Empire of Horses

by John Man

  Then there were the camels and horses to be fed, and their fodder to be accounted for. As in most guard duty, boredom must have been the greatest enemy, followed by carelessness. The twenty-six watch-towers in Xu’s 40-kilometre section did not have staircases, only handholds and ropes. You could easily lose your footing, as one of the officers did. One hot August evening, runs his report, ‘I fell off the tower accidentally and injured my back. After recovery I resumed duties this day, August 31.’ Imagine him climbing the towers, inspecting heavy crossbows on their mountings – one in reasonable condition had a range of 255 metres – making sure they were well greased, counting the helmets and armour and pots of grease, and wishing himself and his family back south, where there were no bitter winds in winter, where there were trees to lie under, and fruit, and cool streams.

  One of Xu’s duties is organizing the roster of patrols along the outer sandbank, hunting for the footprints of would-be intruders. For ten mornings in succession a private would take the dogs out, scanning a few kilometres of sand, almost always returning with the same report: ‘No traces of illegal passage by men or horses.’

  Then there was archery practice (with crossbows: twelve arrows to be fired, six hits for a pass) and signal practice (with flags and smoke-baskets by day, torches and fires by night). You had to remember your flag-and-fire codes and use the right one, depending on the numbers of attackers and what they were doing. ‘For penetration by 1–10 men: by daylight – one wood-pile and two flags raised; by night – two torches to be lit. 500 enemy sighted: one wood-pile and three flags by day, or three torches by night.’ Each signal was carefully logged: ‘Officers in command of posts shall record in writing the date and time of arrival of signals,’ so that the signal could be sent on down the line and then back again as confirmation that it had been received. Sometimes, someone would arrive from HQ with the records to check how long the whole operation had taken.

  And supposing he couldn’t stand it any longer – the boredom, the bureaucracy, the attacks – would he dream of defecting to the Xiongnu? Some did, criminals mainly. Not Xu and others like him, though, knowing the punishment. ‘As to those who abscond … these are to be cut in half at the waist. Their wives and children should be shaven and made hard-labour convicts.’

  There were carrots as well as sticks. If you captured a Xiongnu spy alive, your reward was 70,000 ‘cash’ – 70 strings of 1,000 copper coins, equal to about 2.8 kilos of silver. If you tipped off the authorities about a Xiongnu spy and they caught him, the reward was 50,000 coins. If you killed a Xiongnu commander, it was 70,000.

  Did Xu or his fellow-officers ever have to signal an attack? Did they get their instructions right? Did they survive? Did they and their families ever return to central China? Perhaps buried somewhere in the sands of Edsen Gol there are strips of bamboo that will tell of their fate in this, the most northerly outpost in Han China.

  1 These details are estimates by Barfield, The Perilous Frontier.

  2 Kradin, ‘Stateless Empire’, in Brosseder and Miller (eds), Xiongnu Archaeology. As Kradin adds, ‘A similar phenomenon happened time and again in history … ending wih the developing of the New World by American pioneers.’

  3 Craig G. R. Benjamin, The Yuezhi (see Bibliography).

  4 Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers.

  5 Yap, Wars.

  6 In Ann Paludin, Chinese Sculpture (see Bibliography).

  7 Alexei A. Kovalev et al., ‘The Shouxiangcheng Fortress’, in Brosseder and Miller (eds), Xiongnu Archaeology.

  8 Chunag Amartüvshin et al., ‘On the Walled Site of Mangasyn Khuree’, in Brosseder and Miller (eds), Xiongnu Archaeology. You can see both places on Google Earth (42.36/105.10.5 and 42.33.45/107.24.14).

  9 This composite portrait is drawn from Michael Loewe, Records of Han Administration (see Bibliography).

  III

  COLLAPSE

  9

  DECLINE AND FALL

  THIS CHAPTER STARTS THE STORY OF THE XIONGNU EMPIRE’S collapse. It involves a series of tribal migrations that remade Central Asia like well-struck balls on a snooker table. On this vast carpet of baize, with its rough edge of mountains and deserts, tribes ricocheted off each other under the impact of war and migration. Nothing was fixed, nothing predictable, nothing explicable except by hindsight. There were no borders other than the Great Wall (as in Mongolia today, where you can drive wherever you like over fenceless steppes).

  For the Xiongnu, their descent from greatness shattered their self-image. For two centuries, they had taken what they wanted. They had become rich. What happened to all the wealth – the silks, the carriages, the ceramics? Scattered, given away, wasted, buried. They might have invested it in cities, roads, and institutions as grand as those of their Chinese enemies. Instead, there is almost nothing, hardly one stone standing upon another. There are graves, but there was nothing much in them – until, suddenly, late in Xiongnu history, they increased in size and wealth. That is the essential mystery at the heart of Xiongnu studies. Something changed. To explain what and how, we have to look at why the Xiongnu collapsed and what the effects were.

  It was the loss of the Western Regions that undermined the Xiongnu. From the settled oasis communities, they had derived grain, iron weapons, taxes and manpower. When the empire was at its height, the chanyu had delegated authority to subsidiary kingdoms, and their rulers now worked at making themselves independent. The chanyu Huandi tried to retain leverage by invading China in 80–79 BC, with no success. Envoys came and went, talking about talks about reviving the peace-and-kinship treaty. But with the Xiongnu on the back foot, and with no hope of them regaining the crucial Gansu Corridor, Han could afford to ignore the pressure. The Great Wall was doing its job: any attack anywhere along it was reported by fire-and-smoke signals within three days. From the early 70s BC, former Xiongnu vassals turned against them. Wuhuan, in the north-east of present-day China, was shattered by a Han invasion. To have a vassal destroyed by Han might once have galvanized the Xiongnu. Now it stunned them into inaction. The once great empire was in a slow but steady decline.

  Lucky for Han China, because it was riven by intrigue and in no shape to reinforce Emperor Wu’s warrior policies. His young heir died in 74 BC, aged twenty, leaving as empress dowager and nominal head of state a fifteen-year-old wife, Shangguan – the youngest empress dowager in Chinese history and also the granddaughter of the regent Huo Guang. Under the guidance of the regent, the throne went to Wu’s grandson, Liu He, who proved to be ‘totally debauched, a hedonist, given to a life of utter and excessive dissipation’ (Sima Guang). Liu arrived from his estate with ‘young women concealed in the baggage carriages for his sensual pleasure’. When they were discovered, he said he knew nothing about them and had those who had hidden them executed. Moreover, he refused to undertake the rituals of mourning, saying he had a sore throat and could not weep. In brief, he would obviously be a disaster.

  A month after the coronation, the regent Huo Guang summoned the ministers, announced that Liu was wantonly debauched, and proposed that he should be impeached instantly. With the ready cooperation of his granddaughter the young empress dowager, he had Liu He locked in his apartment. She – wearing her imperial tiara, enthroned in state and flanked by hundreds of guards – summoned Liu He, accused him of ignoring rituals, using the Treasury as his personal cash-box, organizing fights between wild boars and tigers, using the empress dowager’s carriage without her consent, having an affair with one of the dead emperor’s concubines, threatening any informants thereof with bisection, et cetera, et cetera. He was then deposed and banished to his former estates, becoming the only emperor in Chinese history to be fired, and the one with the shortest reign. His replacement was a virtually unknown great-grandson of Emperor Wu, a seventeen-year-old named Liu Bingyi, who was reportedly erudite, austere, parsimonious, gentle, benevolent, and in all ways thoroughly filial. He was crowned with the ruling name of Xuan.

  In 71 BC, now re-stabilized, Han join
ed with the Wusun to attack the Xiongnu again, capturing ‘40,000’ people and ‘700,000’ animals, all in quotes to inject scepticism, but there was no denying that the blow was devastating. A revenge attack by the Xiongnu that winter ran into a blizzard that killed 90 per cent of their force. Their weakness inspired further uprisings by vassal states. More deaths in battle, more livestock lost, yet more deaths through famine, chaos, anarchy, and in response only frantic, hopeless efforts by the Xiongnu to re-establish the peace-and-kinship treaty.

  As the Xiongnu declined, Han rose. An attempt at independence by the ruler of Shache, an oasis kingdom on the trade route south of the Taklamakan Desert, was crushed by a Han force, the king’s decapitated head being pony-expressed to Chang’an for display over the city gate as an example for visiting dignitaries. ‘As a result, all the nations of the North and South Passages [i.e. north and south of the Taklamakan] were restored to the sway of the Han kingdom.’ (Sima Guang.) Indeed, the King of Dayuan gave the victorious general a special ‘blood-sweating horse’ named Elephant Dragon, which was taken back to Chang’an and presented to the emperor. To stamp his authority on the region, the emperor ordered the construction of a new fortress-city just north of the Taklamakan, declared the whole Western Region a protectorate embracing all thirty-six mini-kingdoms, and proclaimed ‘that the entire region was again open to travellers heading west’.

  Not that peace was guaranteed. Take the Wusun, who had been forced to follow in the tracks of the Yuezhi by the Xiongnu some seventy years before; they had displaced the Yuezhi from the Ili Valley and settled there on the border of present-day Kazakhstan and China. They were supposedly bound by a peace-and-kinship treaty, by which a Han princess had been sent to the ruler, Nimi. But he was known as the Mad King for his ‘ferocious and petulant’ behaviour. Complaints from the princess led in sequence to a planned assassination of the king, its failure, his escape, a revenge attack by the king’s son, his assertion that the Xiongnu were about to come to his aid, the murder of the Mad King, and too many other consequences to mention here. It was all sorted out by a remarkable woman called Feng Liao, the companion of the abused princess.1 Lady Feng was a brilliant diplomat who, on no basis but her own skill, negotiated with local chiefs and the Han government. Summoned to report directly to the emperor, she was sent back ‘in an imperial carriage clad in fabulous embroideries’. Later made regent for a young Wusun heir, she used the threat of Han intervention to impose peace on this turbulent region, keep its occupants firmly in the Chinese sphere of influence and make sure the Wusun would never, ever have anything more to do with the Xiongnu.

  North of the Great Wall, the Xiongnu’s long collapse continued in twenty years of usurpation, intrigue and murder. In 59 BC, when the king of a vassal tribe in eastern Mongolia died, the chanyu Yuan-Guidi tried to foist his young son on them, at which the whole tribe migrated eastwards, fleeing from the 10,000 horsemen the chanyu sent in fruitless pursuit. Driven into revolt by the violence, several tribes united to elect a chanyu of their own, Huhanye by name, brother of Yuan-Guidi. He formed an army and started a civil war. Yuan-Guidi had neither the nerve nor the manpower to fight back. He sent an urgent message to his younger brother: ‘The eastern insurgents are attacking me. Can you come to my aid?’ To which his brother replied, ‘You have no empathy for others, you have created carnage among your own brothers and nobles. You should die where you are. Do not affront me.’ At this, Yuan-Guidi realized everything was lost and committed suicide. There followed total anarchy, as tribal bosses, rebellious relatives and commanders set up local rulers – six of them in 57–56 BC – in a flurry of conspiracies, flights, attacks, defections, executions and suicides.

  In Chang’an, the emperor and his advisers received reports of the chaos in astonishment. This, some urged, was a chance to finish them off. But the Imperial Counsellor advised a different course: ‘The greatest virtue of a sage lord is not to take advantage of his enemies during their internal strife.’ An attack now would just drive the Xiongnu further north. Better to send an envoy to express condolences and offer assistance. And stand by to welcome surrendering chieftains. That will help dealings with these and other barbarians. ‘The emperor accepted the proposal.’

  After two years of turmoil, the six Xiongnu claimants to the throne whittled themselves down to two: Huhanye in the centre and his elder brother Zhizhi2 in the east. In 54 BC, it was Zhizhi who came out on top, chasing his brother from the tent-city in the Orkhon Valley that was the Xiongnu capital.

  For Huhanye, there was only one source of help: China. That would mean surrender. He opened a debate with his officers. Most were appalled at the idea. Sima Guang summarizes the tumult:

  Preposterous, intolerable! We Xiongnu revere the chivalrous and brave! Surrender is utterly despicable! Our kingdom was founded on horseback and warfare! Our motto is: Wage relentless war! To perish in battle is a divine honour! Han, mighty as it is, has never prevailed! Why be disloyal to our ancestors? If we surrender, our vassals will deride us!

  One of Huhanye’s top officers took the floor, and called for a reality check:

  We do not have the resources to recover what we have lost. We have not seen peace for a long time. If we were to serve Han, we would be guaranteed peace, and our people would gain some respite. But we are destined to be annihilated if we choose to continue along the present path.

  The tumult continued, then died. Zhizhi was on his way, with overwhelming force. What other course was open? Huhanye accepted, sending his son to Chang’an to act as a hostage, and starting several months of ambassadorial exchanges to arrange the formalities for the spring of the next year, 51 BC.

  In Chang’an, news of his approach sent the court into a frenzy. Huhanye was coming to pay homage. But he was head of an independent state. How should he be treated? As guest or vassal? After much debate, the emperor decreed that Huhanye was voluntarily making the Xiongnu, their enemies for centuries, a subject state. This – the unforced submission of a whole empire, never mind that it was an empire divided against itself – was unprecedented, overwhelming. ‘I do not possess the virtue or moral aptitude for this grand and formal procedure,’ said the emperor, and would therefore ‘receive the chanyu with our national ceremonial etiquettes reserved for the most distinctive and esteemed guests’.

  Coming to Chang’an in the spring of 51 BC, Huhanye could hardly have believed his eyes. Built by the dynastic founder, Gaozu, 150 years previously, Chang’an was home to some 250,000, equal to a sixth of the chanyu’s own people. His whole tent-capital would easily have fitted inside the emperor’s main residence, the Everlasting Palace, a rectangle 8.6 kilometres around, with forty halls, standing on a platform 15 metres high. And this was only one of seven palaces. His weakened empire had a few fortresses, but nothing with walls like this – 25 kilometres around, 8 metres high. Yet he and his predecessors, with their 1.5 million people, had almost had all this and Han’s toiling millions (60 million, according to one estimate) at their feet. They had been fighting to get their share for the last 200 years. Now a share was theirs for the asking.

  The reception, outside the city, at which Huhanye was not required to kneel, was ‘incomparable’, with ‘dazzling and luxuriant gifts’, listed by Sima Guang: an imperial diadem, a belt and unspecified trappings, a solid gold seal fastened on to an embroidered sash, a sword with a jade-inlaid hilt, a dagger, a bow and 48 arrows (of unknown symbolic significance), 10 ceremonial halberds, a royal carriage, a saddle (no doubt ornately decorated), a bridle (ditto), 15 horses, 20 catties (about 12 kilos) of gold, 200,000 coins, 77 suits of clothes, 8,000 bales of brocade and 15 tonnes of silk.

  Then, joined by aristocrats of every sort, heads of vassal states and barbarian chieftains, Huhanye was led past tens of thousands of onlookers to the main bridge over the River Wei, where the emperor greeted him, to roars of ‘Long live the emperor!’ from the crowd, and led him in a formal entry into the city.

  After a few days, it was time to return home, t
hough what ‘home’ meant now was an open question. Huhanye asked if he and his people might settle just outside the Great Wall, north of the Yellow River, pretty much where his ancestors had been driven from by Meng Tian. And perhaps, in case of an emergency, he could find shelter inside the Wall? No problem. Off he went, with 16,000 Han troops, to his new base, where his hungry force – and presumably their families – received 34,000 hu of grain (which, if true, comes to 1,300 tonnes, presumably enough to last until the next harvest).

  So the Xiongnu were divided in half, the southerners under Huhanye in the borderlands, in the well-funded service of the Han emperor, and the northerners under Zhizhi in control of the old heartland, nursing hopes of a revival. Obviously there was no point in Zhizhi taking on Han. Instead, revival for him meant reclaiming the west, namely Wusun territory.

  It was not just the usual historians – Sima Qian, Ban Gu, Sima Guang – who recorded the split in Xiongnu leadership. There is an independent source. Among the thousands of bamboo slats that served as stationery for Han administrators in the Western Regions, one collection is a report by an official named Xi.3 The strips were jumbled, and no one agrees on the exact order, but it is clear that Xi is apprehensive about reporting bad news. ‘Your utterly unworthy subject, risking capital punishment and with repeated salutation’ reports that ‘the captain and soldiers saw outside the defence lines to the north-east … fires in four places, as large as wood-piles for signalling, at a distance from the defence lines of more than 100 li [some 50 kilometres].’ Xi mentions Huhanye and the Wusun king, calling them cheats, then makes a reference to Zhizhi ‘not knowing about this situation’. He concludes: ‘The barbarian people are greedy and inconsiderate, wicked and possessing two hearts,’ and submits his report in grovelling terms suitable to his low rank: ‘being foolish and stupid … and with forgetful speech, I bang my head to the floor’.