Empire of Horses

by John Man

  The army was organized on the ‘decimal’ system, in which the ‘ten thousands’ were broken down into units of thousands, hundreds and tens, each with its own commander. The structure was extremely flexible, providing anything from a small raiding-party to a full-scale invasion. Since all men were both herders and soldiers, the system guaranteed an army of 240,000, in theory. That fits: assuming that every man had a wife, two children and dependent parents, the population would have been 1–1.5 million, which, as it happens, is the roughly estimated capacity of the Mongolian grasslands. The system may have been taken over from the Persian Achaemenids, whose empire ended only a couple of generations before Modun’s birth,8 with word passing from group to group across Eurasia. Later, this became the usual way for steppe empires to organize themselves (notably the Jin in the twelfth century and the Mongols in the thirteenth).

  It is hard to know what to call Modun’s creation. Scholars debate whether it was some sort of a super-chiefdom or a state. States are often said to be defined by systems of taxation, law and administration, among others. We don’t have enough detail to decide. Whatever you call it, the point is that Modun’s vision and authority built, from notoriously fickle elements, a confederacy and an empire powerful enough to challenge the new dynasty that had sprung up south of the Gobi.

  In newly unified China, the brutality of the First Emperor and his heir had inspired a rebellion, led by a man who had been born a peasant, Liu Bang. Sima Guang, presumably relying on long-lost sources that bridged a millennium, provides a portrait of Liu Bang, with some weird details: he ‘had a high nose bridge’, a regal aura with a stately stature, and ‘it was said that on his left thigh there were seventy-two black moles’. Liu had fled from farm work and become a low-grade patrolman. One day, when escorting prisoners, some escaped. Afraid of punishment, he ran away and joined a band of brigands, eventually taking charge. As their boss, he headed a rebellion against the Qin government, rising to fame and fortune when the rebellion overthrew the Qin empire. There followed a four-year civil war, from which Liu Bang emerged victorious. In 202 BC, he proclaimed himself emperor with the name of Gaozu and established the Han dynasty, with a new capital at Chang’an, today’s Xian. Once again, two rival empires confronted each other: grasslands versus cities, nomads versus farmers, Han versus Xiongnu.

  Almost immediately9 – in autumn 201 BC, according to Sima Guang – Modun took on Gaozu. He advanced some 200 kilometres into China, aided by a secret deal with the region’s treacherous governor. Advancing via present-day Datong and over the steep Yanmen (Wild Goose) Pass, he reached the provincial capital, Taiyuan, and then, unaccountably, retreated. Apparently his aim was not to take over cities, perhaps because that would mean abandoning his nomadic way of life. A year later, the disloyal governor, faced with a punitive attack from his own emperor, defected to the Xiongnu. Another Xiongnu attack-and-retreat followed in the dead of winter, and ‘it was said that two or three [Han] soldiers out of ten lost their fingers through frostbite’. Not a problem for the Xiongnu, in their long-sleeved, fur-side-inwards sheepskin coats and sheepskin mittens.

  Come the spring, a new challenge emerged. The Xiongnu were talking to the rebellious state of Hann (nothing to do with Han the ruling dynasty) about a possible alliance. The emperor gathered a huge army (supposedly 320,000 strong) and marched north, through Taiyuan, over the Yanmen Pass to a place called Pingcheng, near today’s Datong. Accounts conflict, but it seems that the emperor’s spies told him that Modun’s army was so weakened it could easily be defeated. In fact, it was a set-up. Modun ‘hid his well-fed cattle and horses, only allowing the spies to catch a glimpse of enfeebled soldiers and sick animals’. A general named Liu Jing tried to tell truth to power, only for the emperor to shout him down and imprison him for insubordination. The result: Modun’s immense and very fit army surrounded the emperor’s, or perhaps cut him off from his main force. For a week, it seemed he was doomed, until his chancellor managed to bribe Modun’s queen10 to have a word with him, advising him to retreat. Sima Qian imagines her saying, ‘Even if we are successful in taking over the land from Han, it is ill-suited for your herding purposes.’ But the clincher would surely have been the promise of payments on an unprecedented scale – peace in exchange for cash and luxuries. True or not, the Xiongnu relaxed their grip, allowing the emperor to beat a hasty retreat, following which he released Liu Jing, apologized to him, and appointed him his chief adviser.

  The catastrophic defeat at Pingcheng showed that the emperor’s chariots and crossbows were no match for Modun’s horseback archers. That was the lesson drawn by the emperor’s advisers, who were not about to blame themselves and him for poor planning. Worried at his inability to stop Modun’s predatory habits, Gaozu asked Liu Jing what to do. In reply, the general spouted prejudices that became accepted as truths:

  Our soldiers are tired and exhausted, so we must relinquish the notion of using force against them [the Xiongnu]. Modun committed patricide, usurped his father’s throne, taking his stepmothers as wives. He is hideously savage, implacable beyond belief, using sheer brute force to manifest his might. One cannot reason with people like him with compassion and benevolence.

  The plain fact was that resistance was useless. Han, the dynasty ruling China, was in no position to bargain. As Liu Jing put it in another memo, the Xiongnu were only 700 li (350 kilometres) away, and the six kingdoms defeated by Qin were unreliable subjects. ‘Should they turn against the central government, I am afraid Your Majesty would suffer from recurrent insomnia.’ The sensible thing to do ‘is to cast our eyes to the future: try to work out a long-term stratagem so that the descendants of Modun will eventually capitulate’.

  What would that mean? The only possible answer was to refine the offer made for the emperor to escape with his life after the battle of Pingcheng. Liu Jing outlined a policy of bribery and corruption that would be sure to work. The assumption was that Modun and his male followers, being barbarians, and therefore eager for anything Chinese, were all desperate for social acceptance, diplomatic equality and sex with ‘civilized’ women: ‘If Your Majesty would contemplate betrothing your eldest daughter to Modun as wife … accompanied by opulent dowries’, he would marry her, and she would produce a son, who would be crown prince. ‘During festivals and important dates, we would send them girls from our national surplus,’ by which he meant the emperor’s harem. Envoys would follow, along with well-spoken officials who ‘would educate the chanyu in how to behave as a son-in-law’, and in due course ‘your grandson would accede to the throne’. And Confucian ideas of filial loyalty meant that the Xiongnu ruler would, by definition, be subservient to Han China, and ‘who has ever heard of a grandson being rebellious against his own grandfather?’. But why on earth would the Xiongnu know anything about Confucian ethics, let alone put them into practice? In brief, the Xiongnu desire for luxury was their weakness, to be exploited by ‘bribes and brides’. It would of course be expensive, but nothing like so expensive as constant warfare.

  ‘Excellent!’ said the emperor.

  As it happened, the princess’s mother objected, wailing and weeping and accusing the emperor of callousness in ‘sending my daughter away to the Xiongnu in the wilderness’. Anyway, she was already married, so that obviously excluded her, a fact Liu Jing himself would have known, and which suggests that his speech was one of Sima Qian’s inventions.

  Never mind: the principles were clear. The result was a treaty between the two empires, signed in 198 BC. It marked the beginning of a new world order in Asia, with the Xiongnu and their chanyu recognized as equal to the Han Chinese and their emperor. Han would send a princess for each new chanyu, along with regular gifts of silk, cloth, grain, chariots, mirrors, jewels and many other luxury items. An unnamed beauty, who may or may not have been of royal blood, chaperoned by Liu Jing, was sent off to the chanyu’s tent-HQ, travelling in style in a carriage, with staff and outriders, possibly along the road built by Meng Tian. She, like all the later
‘princesses’, then vanished from the historical record. This – the so-called he-qin (peace-and-kinship) policy – was the basis for a ‘peace’ (in inverted commas) that would last on and off for some sixty years.

  For the first time, but not the last, nomads dominated China by scourging the northern frontier regions. That was the fact, but it was not one the Chinese wished to recognize. It would have been too humiliating. So they put a spin on it. They were not being weak by handing over tribute, but magnanimous by handing over ‘gifts’, as befitted a superior culture. They lived in hope, for the gifts had a hidden agenda: not just to buy peace, but to undermine the hardy Xiongnu by addicting them to luxuries. As one statesman and scholar, Jia Yi, wrote, ‘Our markets beneath the Great Wall will surely swarm with the Xiongnu … When the Xiongnu have developed a craving for our rice, stew, barbecues and wine, this will have become their fatal weakness.’ Hence the occasional Chinese princess journeying across the Gobi to join the chanyu’s court. Every one of them was a germ injected into the body politic of the Xiongnu, intended to multiply and overwhelm its barbarism. Border markets thrived.

  But the Xiongnu showed no signs of being infected by Chinese values or corrupted by luxury. Raids continued, perhaps conducted by Xiongnu chiefs independent of the chanyu. Anyway, the Xiongnu remained as tough as ever. ‘They scale and descend even the most precipitous mountains with astonishing speed,’ reported one envoy. ‘They swim the deepest torrents, tolerate wind, hunger and thirst … If they ever suffer a setback, they simply disappear without a trace like a cloud.’11

  Facing a minimal threat from Han and flush with wealth from Han’s gifts, Modun turned his army on today’s Gansu, China’s far north-west, attacking the Yuezhi, who occupied the strategic Hexi or Gansu Corridor and lands to the west, where streams from the Qilian Mountains water oases in the wastes of the Western Regions. This was the tribe with whom he had been lodged as a hostage eight years previously. There are no details of the campaign, but it was a large-scale invasion, because the Yuezhi were said to have had between 100,000 and 200,000 archers. The invasion must have pitted mounted archers against mounted archers. Modun would surely not have attacked without being confident that his well-coordinated army could shatter the Yuezhi’s disunited clans. This was no rout, but he had his revenge, forcing some Yuezhi groups to scatter and seizing their territory. His empire now included the Corridor, with its good grazing grounds and access to the oasis kingdoms of the west – the stepping-stones that we now know as part of the Silk Road. Populations once in awe of the Yuezhi would now be in greater awe of this expansive new power.

  Then came the reconquest of Ordos, which was wide open. After Meng Tian’s victory, soldiers and colonists had moved in by the thousand. But the First Emperor and Meng Tian were dead, the armies had gone, the Wall’s towers were abandoned and the Qin dynasty had collapsed. All that stood in Modun’s way were farmers. So, in Sima Qian’s words, the Xiongnu under Modun ‘again gradually crossed the Yellow River southward into China and set the boundary of their nation at its old limit’ – and beyond: sources mention the conquest of smaller tribes which took Xiongnu control south of Ordos.

  No one recorded the details of the reconquest, but half a dozen graves hold the evidence that suggests it happened: belt-buckles and other objects are the same as earlier ones. Take one find from Daodunzi, a cemetery in Tongxin County, Ningxia, almost on the borders of Ordos. Twenty-two plaques feature oxen, dragons, gazelles, horses, a dragon wrestling a tortoise, and a camel – all designs common in Ordos for centuries. According to the excavation report, the burial dates from some time in the first century BC. Long before then, the Xiongnu were firmly back in control of Ordos.

  And also firmly in control north of the Yellow River. That was where their HQ remained, with Ordos as a sub-region, its local rulers dependent on the chanyu in Mongolia. Now the Xiongnu were only 350 kilometres from Gaozu’s new capital, Chang’an. Gaozu could not fail to see the threat, and made preparations for building more walls, a project that would take fifteen years.

  Appeasement seldom works for long. It didn’t with the Vikings or the Nazis. It certainly didn’t with the Xiongnu, for Modun could not stop some of his chiefs indulging in trans-Wall raids, nor was it in his interests to do so. And clearly, as is the way with dictators, he was always on the lookout to increase his power. After the death of Gaozu in 195 BC, China was run by the queen mother, Lü, Gaozu’s wife and de facto empress (though technically only a regent). Modun even tried his hand at diplomacy. In 192 BC, he wrote to her in mock-self-deprecating terms. In the letter, part of an exchange recorded in Ban Gu’s Book of Han, he seemed to be suggesting a marriage alliance:

  I, who am alone but still vigorous, a ruler who was born amidst lowlands and swamps … have several times approached the borders, wishing to be friendly with the Central States. You, Your Majesty, sit alone on the throne, and I, alone and restless, have no one beside me. Since we are both bored, and are both bereft of what could console us [or in another more explicit translation ‘without pleasures’ and ‘unable to gratify ourselves’], it is my hope that we can exchange that which we have for that which we are lacking.12

  What was he hoping for? Perhaps he was suggesting that Empress Lü herself would be the next princess for his harem? Sima Guang records that in that year ‘the Han court was looking for a princess in the royal families to take up a marriage union’. Or perhaps he planned to increase his power by fusing the two nations? If so, he was either misinformed or miscalculated. Empress Lü was an extremely tough-minded lady – ‘strong-willed’, Sima Qian called her; ‘vicious’ and ‘vindictive’ also come to mind – who had gone to great lengths to secure power. When her husband died, she ruled through her teenage son, Hui, a ‘weak and soft-hearted’ boy. She had a problem: the former emperor’s favourite concubine whose son had briefly been favoured as heir by the emperor. She loathed them both, and solved the problem in brutal fashion. First she had the boy killed by forcing poisoned wine down his throat, then dealt with the girl by ordering guards to cut off her hands and feet, put out her eyes, and make her dumb by destroying her larynx with poison. Finally, she had her thrown into the lower part of a toilet, where the pigs were kept, and showed this ‘human pig’ to her own son, the teenage emperor. When he realized what he was looking at, he was shocked into utter subservience to his mother’s will. ‘No human being could have done such a deed as this!’ he said. ‘Since I am your son, I will never be fit to rule the empire!’ Later, after Hui’s early death in 188 BC, Lü placed two children on the throne, in sequence, the first murdered because he was ill, the second murdered later during the struggle for the succession after Lü’s death.

  When Modun wrote, she was in full control. Sima Guang records her first reaction: ‘She was beside herself with mortification and rage.’ She called a council, suggested the execution of the poor Xiongnu envoy and wanted to send an army to destroy Modun and his people. Her top general, Fan Kuai, stepped forward. Of humble origins – a former dog-butcher, dogs being raised for their meat in ancient China – he had helped Gaozu establish the dynasty and was also Lü’s brother-in-law. He brashly volunteered to lead an army of 100,000 northwards. An unnamed councillor was aghast: ‘Fan Kuai should be executed for making such a remark!’ He dared point out that Fan Kuai had failed to raise the siege of Taiyuan with 320,000 troops, so what made him think an invasion with an army one-third that size would gain victory? That brought Lü to her senses. Diplomacy trumped outrage. No one recorded the fate of the Xiongnu envoy. Perhaps he was spared to carry her reply, in which she gave Modun the brush-off, in mock-extremes of self-deprecating, grovelling humility:

  Chanyu, you have not forgotten our humble kingdom, you have graced us with your missive. It sent our entire nation into a tumultuous commotion with awe. I personally would have gone forth to your court to serve Your Majesty. Unfortunately my blood is thin and weak, my hair and teeth are falling out, and when I walk I stagger. You ought not to sully y
ourself. I, who stand at the head of an impoverished domain, am not to blame [for refusing you] and should be pardoned. I have two imperial chariots and two teams of four coach horses which I present to you.

  That worked. Rebuffed but mollified, Modun saw that his interests were best served by sticking to the 198 BC treaty. He sent an envoy to apologize, and resume the terms agreed six years before, with its lucrative exchanges. ‘I am not conversant with Han etiquette, Your Majesty,’ he said. ‘Please pardon my indecorous behaviour.’

  The sources speak of ‘letters’ and ‘missives’. In translation, to English-speakers, the words suggest paper and pen, to Chinese paper and brush. But this was before paper, which – so the Chinese tradition claims – was invented in AD 105. Yet Chinese scripts of many different forms had been used for over 1,000 years. Since about 1500 BC, Chinese had ‘written’ – drawn, painted, scratched, inscribed, engraved – on many different surfaces: turtle shells (so-called ‘oracle bones’) to start with, then stone, bronze, clay, pottery, wood, and on countless objects made of these materials. Classics, like the Yi Jing (Book of Changes) or the works of Confucius, were inscribed in wood or stone, with immense and delicate labour. None of the materials and techniques were suitable for ‘letters’, such as those between officials and heads of state. Yet Sima Qian and other sources record the contents of letters and the First Emperor is said to have burned subversive ‘books’.