Empire of Horses

by John Man

  Wu offered Huo Qubing a mansion to settle down in, to which Huo replied: ‘The Xiongnu have not yet been wiped out. How can I settle and start a family?’ He died on his return in 117 BC, aged just twenty-three, supposedly after drinking water from wells the Xiongnu had poisoned by dumping dead animals in them.

  His grave, 50 kilometres west of today’s Xian (Chang’an), honours him in a fascinating way. Emperor Wu had his tomb-mound raised close by his own, itself a considerable accolade. In addition, the tomb became the focus for something entirely new in Chinese art: monumental rock sculpture. Set out in the pavilions and arcades around Huo’s 40-metre tomb-mound are seventeen lumps of roughly carved boulders weighing many tonnes each, all made of granite quarried from the Qilian Mountains some 500 kilometres away. The mound is swathed in firs today, but originally the statues were scattered over the bare flanks. Mostly of animals – fish, tiger, elephant, boar, frog, ox, horse – they seem unfinished, as if each subject was suggested by the shape of the boulder and is struggling to escape from its rocky embrace. Three seem to be magical carvings: a monster holding a goat in its jaws, a masked figure hugging a small bear, a human head with a hand raised as if to say ‘Stop!’

  One statue is of particular importance. Usually described as ‘a horse trampling a barbarian’, it seems to be an obvious symbol of Huo’s achievement. But that idea comes from the man who first described the statue in 1914, the French ethnographer and art historian Victor Segalen. In fact, there is no trampling going on. This superb composition in 3.8 tonnes of granite portrays a horse simply straddling a heavily bearded ‘barbarian’, recognizable from the bow in his left hand and an arrow in the other. It is as if the horse and barbarian are in some sort of formal relationship, superior and inferior, a static portrayal of an ideal, now that the Qilian Mountains and the ‘barbarian’ inhabitants of the Western Regions had been brought inside the empire. In any event, as the historian of Chinese carving Ann Paludan points out,6 this is the first example of stone animals of the kind that line the approaches to later imperial tombs.

  The ruins of the Black Water fortress would make an equally good memorial to Huo Qubing’s victory, for it was the very image of desolation. Sand had piled up against the walls and flowed down the inside. At the south-east corner, a dune had risen higher than the walls. I climbed it, and saw that someone in authority had made an attempt to recall the significance of the place with a little pavilion and a plaque: ‘Ancient Ruined City of Black Water’. But it was not its history that was recalled. ‘This is the most mysterious sand dune in history,’ it announced in Chinese and poetic English. ‘It is shaped like a big whale. No matter how the wind blows, it has not moved in 2,000 years. It is as if it is waiting for something. Who can solve the problem, and say why it is still here?’

  So much for the western campaign. What of the other one, in the centre, north of the Yellow River? It had had its successes, mixed with disasters.

  It was plagued by disputes, because the eminent, elderly, feisty loose cannon Li Guang, veteran of seventy battles against the Xiongnu, demanded a chance to finish them off once and for all. But because of his age and perceived unreliability he was granted only a sideshow, leading his own contingent apart from the main force. That one, the main force, was under the command of Wei Qing, who in 119 BC headed north, across the Gobi – a three-week march, easily long enough for Xiongnu scouts to see them coming – and ran directly into the chanyu Ichise and his army. Wei Qing formed a laager with armoured wagons, Wild West fashion, making an effective defence against Xiongnu arrows. There were charges, and counter-charges, ‘carnage and slaughtering’ (in Sima Guang’s words) until late afternoon, when a dust-storm struck, one of those so-called ‘black storms’ that can shred tents and strip the paint off cars: ‘sand, gravel, pebbles and stones were sucked into the sky, pelting against the faces of the warriors … it became almost pitch black, so that the warriors could not distinguish friend from foe’. Then, as the storm passed, Wei Qing ordered a two-pronged assault, so astonishing Ichise with the size of the Chinese forces that he ‘clambered into a carriage drawn by six mules’ – mules rather than horses because they have greater endurance – and escaped to his tent-city capital several hundred kilometres to the north-west. ‘Shocked to the core,’ the Xiongnu scattered, while Wei Qing led a task force in a night-time pursuit of the chanyu.

  Come the dawn, ‘they looked to the horizon. It was a desolate wilderness with no Xiongnu in sight.’ Arriving at a fortress built by a Xiongnu chief who had defected to the Han then defected back again, Wei Qing’s men fed themselves from the stores, trashed the place so completely its ruins have never been found, and returned to Chang’an.

  Li Guang, meanwhile, had lost his way, and on returning, was arraigned before a military court. He was a model of decorum. Getting lost was all his own fault, he said, ‘my subordinates are not guilty of any blunder’. He was over sixty now, he went on, and ‘simply could not bear to face these petty bureaucrats’. Saying which, ‘he drew his sword and slit his own throat’. All his men ‘wept bitterly’ at the news, as did civilians young and old, whether they had known him or not.

  Military victory was not enough. Something had to fix the frontier, define what was China and what wasn’t. That something was, of course, the Wall. So Wu picked up where the First Emperor had left off. In the centre and east, old walls were repaired, and sections linked. In the west, new bits of the Wall arose, running from Lanzhou northward then west over the border of what is now Xinjiang. To build and man it, four new administrative areas sprang up, with two, Gan and Su, straddling the narrow mid-section. Eventually, these two gave their joint names to the province, Gansu. Its origins explain Gansu’s odd thigh-bone shape, 1,500 kilometres long, fat at either end with the extremely narrow waist of the Gansu Corridor.

  Wu’s push west went into overdrive. In theory, it all fitted together beautifully. The borderlands would be colonized. The colonists would make deserts bloom, and feed themselves, and provide labour for an extension of the Great Wall, which would protect the soldiers, the traders, the farmers, the administrators. The far western oasis kingdoms would fall into line, as China proved itself the dominant power. Silks would be sent, and horses received. China would not only be unified; she would be secure at last and eventually, surely, richer than ever. What greater legacy could an emperor leave?

  This, the influx of 119 BC and afterwards, was the real beginning of the modern Wall as the defining symbol of China, the one running all the way from the western deserts to the Pacific. It became a sub-culture, a ‘long city’, which is the alternative meaning of its Chinese name, indeed several ‘long cities’, given its many branches and doublings. Soldier-farmers began to arrive by the hundred thousand, supplementing volunteers, conscripts and convicts. Families followed, making an estimated 1.5–2 million settlers – roughly equal to the whole Xiongnu population – all being provided with land, animals and seeds. Villages and farms arose where there was water.

  Silk began to flow westward in prodigious amounts to buy the loyalty of the oasis kingdoms – the beginning of the trade network we now know as the Silk Road, an exercise in empire-building that would reach out far beyond the Great Wall, driven by the need to outflank the Xiongnu. This was an empire inspired by strategic need, founded by force, underpinned by bribery, secured by colonists and traders, and guaranteed by government. And there could be no turning back. Princesses could not be abandoned and treaties broken, or the Xiongnu would be back in an instant.

  By 111 BC, ten vast caravans a year, each the size of a small city on the move, were rolling west, the beginning of an economic offensive that by 50–40 BC would carry westwards every year anything up to 18,000 rolls of silk and some 3–4 billion coins, about 30 per cent of the national cash income, perhaps 7 per cent of the empire’s total revenue. In Chang’an, the opening of the west turned into a gravy train for adventurers, all claiming they would be ideal ambassadors, once they had received imperial backing.
Many simply took the money and vanished. Others did go west, but ran out of supplies and imposed themselves on unwilling hosts, who, when their patience ran out, ‘harassed and robbed the envoys’. More troops followed to sort out the mess. In 105 BC, another princess was despatched to be wife to the chief of the Wusun, 2,000 kilometres westward in the Ili Valley, in present-day Kazakhstan (a move countered by the Xiongnu sending one of their own princesses, though what happened to her was not recorded). Other tribes were knocked into line with military expeditions.

  Could the Xiongnu respond? Only further east, where attacks and counter-attacks across the Great Wall preserved a Western Front balance of military power. To the west, a Chinese force drove into the Ferghana Valley, over 2,000 kilometres from Chang’an. The idea was to capture enough of the ‘bloodsweating horses’ to start a breeding programme, and to shock vacillating states into submission. Two centuries before, this kingdom, known as Great Yuan (Dayuan), was home to the Greeks left behind by Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC. Now it was probably a mix of Greeks and Scythians. This was another epic, for in the first approach all the Han envoys were killed, leaving Emperor Wu ‘seething with rage too fearful to behold’. His response was: more of the same. Under Li Guangli (not to be confused with the Flying General, Li Guang), an army of 60,000 – with conscripts including petty criminals – gathered in Dunhuang, backed by volunteers. This turned into both an invasion and a migration: 100,000 cattle, 30,000 warhorses and 180,000 settlers started to arrive to build new farming communities along the Gansu Corridor and up the Black Water (the Edsen Gol, the Lord’s River, as it is in Mongolian). That was how the army would be supplied.

  Even so, it took a regiment of Xiongnu defectors, two campaigns and two more years to assert the royal will on Dayuan. A 40-day siege of the capital ended after Li Guangli had his engineers divert the river on which the city depended. ‘In a state of complete bedlam’, the inhabitants of the capital revolted, killed their king, sued for peace and handed over ‘a few score’ of the blood-sweating horses. The effort, the cost and the losses achieved Wu’s aim: Dayuan cowed (though not conquered), the Western Region kingdoms stunned into compliance, the Xiongnu held in check, potential allies bribed and scared into allegiance, blood-sweating horses delivered – though without much effect, because no one heard of them again. Perhaps in the end there was nothing special about them.

  This immense effort, which drained both the Han economy and its army, took some time to take effect. War and peace with the Xiongnu continued, envoys came and sometimes went (one Chinese at least was detained by the chanyu in retaliation for a Xiongnu envoy who defected), a Xiongnu prince defected, and three chiefs of Xiongnu vassal states came over to Han.

  In 110 BC, the two empires had started to talk seriously about renewing the peace-and-kinship treaty, perhaps because the Xiongnu had a new chanyu, Ichise having died. His son and heir, Wuwei (Uvei in Mongolian) even suggested a face-to-face meeting with the emperor, but withdrew when in 107 BC a Xiongnu envoy died of natural causes while he was in Chang’an. So it all came to nothing. Wuwei died, a plot to murder the next chanyu failed, he died anyway, as did the next after only a year on the throne, and – perhaps to paper over the cracks of so many suspiciously premature deaths – the raids restarted, worse than ever.

  Wu could do nothing except keep on fighting. He wrote a letter to the new chanyu, Chedihou, warning him of the risks. Almost a century before, Wu said, his great-great-grandfather had been humiliated by the Xiongnu. Now that humiliation had been reversed, with more to come, he implied, if these provocations continued. Chedihou was in no position to act belligerent. ‘I am but Your Majesty’s junior in ranking,’ he replied. ‘I do not have the audacity to affront Your Majesty.’ To show his goodwill he released several Han officials who had been held captive for the last few years. In the hope of re-opening civilized diplomacy, Wu reciprocated, and sent back some Xiongnu prisoners, under the command of an envoy, Su Wu, an assistant Zhang Sheng, and a secretary. Su Wu is the hero of this story (told in lurid detail by Sima Guang) and has remained so down the centuries.

  By the time they arrived, the mood in the Xiongnu court had changed. Chedihou had gained in confidence, and treated the Chinese as if they had come to pay homage. Zhang Sheng took offence and, as word of his anger spread, he became embroiled in a plot to topple the chanyu, kidnap his mother and murder his top adviser, Wei Lu, a defector from Han whose father was a Xiongnu. The idea behind this plot was that the emperor would be so delighted that he would reward the plotters and their families back in Chang’an. A turncoat leaked the scheme to the chanyu, who arrested most of the plotters and held them, pending their trial. This threw the leader of the Chinese delegation, Su Wu, into a panic. They will torture them! he said in a conversation with Zhang Sheng, his aide and also one of the plotters who was still free, and: ‘They will trace the whole affair to me!’ It would look as if he’d betrayed his country! He was on the point of committing suicide, but Zhang Sheng persuaded him to put down his sword, with more drama to follow: the captured plotters indeed revealed all, and the chanyu demanded Su Wu’s surrender in a message delivered by the royal aide Wei Lu, the intended victim of the plot. And this time Su Wu, determined to avoid humiliation, ‘drew his sword and ran it through his body’.

  Wei Lu was aghast at Su Wu’s action. He clasped hold of Su Wu and sent for a physician instantly. The doctor dug a trench, lit a simmering fire and placed Su Wu face down above the warmth of the fire and massaged his back to release the clotted blood and ease his circulation. Su Wu was in a coma for several hours before he regained consciousness.

  When he came to, his colleagues ‘broke down and wept’, and carried him back to their camp. Chedihou was so moved – or perhaps just plain astonished – by Su Wu’s act that he sent messengers every few hours to learn the details of his recovery, but had his colleagues arrested as accomplices in the plot. One was executed; the other chose to join the Xiongnu. When Su Wu had recovered, Wei Lu, the one-time defector and now royal aide, tried to get him to defect also. Surrender, he said, or go to prison. But, countered Su Wu, I am entirely innocent, so ‘why should I be incarcerated?’

  There followed another piece of high drama:

  Wei Lu thrusts a sword at Su Wu, and says (in this pared-down version of Sima Guang’s account): ‘I turned my back on the Han court. My lord the chanyu has been most benevolent. I preside over several tens of thousands of men. I own thousands upon thousands of cattle, horses and sheep that cover the entire landscape. If only you will give me just a nod, you will receive similar treatment tomorrow. On the other hand, if we execute you and expose your corpse to the elements, who will know or care?’

  Su Wu remains silent.

  Wei Lu tries again: ‘Consider – if you surrender, we will be the best of friends, like brothers. If you don’t accept my offer, you won’t be given a second chance.’

  At last Su Wu responds: ‘You, who were once a subject of His Majesty, are but a slave of the Xiongnu. You have no shame. Why should I want to see you again? The chanyu may allow you to preside over life and death, but you do so with injustice. You incite two kingdoms to engage in warfare.’ He goes on to quote several instances of what happens when Han envoys are killed – war and annihilation for the perpetrators. ‘However,’ he finishes, ‘if you are bent on eternal war, please start with me.’

  Wei Lu gives up his attempt at conversion and retreats to tell the chanyu what happened. The chanyu, while admiring Su Wu’s fortitude and loyalty, is even more determined to break him. He has Su Wu shut up in a cave, deprived of food and water, with a wall separating him from the bitter snows outside. After a few days, Su Wu eats the wool from his leather jacket and reaches through the window for ice and snow to make water. ‘Totally astounded’ at his survival, the chanyu grants him his life, but banishes him and a few servants to the shores of Lake Baikal with a herd of rams and a backhanded promise: ‘On the day your male sheep produce milk, you will be set free.
’ For that to happen, of course, he has to be kept alive, so the chanyu promises to send food to him and his entourage.

  How do we know all this? Because nineteen years later he returned, in circumstances we will get to shortly.

  In 99 BC, another campaign ended in a total and very famous catastrophe. One army, attacking westwards, killed 10,000 Xiongnu – meaning ‘many’ – yet lost 70 per cent of its men. But the greater catastrophe involved the second force, 5,000 men with wagonloads of food and arrows, which struck northwards along the Black Water River, across the Gobi and into the Mongolian heartland, aiming perhaps to entice the Xiongnu into a frontal assault against Han’s repeating crossbows. It was led by the general Li Ling, grandson of the late and much-lamented Li Guang, with all his forebear’s bravado. It was not a big force, but Li Ling was confident: his warriors, armed with crossbows, with 500,000 arrows in their wagons, were ‘great fighters, specialists and swordsmen. Their strength is so great they could kill a tiger bare-handed, and when they shoot they never miss.’ He was short of horses, but said it didn’t matter, because his infantrymen were supreme. Besides, it was autumn, the best weather for marching. He planned to be back before winter, stopping off at a Han border fortress in the south Gobi to rest his soon-to-be-victorious troops.7