Empire of Horses

by John Man

  The fortress, called Shouxiang in Chinese and Bayan Bulag (Rich Spring) in Mongolian, was near the present-day town of Nomgon. It still has a rich spring, which produces 12,500 litres an hour, though its surroundings are much grimmer now than they were 2,000 years ago, when the guards could grow their own crops. Russian and Mongolian archaeologists, who excavated it in 2009, identified the fortress from bronze crossbow triggers and halberds, which the Chinese used but the Xiongnu did not. This confirmed the written accounts that mentioned the crossbows, and also confirmed that the Han had fortresses on the border. There is another, revealed in 2005, 180 kilometres to the east – due east, exactly, the same latitude to within 0.03 of a degree. It was a great location, for back then it was on an island in a river. The Han must have had some top-class surveyors. Its local name is Mangasyn Khuree, the Ogre’s Circle, an insulting reference, perhaps, to the Han soldiers who manned this square base, about 150 metres per side, guarded by a circular wall, 3.7 kilometres around. This was home territory for the Xiongnu, the back of beyond for the Han.8

  What happened next turned into one of the best-known incidents in Chinese military history, a sort of Custer’s Last Stand, with tragedy for some, especially for the major source, Sima Qian, embarrassment for the emperor, and his even greater determination to end the menace of the Xiongnu for ever.

  A month’s march and 250 kilometres later, halfway across the Gobi, Li Ling’s force was in the mountains – probably the Gurvan Saikhan (Three Beauties) range – when they found themselves surrounded by 30,000 Xiongnu horsemen. Li Ling laagered his wagons, held off the attackers with halberds, then retreated behind the crossbows. That held off the Xiongnu a second time, allowing Li Ling to retreat to a hilltop. Stunned by his losses, the Xiongnu commander sent for reinforcements, another 80,000 according to Sima Guang. Outnumbered twenty to one, Li Ling staged a fighting retreat into a valley. ‘The enemy was lodged in the hills, surrounding him on all sides and shooting arrows like drops of rain,’ according to the Han Shu. With only half their number still alive, the surviving Chinese, with few arrows left, fled towards a narrow defile, while the Xiongnu fired down on them and rolled boulders to block their path. Days passed, arrows ran out, death for all seemed the only outcome. In Sima Qian’s florid words: ‘Li Ling with one cry gave courage to his army, so that every man raised himself up and wept. Washed in blood and choked with tears, they stretched out their empty bows and warded off the bare blades of the foe.’ Finally, one night, Li Ling ordered his men to disperse in small groups, each with some food and a chunk of ice for water. They were 50 kilometres from the border. Perhaps a few would make it. Li Ling himself galloped clear, only to be hunted down and forced to surrender. Just 400 of his men made it back over the Gobi’s coarse gravel and tussocky dunes, finding refuge perhaps in the Han fortresses on the border.

  The disaster has several sequels, one being the appalling fate of the Grand Historian Sima Qian, detailed in Chapter 6. Another was the result for Li Ling’s family.

  The consequence of Li Ling’s defeat and defection is another long story, tying up with the famous non-defector Su Wu. A high-status hostage with the Xiongnu, Li Ling lived on with them for another twenty-five years. Two years after his capture, an attempt to rescue him failed, because, according to the general in command of the operation, Li Ling was working with the Xiongnu, a report that again infuriated the emperor, driving him to order the execution of Li Ling’s family. It turned out the report was wrong. There was a Chinese officer helping the Xiongnu, but it was not Li Ling, who had the man assassinated. Li Ling, too ashamed to return home, accepted his privileged position and joined the Xiongnu as a commander. The chanyu Hulugu (reigned 97–85 BC) gave a daughter to him in marriage. So the false report became right, as did the emperor: Li Ling turned traitor after all.

  So there were the two generals, Su Wu, the high-minded loyalist, minding flocks in the far north, and Li Ling, the traitor, living in luxury, honoured by his Xiongnu master, but forever in misery at his betrayal.

  Now for the final chapter in this saga. Su Wu and Li Ling knew each other. They had been friends, both serving the emperor as ‘palace attendants’. A few years after Su Wu’s banishment to the shores of Lake Baikal, word filtered back to the chanyu that he was in a bad way, ‘reduced to digging up grassroots and catching rodents for food’. The chanyu told Li Ling to pay him a visit and persuade him to defect. Inviting Su Wu to a lavish reception, Li Ling did his best in a long speech of which this is a summary:

  So many years, all this suffering, he mused, what was it for? Your two brothers have committed suicide, your mother died, your wife remarried, you had two sisters, two granddaughters and a grandson, but that was ten years ago, so who knew if they were still alive? Life is like the morning dew that dissipates when the sun rises. I know how hard betrayal is. But the emperor is old and driven mad by rumours of revolt and witchcraft, and life and death at court is at His Majesty’s whim. Why keep on tormenting yourself?

  It was useless. Su Wu said he owed everything to the emperor. He was like a father. You could hack me in pieces or stew me alive, he said in Sima Guang’s version, it would make no difference. ‘When a son dies for his father there is no regret. Please do not continue to pester me.’

  ‘“Alas!” said Li Ling. “Such chivalry and righteousness!” He broke down and wept, tears rolling down his face and drenching his lapels.’ Leaving a few sheep and goats for his friend, he left.

  More years passed. Back in Chang’an, the ageing emperor slipped into the grip of paranoia, imagining a plague of shamanic curses and ‘hexed mannequins’. He wracked the palace with accusations, inquisitions, bisections-at-the-waist and decapitations. Of the many themes in Chinese history worth an epic film, the Madness of Emperor Wu ranks high. An uprising, the suicide of the crown prince and too many Xiongnu raids to list reduced the empire to chaos.

  In 87 BC, Li Ling came again to Su Wu with the news that the emperor had died aged seventy after his fifty-four-year reign, leaving a dangerously unstable government under a regent and a seven-year-old successor. Su Wu ‘wailed until he drew blood’, but refused to come home.

  Two years later, a new chanyu, Huandi, still uncertain on his throne after a disputed succession, suggested renewing the peace-and-kinship treaty with the successor regime in Chang’an. Envoys came. They asked about Su Wu. The chanyu claimed he must be dead. But Su Wu’s one-time secretary, a defector to the Xiongnu, told them that Su Wu was still alive, and concocted an unlikely story to ‘prove’ it. He said the young Han emperor had been hunting in the royal park when he shot a goose which, marvellous to relate, had a message tied to its leg – from Su Wu, would you believe, asking for help for himself and some hostages. Embarrassed, the chanyu had Su Wu and the others brought to his court, where they were given a send-off banquet, with fulsome praise from Li Ling: of all the great men recorded in chronicles and paintings, no one was Su Wu’s equal. How he regretted being unable to return with him. So in 81 BC Su Wu made it home, after nineteen years, along with many others released as a goodwill gesture, being received with high honours, high office, high pay and a mansion.

  Li Ling, having rebutted an offer of reconciliation from the Han court, died in 74 BC of natural causes. Su Wu, despite the grey hair he had acquired in his wilderness years, outlived his friend by fourteen years, dying at eighty, a symbol then and now of loyalty and courage.

  A thousand years later (for immortal tales a millennium is an eye-blink), all of China fell to the Mongols, whom both cultures considered descendants of the Xiongnu. So imagine the humiliation for the Chinese – after all this time, the ‘barbarians’ were victorious, ruling as the Yuan dynasty under the Mongol Emperor, Kublai Khan.

  And this, for those few Chinese subjects who had any freedom of choice, was a problem, the age-old problem of conquered peoples: whether to oppose the invaders forever, until death, a fate embraced by hundreds who committed suicide; or to choose disloyalty – the accusation marked the accus
ed like a plague-spot – accept, kow-tow, collaborate, live and prosper?

  There was no easy answer, of course. Today’s intransigence will seem pig-headed tomorrow; this year’s disloyalty may seem like next year’s good sense. Even though Kublai proclaimed a Chinese dynasty, even though China accepted and still accepts that fact, the conquest injected a virus of bitterness that would a century later overwhelm Kublai’s inadequate heirs.

  Look now at one man who struggled to find a way through this moral maze. He is not typical, because he was a master painter; some say a genius. His name was Zhao Mengfu. A distant relative of the Song royal family, Zhao was starting a career as a minor official, aged twenty-five, when in 1279 his world was shattered by the Mongol invasion of southern China. Like many other scholar-officials, he was appalled by the new regime and its crude class structure which put southerners at the bottom of the heap, and by his own helplessness. No longer did examinations offer the educated the chance of a career. All hope gone, he became one of the ‘leftovers’, those who preferred obscurity to collaboration. He retreated to his home town, then Wuxing, now Huzhou, which then and now was famous for its glorious countryside – the huge Taihu Lake to the north, the bamboo forests of the Tianmu Mountains to the west. In a country retreat, the Gull-Wave Pavilion, he buried himself in classical studies, and discovered prodigious talents.

  He wasn’t the only one. Wuxing’s lake and green mountains inspired a loose confederation of masters: the ‘Eight Talents of Wuxing’ as they became known. Over the course of the next seven years, Zhao won fame as a master of three genres, painting, calligraphy and poetry (later to become, many think, the greatest of his age in all three).

  In 1286 an imperial official arrived in Wuxing, scouting for talent in the name of Kublai. He heard of the Eight, sought them out, and made them all offers of employment in the imperial service. Zhao accepted. Some who refused turned against him – a descendant of the first Song emperor serving the Mongols! – and from then the reek of disloyalty hung about him. It was no easy decision, and there was no escape from its consequences. Zhao achieved eminence, in government – as an official in the Ministry of War and a provincial administrator – as a scholar, as an artist. But regret for his lost world of lakes and mountains, where he had been his own master, gnawed at him for the rest of his life. As he wrote in one poem:

  Before I was as a seagull,

  Now I am a bird inside a cage,

  No one cares about my sad weeping,

  My feathers are falling off every day.

  His distress also permeates one of his paintings, portraying a sleek sheep and a miserable-looking goat: simple enough at first glance, less so the deeper you look. In traditional fashion, it includes some of Zhao’s beautiful calligraphy, which hints at hidden meanings. ‘I have often painted horses, but never before painted sheep or goats,’ he notes, as if to say he had painted subjects dear to his horse-loving masters, but not those closer to the people they ruled. ‘So when Zhongxin [a friend] requested a painting, I playfully drew these for him from life.’ One commentator, Chu-tsing Li, of Kansas University’s Department of Art History, has argued that there is a hidden message here. The sheep and the goat are the two most significant Han generals captured by the Xiongnu, Su Wu and Li Ling. Both had a chance to collaborate. One, Su Wu, refused, and was sent off to mind his flock of sheep for twenty years. The other, Li Ling, accepted collaboration and became rich. Which was the better off? Here is a haughty sheep, fat and healthy, but ripe for the pot, and here a scraggy goat, dejected, but at least alive. It seems, reader, that Zhao Mengfu couldn’t decide which was which, and which the wiser choice. Can you?

  Today, the landscape out west is semi-desert, but back then it was wetter, with pastures and reed-beds. By 100 BC the lines of the western Wall were established pretty much as they remain to this day, stretching from Wuwei to Yumenguan. Much of it is still there today, eroded into saw-teeth and cut through by roads, but easily traced. A few summers ago, I drove past the final fortress, Yumenguan, the Jade Gate Pass, a stark block of baked earth. A couple of kilometres beyond, the Wall sinks to its end in a 2-metre-high bank of mud and straw, piled up in layers. Two thousand years of wind-blown sand have scooped away the hard-packed soil, leaving the dried reeds sticking out like the hairs of a caterpillar. The reeds could have been harvested yesterday. I picked up a few strands from the dusty ground, tossed them to the oven-hot wind, and looked to the horizons. To the east, it was 1,400 kilometres to Wu’s capital, Chang’an. Westwards lay another 1,400 kilometres to China’s edge, all of it desert, dotted with oasis communities linked by camel-trails. That was where Wu’s armies went to outflank the Xiongnu, building outposts all the way to Kucha, almost 1,000 kilometres from the end of the Wall.

  There was also another line of the Wall that broke away, running northwards for 250 kilometres from the Qilian Mountains with the Black Water River (the Edsen Gol), following it until it ended in Lake Juyan. Although this counts as part of the Wall, it was in fact a line of 156 watch-towers and ten forts, ending in the back of beyond on the edge of the Gobi. It was colonized by the Chinese in 107–102 BC to grow food for the Wall garrisons, deny pastures to the Xiongnu, defend traders, control (i.e. count, tax and recruit) the scattered locals and catch fleeing convicts.

  For the 800 or so officers and men charged with manning this line of towers, the bone-dry climate made life harsh, especially in the bitter winters. For modern archaeologists, it has been a godsend, because the sand preserved thousands of bamboo strips as the only written evidence of life in these distant parts. Ten thousand strips – a minute fraction of those that were produced – were gathered in 1927–34 by a Sino-Swedish expedition led by the great Swedish explorer Sven Hedin. Via Beijing and Hong Kong, they ended up in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, where they were examined by the eminent Cambridge Sinologist Michael Loewe in the mid-1960s. Thousands of others were also recovered from Dunhuang and Wuwei, a trove of information it will take decades to assess.

  ‘Wooden stationery’ was made of many different woods, in many sizes, but overwhelmingly it consisted of 30-centimetre strips of bamboo, which could be joined by thread to form scrolls. These strips and scrolls, on which clerks wrote vertically, bound the Wall’s officers, men and families to higher authorities. Most were written to officers down the line in the next sector, a few to or from seniors in Dunhuang, or even the national capital. Besides strips used as labels and travel documents, there are reports, statutes, accounts, lists of food, numbers of men coming and going, charge sheets, and all the other routine items of documentation that armies generate. The strips would be bound, tied, put in a leather container, addressed and despatched, with instructions for either first- or second-class delivery, i.e. either by horse or by runner. All mail was logged in and out, and the actual time taken for the journey compared to the official time. A runner was supposed to cover 11 li (about 5.5 kilometres) per hour for short distances, a little less – hardly more than walking pace – for longer stretches.

  Overwhelmingly, the content of the strips is what you would expect from junior bureaucrats: tedious in the extreme. But it is possible to use the strips to paint a composite portrait of life on the frontier.

  Take, for example, young Xu Zong, twenty, section commander. He is a volunteer from somewhere in central China, fifty days’ march away, and has been well rewarded. He needs to be, because he already has a considerable family to support: a wife, four children, two brothers and two sisters, all of whom help on his 5-acre plantation. He is a low-grade official, paid partly in cash, partly in grain. Not long before this, cash would have been highly suspect. Coins varied; counterfeiters were everywhere. But Emperor Wu had introduced new coinage, which had won universal acceptance. You knew what you could get for one of the new 3-kilo strings of 1,000 coins.

  Young Xu fields a stream of directives, for this is a time when the Han dynasty is imposing itself with tough laws. One of his tasks is to catch criminals and desert
ers. If a deserter is caught, Xu has to report the deserter’s name, age, height, colouring, clothing, equipment and baggage, along with the date. He has to make sure local troublemakers are duly caught and punished – as happened with two who got into a swordfight. One was injured near the right eye, the other in two places on the fingers of the right hand. Both were ‘detained in manacles’. He also checks on travellers, like Cui Zidang, who ‘states that he is engaged in domestic and private marketing … I beg to state that Cui Zidang has not been subject to official judicial proceedings, and is qualified to receive a passport.’ Cui would then be given his numbered passport, written on wood split into two parts, one of which is held locally, so that on his return he will be allowed on his way only when an official, like Xu, has matched the two.

  Xu’s job includes looking after contingents of three types: convicts, conscripts and volunteers like himself. They arrive in squads, exhausted by their march from the farmlands, ignorant of conditions here, illiterate, resentful, but cowed. They must all be listed, provided with clothing, equipment and food, and allocated to a group, with specific duties: guardsman, pioneer, farmworker. You couldn’t trust the convicts and conscripts, of course. Given a chance, they will sell what the state provides and be off to join the Xiongnu. Then he has to get his clerk to write up what he has done: ‘Issued: barley, [1,740 kilos] as rations for 66 pioneers engaged in hard labour for the 5th-8th months inclusive.’9 Their tasks include digging earth for the body of the Wall and clay for baked bricks (each man to make eighty bricks of standard size, 41 × 18 × 14 centimetres, per day). Meanwhile, others are preparing the horse-dung plaster or splashing on yet another coat of whitewash. Reed-gathering, tree-cutting (yes, there were plantations then, though there are none now), tending orchards and vegetable gardens, guarding them against pilferers – the tasks were never-ending, and all subject to checking by seniors. ‘One large flag on the tower old and damaged; wall unswept and unplastered,’ a carping officer wrote. ‘One dog absent.’