by John Keay
Nanyue (‘Southern Yue’) was a Han kingdom with a difference: it owed nothing to Han Gaozu and had imperial pretensions of its own. Corresponding roughly to Guangdong province plus neighbouring parts of Guangxi and northern Vietnam, its capital was at Panyu. This was the then name for the metropolis of Guangzhou (Canton), in the heart of whose international district were exacavated in 1983 yet another Han-period royal tomb and, in the 1990s, the remains of the royal palace gardens.
The tomb is that of King Wen, the second in the Nanyue succession and not to be confused with his contemporary Han Wendi, the emperor in Chang’an. In accordance with his rank, Nanyue’s King Wen was buried in a jade suit; it did nothing for the preservation of his corpse, although his many-chambered tomb is interesting. It represents in miniature the layout of his palace, with public rooms to the fore (banqueting hall in the east wing, treasure store in the west wing) and private apartments to the rear (including a chamber for those servants who accompanied him in death and another for concubines similarly ‘honoured’). Both Han and native Yue productions figure among the furnishings, along with African ivory, frankincense from southern Arabia and a circular silver bowl with lid that could be Persian. Then as now, the wealth of Panyu/Guangzhou stemmed from its Pearl River frontage on the South China Sea. Backed by the Nanling mountains, Nanyue seemed to have eluded Han ambitions and to be enjoying the perks of its balmy climate spiced with whatever foreign fancies came its way.
The Yue people are thought to have been Malayo-Polynesian rather than Mongoloid like the Xia Chinese. In northern China they were invariably deplored for their alien customs (e.g. banana leaves for plates) as much as for their steamy hillsides and malarial swamps. When the First Emperor extended his sway into the region, it was not a popular destination; only ‘fugitives, reprobates and shopkeepers’ were sent to settle there. Qin’s short-lived administration had been skeletal, and when the emperor died, it broke away. A Qin official, taking his cue from the melancholy Chen She’s uprising, had declared Nanyue an independent kingdom and himself its first king.
This was Zhao Tuo, otherwise King Wu of Nanyue. For ten years he was left in peace, Han Gaozu ‘having enough to do to take care of internal troubles’, according to Sima Qian. But in 196 BC the Han emperor sent a trusty troubleshooter, the Confucian ideologue Lu Jia, to talk King Wu into acknowledging Han supremacy. The king obliged in return for recognition of his assumed title, then reneged over a trade dispute. A Han embargo on iron sales, a strategic commodity since it was used for weapons, brought protests, followed by recrimination: King Wu declared himself an emperor, and troops sent south in 183 BC by the Dowager Empress Lü failed to quash this presumption. On the contrary, Nanyue’s troops began overrunning neighbouring territories. Their sovereign now rode in a carriage with a yellow canopy and issued his own ‘edicts’, both of these being imperial prerogatives.17
Sima Qian has Nanyue’s first king (and self-made emperor) dying in 137 BC. This seems unlikely; for if, as he says, King Wu was a magistrate under the First Emperor, he would have been at least a hundred and have outlasted two Qin and six Han emperors. More plausibly it was his successor, he whose jade suit now lies in the Guangzhou museum, who received the troubleshooting Lu Jia a second time and undertook to renounce the imperial style and send tribute to Chang’an. This was during Han Wendi’s reign and should have ended the matter; but unlike Qin’s incorporation of the Chinese ‘Midwest’ in Sichuan, the Han incorporation of its ‘Deep South’ dragged on.
Two more kings of Nanyue occupied the throne in Panyu before trouble broke out again. By then, from Chang’an the mighty Han Wudi, son and successor of Jingdi, was transforming Han’s patchwork dominion into a dynamic east-Asian empire. The much-fragmented ‘feudal’ kingdoms had been reduced to impotence and obliged to accept imperial appointees as their chancellors, or prime ministers. This innovation went down badly in Nanyue when it was introduced in 113 BC. No Nanyue king had as yet actually visited Chang’an to offer tribute; and when a pro-Han faction in Panyu persuaded the young king to do so, the country rose in revolt under its existing chancellor. Han envoys and supporters were massacred, an avenging force from Chang’an repelled.
The Han empire, which had just opened a grand salient into central Asia, was being humbled by ‘barbarians’ at its back door. Han Wudi could no longer trifle with the situation, and suasion having failed, only force remained. In 112 BC no less than four expeditions converged on Panyu by river and sea. The ‘General of the Towered Ships’ at the head of 20,000–30,000 men got there first. Joined by the ‘General Who Calms the Waves’, he stormed Panyu at night and, come dawn, the city surrendered. ‘Thus five generations, or ninety-three years after Zhao Tuo first became king of Southern Yue, the state was destroyed.’18 Sima Qian, then at work on his Shiji, felt nothing but satisfaction. There would be no more kings of Southern Yue, nor of Eastern Yue (in Fujian), which suffered a similar fate the following year. By the end of 111 BC all of mainland southern China plus the island of Hainan and the Red River valley of northern Vietnam were finally incorporated into the empire.
5
WITHIN AND BEYOND
141 BC–AD 1
HAN AND HUN
AMONG FUGITIVES FROM HAN JUSTICE IN the second century BC there was a saying that, if all else failed, they could always go ‘Northward to the Xiongnu [or] Southward to the Yue’. Of these the first was generally preferred, the Mongolian steppe-land of the Xiongnu being more congenial than pestilential Southern Yue. But for the authorities in Chang’an, the problem was the same: permeable border zones, with unpredictable enemies beyond and fickle dependants within, were incompatible with a well-regulated empire. In the far north, as in the deep south, the frontier had taxed the resolve of Han Gaozu and his successors and would only be settled, after a fashion and at great cost, in the reign of Han Wudi.
Wudi succeeded Han Jingdi in 141 BC. Fifteen at the time, he was still on the throne when he died at the age of sixty-eight. One of the longest and most eventful reigns on record (141–87 BC) benefited greatly from continuity, then fell victim to it. Opinion of Wudi’s rule has always been divided. He was either ‘an outright autocrat’ who subverted the authority of his ministers to ‘direct the government in person’, and so become ‘perhaps the most famous of all Chinese emperors’; or he was a palace cipher, scarcely able to control his own household, who ‘took no part in the military campaigns for which his reign is famous’ and was so oblivious of their cost that his tenure was in fact ‘a calamity for China’.1 While the emperor busied himself with matters of ceremony and ritual and dabbled in the arts, state initiatives seem often, but not always, to have come from ministers, counsellors or generals; and once approved, their execution was entrusted to the same functionaries.
This was in accord with Confucian teaching. Emperors were not supposed to toil day and night over cartloads of bamboo documentation as the Qin First Emperor was said to have done, nor to take the field with troops and drinking companions like Han Gaozu. Setting an irresistible example of righteousness and humane conduct required Heaven’s Son to stand aloof, and with his authority unimpaired by legislative niceties and executive responsibilities, cultivate a state of impassivity.
The condition was known as wuwei, a Daoist term variously translated as ‘doing nothing’, ‘suspended animation’ or ‘surcease of action’. The sage ruler ‘does nothing (wuwei)’, says Laozi, ‘and there is nothing that is not brought to order’.2 This was possible because in an ideal world the moral example set by the emperor was thought to create an attractional effect, like a magnet. By it, society as a whole was automatically orientated on the path of righteousness, so eliminating the need for laws and punishments, and by the same force the ablest and most upright of subjects were drawn ineluctably into the emperor’s ambit of service. His Celestial Majesty might then ‘do nothing’ in the knowledge that, with such paragons at the helm, nothing would not be ‘brought to order’.
There was a danger, though:
cynics might be tempted to judge the excellence or otherwise of the emperor by the calibre of his officials. Discovering and selecting men of unimpeachable distinction and ability was critical, and it could usefully be advanced by some intelligent recruitment. Time and again the records include edicts urging officials throughout the empire to seek out promising candidates for office and send them to Chang’an. The practice had started back in Zhou times but assumed much greater urgency under the Han as the administration grew in size and complexity. Han Wudi increased the frequency of these recruitment drives, while standardising the selection process by the introduction of a question-and-answer element. Qualification by examination, a cardinal feature of the later imperial bureaucracy, would follow. Even a questionnaire required a syllabus and a panel to mark the submissions. The panel was set up as an academy of scholars, of whom there were fifty in 136 BC, though the number soon increased; and the syllabus entailed these academicians selecting and interpreting a canon of suitable texts, initially five, all of them either favoured by Confucius (‘Book of Changes’, ‘Book of Songs’, ‘Book of Rites’) or attributed to him (‘Book of Documents’, ‘Spring and Autumn’ Annals). In effect an embryonic ‘Confucianism’ based on writings associated with Master Kong was acquiring, through state endorsement, an institutional substance and a veneer of orthodoxy.
But in the practice of government Wudi favoured concepts and policies more in keeping with those promoted by the Qin First Emperor. Wudi too travelled extensively, refined and consummated the sacrificial rites to be conducted at various sacred summits, and became obsessed by life’s transience and the lure of the immortals in their Paradise Islands of Penglai. Since Han Gaozu had neglected to realign his new dynasty with one of the Five Elements (or Phases), in 104 BC Wudi made good the deficiency. The calendar was revised, a Grand New Beginning announced, and ‘earth’, the element that overcame Qin’s ‘water’, acclaimed as that by which Han ruled. Its complementary colour was yellow and its appropriate number five, though it does not appear that wheel gauges were altered accordingly. The dynasty was thus belatedly synchronised with the waxing and waning of the elemental Phases, and the legitimacy of its having supplanted Qin affirmed in terms, not of the Confucian’s beloved Mandate, but of an esoteric theory more often associated with Daoism.
There is no evidence of legalist precedent being invoked by Wudi to restore the full severity of the First Emperor’s laws and punishments; but the courts were busier and the convict population greater than at any other time under the early Han. Taxes were increased; state monopolies of iron and salt (in 119 BC) and liquor (98 BC) were introduced to raise additional revenue; and convicts, slaves (usually prisoners of war or debt defaulters), conscripts and corvée labourers were mobilised on a massive scale. Roads, flood prevention schemes and imperial monuments accounted for some of this activity; so did the newly ‘nationalised’ foundries and salt-workings, in which unpaid labour was the norm (it would today be called ‘slave labour’). But the main reason was war. ‘Wu-di’ means ‘The Martial Emperor’, and though he seems seldom to have inspected his troops and never to have led them in battle, his reign was one of incessant campaigning, mostly in that great wilderness, devoid of familiar place-names and features, that lay on and beyond the northern frontier.
Here, in an arc extending from the Korean peninsula to Xinjiang, across thousands of kilometres of forest, steppe and desert, China’s sedentary agriculture blended into a harsh and interminable realm of nomadic pastoralism. As in Africa and the Middle East, the relationship between ‘the desert and the sown’ was an uneasy one, potentially beneficial to both but fraught with mutual misunderstanding and suspicion. In east Asia, distinctions in lifestyle and culture between the windswept nomad encampments and the huddled farming hamlets were compounded by differences of race (though this may have been more perceived than real), governance, language, literacy and much else that each held dear in the way of accomplishment. China, ‘the land of caps and girdles’, as Sima Qian calls it, was one thing; the yi (‘barbarian’) country, a land of pelts and trousers, quite another.
But if the social and economic distinctions were clear cut, the vegetational divide was anything but. Cultivation fingered into the steppe; shifting sands invaded the crops. Irrigation could transform desert as dramatically as desiccation could terminate farming. Extensive grazing grounds interrupted the patchwork fields to the south; rich oases dotted the western deserts. While the rivers were few, their watersheds indeterminate and their valleys too agriculturally valuable to be turned into frontiers, the mountains were far, their contours generally surmountable and their directional trends unhelpful. The demarcation of a frontier, let alone its regulation, looked impossible across such terrain and would tax imperial China for centuries.
The Qin First Emperor had not been deterred. His Qin forebears had long experience of dealing with their nomadic neighbours, and Meng Tian’s great push into the Ordos of c. 218 BC had been conducted so as to secure, once and for all, Qin’s northern and north-western flanks. The resulting network of forts, watchtowers, walls and roads – the ‘Great Wall’ of later tradition – might have served well had it been maintained. But the costs were prohibitive, and the years of civil war that followed the death of the First Emperor proved fatal. Troops had been withdrawn, colonists drifted back to the south, and the ‘forward policy’ was abandoned.
Arguably, though, it was the original advance into the Ordos and neighbouring steppe to the east and west which was of more consequence. Deprived of valuable grazing, and with informal trade across the new frontier restricted, the herdsmen beyond it for once made common cause. Effective leadership came courtesy of the Xiongnu, a tribe or lineage that rapidly became the nucleus of a great confederacy. Under Maodun, a young Xiongnu prince who slew his father to claim the title of shanyu (chanyu), or king, in 209 BC, the Xiongnu confederacy swept east, west, south and north, routing Chinese and non-Chinese alike. Shanyu Maodun reclaimed all the lands taken by Meng Tian and penetrated deep into what are now Hebei and Shanxi provinces. Thus, while Liu Bang and Xiang Yu had been fighting to the death on the banks of the Yangzi, Maodun had made free with the northern commanderies and ‘was able to strengthen his position, amassing over three hundred thousand skilled crossbowmen’, according to Sima Qian.
In English ‘Xiongnu’ is sometimes rendered as ‘Hun’. As to whether these two words really represent the same original when mangled by Chinese and Latin pronunciation, there is, however, no consensus; learned opinion blows one way then the other, like the wind across the Eurasian steppe. Certainly the Huns who invaded Europe were nomadic pastoralists like the Xiongnu. They too fought on horseback, terrorised an empire and had to be bought off at great expense. But that was centuries later and half a world away. Judged by the few words that have been identified, the Xiongnu spoke a Siberian language and may well have come from there. Equating them with the Huns of European history is useful only insofar as any mnemonic signage, however dubious, is welcome when negotiating the unfamiliar wastes of inner Asia’s remote past.
Since the steppe peoples left no account of their affairs and were said to be illiterate, nearly all that is known of them comes from Chinese sources. But without much in the way of prior records, a historian like Sima Qian had to rely on quizzing contemporaries with frontier experience, collecting observations of his own and using his imagination. The last unexpectedly extended to representing the nomadic point of view; for his early foray into anthropology and for his supposed ‘barbarian’ sympathies, the Grand Historian has been complimented.3
The Shiji’s section on the Xiongnu themselves is far longer and more informative than that on Nanyue. Evidently the steppe confederation presented Han statesmen with something more than the threat of dynastic and military embarrassment. It was a confrontation in which the empire’s future extent was being projected and its identity forged. With uncanny foresight Sima Qian seems to have surmised the course of subsequent history and anticipated the
part that would be played in it by later frontier peoples – Tibetan, Khitan, Turk, Mongol and Manchu to name but a few. In measuring zhongguo’s centrality, stability and cultural superiority against a nomadic ‘other’ of marginal, itinerant and barely literate pastoralists, the Grand Historian set an historiographical convention that would become an historical reality. Han versus Hun was just round one.
Sima Qian conveys this idea by treating the Xiongnu as a recurrent phenomenon prefigured by those non-Xia indigenous peoples such as the ‘Rong’ and ‘Di’ who had been assimilated in Zhou times, and by quoting the stereotypical opinions of his contemporaries. In Chinese, the term ‘Xiongnu’ was explained as meaning ‘Furious Slave’. They were commonly compared to wolves and other predators. A visitation from the Xiongnu was ‘like a flock of birds’ descending on a cornfield. They came ‘like a sudden wind’ and left ‘like a mist’ but ‘with the speed of lightning’. Among such ‘barbarians’, aggression and avarice were inherent and, without long exposure to the refinements of civilisation, nigh incorrigible. The Han would need to be patient, even magnanimous, to overcome them.