by John Man
Sima Qian tells us a little about Tumen. His clan or family was Luandi (in Chinese), which remained the royal lineage until the Xiongnu fell. He had a son and heir named Modun (Maodun, Modu and Mao-tun are alternative transliterations), who will soon take centre stage. Tumen became infatuated with a new young wife with whom he had a second son, and decided to replace Modun as his heir with his newborn. What was to be done with Modun? A solution was to hand. To guarantee their security and as a sign of submission, minor tribes often sent princes as hostages to dominant tribes. So Tumen sent Modun off to the Yuezhi, a move that must have left him seething with resentment against his father.
Was this true? It’s credible, in part at least. The name Tumen means nothing in Chinese, but in Mongolian and Turkic languages it means ‘Ten Thousand’, the equivalent of the Chinese wàn, with the difference that in Mongol and Turkic it is both a military unit and a common name. There are lots of Tumens in Mongolia today (one being the eminent archaeologist Dashtseveg Tumen). The Tumen River marks North Korea’s frontier with Russia.
But only in part credible, for the whole story of Tumen and his son is just too good to be totally true. As Nikolai Kradin (of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Far Eastern Branch, Vladivostok) points out,12 ‘historical events and elements of fantasy are mixed’. It is as if the origins of Xiongnu power had already been turned into an epic by bards, and then told to Sima Qian. Is it really credible that a plot to murder Tumen should unfold in public? That it involves the killing of both a beloved wife and a beloved horse? That events unfold in threes? That a man who murders his way to the throne should be a hero? Perhaps Tumen – Ten Thousand – is no more than a symbolic character, an Everyman from whom Modun seizes power.
You will see what I mean in Chapter 5, when Modun takes over in dramatic circumstances, and makes the Xiongnu powerful enough to found the first nomadic empire. But that was in response to events unfolding to the south and east, in what would soon become the heart of a unified China.
1 Notably the Man, Yi, Rong and Di, all later absorbed by the Xiongnu.
2 Quoted in Joseph Yap, Wars with the Xiongnu (see Bibliography).
3 Ibid.
4 There are many editions. The best is Igor de Rachewiltz’s (see Bibliography).
5 Bryan K. Miller, Power Politics in the Xiongnu Empire (see Bibliography). See also Ursula Brosseder’s long article ‘Belt Plaques as an Indicator of East-West Relations’ in Brosseder and Miller (eds), Xiongnu Archaeology.
6 Quoted in Yap, Wars.
7 Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian, translated by Burton Watson (see Bibliography).
8 Christine Lee and Zhang Linhu, ‘Xiongnu Population History’, in Brosseder and Miller (eds), Xiongnu Archaeology.
9 Nicola Di Cosmo, Ancient China and its Enemies (see Bibliography).
10 This is the basis for Yap’s Wars with the Xiongnu.
11 Qut was part of the nickname of Genghis Khan’s foster-brother (or fosterson, accounts vary) and chief official, Shigi Qutuqu, Shigi the Fortunate. The Chinese version of the title is chán yú, but it is impossible to know if this represents the Xiongnu sounds accurately.
12 Nikolai N. Kradin, ‘Stateless Empire’, in Brosseder and Miller (eds), Xiongnu Archaeology.
3
THE GROWING THREAT OF A UNIFIED CHINA
THE THIRD CENTURY BC, IN WHAT WILL BECOME THE HEARTLAND of a unified China: a hundred mini-states and city-states have whittled themselves down to seven. The seven are at war, constantly. Unity, a dominant theme for students of Chinese history, was non-existent. But it was on its way, with many implications for Ordos and its neighbouring grasslands north of the Yellow River. For China’s unification created pressures that would soon spill over into the steppes, inspiring the nomads to match the power of the new China, and confront it. Unity and pressure on one side led to unity and counter-pressure on the other.
In the Chinese heartland, unification had deep roots in preceding periods of rivalry and conflict. Under the influence of constant warfare, social evolution went into overdrive. Bronze gave way to iron, tools improved, agriculture became more productive, trade increased. The obsession with war had equal and opposite obsessions: with peace, diplomacy, art, philosophy and poetry. Great thinkers struggled with great questions, the greatest thinker being Kong Fuzi, or Confucius to give him his Latinized name. Dismayed by the evils of his world, he devised a system of ethics and government that promoted the good. He taught that people should see clearly their place in a hierarchical universe, from king to commoner. All should fulfil their responsibilities to those above and below, exercising loyalty, piety, filial respect and benevolence. He taught that human beings are part of one big family, governed by family virtues. The advice to rulers from Confucius was: Rule virtuously and peace will follow.
But all too often it didn’t. A school of cynics arose, asking a tough question: What is the point of cultivating peace if it does not lead to peace? Their answer was brutally pragmatic: None at all. The only way to peace was through war. In peace, the wise ruler prepared for war; in war, he ensured victory; in victory, he preserved peace by preparing for yet more war. It was this philosophy above all that would, a century later, force the pace of change in Ordos and other nearby steppes.
Warfare inspired another twist in the spiral of social evolution: wall-building. City walls had been a feature of the settled lifestyle for centuries, but now, suddenly, round about 300 BC, frontier walls appear. This was possible because, for the first time in Chinese history, states could organize labour on a large scale. These states seemed to need the sort of protection everyone was used to: a city wall, but bigger. So states built walls around themselves, along their frontiers, against each other. The walls, ostensibly for defence, also defined borders and imposed the state’s will. Small-scale city-states were becoming nation-states, backed by tough legal systems, huge armies, great irrigation projects, bureaucracies, taxation.
One state, Qin, began to set itself apart. Qin – centred on present-day Shaanxi, the cradle of Chinese civilization – was in those days considered by other states to be an uncouth backwater. But it was very successful. In an age of states dedicated to the rigid rule of law, it was the most dedicated. Every official act had to go towards making the state rich, the army strong and expansion rapid.
This line of thought was given its most forceful expression by an ambitious young scholar named Shang. Lord Shang (Shang Yang), as he became known, was born in the state of Wei, which dominated the middle Yellow River, probably around 400 BC, when the states that would merge as China were at eternal war with each other (hence the name of the age, the Warring States, 480–221 BC). Might is right (he argued), power the only virtue. Human beings are idle, greedy, cowardly, treacherous, foolish, shifty, so Confucius’s idea that they respond well to good treatment is simply naïve. The only way to rule is to entice, terrify, reward and punish. This is not arbitrary, but based on the stern rule of law, applied to everyone without distinction, an agenda from which it gets its name: Legalism. The ruler’s task is firstly to devise the law, then record it, then ensure that it is applied impartially through officials utterly subservient to the state’s institutions.
Wei’s prime minister, Gongshu Cuo, was so awed by Shang’s abilities that he feared what might happen if the young man took his ideas to a rival king. Sima Qian tells the story. When the prime minister was on his deathbed, he advised the king to keep Shang’s loyalty by making him the next prime minister. If not, he said, ‘be sure to have him killed. Don’t allow him to leave the state!’ Claiming that Gongshu was ‘quite out of his mind’, the king dismissed both ideas, with the result that Gongshu had feared. Shang, unrewarded and very much alive, turned to the neighbouring state of Qin, the state that was emerging as the strongest of the seven warring rivals.
His move to Qin was welcomed by its ruler, Duke Xiao, who seized on Shang’s grim policies. In the words of his follower Han Fei: ‘Lord Shang taught Duke Xiao of Qin how to
organize the people into groups of five or ten families that would spy on each other … anyone who failed to report criminal activity would be chopped in two at the waist.’ In addition, the duke had three aims: to ensure a professional army; to provide farm-labourers who supplied its food; and to uphold the Law, applied to everyone, except of course the duke himself, for he personified the Law and was above it. For Shang, nothing must rival the prince’s laws, not even the cries of the people: ‘A weak people means a strong state,’ he wrote. ‘A strong state means a weak people.’
Shang was not popular. When Duke Xiao died, Shang didn’t last long. He was caught, ‘tied to two chariots and torn apart’.1
But his policies worked. Qin expanded, spreading southwards into Sichuan, then eastwards into neighbouring Zhou. War followed war, and death piled on death, as Qin turned itself into the hardest of the hard.
Shang’s spirit lived on in Han Fei, who set out the Legalist agenda with brilliance. Here are four pieces of his extremely scary advice on how rulers should behave:
•‘It is said: “So still he seems to dwell nowhere at all; so empty no one can seek him out.” The enlightened ruler reposes in non-action above, and below his ministers tremble with fear.’
•‘This is the way of the enlightened ruler: Where there are accomplishments, the ruler takes credit for their worth; where there are errors, the ministers are held responsible for the blame; hence the ruler’s name never suffers.’
•‘Be empty, still, and idle, and from your place of darkness observe the defects of others. See but do not appear to see; listen but do not seem to listen; know but do not let it be known that you know.’
•‘This is the way to listen to the words of others: be silent as though in a drunken stupor. Say to yourself: Lips! Teeth! Do not be the first to move … Let others say their piece – I will gain knowledge thereby.’
The scene is set for the entry of the First Emperor, the man who would confront the ‘barbarians’ of Ordos and the other northern grasslands, and turn them from rivals into an existential menace. His story, like many in history, mixes character and events entirely at random, yet leads to an end that seems inevitable, in this case unity.
The story starts, as it often does with dictators, in a deep sense of insecurity rooted in childhood.
Our main source is Sima Qian, Grand Historian of Han, writing a century after the events he describes.2 As he tells it, the story opens in the next-door state, Zhao, with a rich and ambitious merchant named Lü Buwei meeting a minor Qin prince, Zichu, the son of a junior concubine of the heir to the Qin throne. Zichu, it seems, is never going to amount to much. He is not in line for succession – indeed, there is no line, because the crown prince’s official wife, of whom Zichu is very fond, is barren. One of twenty sons by various concubines, Zichu has been sent off to become a hostage in the Zhao court, a common diplomatic ploy to prove Qin’s good intentions. But being low in the pecking order, Zichu lives frugally, without a retinue or carriages, and with no future, until Lü spots in him a chance of advancement.
Lü is a novelty in the changing society of the time. Merchants had previously been despised by Confucians as under-educated parasites. But in these Legalistic times, merchants were on the rise. Smart, self-serving, unscrupulous, Lü invites the prince into a back room, and proposes a scheme to lever him on to the Qin throne. The prince has nothing to lose, and agrees.
Lü gives the prince some cash to hire himself a band of followers and buys some ‘rare objects, trinkets and toys’, which he takes to the Qin capital, Xianyang. He strikes up an acquaintance with an intermediary and has his purchases delivered to the wife of the crown prince along with a message about how much Zichu adores her. Since she has no son, he says, she will have no one to look after her when the emperor dies. She had better find a stepson, who will therefore be the crown prince’s heir, and second in line to the throne. Eventually, when ‘the one whom you call son becomes king, you need never fear any loss of position’. The one she should choose is, of course, Zichu. So it happens. Zichu becomes the crown prince’s heir, and Lü becomes his tutor.
Now comes a dramatic incident that may or may not be true. Lü has a very beautiful girlfriend. She becomes pregnant. Zichu sees her, falls in love, and asks for her. Lü, whose whole future is now tied to Zichu, swallows his outrage and hands the poor girl over. In 259 BC, she has a son, named Zheng – the future First Emperor.
In 251 BC, after a couple of royal deaths, Zichu becomes king, the girlfriend his queen, and Lü his prime minister. Five years later Zichu dies, leaving thirteen-year-old Zheng to succeed, under the control of his all-powerful patron.
Lü and the beautiful queen, his former mistress, continue their relationship, but Lü, afraid of discovery, hatches another plot even more complicated and lurid than the previous one. In Sima Qian’s words:
The queen dowager did not cease her wanton behaviour. Lü Buwei began to fear that, if her conduct were ever brought to light, he himself would become involved with the scandal. He therefore searched about in secret until he found a man named Lao Ai who had an unusually large penis, and made him a servant in his household. Then, when an occasion arose, he had suggestive music performed and, instructing Lao Ai to stick his penis through the centre of a wheel made of paulownia wood, had him walk about with it, making certain that the report of this reached the ears of the queen dowager so as to excite her interest.
Should we believe this extraordinary story? Why paulownia wood? Probably because such details add plausibility, of which Sima Qian was a master. But plausibility is not the same as truth. It is, perhaps, no more than a rumour that adds drama to explain the beginning of a long-lasting affair.
Anyway, the queen asked to meet Lao Ai. But there was a problem. The palace system did not allow ‘real’ men into the dowager empress’s quarters. So Lü’s plot gets its next twist. He arranges for Lao Ai to be falsely accused of a crime for which the punishment is castration. The official in charge of castration is then bribed to pretend to carry out the procedure, plucking out Lao Ai’s beard and eyebrows to make him look like a eunuch. ‘In this way,’ says Sima Qian, ‘he eventually came to wait on the queen, who carried on clandestine relations with him and grew to love him greatly.’
The affair continued for several years. As the queen’s top adviser, he was made a marquis and acquired a retinue of 1,000 retainers. The queen bore Lao Ai two sons, who thus became half-brothers and possible heirs of the teenaged King Zheng, who was kept in the dark by his mentor, Lü Buwei, his mother’s ex-lover and perhaps his real father. This was a ticking time bomb.
It exploded during the ninth year of his reign (238 BC), when ‘someone reported’ to King Zheng the truth about his mother’s affair with Lao Ai. And Lü Buwei’s role. The king ordered an investigation. Lao Ai, panic-stricken, tried to start a revolt in which several hundred died. But his followers deserted him, and he was quickly captured.
So there was the 21-year-old emperor, Zheng, suddenly aware that he was possibly a bastard, or at best the son of a minor prince who came to the throne by trickery, that his mother was an ex-dancer of ill repute obsessed by a well-endowed and treacherous gigolo, all with the participation of the man to whom he owed his throne.
The stakes could hardly be higher. Either he would remain a puppet, controlled by his mother, her lover and his mentor; or he had to assert himself by crushing the lot of them.
He chose suppression. Lao Ai was tied to four chariots, which were then driven off in different directions. His associates and relatives were executed, as were the two boys, his half-brothers and possible future rivals. Lao Ai’s 1,000 hangers-on had their estates confiscated and were exiled, as was his mother and Lü Buwei, who committed suicide by drinking poison.
That left King Zheng alone, betrayed, without his closest adviser, surrounded by thousands of clamorous courtiers, any one of whom could turn traitor. What should he do? His first reaction was uncontrolled, foaming-at-the-mouth anger. In the word
s of the eleventh-century historian Sima Guang, the king issued a decree: ‘Whoever even dares to utter a word regarding my mother, I will have him decapitated, quartered and his remains scattered in front of the palace as exhibits.’ Twenty-seven people died for daring to utter a solitary remark about the king’s mother. An adviser named Mao Jiao, from the kingdom of Qi, was so appalled at the king’s unfilial behaviour that he risked death to point out the king’s failings. ‘Get the giant cauldron ready!’ screamed the king. ‘I will have him stewed alive!’ But Mao Jiao persisted: other kings have been notorious for their abominable cruelty, but Zheng outdid them all. As a result he said, ‘I am apprehensive for Your Majesty. No one will dare to come near Qin again.’ Saying which, he doffed his hat and prostrated himself, prepared to die. That did it. The king raised him up, spared him and made him an adviser.