Great Wall in 50 Objects

by William Lindesay

  But ‘large numbers’ on the steppe were not large numbers in ancient China, where everything, including a demand for commodities, was so much bigger. The horse deficit was a constant problem. As Song Qi observed, one strategy was ‘to overwhelm the enemy’. While large nomadic armies were in the order of a few tens of thousands, contemporaneous Chinese armies were of several hundred thousand – at least ten, and sometimes twenty-five times larger.

  The difficulty of supplying horses – and the ease with which they could be lost – became more acute when China went on the offensive, sending armies north of the Great Wall, to engage the enemy. Han Wudi’s Mobei or ‘North Desert Campaign’ of 119 BC was victorious, but his army lost an estimated 80 per cent of the empire’s entire horse population.

  In the Ming, the Yongle Emperor was responsible for the successful production and drastic loss of horses. Nomads assessed wealth according to the number of steeds owned. Almost mimicking them, the Prince of Yan, the future Yongle Emperor, had written: ‘In ancient times the official in charge of horses was known as the “Overseer of Horses”. When asked about the wealth of a ruler, they answered by counting the horses. This shows that horses are the most important thing to a country.’

  On taking power in 1402, the Yongle Emperor put his words into action. He’d seized an empire possessing only 40 000 horses, but through diverse means – large-scale tribute from vassals, capture, exchange and breeding programs – he increased it to an impressive 1.5 million. But he lost a large number of them on his final, disastrous fifth Northern Expedition, in 1424. A quarter century later, in 1449, during the offensive that climaxed in the humiliating event dubbed the Tumu Incident, many of the imperial army’s horses were lost in battle (see Object 29).

  Devastating losses had an immediate impact on future military policy, and prompted methods that sought to replenish stocks swiftly. In the late Ming, thirteen ‘horse–tea’ markets along the border were authorised by the Board of War, but their continued operation was a sensitive issue subject to local conditions, as a document dated 1637 and kept in the National Museum of China evidences. It concerns the reopening of the Zhangjiakou market after a period of closure for an unspecified reason – much to the relief of various parties. ‘Now that the market has reopened,’ it reads, ‘merchants have flocked here, goods and silver are as plentiful as stars in the sky. Officers and soldiers can mount fast steeds again, and local people too have benefitted from the trade. In less than one year the barrier [the Great Wall] has taken on a new look and worn out troops are energized . . .’

  When analysing the various means of obtaining horses, one inevitably returns to the same old problem: unsustainability. This directs us towards finding the reasons for an apparent degeneration of horse quality. China is famous not only for its inventiveness, but also for copying. Nowadays, fakers obtain an ‘original’, make copies for a fiftieth of the price and sell them for a tenth of the price, by which time the domestic market no longer wants the overpriced genuine articles any more. So why, once China had obtained fast, strong horses from its nomadic neighbours, could they not let the mares and stallions do the rest? This becomes a more intriguing question in the late Ming, when horse–tea markets created a mechanism for importing more horses.

  We get a hint about the mystery from the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), when he wrote about ‘the fertility and products of the Chinese Empire’ in his journal. ‘They [the Chinese] have countless horses in the service of the army,’ he wrote, ‘but these are so degenerate and lacking in martial spirit that they are put to rout even by the neighing of the Tartars steeds, and so they are useless as war horses.’ Ricci added that ‘the Chinese know little about the taming or training of horses’.

  It seemed that once the horses had left their steppe motherland, they just weren’t the same, an apparent fact that has never been convincingly explained. Was it disease or a deficiency that accounted for the lacklustre performance of breeding programs for 1500 years? Or might their languor be explained more simplistically by the change in the horse’s habitat – by being too far removed from its homeland of cool temperatures, clear streams and lush grasslands?

  The question of the inability of the Chinese to successfully and consistently breed quality war horses is an historical mystery, but one which, according to Professor Lev Gumilev (1912–1992), may have a possible biological-environmental explanation. The Russian historian and anthropologist theorised that a lack or excess of selenium in China’s soil was the problem. This element is important to all animals for cellular functions, and each species has different demands and tolerances. Horses are known to be intolerant of both too little and too much selenium: they can only develop healthily and reproduce strong foals if the level is within this certain range.

  Gumilev’s theory certainly warrants further research. I do think, as observers across the ages have noted, that the problem of quality was not solely related to the horses, but also to their training and their riders’ horsemanship. If you’re to win a fight you must have a good sword, but you must also be capable of using it.

  32.

  Sixteenth Century Typos

  Bluestone stele bearing construction records

  When I worked as an editor at the Xinhua News Agency in central Beijing in the late 1990s, my role as a ‘foreign expert’ was to improve the standard of reporters’ writing; the most important thing was to avoid printing any errors. Senior Chinese editors would often recall the dark years of the Cultural Revolution, when any mistake – factual, grammatical or typographical – was considered a serious political error, especially in any writing relating to Chairman Mao.

  Things were clearly different 450 years earlier, in the Ming, when this small tablet was inscribed. The writer made two cuobie zi or faulted characters among the stone’s total of fifty-eight, rather like our own spelling mistakes or incorrect usage of a homonym or homophone. Surprisingly, one of them is a botched version of His Imperial Majesty’s reign name. The proverb ‘Heaven is high and the Emperor is far away’ might partly explain the reason for the sloppy writing, for this stone was made in Jiayuguan, almost the whole length of the Great Wall away from Beijing.

  While the highlights of history always attract the most interest, it is sometimes the more utilitarian artefacts – or, in the case of this inscription, something hastily done in the lower ranks – that survive and challenge our understanding. Measuring just nineteen by eleven centimetres, this thin bluestone slab is roughly the size of a page from a standard paperback, and is inscribed on both sides. Seeing it for the first time, I was struck by four things: its small size; the quite varied size of its characters; the freehand style of the writing; and the very odd ‘layout’. It’s more like a hastily written news brief than a carefully composed and designed official document. Yet this does not detract from its value; on the contrary. Its provenance and errors take us far away from the Middle Kingdom’s centre, the capital region where all was standardised, checked and perfect, to the far-flung western reaches of the Ming frontier. It allows us to see how things were done on the empire’s rough edge.

  What we have here at Jiayuguan is an apparently impromptu record of a bunch of workers who built a section of rammed-earth Wall. It’s poorly written on a scrap of stone, cramped in layout, and contains either language mistakes due to low literacy or perhaps a form of shorthand, depending on whose opinion you prefer.

  The fifty-eight-character text reads from right to left, top to bottom (I’ll use capitals to denote the larger characters):

  [Front] THE FIRST WORK GROUP . . . [In the] nineteenth year of Jiajing [during the] seventh month [from the] first day [to the] tenth day . . .

  [Back] MEI STARTS CAI FINISHES . . . first section Li Qing’s team starts [comma] second section Mei Xi’s team [comma] third section Wang Yuan’s team [comma] fourth section Hou Xun’s team [comma] fifth section Wei Zong’s section [comma] sixth section finishes.

  When I look at this tablet, I’m ple
asantly surprised to find that I can actually read it. When I look at larger, longer, perfectly produced tablets in the Beijing region, I can read very little of them – most Chinese, too, struggle to comprehend their contents. The challenges are numerous. For one thing, there’s no punctuation. Names come with attached military ranks and imperial titles, which are composed of rarely used characters which most people today don’t recognise. The characters are all traditional (complex), while today’s are simplified (with fewer strokes).

  In contrast, the Jiayuguan tablet has brevity and simplicity: there’s a limited range of characters, it repeats several common characters, and it avoids complex ones. It reminds me of the simple love letters that I wrote during my very early years of language-learning to my fianceé (now my wife). My very limited knowledge then meant that I could only choose words I could write. Anyone learning a language first masters the name of the person who’s most important to them. For a baby, that’s the names of its mother and father. For me at that time, it was my girlfriend’s name. Then my own name. The next thing we learn is to count and write out those numbers.

  Etched on the Jiayuguan tablet we find all these simplicities. Thirteen of the fifty-eight characters, for example, are simple-to-write numerals. Of the remaining forty-five characters, the simple three-stroke character 工 or gong, meaning ‘work’, is used eight times – it was a word the men knew well. Six of the next thirty-seven characters are dui, meaning ‘team’. Fourteen of the remaining thirty-one are peoples’ names. But while early learners quickly master proper names of importance to them, coming to terms with the names of occupations is a bigger challenge. That’s why there are names but no ranks on this tablet. To compensate for this shortcoming, the names of the two most important officers are emphasised in a much larger script: regional military bigwigs surnamed Mei and Cai.

  For me, the most intriguing ‘blemish’ on this stele is the incorrectly written (or is it a short form?) first half of the Emperor’s reign name: Jiajing. In order to record the year, it was essential to inscribe this. The character used by our Jiayuguan writer for jia is actually the most commonly used of all the jia characters; it means ‘plus’, which would have become familiar to anyone who had learnt even basic arithmetic. But the jia character that forms part of His Imperial Majesty’s reign name is less common, so it seems that, back then in 1540, our writer used the first character he knew that sounded right.

  Yet the explanation may not be as clear-cut as that. Some researchers explain the ‘mistake’ as a deliberate abbreviation: the jia the writer used constitutes the lower part of the jia character he should have used. Is it possible that the writer took it upon himself to abbreviate the Emperor’s name?

  The second ‘typo’ concerns the character di, which is used as a character in context to denote an ordinal number. One of its homonyms, in the double form didi, means ‘younger brother’. This seems certain to have been a mistake, with the writer using the name of a family member. Chinese people rarely call their siblings by given names. Mostly they use terms such as didi, explained above, jiejie for ‘elder sister’, gege for ‘older brother’ and so on, and these would have been among first the characters anyone learned.

  But again there is an alternative explanation. Research has found that tong jia zi, or ‘incorrectly transposed characters’, were commonly accepted. So, the ‘younger brother’ form of di was widely used for the ordinal form of di, and this, some claim, makes it acceptable. In both Chinese and English today, of course, all kinds of grammatical ‘rules’ are broken: u is used for you in English, while 5 is used for wo (or ‘I’) in Chinese. If it sounds right and takes less time, it works.

  DESCRIPTION: A small bluestone stele, nineteen centimetres by eleven centimetres, and two centimetres thick, dated and bearing a short inscription recording the names of contractors in charge of work groups building the rampart

  SIGNIFICANCE: A rare on-site record of the construction of a rammed-earth Wall

  ORIGIN: Inscribed circa August 1540; found in 1975 in the ruins of a rammed-earth Wall at Shiguanxia, near the Jiayuguan Fortress

  LOCATION: Jiayuguan Great Wall Museum, Gansu

  Whatever the case, the Jiayuguan tablet shows us that a writer – probably the most literate officer available – decided to carve an inscription, and he used his very limited vocabulary to record the August 1540 event.

  According to Yu Chunrong, curator of the Jiayuguan Great Wall Museum, researching in Suzhen Huayizhi, or ‘Records of the Suzhen Military Border Region’, it was during the previous year, the eighteenth of the Jiajing Emperor – that’s 1539 – that Li Han, commander of the Suzhen Garrison (today’s Jiuquan) received a directive from the Board of War ordering the construction of border defences on either side of the existing Jiayuguan fortress. Why, then, did he delay one year in carrying out the imperial order?

  One explanation may have been the availability of the sub-commands’ personnel whom Li Han assigned to oversee the construction work. The four large characters on the reverse of our tablet include Mei and Cai, surnames that appear in the ‘Records of the Suzhen Military Border Region’. These two men were in charge of the very large Suzhen-Wei and the Liangzhou-Wei (today’s Wuwei) subcommand regions, respectively, and the stele implies that they were onsite at the time of the construction work beside the Jiayuguan fortress.

  While I don’t imagine for one moment that these sub-commanders personally presided over the construction of hundreds of kilometres of the Wall throughout their regions, I can understand their superior’s particular attention in sending his top field men to represent him at Jiayuguan at this time. The fortress had stood alone at the western extremity of the Ming Wall since the 1370s. Located in the middle of the narrowest part of the long Hexi Corridor, strategically it commanded land between the natural defences of a gorge carved by the Taolai River to the south and Mazhong Shan (‘Horse Mane Mountain’) to the north. The location merited a top-quality structure, and to ensure this Li Han sent his two best men.

  The tablet also tells us that the work was done between the first and the tenth days of the seventh lunar month of 1540. This translates as between 12 August and 21 August of the Gregorian calendar – high summer. These are revealing details concerning duration and the working season.

  First, the construction period was very brief: out west at Jiayuguan, the builders were making ramparts of rammed earth, which is much easier and faster than a defence made of quarried rock. Such ‘soft’ Walls were far easier to build than ‘hard’ Walls. Second, the work at Jiayuguan was done at the hottest time of the year. By contrast, construction-related steles found along the Wall’s eastern sections – in the Beijing and Hebei regions, for example, which were built of rock and brick – show that the work there was carried out primarily in spring and autumn, when temperatures were not extreme. Why, then, was the Wall out west built in high summer? Answer: because at that time one of the essential building materials fell out of the sky.

  Water was needed to wet the earth in order to tamp it down, and the planners preferred to let nature deliver it directly, rather than increase the risk of workers’ discontent and exhaustion by having them transport the heavy commodity for several kilometres in searing summer temperatures (see Object 6). Jiayuguan receives its heaviest rainfall in July and August; thunderstorms form in the region when the Gobi’s hot and unstable air is forced to rise rapidly by the 4000-metre-plus Qilian Shan range, which rims the southern edge of the Hexi Corridor. So there was no delay as such. The command just waited for the next building season to come around.

  History gives us relatively few fragments of evidence that assist our understanding of the ordinary people – the workers – who participated in great events. What I like about this object is its ordinariness, its earthiness, and the crude way in which the low-ranking names are recorded beside their commanders. It tells us that six groups of builders in the charge of officers Li, Wang, Hou, Wei, Mei and Zhang (written in ‘small font’ characters
) had their work overseen by regional sub-commanders Mei and Cai (big names indeed, and written in ‘large font’ characters) as they carried out the Emperor’s building order.

  This stele, with its distinctive ad hoc appearance, says: ‘We did this.’ It expresses the honour low-ranking officers felt at working with top men from HQ. It’s a remarkable message from the Wall’s north-western frontier, posted in 1540 and received in 1975, telling of resourcefulness, creativity and pride, and with a thought for posterity.

  33.

  Stone Age Weapons

  Gunpowder rock bombs

  I’ve never been directly involved in a war. I suspect that few, if any, of my forebears can make such a fortunate claim. In childhood, though, I often heard World War II stories told at the dinner table. I particularly remember my mother’s recollections of the nighttime air raids on the port of Liverpool, when the city’s main defences were hopes and prayers. I remember thinking that nothing could be as terrifying as that.

  But perhaps it could: when death was planted, lurking silently in wait. The ground would suddenly heave up. Everything within a radius of several metres – earth, leaves, grass, bush, horse and man – would rise and fall in the supernatural eruption. When a landmine exploded, hell itself surfaced.

  I found my first landmine quite by chance. It was 1996, and I was exploring the Wall in the Beijing region. I’d followed a path out from the village, hoping it would lead all the way up to the Wall, but it led only to the top fields. Beyond, I forged on crosscountry, through the woods and along gullies. It was very slow going, and hazardous too. I spotted a rock that looked different from the others. It was natural but sculpted.