Empire of Horses

by John Man

  In an unpublished paper, he summarizes the critical academic responses, both western and Chinese: ‘untenable’ … ‘impossible to accept’ … ‘a historical romance’ … ‘a bizarre flight of fancy’ … ‘a work of fiction of moderate interest’. There are so many things that simply don’t fit, not least that 145 men, who would anyway have been getting close to retirement, would not have been much of an addition to China’s western defences. They were too few to found a city.

  Look at the two fundamental claims:

  •that Li Qian equals Rome. Many scholars have pointed out that there is no reason why Li Qian should equate with Alexandria, or why Alexandria should equate with Rome, since Alexandria was Greek, and not conquered by the Romans until 30 BC, six years after the capture of Zhizh’s capital. Anyway, Li Qian was the name of a local administrative area a century before both the attack on Zhizh’s capital and the battle of Carrhae. The obvious conclusion was in one of the articles in the proof copy of the book Mr Song had given me: ‘Therefore there is no connection between Li Qian and any Roman prisoners.’6

  •that the soldiers formed a testudo. Dudbridge goes on to a highly technical examination of Dubs’s suggestion that a ‘fish-scale formation’ was a Roman testudo, and finds it wanting. The translation is simply wrong, he says. Dubs misunderstood both the grammar and a technical term. What the Chinese means is: ‘More than 100 foot soldiers were formed up in close order on either side of the gate, practising military [i.e. weapons] drill.’

  •‘The plain fact is,’ he concluded to me, ‘that Dubs linked together three entirely unrelated matters – the battle of Carrhae (53 BC), the Chinese capture of a Central Asian stronghold in 36 BC, and the ancient county of Li Jian in western China (already there in 53 BC).’

  No historical evidence, and no present-day evidence either. If there really are people in the area who ’look foreign’, it could not be a result of Italian genes carrying their information down the centuries, for eighty generations. No traits particular to individuals endure that long, because any trait as general as overall appearance is the result of uncounted numbers of genes that mix randomly. Yellow hair doesn’t sound very Italian. On the other hand, this was once the western frontier of China, with all sorts of contacts with non-Chinese peoples, whose genes could well have filtered down to the present, enough to produce a few families who look foreign to Chinese eyes.

  But good stories like this are too appealing to be destroyed by disapproval and disproof. At the grass-roots level in China, where ‘heritage’ and folklore often pass as historical fact, chances are that statements by killjoy experts who prefer evidence to good stories will have absolutely no impact at all. Anyway, the story has now escaped from its roots. Four hundred kilometres to the east, in a Ming fortress that is now the China West Film Studio, is a display left over from the making of the Homeward Bound film. It is the house of the governor whose task it was to look after the Roman soldiers in their new home. It includes some wonderful and thoroughly authentic-looking furniture. My guess is that the statues, the plaque, the pavilion and the film set will convince many thousands every year that the story is true.

  Back east, Huhanye was relieved at his brother’s death, but apprehensive lest he share a similar fate. So once again, in 33 BC, he went to Chang’an to pay homage to the emperor, requesting the hand of a princess to re-establish the peace-and-kinship treaty and turn himself into the emperor’s son-in-law. The emperor agreed, and selected a woman from his harem who was of a noble family and who had not yet been invited into the emperor’s bed. This was the soon-to-be-famous Zhaojun, whose story and subsequent legend is told in the next chapter.

  Huhanye was ‘ecstatic’. ‘I will be the border sentinel for Han,’ he wrote. ‘Not for this lifetime, but for ever. Please withdraw your troops from the border.’ One minister advised the emperor against agreeing, offering ten reasons: all barbarians would take heart, they will return to war, they are not to be trusted, those who are settled here will abscond, Han profiteers will inspire them to rebel again, ‘bandits, louts and riffraff’ would flee to them, and so on. So, said the emperor, thanks but no thanks. To which Huhanye grovelled: ‘I am dense. I never even contemplated such intricacies.’

  Two years later (31 BC), Huhanye died, in looming chaos over the succession. Since the early days, the crown had gone from father to son (indeed, the stability of the system was a major reason for the endurance of the Xiongnu empire), but sons were sometimes too young, or for some reason deemed inadequate by the Xiongnu aristocracy, and it had become customary for the succession to go from brother to brother. After Huhanye’s death, there were no brothers, only disputatious cousins. Civil war was inevitable. But not yet. For three decades there was peace, and riches flowed northwards, more than ever. From 6,000 bolts in 51 BC, deliveries of raw silk rose to 30,000 bolts in 1 BC, when the current chanyu, Ujiuli, came to Chang’an on an official visit. ‘Whenever the Xiongnu chanyu came to pay homage,’ wrote Sima Guang, ‘the Han Emperor would confer upon them gifts and embroideries and bales of raw silk in ever-increasing quantities.’

  Again, this – another voluntary submission by an old enemy – was a great event, marked by a banquet for ‘hundreds of civic and military officers’. But it seems that the 26-year-old Emperor Ai had more than diplomacy in mind. His reign was already marked by violent rivalries between four women, all of whom called themselves empress dowagers. In addition, Ai was besotted with a man named Dong Xian, a few years his junior, whom he had presented with ever higher offices, ever greater wealth and a royal mansion. Everyone knew about the affair. Once, so they said, when the two were asleep together, clothing entwined, Emperor Ai awoke and rather than disturb his lover he cut off the sleeve of his robe to ease himself out of bed. Ever after, homosexuality was referred to as ‘the passion of the cut sleeve’. Courtiers were aghast. Astrologers said that the emperor was under the malign influence of the planet Jupiter, which exuded a bad pneuma (air) and presaged a year of catastrophes. This needed to be countered by some grand positive gesture. Possibly the state banquet would suffice.

  Into this hotbed of corruption and scandal came the chanyu, Ujiuli (reigned 8 BC-AD 13). At the banquet, he was amazed to see the honour given to the imperial favourite. ‘Through the translator [please note: the chanyu did not speak Chinese] he inquired as to how a young man of his age could attain such a supreme position.’ The emperor avoided details. Through the interpreter, he replied curtly, ‘Whilst the Grand Marshal [one of Dong Xian’s many offices] may be young, he is nevertheless a sage.’ After the banquet and a night in the Lodge for State Dignitaries, which the emperor said was a great honour, the chanyu left much richer. Among the gifts was a lacquered wooden bowl – a so-called ‘ear-cup’ from the shape of its handle – made in the imperial workshop in Kaogong, Chang’an, and dated the fifth year of the Emperor Ai (2 BC). It was found in Noyon Uul, in Petr Kozlov’s tomb No. 6, which suggests that this tomb was Ujiuli’s (though how you prove that is an open question).

  In China, Ai died suddenly, and Dong Xian, stripped of all his ranks, committed suicide. In a flurry of accusations, suicides, banishments and executions, a usurper, Wang Mang, a minister-turned-emperor, seized power in a brief and bitter interregnum (AD 9–23). Described by Sima Guang as ‘restive, petulant and tetchy’, Wang Mang announced the birth of a new dynasty, Xin.

  1 The princess, Liu Jieyou, asked to come home in 51 BC. ‘I am advancing in years,’ she said. ‘I miss my homeland.’ She was escorted back to Chang’an, given a great reception and died two years later. The story, told by Sima Guang, is quoted in Yap, Wars.

  2 Two different characters, two different tones: Zhì Zhī . What he was called in Xiongnu we cannot know.

  3 Enno Giele, ‘Evidence for the Xiongnu in Chinese Wooden Documents’, in Brosseder and Miller (eds), Xiongnu Archaeology.

  4 See Bibliography. It was originally a lecture given two years earlier to the China Society.

  5 At the time, I treated th
is as a joke. To Chinese, especially in areas unused to seeing many foreigners, it seemed that all of them look alike. On this non-PC basis, I could have a large number of brothers. But I was wrong. A few years later, I was in conversation with an old friend, the travel writer and novelist Colin Thubron. I told him my story. ‘It was me,’ he said. He had been researching his book Shadow of the Silk Road. We’re not far apart in age, same height, and look vaguely alike. We could indeed be brothers. Mr Song, I misjudged you. My apologies.

  6 The article is by Zhang Defang (), Director of the Gansu Provincial Archaeology Team. Other references coming to the same conclusion, for Chinese readers: Wang Shou Kuan (), Dunhuang Journal (1, 37), 2000; Liu Guanghua () and Xie Yujie () 2nd North-West Minority College Journal (2, 39), Lanzhou, 1999.

  10

  PRINCESSES FOR PEACE

  IN INNER MONGOLIA’S CAPITAL, HOHHOT, MY HOTEL, which would not have been out of place in central London, or Paris, or New York, had a vast and intriguing bas relief behind the check-in desk: a woman wrapped in a large furlined cloak playing some sort of a lute. She was obviously important, because she was surrounded by dancing girls, soldiers and horsemen. When I asked about her, I was told the hotel was named after her, and that she was indeed important because she had brought peace to China by marrying a Xiongnu chief. Though one among many, she stood for them all. This is her story, and theirs.

  Buying off the Xiongnu was expensive, not only in troops and weapons and ‘gifts’ but also in princesses. Twelve of them were sent north to marry various chanyus between 200 and 100 BC, one every eight years or so, and several others after that. There are few details. They get chosen, they go, they vanish.

  Today, the absence of information seems dismissive, as if the women were mere pawns, offered in order to satisfy the lust of a coarse barbarian chief.

  But it wasn’t like that. For one thing, royal women were not objects to be moved around at the emperor’s will, mothers in particular. Empress dowagers were formidable figures (Empress Lü uniquely so in her cruelty and vindictive scheming). In the words of Burton Watson, translator of Sima Qian, ‘The mere suggestion that a king or an emperor had failed to treat his mother with the proper deference would be sufficient to cast a shadow of guilt over his whole regime.’ He goes on to summarize the role of women at court, as recorded by Sima Qian.

  Time and again we discover them manoeuvring behind the scenes to bring pressure upon their lovers and sons; in scene after scene we see concubines dissolving into persuasive tears before their lords, or testy old women carrying on like spoiled children until they get their way … [or] the figure of the determined matriarch contriving to dictate the lives of her offspring.

  Secondly, the young women were agents with a mission – to forge links so close that the ‘barbarians’ would become ‘civilized’ and peace would be guaranteed. If things turned out well, their children would be the sons and daughters of Chinese royalty. In theory, therefore, the chanyu would become family, and filial duty would make war impossible. Sometimes it worked well, sometimes a little, sometimes not at all. But there was no denying the burden carried by the princesses, even if they had no choice.

  Handing over high-status women was an act of significance, not just for the women, who were hardly out of their teens, but for the court and for ordinary Chinese. The princesses may have had a reasonably good life in the chanyu’s court, bearing in mind that it contained many bilingual officials and maybe one or two other princesses. If they were mistreated, reports would filter back to Chang’an, with consequences, like an invasion or a halt to the flow of gifts, or both. But to most of the court and the public, who knew nothing of nomad ways, it was a fate worse than death. That anyone, let alone a princess, could be sent into the land of the northern barbarians was the equivalent, in European folk tales, of sacrificing a virgin to a dragon, except this was for real.

  Actually, the policy involved more than just the Xiongnu, because their empire included many other tribes, which occasionally had to be paid off with goods and a princess or two. In 108 BC, a poem was placed in the mouth of a princess named Liu Xijun – her family name defining her as a relative of Liu Bang, founder of the Han dynasty – after she was despatched to the Wusun in an attempt to prise them away from the Xiongnu. The words are not hers. It was written by someone back home, imagining what it was like to be her:

  My family married me to a lost horizon,

  Sent me far away to the Wusun king’s strange land.

  A domed lodging is my dwelling, of felt is its walls,

  Flesh for food, mare’s milk for drink.

  Longing ever for my homeland, my heart is full of sorrow,

  I wish I were a brown goose flying home.

  None of the women themselves recorded their experiences, so we have no idea how they felt or what their new life was like. But the practice had such emotional clout in China that it cried out for universal expression, which it found in the story of one particular girl, who was not, as it happened, a princess. Somehow, that only added to the pathos. As often in Chinese history, the few bare facts were overtaken by multi-layered fictions. She acquired attributes, passions, and relationships that turned her first into a heroine and then a goddess, celebrated with plays, poems, memorials, a film, an opera, a tomb-park and that plush hotel in Hohhot.

  Her name was Zhaojun, and her real-life story begins in 33 BC, when the Xiongnu and Han-dynasty China were at peace. This was two decades after the Xiongnu had been split between two brothers, Zhizhi and Huhanye. Zhizhi had fled and been killed. In 33 BC, the grateful Huhanye came on his second state visit, saying that he wished to ‘become the Emperor’s son-in-law’. He was hoping for a princess. What he got was something rather less – a nineteen-year-old lady ‘of noble family background’, Zhaojun.

  She must have been fabulously beautiful. The Han Shu says that she was presented at a state banquet. ‘Her beauty, dazzling in its luminosity, lit up the entire hall. The young woman casually ambled into the hall with unassuming elegance and grace, leaving those present with a feeling of profound awe and admiration.’

  Huhanye was delighted. Off she went, probably by carriage, because that was how dignitaries and royal women travelled, and possibly (according to one scholar) along Meng Tian’s Straight Road. She bore a son. Huhanye died two years later. Following Xiongnu tradition, she married his heir, her stepson, by whom she had two daughters, the older named Yun, the younger unnamed, but both respected enough to be useful in Chinese-Xiongnu diplomatic exchanges. Soon after, she vanished from the historical record.

  Her transformation began about two centuries later, and has never stopped. She is one of the Four Beauties, women linked in legend by nothing more than their looks. Their beauty caused fish to forget how to swim, the moon to hide her face, birds to fall from the sky and flowers to wilt. Version followed version, building incident and character to serve one agenda after another, until now. Scholars list some 250 books, 780 poems and several plays about her.

  Here’s how the story went in its earliest form:

  At seventeen, Zhaojun1 is already a celebrated beauty, so beautiful that her father refuses all offers of marriage and presents her to the emperor. But her father has no influence at court, and she is one among many. She is put in the Palace of the Concubines, and there she lives for several years, until depression sets in and she ceases to care for herself. No wonder, then, that she is never noticed. When the Xiongnu king comes, there is to be a great spectacle of dancers, musicians and singers. Zhaojun seizes her chance, and appears at her best, wonderfully dressed, her face and figure radiating beauty. When the emperor asks the chanyu if there is anything he would like in particular, the chanyu replies, ‘I have treasures enough, but the Xiongnu women cannot compare with the Chinese. Grant me one of your beauties.’ At this the emperor asks for a concubine to step forward and offer herself voluntarily. Zhaojun advances and speaks: ‘Your humble servant has had the good fortune to find herself in the Palace of Concubi
nes. Alas, alone among them, she was too ordinary to be of interest to Your Majesty. I therefore wish to offer myself to the chanyu.’ The emperor is stupefied by her beauty, and filled with regrets, but cannot go back on his word. With a sigh, he lets her go. Her heart, however, stays with China. On her arrival in the wild lands of the north, she remains the image of sadness, and composes mournful songs, lamenting her fate among the swirling sands and biting winds, enduring an incomprehensible language and fermented milk that ruins her hair. She has exchanged unhappiness for pure misery. In one poem, ‘Bitter Nostalgia’, she sees herself as a beautiful bird, shut away in a far-off palace, tormented out of her mind, yearning to join the wild geese in their flight south.

  High is the mountain,

  Deep the river!

  Alas, my father! Alas, my mother!

  How long is the road that separates us!

  Oh, how many are the sorrows

  And the cares that afflict my heart!

  She has a son, who on the death of her husband succeeds him. She asks her son whose traditions she should follow: the Xiongnu’s or the Chinese. He says: Do as the Xiongnu do. So she takes poison, and dies.

  Already, she has some character. She is no mere victim, but a volunteer, which makes her tragic. She is devoted to her emperor and her country, and she cannot live with her loss. But it is all rather depressing. We could do with a little more drama, which is what was added by the fifth century. Now a new character appears, one of the court painters, the evil Mao Yanshou. Since the emperor can’t possibly visit all his concubines, and since he wants only the most beautiful as his consorts, it is the job of the artists to paint the portraits of all the girls so that the emperor can choose the most beautiful. Customarily, the girls bribe the painter to upgrade their charms. But Zhaojun has integrity. She refuses to pay. In revenge, Mao paints her ugly. When the chanyu asks for a Chinese girl, the emperor chooses the ugliest – Zhaojun – and only discovers his mistake as she is about to leave. He cannot, of course, go back on his word, and in his fury has all the painters executed.