by John Man
The story is now much more dramatic, but she is still the epitome of suffering. Later, therefore, she not only chooses her fate: she does so bravely, for a noble cause. As she says in a letter that she is supposed to have written to the emperor: ‘In a thousand years to come, and even ten thousand, it will be remembered that Your Majesty once had a woman who played the role of special envoy in a foreign court beyond the Frontier.’ Now she has become the self-elected representative of a superior culture, who, like a missionary, seeks to teach the Xiongnu the ways of civilization, ensuring endless peace.
Sometime in the first millennium, she acquires another talent, and an attribute: she becomes a singer, who plays brilliantly and sadly on a pipa, a Chinese lute. The pipa, the instrument of court musicians, had special significance, as the third-century poet Fu Xuan recorded: ‘The pipa appeared in the late Qin period. When the people suffered from being forced to build the Great Wall, they played the instrument to express their resentment.’
The final element in the evolving story was the addition of a love interest. The emperor hears Zhaojun playing her pipa. He falls in love with her. He confers upon her the name Mingfei (Shining Consort), which is how people usually refer to her today. The evil Mao defects to the Xiongnu, and persuades the chanyu to demand Zhaojun’s hand. The emperor is weak, and must comply. The lovers part, in tears. The Xiongnu withdraw. Zhaojun, the saviour of the nation she has lost for ever, casts herself into the Yellow River.
It is in this form that the story reached maturity, in a play by the fourteenth-century playwright Ma Zhiyuan entitled Autumn in the Han Palace. Ma wrote with his own agenda, which could not be the established one of how Zhaojun civilized the Xiongnu, because China had recently been invaded and occupied by the Mongols, the ‘barbaric’ descendants of the Xiongnu. Weakness had led to unprecedented disaster. For the first time, the whole nation was under foreign rule. Beautiful women like Zhaojun get taken over by the barbarians, and China loses her very soul. This was tragedy, pure and simple.
So she entered the world of myth. After the Mongols fell, people reverted to the old theme, saying she had been sent from heaven by the Jade Emperor to make peace between the Chinese and the barbarians. To prove her divinity, people told the story of how, on her journey beyond the Great Wall, just as she comes to the Yellow River, there is a terrible storm of wind and snow. Calmly she dismounts and begins to play her pipa. There follows an astonishing transformation. The blizzard ceases, the sky clears, and on the plain flowers appear and the grass turns a wonderful spring-time green. All the places through which she travels become fertile.
When she died, it was said that everywhere the grass withered, except upon her principal tomb, which, in the seventeenth century, arose south of Hohhot. The 30-metre hummock is now the focal point of a major tourist attraction with a big new building at its entrance, its two wings sprouting from a central passageway. When I visited with my companion, Water Xu, an autumnal wind scattered leaves across the marble forecourt. There was no one around except a guard. Could we go inside? No, it wasn’t finished yet. In a year or so, one of the wings would be a museum. ‘You know,’ he went on, ‘seen from the air, this building looks like a flying goose.’ Ah, yes, of course. It recalled that poem put into the mouth of one of the princesses, wishing to be at one with the wild geese flying south to the civilized world. Never mind that that particular girl had been sent off to the Wusun, not the Xiongnu, for all the princesses were Zhaojun. Everyone knows the poem, said Water, because it was turned into the theme song of a TV series about Zhaojun, ‘Wild geese flying south,’ he hummed. ‘Over hills and mountain, how great the grasslands are, something, something, I can’t quite remember.’
The park is, of course, a political statement, celebrating national unity and the fortieth anniversary of the establishment of Inner Mongolia in 1966. So Zhaojun is given royal treatment. An arch shields a statue of her in a long, flowing gown, very suitable for a Han princess, though not for the consort of a steppe-based chanyu. Statues of animals crouching in reverence line the avenue leading to the tomb-mound, all of them partly or wholly mythological, recalling oxen, deer, and a legendary creature called xie zhi, a cross between a goat and a sheep with the magical ability to tell right from wrong and to swallow bad officials. The animals lead to a romantic statue of Huhanye and Zhaojun on horseback – a carriage, though more truthful, would have concealed her – with a plinth captioned he-qin, peace-and-kinship, the policy by which Han and Xiongnu were supposedly united as members of one big happy family.
It’s all fake heritage. She was probably buried somewhere on the steppes. She has eight possible burial sites, but this is the one people take most seriously, not because it’s true but because it is impressive. Stairs lead steeply up the burial mound to a little pavilion containing a stele in her honour. It is a good view from up there. Looking down on hectares of parkland, an avenue of kowtowing beasts, a building symbolizing her homesickness and statues proclaiming her importance, who would dare deny that she is worthy of the words picked out in white on the stele: ‘GREAT MERIT’.
1 As often, our heroine had many names. Originally, she was Wang Qiang. Her ‘style’ or ‘courtesy’ name was Wang Zhaojun, Zhaojun for short. At court, she became Mingfei (Shining Consort).
11
THE SHOCK OF SURRENDER
WHAT WOULD IT HAVE BEEN LIKE FOR ZHAOJUN TRAVELLING to the Xiongnu capital in her four-horse carriage? We cannot know, but pictures and contemporary descriptions can release the imagination. Armoured outriders, a mixed force of Han and Xiongnu in wary cooperation, guard her on either side, and carriage-loads of silk-clad officials follow behind her, with ox-wagons full of tents for the two-month journey from Chang’an.
To put ourselves in Zhaojun’s delicate shoes (though perhaps she has had the sense to put on sturdy leather boots), we should imagine her and her entourage as they make good time along Meng Tian’s Straight Road for a month, take rafts buoyed up by sheepskin floats over the Yellow River, wind up and over the Yan Mountains, rest at one of the Xiongnu border fortresses where prisoners eke out a living as farmers, pick up speed over the Gobi’s gravelly wastes, and then, to the growing dismay of her Chinese guardsmen, enter the enemy heartland, the flowing grasslands of central Mongolia, where herders on horseback, wielding lassos at the end of long poles, round up herds of horses, goats and sheep. What about toilet arrangements for this aristocratic beauty? Ordinary girls pee on the grass. Zhaojun has the privacy of her carriage, a tent, and handmaids with chamberpots. Occasionally, at some larger collection of tents, weather-beaten women in their all-encircling deels offer fermented mares’ milk and hard curds. They are not (yet) to Zhaojun’s taste, but perhaps she waves her handmaids aside to sip and nibble. After being on the road for two months, her cavalcade weaves between forested hills, along tracks similar to the ones you see today, broad patterns of parallel lines where drivers have made new tracks. Herds of sheep scatter as the outriders cut through them. Ahead, many tents fill a valley: the capital, at last. Her husband, Huhanye, has long since gone on ahead, to supervise a formal greeting. Small family tents by the hundred, with their lines of tethered horses, surround larger tents by the dozen, some of which form a corridor leading to the vast palace-tent, big enough to host 1,000 people. Lines of mounted Xiongnu warriors, fearsome in leather armour, mix with crowds of women in deels. All carry bowls of kumiss, which they flick heavenward with their third fingers, crying, ‘Ura! Ura!’ as she passes. Her escorts, Xiongnu and Chinese, peel away, leaving her to be welcomed to her new life. She steps carefully over the wooden threshold, for she has been warned that to touch it is a gross impropriety.1 Inside she sees two circles of poles holding the great dome of felt, over a floor covered by felt carpets with intricate designs of semi-mythical animals, like those on the Ordos bronzes and the hangings found in Noyon Uul. Huhanye, warned of her arrival hours before, sits on a gold-plated wooden throne, flanked by advisers. Back home Han courtiers imagine her to be in misery.
Far from it. She is at the heart of a rich empire, well supplied with Chinese products, and with Chinese companions chosen from the thousands of captive servants. She has wealth and authority she could never have dreamed of in Chang’an. She cannot know that the Xiongnu empire will never be what it once was. Anyway, the end will not come for another century. She has a lot to learn, and she’s terrified. But it’s not a bad outlook for a teenager who was until recently a tiny cog in the vast machine of the Chang’an court.
One summer a few years ago, I went to Noyon Uul with two Xiongnu experts from Ulaanbaatar’s Museum of Mongolian History – Odbaatar, slim and quiet-spoken, and his boss Gelegdorj Eregzen, whose dissertation was on Noyon Uul. Travelling in a solid Russian Forgon 4 × 4, we drove north for 100 kilometres and turned on to a track, rolling like a dinghy in a swell through stands of birch and knee-high shrubs and over grass rich with yellow flowers.
Eregzen pointed to a grove of trees. Hidden by the birches and a blanket of shrubs was a circular mound, and in the side of the mound was a hole. This – Kozlov’s tomb No. 1 – looked like an overgrown and abandoned well, a square pit lined with decaying timbers. Other mounds dotted the woodlands, all practically invisible. But in a half-hour walk we came across dozens of them – Eregzen knew of 100 or so – mostly only a metre or two high, and 10 metres apart. Some were bigger. One, No. 24, was a crater that must have taken weeks to excavate. It was still 6 metres deep and a stone’s throw across, with the entrance road running into it much as Kozlov’s team had dug it, like an ancient sunken lane. A Chinese lacquer bowl from tomb No. 6 has an inscription dating it to 2 BC, which means it was probably a gift from the Han emperor Ai to the Xiongnu chanyu Ujiuli (Wuzhuliu in Chinese).
For decades, scholars have known that the Xiongnu élite had been extremely wealthy. They were no barbarians, at least the top people weren’t, in terms of possessions and art and social structure. The Xiongnu armies and the Noyon Uul graves represented wealth on a grand scale. But no one had any idea how grand until recently.
Only since the early 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and Mongolia’s Communist government, have international teams of scholars begun to reveal the true depth and range of the culture created by the Xiongnu. Mongolia is still almost virgin territory for archaeologists, so there are many international projects – fifteen in 2017, with more planned for 2018 and beyond. The Xiongnu finds are mostly from graves, a few of them from around 10,000 graves of local dignitaries, most from the so-called ‘élite’ or ‘royal’ or ‘terrace’ graves, with the very biggest rivalling those of Noyon Uul. There are several hundred of these, which are almost square with sloping entrance corridors up to 40 metres long pointing south. The corridors do not reach the bottom of the burial chamber, one of many mysteries. Only twenty have been excavated. All but one have been looted (or perhaps they were deliberately destroyed by successive chanyus as a way of promoting their own legacies, as new CEOs squash the projects of their predecessors). They are in ten cemeteries ranging in size from Noyon Uul’s almost 2,000 hectares down to 20. Two are in the far west of Mongolia, two in southern Siberia, the rest in central Mongolia and none in China. Two are near the valley of the Orkhon River, in the centre of Mongolia, which is the best place from which to rule this region (later Turkic and Mongol empires also ruled from here). All have a penumbra of subsidiary graves, hundreds of them, about half being circular, the others rectangular. Most are on gentle slopes that were probably used as winter pastures. The majority of the really big ones – the élite tombs – are raised about 1 metre inside a low stone wall. The graves, dug in soft earth, have sloping walls, in steps, so that they did not collapse as they were dug. The depths range from 5 to 20 metres.
All the élite tombs vary, but there are similarities in size and structure, and also in content: animal bones (skulls, legs and tailbones of horses, cows, sheep and goats); horse paraphernalia of iron; Chinese carriages; the end bits or ‘ears’ of bows; bronze cauldrons; ceramic pots (almost 300 of these, made in local kilns); bronze mirrors, Chinese, many deliberately broken (more on these later); textiles; many types of ornament and personal possession, typically beads, belt-buckles like the ones found in Ordos, in bronze of course, but also in bone, stone and wood; and sticks of bone that may be chopsticks, often found near Chinese lacquered bowls and cups (occasionally with Chinese characters defining their function, suggesting that the Xiongnu adopted eating habits from China). One cup has a Chinese dedication to ‘sons and grandsons’, as if it were a marketing slogan. These cups show that the Xiongnu aristocracy were fussy: when the Eastern Han came to power in AD 25, lacquered ware in China gave way to downmarket ceramics, but the Xiongnu élite didn’t go for the new style and did not put much of it in their graves. Ankle bones of sheep2 are common. These little rough cubes, with their six different faces, were used as dice for games and telling the future (still are actually). Often, the smaller objects were wrapped in cloth. The burial chambers were of logs, sometimes a double chamber, containing the coffin, all covered with layers of pine cones and brush, which were set on fire before the pit was refilled. Coffins were often decorated with lozenges outlined in gold, reminiscent of the folding walls of Mongolian gers (tents) today. Perhaps the shapes represented spirit-gers.
What all this means is obscure. Do some items have special significance? Does their position in the tomb? Does size matter? Were the grave-sites sacred? Why the difference between circular and rectangular tombs? Did the entrance ramps serve a practical or ritual purpose, or both? So many questions, so few answers.
Take one small mystery among many, but worth a look because it is so odd. In 1996–9, an eight-man team3 excavated a burial in a cemetery of sixty-six graves bordering the Egiin Gol, a river in the forested hills of northern Mongolia near the Russian border. The graves date from the fourth century BC to the second century AD. One grave was a rough circle of stones. In the centre 1.7 metres down was a cow or bullock skull. A little further, under three layers of flat stones, scattered by looters, lay a coffin with two skeletons, male and female. With the man’s bones were bits of a bow, a spearhead, arrow-shafts and arrowheads, and bits of textile. But the bones themselves were a mess, scattered by the looters (one assumes), with some missing. He was between thirty and forty-five when he died. Beside him lay the woman, on her back, aged about thirty at death. Her skeleton was intact, her head supported by a leather pillow. She was buried with not much – a couple of hairpins, a mirror placed on her stomach. Above the two of them was an ‘offering box’, containing some cattle bones and – this is the puzzle – the woman’s hyoid bone. The hyoid bone, at the top of the throat, is a peculiar thing. It is not strictly a bone, but a semi-circular piece of cartilage that is attached only by muscle, with no other link to the skeleton. It is a foundation for tongue-movements. To get it out and put it in its place of honour, the woman’s tongue had been removed before burial. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. The eight authors of the paper reporting the find4 make none, but point out that there is no clue as to whether the operation was done post- or pre-mortem. Post-, I would guess, because pre-would have been excruciating. In any event, she was buried with care and consideration, as was her hyoid bone.
To get an idea of the Xiongnu in life and death, I went to see the doyen of Mongolian archaeologists, Diimajav Erdenebaatar, professor in Ulaanbaatar’s National University. A burly man with a thatch of grey hair and a drooping moustache, he has a passion for his subject, and experience to match, having shared in the excavation of the vast cemetery known as Gol Mod 1 and masterminded work on its twin, Gol Mod 2 (Gol Mod means ‘river-wood’, recalling their surroundings of mountainous fir forests and streams). His finds really need a large-scale, state-sponsored museum, which does not exist, so Erdenebaatar has made his own in the university. It is a jewel-box of treasures.
His main focus is Gol Mod 2, which he talks about with pride, because he discovered it in 2001. He had started with Gol Mod 1 working with a team of French archae
ologists. He had told them where it was and collaborated on its excavation. One day, wanting to get to another site he was working on, he decided to take a short cut, and asked a local to come along to guide him. ‘You know,’ his guide said, ‘we have another place, very like Gol Mod.’ So they went to check it out, and he was astonished to see, in among the scattering of fir trees, a vast pile of rocks, with numerous smaller piles alongside.
‘Obviously it was a cemetery,’ he said. And the main grave was not only bigger than the one at Gol Mod 1, it was richer – though looted, the robbers had left many more artefacts in place. ‘It was like a gift from Heaven,’ he added – from the Mongol god, Khökh Tenger, the Blue Sky. This was Gol Mod 2, comprising not just one large grave – the largest known so far – but 400 subsidiary graves as well. He then worked for three years on the main tomb, a massive operation, in which up to 200 people, digging down 21 metres, found the array of objects now in his museum.
There is, for instance, the iron rim of a chariot wheel, now laid out on the floor of his museum as if waiting to be refitted. About 1.25 metres across, it was part of one of sixteen or seventeen carriages, all broken and all but one burned as part of the burial rituals (the number of chariots was an estimate based on the number of wheel-hubs). That’s a cavalcade of chariots, almost enough to rival those of the Qin and Han courts, certainly enough to transport a royal Xiongnu family and top officials south across Ordos. Chariots, covered in black lacquer and drawn by two or four horses, were an important part of the ‘gifts’ sent by the Han emperors, and equally important as the official means of transport of Han envoys and Han princesses. Though once widely used in warfare, their military importance had faded. Mounted archers could run rings round chariots. The Xiongnu made their own, but they were wagons for domestic use. As the remains of many chariots in other graves suggest, these were status symbols not just for the chanyu but for all Xiongnu aristocrats, the equivalents of limousines for a modern head of state. Most of them had parasols or roofs to keep off the rain and sun. Rock drawings and paintings of chariots show their horses prancing along, tossing their heads as if they had not a care in the world.