by John Man
So, to summarize, they could have built a capital. But they didn’t. Or rather, there is as yet no evidence that they did. There is no Xiongnu equivalent of Avraga or Karakorum, or at least not one big and solid enough to be found. Yet, as the graves of the Xiongnu élite suggest, the focal point of the empire was in northern central Mongolia. A great empire, yet no capital. It’s a puzzle.
One possible explanation is that to build in this area would create a target for Chinese armies, whereas a capital of tents remained mobile. It seems likely that the stone-built settlements were subsidiary, with the biggest, Ivolga, way to the north, almost certainly beyond the reach of Chinese armies, leaving the capital as a city of tents, impressive to look at but still quickly moved in case of an invasion. And also movable in response to the weather and the season, in the tradition of nomads. Perhaps, when we know more, the lack of stone buildings will not be a puzzle after all but a consequence of political realities and a long-established way of life.
So, placing yourself in Zhonghang Yue’s boots, imagine dozens of family tents, all with their horses tethered to lines strung between two poles. From a few tents come the slopslop sounds of women churning milk with paddles to make curds. Someone is rubbing a goatskin against a sheep’s scapula wedged into a wooden pole, turning a stiff hide into soft, oil-tanned chamois leather.4 Ahead are larger tents and one huge palace-tent, 30 metres across, supported internally by two circles of posts, carpets decorated with mythical animals, a throne for the chanyu, warriors in leather armour acting as guards, officials and interpreters in silks and furs, dogs kept to fight off wolves held back by leashes – all very threatening in Chinese eyes, for these are traditional enemies notorious for their violence.
But, to this embittered newcomer from south of the Gobi, the place was a sanctuary. On arrival at the chanyu’s court with the princess, Zhonghang Yue defected. Perhaps he found support from the descendants of the Yan heir who had sought Xiongnu protection during the wars of conquest. Anyway, Zhonghang ingratiated himself by muttering dire warnings about the dangers of dealing with the Han. Word soon got back to Chang’an, where officials took note, and as a result the eunuch’s treachery found its way into the later histories. Here is Sima Guang’s version of what Zhonghang said:
The entire population of the Xiongnu empire is no more than one prefecture in the Central States. Hitherto you have been invincible and robust. Do you know why? Because your eating and dressing habits are vastly different from the people of Han, you have never been dependent on them and have the least admiration for their way of life. But now you are changing your culture and lifestyle and starting to indulge in things from Han. The Han people have only to spend one-fifth of their national expenditures5 to have the entire Xiongnu empire under their domination.
Sima Qian had more. ‘Ride quickly through the grass and brambles,’ says the eunuch, ‘and you will see that their clothing will be ripped to pieces and is not as good as felt and fur garments.’ The same with Han foodstuffs, which ‘are not as convenient nor as excellent as milk or kumiss!’
Having abandoned all hope of returning, Zhonghang Yue was eager to see the Xiongnu as the embodiments of noble savagery and his own people as softened by luxury. When Han envoys made disparaging remarks about Xiongnu habits and manners, Zhonghang Yue countered by saying that the Xiongnu were strong because they stuck together. When a man dies, his brother marries the widow. Chinese might find the practice barbarous, but it kept the clan name intact. A junior wife might marry her stepson – the son of the senior wife – for the same reason. For the royal family, the succession from father to son or brother kept things simple, so that ‘governing the nation is like governing a single person’.
How different from life in China, where ‘families become increasingly distant from one another and consequently murder each other’. In China …
… ruler and people look at one another with hatred, and the extensive building of houses exhausts the strength of the people … when the people face disturbance they are not used to fighting, and when the crisis is over they are too fatigued to work. Pfui! The Han people who live in houses built of earth chatter and dress up to no avail. What is the use of wearing an official cap?
Why would Sima Qian be so eager to put such words into the eunuch’s mouth? Perhaps to show how virile and self-sufficient the Xiongnu were, and how impossible it was to defeat them, as Emperor Wu was set on doing. The only way to solve the problem (he implies) was to deal peaceably with these sturdy, independent people.
Whether or not he said the words attributed to him, Zhonghang Yue talked himself into a job as a top royal adviser, with one important result mentioned by Sima Guang: he ‘convinced the chanyu’s attendants to keep records, in order to levy taxes on all the domestic animals of the people’. Since no evidence exists that these records were in Xiongnu, this backs up the conclusion suggested by Modun’s letters that the court had teams of officials making records in Chinese, presumably on silk.
This all makes a great story. But, like so much of Sima Qian’s work, it has an ulterior purpose to do with the strange fact that Sima Qian’s account misses out eight years (174–166 BC). Other sources partially fill the gap. For instance, the Han Shu records another Xiongnu attack across the far western Wall in 169 BC. But the main reason for the gap seems to be that Sima Qian wished to suppress two long memos from two scholars, Jia Yi and Chao Cuo, suggesting that the way forward was to subvert the Xiongnu – undermine them with good food and luxuries, seduce their allies away from them, and turn them into Han with kindness. This would cause the Xiongnu to defect in ever-increasing numbers. In effect, the two were refining the policy recommended by Liu Jing when the peace-and-kinship treaty was negotiated about thirty years previously.
Chao Cuo was one of the great men of his age – severe, outspoken, austere and inflexible, according to the sources, but with a formidable intellect. He was so well read and his advice so solid that he was nicknamed ‘the Wisdom Bag’, a reference to the sealed bundle of secret instructions that generals carried with them on campaign. He would come to a bad end fifteen years later, when the emperor blamed him for unrest looming in seven semi-autonomous kingdoms and had Chao Cuo cut in two at the waist. But at the time he was riding high, and his proposals would eventually, after a delay of nearly thirty years, be put into effect.
The peace-and-kinship treaty, Chao argued, was not working. The army was a disaster. Generals were inept, soldiers undisciplined, war-drum signals meaningless and weapons so ineffective that ‘one might as well fight with one’s bare hands’.6 Out on the open plains, of course, Han armies had an advantage, with fast chariots and crossbows and tight formations in which crossbowmen could advance and retreat behind the shields of the vanguard. But the Xiongnu, being barbarians, did not fight like this.
When trudging over craggy mountains and fording rapids Han warhorses are no match for Xiongnu horses. At defiles and strategic passes, Han cavalrymen are no match against the Xiongnu, as they are most proficient with their riding and archery skills. During thunderous storms and torrential rain, the Xiongnu warriors persevere and continue to fight on in the most adverse conditions despite hunger and thirst.
What was to be done? Qin had failed because of its brutality. To raise his army, the First Emperor had scraped many barrels, employing ‘convict conscription’, first conscripting small-time criminals, then in turn bonded servants, criminal merchants, former criminals who had served their sentences, idlers, the sons and grandsons of criminals, and finally the neighbours of criminals. Moreover, troops were unused to the extreme conditions on the frontier: ‘When they were conscripted it was no different from sending them to be executed.’ And they were unpaid, and when they died their families received no compensation. No wonder that when Liu Bang revolted, ‘the people under heaven followed him like a tidal wave bursting open a floodgate’.
Current strategy was not working. Small armies were useless, large armies hard to control. Troops sent t
o garrison border fortresses were replaced every year, so they never had a chance to get properly trained. If it went on like this, China would end up broke and ‘our people will live in total misery and abject poverty’.
Han needed a new strategy. The answer Chao proposed was two-fold:
Firstly, to ‘use barbarians to fight barbarians’. There were several groups in the Han empire who lived and fought like the Xiongnu. They should be enlisted, armed and used as border guards.
Secondly, in a recommendation that sounds like a draft for modern China’s policy in Tibet and Xinjiang, he said that the government should send civilians to colonize the border regions, providing them with protected settlements: ‘We should proceed to encourage people to migrate.’ This would be a massive operation – settlers by the million, state-funded, over decades. They should receive official titles, tax relief, clothing allowances, and food until they can look after themselves. If state-owned cattle were stolen, settlers should be encouraged to seize them back by being given half of what they recover. His proposal was a blueprint of how to organize the colonies, in terms of size, leadership, location and defence. ‘This policy of resettling immigrants is far superior to deploying troops from remote places,’ Chao Cuo concluded. ‘This is a lasting strategy and the benefits will be enduring.’
None of this finds a place in Sima Qian’s history. The ‘missing’ years during which Jia Yi and Chao Cuo made their well-reasoned arguments were taken up with the story of the embittered eunuch. Why would such a great historian wish to suppress the proposals of two of the greatest scholars of the age? Because – as Jonathan Markley argues – the unfortunate truth was that the Xiongnu were as active as ever. And that undermined Sima Qian’s thesis that under the Emperor Wen the empire was at peace and growing in wealth, as opposed to the disastrous state of affairs under Sima Qian’s war-loving Emperor Wu.
Chao Cuo urged instant action, because he was sure that the Xiongnu would attack as soon as there was a hint that the peace-and-kinship treaty was at risk. So it proved. In the winter of 166 BC they invaded, with 140,000 horsemen.7 A Xiongnu detachment galloped to within 80 kilometres of the capital, Chang’an, spreading panic inside the city walls. The emperor declared a state of emergency, called up 1,000 chariots and 100,000 infantry, made an inspection of the camps outside the capital, and announced that he would personally lead an expedition against the Xiongnu. His cabinet and his mother were so appalled at this rash idea that he dropped it, giving the task to three generals. All this took a month. Meanwhile the Xiongnu army camped ‘within the passes’, the phrase for ‘inside Chinese territory’. As usual, when they saw the Han army coming, they retreated with their loot. By the time the Han got to the border, the Xiongnu were long gone.
So it went on, every year for four years, with the Xiongnu going from strength to strength. In 162 BC they turned again upon the Yuezhi, already broken by previous assaults in 207 BC and 176 BC. Under Jizhu (often called ‘old’ because he was in his forties when he succeeded Modun), they probably advanced across the Gobi, past a thriving city, Edsen – later known as Khara Khot, the Black City – and south along the Edsen River. The invasion was intended as a death blow to their old enemies, and so it proved. Sima Qian records: ‘The “old” chanyu killed the king of the Yuezhi and made his skull into a drinking cup,’ a common way for steppe-dwellers to publicize victory over a rival. No source names the dead king, and none records his successor, but some hint that it may have been a woman, perhaps his consort who acted as regent for an underage prince.
Whoever was in control authorized a momentous decision: get out, or die. The Yuezhi, cut off on three sides, had only one line of retreat: north-west. Jizhu’s victory pushed the Yuezhi into a wholesale, year-long migration – imagine several hundred thousand with their herds and a myriad of horses, most of them moving almost 2,000 kilometres north of the Taklamakan Desert and then west to the valley of the Ili River in today’s south-eastern Kazakhstan (with a smaller splinter group going south into Tibet). These moves affected other groups, turning Central Asia into a sub-continental game of skittles over the coming decades. In this case, the Yuezhi forced out the local Scythian group, known as Saka; decades later, they would end up in Kashmir. The Yuezhi, seeking only to put a safe distance between themselves and the Xiongnu, had no idea that they were starting on something far greater, a migration that would take them another 1,500 kilometres to the borderlands of India. They will play a further role in this story forty years later.
In the same year, the emperor, greatly depressed by China’s losses and Xiongnu gains, sent an envoy with a peace proposal to the chanyu, who responded by sending an envoy of his own to Chang’an. The result: yet another treaty, yet another princess despatched. The emperor announced the news full of self-doubt. He had failed to bring peace, and ‘my virtue is insufficient’. At one point, frustration drove him to belligerence. According to the Han Shu, quoted by Joseph Yap, he put on military dress, practised horseback archery and studied strategy. But fighting was not the answer. What was? He was at a loss. Rising early and retiring late, concern for his people had filled his days with unrest:
Therefore I have despatched envoys in such profusion that their caps and cart covers are within sight of each other on the road, and their wheel tracks are joined, in order to explain my intentions to the chanyu, the ruler of the Xiongnu. At last the chanyu has returned to the wise ways of earlier times … Together we have cast aside our petty faults and together we will walk the higher road of virtue. We have united ourselves in bonds of brotherhood.
If only. The chanyu, Jizhu (a.k.a, Laoshang, Modun’s son) died in 160 or 161 BC. Another (Gunchen in Mongolian, Junchen in Chinese) took his place. Nothing changed. It happened again in 158 BC: 30,000 Xiongnu here, another 30,000 there, smoke signals sent along the Great Wall from beacon tower to beacon tower, the capital ‘reverberating with shock’, generals appointed, imperial inspections made, armies mobilized and sent to the frontier, only to find the Xiongnu long gone.
To cap it all, the Xiongnu showed no sign of being undermined by their new-found wealth. With gifts from China and tributes in people and cattle from vassal tribes, the ruling class had built a rich and varied life for themselves in northern Mongolia and southern Siberia. To the west, beyond the Great Wall, the Xiongnu, having expelled the Yuezhi, controlled thirty-six little kingdoms in the Western Regions.
Things could not go on like this. As Jia Yi said in his advice to the emperor, the Xiongnu are arrogant, insolent plunderers, ‘yet each year Han provides them with money, silks and fabrics’. The natural order of things – the emperor at the top, the vassals below – had been turned on its head. ‘Hanging upside down like this is something beyond comprehension.’ Someone had to do something. Not Emperor Wen, because he died in 157 BC, aged only forty-five, carrying depression and self-abnegation into his grave. ‘I am deficient in moral character and have contributed little to my people,’ he said in his will. Do not mourn for me, he went on, spare the funeral expenses. No carriages or troops. Sweltering summers and shuddering winters are enough of a burden for my people without undue mourning. Mourn for three days only, don’t stop eating and drinking, and a note to family members: only fourteen days in mourning clothes, please, not the usual ninety.
Thus ended a reign portrayed by Sima Qian as one of peace and amity with the Xiongnu – but this picture could only be maintained (in Markley’s words) ‘by suppression of information and distorted general summaries’. Luckily, the survival of the memorials by Jia Yi and Chao Cuo allow scholars to see that his reign was just as violent as ever.
A new emperor, Jing, succeeded. A student of Daoism, he ruled with a light hand, made heavy by a year-long civil war (154 BC), when the rebellion of seven states threatened Han’s very existence. Also he was obsessed with the notion that he could make himself immortal, and paid much attention to a guru who claimed he could invoke the Kitchen Deity ‘to ward off the ageing process’ and other gods to transform cinn
abar into gold. The guru died, but the emperor’s faith remained intact. He said it was only the guru’s body that had died, while his spirit had surely obtained immortality. ‘Bizarre occultists,’ says Sima Guang, ‘travelled to the capital in droves.’
Domestic troubles and esoteric obsessions left the new emperor no inclination in his sixteen-year reign to solve the Xiongnu problem. One thing he did do: he made an order to raise more horses and control the horse trade. Over time, thirty-six new stud farms were opened, which could hold an estimated 300,000 horses. In theory, this was a sensible policy: cavalry would be met by cavalry, a significant change given that in 148 BC it seems that the peace-and-kinship treaty fell into abeyance, with no records of carriage-loads of gifts heading north. And in 147 BC, seven Xiongnu princes defected to Han, possibly driven by greed, and, since their entourages would have been expected to join the Han cavalry, they would have needed horses. But all those horses would prove a target for the Xiongnu. Meanwhile, raids continued. Details are lacking, but one general, Li Guang, was said to be in ‘almost daily skirmishes with the Xiongnu’. A government official even asked for him to be transferred from his frontier HQ in Ordos because he ‘repeatedly engages the enemy in battle. I am afraid that one day we will lose him!’
Li Guang is worth a diversion, because he will play a significant role in Han-Xiongnu relations in a later chapter and because there is a good story told about him. He was the most famous general of his day, tall, strong, ‘with arms like an orang-outang’, and a noted archer. Also the most popular, because he ‘disseminated rewards to his followers, and while his army was on the move, he lived in their quarters, ate their food and shared their congenial and arduous moments’. Controversial, too, because of his relaxed style of leadership, as Sima Qian knew, because ‘I met the general in person. He had a mild manner and was most approachable. He was like a commoner, not particularly proficient with words.’8 Li Guang ‘never placed too much emphasis on the discipline of his troops and their marching formation was pell-mell at best’. Like a nomad, he camped wherever the pastures and water supplies were good, dispensing with nightwatchmen and the gongs sounding the all-clear. Instead, he allowed his men their rest and relied on scouts to scour the countryside. He never bothered much with records, keeping them ‘simple and rudimentary’. His methods contrasted starkly with his colleague General Cheng Bushi, a martinet who made his men march in step and was up all night writing meticulous notes. Both were equally effective leaders, both successful commanders. The contrast reflects an enduring debate among military strategists about how best to sustain morale: discipline is vital, but so is motivation and initiative. As Cheng Bushi himself conceded, Li Guang’s style worked just as well as his own ‘tedious and niggling’ approach. ‘[Li Guang’s] men are relaxed and contented, and they would die for him’ – just as well, considering how the following incident played out.