They were dispatched to the Jurchen capital near Harbin in far-off Manchuria and there held as hostages. Huizong was ignominiously enfeoffed with the title of Hunde, meaning ‘Muddled Virtue’, Qinzong with that of Chonghun, meaning ‘Doubly Muddled’. The Jurchen treated them not unreasonably; but neither would ever see their homeland again.
Forewarned, a younger son of ‘Muddled Virtue’ had evaded capture at Kaifeng and, rallying resistance, was declared the next Song emperor. It was he who would be posthumously titled Song Gaozong (r. 1127–62), or ‘founding ancestor’ of the revered Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279). His first years were inauspicious. Jurchen armies advanced from Hubei and Sichuan, driving the Song forces before them. Several times they even crossed the Yangzi. In 1129 they stormed what would be the Southern Song’s ‘temporary capital’ of Hangzhou on the coast of Zhejiang. This time Song Gaozong managed to escape courtesy of the Song navy. No emperor had ever fled out to sea before, and though he was swiftly landed, the implications of this move would be profound. Rarely had the coastline featured in Chinese strategic calculations as a frontier, or the sea in cosmic theory as an ‘All-under-Heaven’ element. Their utility lay almost entirely in the fish, salt and tributary bounty (otherwise trade) that they yielded. But under the Song, and especially the Southern Song, attitudes changed. Naval fleets began to nose forth from the rivers, mercantile shipping to wing across the high seas. Mongol ambitions beyond China would accelerate this maritime initiative, and under the Ming dynasty in the fifteenth century China would, albeit briefly, rule the world’s waves.
None of which would have been much consolation to Song Gaozong, the founder of the Southern Song, as the Jurchen Jin continued to heap humiliation on defeat. In the 1130s Jin policy veered away from the Khitan precedent of a part-steppe, part-sown empire to swing decisively towards a sino-centric dominion. The Xia in Gansu, the Kara Khitai of Western Liao and the peoples of Mongolia would never be more than remote, occasional and decidedly nominal vassals of the Jin. The records mention an expedition against ‘the Meng’, an early reference to the Mongols, but it ‘could not subdue them’. Instead, in 1146, a treaty was signed with the Meng chief, probably Khabul Khan, grandfather of Chinggis, which effectively wrote off Mongolia as a Jin dependency. Even the Jin homeland in Manchuria was downgraded when a great migration of the Jurchen clans was ordered southwards to Hebei, Henan and Shanxi. The move was consummated in 1151 when the northern capital near Harbin in Manchuria was largely abandoned in favour of what had been the southern capital. This was the future Beijing; the Jurchen Jin were the first to rule zhongguo exclusively from it. They had clearly come to stay. Theirs would not be an overlap empire of the frontier but as near a ‘Middle Kingdom’ as any, with the Yellow River plain as its heartland.
Yet such was the extent of Jin conquest, and such the overstretch of its Jurchen manpower (2–4 million amid a northern Han population of 30–60 million), that for a decade the Jin toyed with subcontracting the task of pacification to an artificially constituted buffer state. South of the Yellow River there thus arose yet another Chu, then another longer-lasting Qi (1130–37). Only a new treaty with the now Southern Song, concluded in 1142, ended this experiment in indirect rule. The Jin sought a more permanent arrangement along their southern frontier. Their armies had not had it all their own way in the south. Like many before them, they had found the malarial climate debilitating and the terrain unsuitable for horses; additionally the Song navy made river crossings hazardous. On the whole it was better to let the Song retain what the Jin could not comfortably subdue. A Jin–Song frontier along the Huai River about 150 kilometres (93 miles) north of the Yangzi was mutually agreed; and the Song were to pay the Jin an annual tribute roughly equivalent to that paid to Khitan Liao by the Northern Song.
The actual sum was less important than Song’s acceptance that it was indeed ‘tribute’. Imperial blushes were not this time to be spared by the usual euphemisms. In the treaty oath, the Song were obliged to refer to their empire as ‘our insignificant state’ and to Jin as ‘your superior state’. For these embarrassing concessions, all the Song received in return were a pledge of coexistence and the corpse of the lately deceased hostage, Song Huizong, he of ‘muddled virtue’ who was the father of the Southern Song’s founder. The Song were now vassals of the Jin, and their emperor ‘must have regarded the extorted documents [of the treaty] as the nadir of his career’. He was not even awarded kinship status as the ‘younger brother’, ‘son’ or ‘nephew’ of the Jin emperor. Instead he must call himself ‘Servant Gou’, Gou being Song Gaozong’s personal name (and, doubly degrading, imperial personal names being normally taboo). ‘[This] must have taxed to the extreme his gift for self-denial.’24
The peace lasted nearly twenty years; it was this ‘edict’ to which Lu You, representing Song irredentism, so poignantly objected in the poem ‘Border Mountain Moon’. Meanwhile the ‘traitorous barbarians’, that is the Jurchen Jin, were indeed ‘living to see their heirs’ – though not especially liking what they saw. Organising their new empire meant, for the Jin, not just accommodating themselves to Han norms but coming to grips with their own tribal heritage. Consensual institutions like the Jurchen chiefs’ periodic councils had already been abolished as incompatible with the dignity of an emperor; and in a further rebuff to Jurchen supremacism, Han subjects had been excused from adopting the Jurchen hairstyle. (This should not be seen as a dynastic innovation, like the Xia tonsure, but as a standard token of submission; it involved shaving the front of the crown, a style which, with the addition of a queue, would be reimposed in the seventeenth century by the latter-day Jurchens who called themselves Manchu.) Now, in a further move to regularise the empire, the independent tendencies of the Jurchen nobles at court and of the clan leaders in the provinces were severely curtailed and their authority restricted to military recruitment.
A Han-type bureaucracy, partly recruited through examination and wholly dependent on the emperor, took over their administrative responsibilities. Tax rolls were revised, censuses conducted, scholars encouraged, degrees awarded and Buddhism esteemed, if still closely regulated. Literature flourished; new literary forms including musical dramas proved especially popular. The court rituals and etiquette of imperial China were adopted wholesale. Only the constraints of Confucian morality and ministerial remonstrance were neglected. The authority of the emperor was more absolute than ever, with the rough-and-ready justice of tribal leadership adding a sharper, bloodier edge to the unimpeded exercise of power.
Responsible for these changes were two tyrannical emperors: the alcoholic Jin Xizong (r. 1135–49), and his cousin and murderer, the lecherous Prince Hailing. (Too tyrannical to qualify for a posthumous title, Hailing nevertheless reigned, 1149–61). Xizong is portrayed as an incompetent wastrel, Hailing as a butchering monster. ‘In the rogues’ gallery of Chinese history, Hailing Wang occupies a pl
ace of honour,’ writes a sarcastic Herbert Franke in The Cambridge History of China; ‘he even became an anti-hero in popular pornography, where his exploits are embellished with gusto.’25 Both emperors had no compunction in murdering enemies, executing supposed opponents and abusing their womenfolk in defiance of custom. They were violent and dangerous autocrats. Yet they were by no means tribal ruffians, and their victims were more often Jurchen chiefs than Han subjects. Both spoke Chinese and had received an upbringing in the Confucian classics. Hailing reputedly composed elegant verse. His intelligence was formidable, and if he inspired universal fear, he did so in the conviction that terror had its place in the authoritarian tradition of Han-type emperorship.
With territory and prestige beyond the dreams of any previous conqueror, the Jin should have been content after the 1142 treaty; likewise the Song, who, despite Lu You’s plaint, had not only survived but retained control of what was now much the most productive region of China. Trade between the two empires revived and diplomatic niceties were respected. Yet in 1161 Prince Hailing of Jin, possibly to counter his extreme unpopularity, revived Jin designs on Song with a massive new invasion. Song hit back in 1206–08. Neither advance achieved its objectives or significantly altered the political geography; rather were both counterproductive.
The Jin attack of 1161 was quickly aborted. Never popular, it did, however, provoke the murder of the unspeakable Prince Hailing and bring to the throne his antithesis. A cousin, this Jin Shizong (r. 1161–89) restored the good name of Jurchen rule and is highly praised by the official historians for his moderation and good sense. Revolts among the Jin’s Khitan subjects were put down. Jurchen sensibilities were appeased with new responsibilities and the promotion of things dear to Jurchen tradition, such as hunting, archery and the Jurchen language and script. Meanwhile Han opinion was mollified by Shizong’s high regard for the Duke of Zhou and his remote utopian age; like every good Confucianist, Shizong urged its adoption as a model to which Jin China should aspire. Peace with the Song was restored at little cost. From a ‘servant’ the Song emperor was promoted to ‘nephew’ and his annual ‘tribute’ downgraded to a simple ‘payment’. The amount stayed unchanged, and Jin supremacy remained intact, though now avuncular rather than magisterial.
