by John Keay
Zhang led his men with the confidence born of long years of hard travel. The Wusun were located, their strength ascertained, and his gifts well received. Interpreter-guides were provided for his envoys to Bactria, India, Parthia, Ferghana and Sogdiana (the later Samarkand). But the Wusun faced a leadership crisis and were ill informed about the might of Han China. Before committing themselves to an alliance, they preferred to send their own envoys to the Han court. Zhang accompanied them back to Chang’an. He had the satisfaction of seeing ‘their appreciation of Han considerably enhanced’ and of receiving the various delegations that his envoys to the other central Asian states would escort back to Chang’an.9 When Zhang died, probably in 113 BC, he was hailed as the pioneer ‘who had opened the way’ to the Western Regions. ‘All the envoys who journeyed to these lands in later times relied upon his reputation to obtain a hearing. As a result of his efforts, the foreign states trusted the Han envoys.’10
But Han comings and goings across Xinjiang were not trusted by the Xiongnu, who during the last decade of the century mounted major assaults on both the Gansu corridor and the northern frontier. These were counterproductive with regard to the Wusun, who, stampeded by Xiongnu threats, soon embraced the Han alliance envisioned by explorer Zhang. Signed in 105 BC, the treaty was not so much one of ‘peace-through-kinship’ as of ‘war-through-kinship’. Han Wudi got 1,000 horses, a willing feudatory and a doughty defender of Han interests in Xinjiang and beyond, while the Wusun welcomed lavish gifts, a powerful patron and a tearful imperial bride.
This Princess Xijun and her sizeable entourage proved the most influential element in the package. Married to a grey-bearded Wusun leader, then to his grandson – with neither of whom she was able to converse – the princess yet exercised considerable influence among her new kinsmen and would on occasion act as the Han emperor’s representative. But she never became reconciled to her fate and famously composed a song that would be remembered long after the Wusun themselves had been forgotten. The song tells of Princess Xijun’s exile in ‘a strange land on the other side of heaven’, where her house was a tent of felts, and her food just ‘meat with fermented milk as a sauce’. ‘I live with constant thoughts of my home,’ sang the princess, ‘my heart is full of sorrow. I wish I were a yellow [-beaked?] swan winging back to my home country.’11 The song is included in the Hanshu, the second of the ‘Standard Histories’ (so sequel to Sima Qian’s Shiji), which was compiled by members of the Ban family. One of them was Ban Zhao, the sister of the main author; and it was surely she, a noted scholar in her own right and in this case a peculiarly sympathetic one, who was responsible for incorporating so poignant a reflection of the homesick plight of a Chinese bride.
Painted T-shaped silk banner from Mawangdui, Changsha (Hunan). Excavated in the 1970s, Mawangdui’s three tombs yielded a dazzling array of artefacts. The banner was found draped over the innermost coffin of the Lady Dai (d. c.150 bc), a contemporary of the Former Han empress Lü.
Inscribed turtle plastron from Anyang (Henan). The authenticity of the Shang dynasty (c.1600 bc–c.1045 bc) was substantiated through study of the written characters inscribed on such shells. Early evidence of a written tradition, they record oracular responses obtained from the cracking of the shells when subjected to heat.
Elongated bronze figure from a sacrificial pit at Sanxingdui in Sichuan. Dated to c.1200 bc, this nearly two-metre-tall figure remains a stylistic anomaly. Such finds suggest that technically sophisticated cultures flourished beyond the parameters of the Yellow River’s classic ‘Three Dynasties’ (Xia, Shang and Zhou).
Bronze vessel (a zun with pan) from the tomb of the Marquis of Zeng (d. 433 bc) in Hubei. The casting of often colossal bronze vessels was one of the supreme achievements of ancient China. None were more encrusted with decoration than those found in the ‘warring state’ of Chu, to which Zeng was tributary.
The 1974 discovery of the Qin First Emperor’s ‘terracotta army’ was probably the greatest archaeological find of the twentieth century. Thousands of warriors and hundreds of horses are now on display at the site near Xi’an. More exotic artefacts, like four-horse chariots in bronze chased with silver and gold, have since been excavated, and the main chamber of the emperor’s tomb has still to be opened.
Jade burial suit of Princess Tou Wan. In the Han period (c.200 bc–ad 220) royalty were often buried in tailored jade. Besides advertising the rank of the deceased, jade was supposed to have preservative qualities. Each suit consists of hundreds of platelets, like the armour of the ‘terracotta warriors’, that were knotted together with silk, silver or gold thread.
The so-called ‘Tarim Mummies’ from the deserts of Xinjiang caused an archaeological furore when identified as not just un-Chinese but decidedly European. Though the origins, language and technologies of this ‘Charchan Man’, or ‘Ur-David’, are still uncertain, it seems that in the first two millennia bc much of what is China today was populated by non-Mongoloid peoples.
Though typical of the structures associated with the long northern frontier, these fortified remains are not those of the Great Wall but of a military granary. Located near Dunhuang in the Gansu corridor, they date from the Later/Eastern Han dynasty (ad 25–220).
The Three Kingdoms period (ad 220–265) is best known as the setting for the later Romance of the Three Kingdoms. A scene from this enduringly popular novel is here depicted on a lacquer-coated box of the Ming period.
Under the Tang dynasty (618–907) imperial China stretched out along the Silk Road to achieve its greatest extent. Even the peoples of Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrghystan and Uzbekistan tendered tribute, typically in horses (seen here being ridden by their escorts in a silk painting of the Song dynasty). Central Asia’s bloodstock was prized, its sports (like polo) were adopted and its fashions aped. Ceramic figurines of the period depict elaborate female head-dresses and booted cameleers with noses of most un-Chinese proportions.
Seventeenth-century Tibetan fresco of the Buddha’s First Sermon. Buddhism reached China in the second century ad, some five hundred years after the Buddha lived and preached in India. It spread rapidly during the long ‘Period of Disunion’ (220–581) and thereafter enjoyed imperial patronage under the Sui and Tang dynasties.
The ‘Ancestor Worshipping’ cave at Lungmen (Longmen) outside Luoyang in Henan was commissioned in the 670s by Empress Wu, wife of Tang Gaozong and China’s only female ‘emperor’. The tradition of rock-cut images of the Buddha had come from India by way of Afghanistan (Bamian) and Xinjiang.
Traffic along the mountain-and-desert trails known as the Silk Road was two-way. Buddhist missionaries heading east into China were soon complemented by Chinese pilgrims heading west for India. Most passed through Dunhuang in Gansu, from where came this ninth-century silk painting of a travelling monk.
While the princess was accustoming herself to life in a yurt, operations to secure the Xinjiang route had continued. Though by no means an unqualified success, in 104 BC they were sufficiently advanced for the dispatch of a military expedition to the capital of Ferghana (it lay between Khojend and Samarkand). This was much the most ambitious foray made by the Han into central Asia, both in terms of distance (about 4,000 kilometres – 2,500 miles – from Chang’an) and of troops (6,000 cavalry and over 100,000 infantry). Its purpose was twofold: to punish Ferghana for its reluctance to be drawn into a subordinate relationship with Chang’an, and to obtain some of its famously ‘blood-sweating horses’. Equine bloodstock, always an important item in nomad–Han trade, was a speciality of the region and would long remain so. Li Guangli, the general who commanded the expedition, was anticipating William Moorcroft, superintendent of the English East India Company’s stud farm, who in the 1820s would spend six years tracking the finest stallions in Asia to exactly the same region and so launch European participation in both the exploration of central Asia and the ‘Great Game’.
Moorcroft would die on his quest, and at first Li Guangli fared only slightly better, being d
efeated by the terrain as well as the enemy. Returning to Dunhuang in disgrace, he was refused re-entry into Han territory and sent back to Ferghana in 102 BC to try again with augmented forces. This time he succeeded. He won a string of victories, obtained the king of Ferghana’s head (his subjects had decapitated him), commandeered 3,000 assorted horses, and left the neighbouring states in no doubt as to the seriousness of Han intentions. After such a demonstration ‘all the states of the Western Regions were shocked and frightened’, says the Hanshu.12 Most of the Xinjiang oases now sent missions to Chang’an, and Bactria and Parthia would follow suit.
But the cost of the exercise had been all too commensurate with its achievement. Of the over 100,000 men who had marched out of Dunhuang with Li Guangli, only 10,000 straggled back. Even Han China could not long sustain human losses on this scale, nor the financial expenditure involved in winning allies like the Wusun. The new state monopoly on liquor probably produced as much resentment as revenue, and voices were increasingly raised in protest over expansionist policies that, while impoverishing the whole empire, gratified only the imperial court.
Among these voices, though somewhat tentatively, was that of Sima Qian. In 99 BC, when the Grand Historian had been working on his Shiji for about seven years, a general called Li Ling served under Li Guangli’s command in an expedition against the Xiongnu during which Li Ling suffered defeat and was forced to surrender. Li Ling’s courage was not in question; with just 5,000 infantry, a ridiculously inadequate force, he had fought on for weeks against impossible odds until not an arrow was left. Sima Qian knew Li Ling and respected him, although he says he was not a particular friend. In interceding with the emperor on his behalf, the Grand Historian meant only ‘to broaden His Majesty’s views’ and counteract the calumnies of others. But somehow ‘our Enlightened Ruler did not wholly perceive my meaning’. Sima Qian was accused of trying to exonerate Li Ling in order to disparage the great Li Guangli. This in turn was construed as an attempt to deceive the emperor, a capital offence.13
Faced with such a charge an official was expected to commit suicide. His honour would thereby be partially redeemed, the emperor would be unimplicated in his fate, and the laws and punishments would remain in utopian abeyance. For in the Confucian ideal, officials attracted by the magnetic effect of the emperor’s moral example were supposed to be sufficiently righteous and high-minded to recognise their guilt and penalise themselves. Not to do so would be to acknowledge their inadequacy for office in the first place and so cast a slur on the judgement and moral calibre of the emperor, a surefire way to a death yet more painful.
Except as a delaying tactic, it was pointless to plead one’s innocence. Imprisonment pending trial was a euphemism for torture pending confession; the trial itself was intended merely to hear the confession and award punishment; and for an accused to be exonerated was almost unheard of. But of late there had arisen a custom whereby an accused might, at great expense, purchase commutation of a death sentence into something less draconian, such as demotion or exile. This was what explorer Zhang had done when disgraced in battle with the Xiongnu. The practice seems to have been favoured by Han Wudi as a means of raising revenue and was much abused for this very purpose.
Grand Historian Sima Qian declined both these options. He could neither raise the necessary funds for commutation nor resign himself to a suicide that would mean leaving his great work unfinished. His father had started the Shiji and had entrusted him with the task of completing it. ‘How can I, his son, dare to neglect his will?’ he asked. Filial piety as well as personal attachment dictated that he persevere. And though horrible to contemplate, there was in fact a third option. Worse than suicide, more disgraceful than execution, and too humiliating to be named in the long letter he wrote explaining his decision, it would at least permit him to finish his life’s work.
This extreme penalty, ‘the punishment of rottenness’ as it was called, involved a short detention in ‘the silk-worm chamber’, a cell reserved exclusively for judicial castrations. After repeated beatings and the inevitable confession, Sima Qian saw his final emasculation as an abject surrender, just like Li Ling’s. ‘Together we became a sight for all the world to laugh at in scorn. Alas, alas! Matters such as these, it is not easy to explain in detail to ordinary people.’ The physical shame, the ignominy brought on his ancestry and family, and the contempt in which he was popularly held for the rest of his life drew from the Grand Historian a bitter outpouring. Such was the price of scholarship, such the debt that posterity owes for the first and finest of China’s Standard Histories.
When I have truly completed this work, I shall deposit it in the Famous Mountain. If it may be handed down to men who will appreciate it, and penetrate to the villages and the great cities, then though I should suffer a thousand mutilations, what regret should I have?14
By the time of his death he had brought his great work up to the reign of Han Wudi. He had also included enough innuendoes to alert posterity to both the emperor’s failings and his own likely bias. Whether he actually outlived his tormentor is not certain.
ADMINISTERING AN EMPIRE
The Han empire had reached its greatest extent around 90 BC. Nanyue (including all of northern Vietnam), Hainan Island (though this was abandoned in 46 BC), parts of Yunnan, all of Gansu, the trans-Xinjiang ‘seaways’ and many of that province’s oasis cities could now be counted as Han territory. In addition, new commanderies had been established in the extreme north-east to include much of Manchuria and north Korea; and farther afield, feudatory or tributary relations had been established with the Wusun and many of the central Asian states. No significant additions would be made by the Han after Wudi’s 87 BC death, nor by any subsequent dynasty until some eight centuries later.
The Xiongnu had been reduced from a threat to a nuisance. Their confederacy splintered; a new treaty was signed with one of its segments in 51 BC, and large numbers of these subdued Xiongnu settled on marginal lands within the frontier. Border alarms now as often involved Qiang from the Tibetan plateau, or a people called the Wuhuan from the Manchurian steppe-forest. Instead of expansion, Chang’an pursued a policy of consolidation through colonisation. Under Wudi’s successors, it would increasingly become one of retention, then retraction, as intrigue overwhelmed the empire from within. The dynastic cycle had reached its zenith.
Elsewhere it was empires which rose and fell – Persian, Greek, Indian and Roman. In China it was dynasties. Empire remained a constant. Heaven’s Mandate might be transferable but its terms were fixed; there could be but one legitimate emperor, one ‘Son of Heaven’. Though variable in extent and often flatly contradicted by political realities, imperial authority was becoming as inseparable from the notion of Chinese identity as was its self-consciously literate culture. Courtesy of Han, of its centralising and staying power, and of its statesmen, generals and scholars, ‘zhongguo’ was being mentally and physically reconfigured as the emphatically singular ‘Middle Kingdom’ or ‘Central State’.
Rome’s near-contemporary empire was comparable in size and would last several centuries. But China’s would weather the millennia. Many explanations – geographical, psychological, even genetic – have been offered for the contrasting fortunes of the two empires and for the different political orders to which they would give rise – fragmentary and increasingly consensual in the case of Europe’s nation-states, unitary and increasingly authoritarian in the case of China’s empire. Explanations that emphasise imperial China’s more effective administrative structure and its more flexible ideology are certainly not the most exciting. Yet they carry conviction; and both – the administrative machinery and its ideological lubricant – were honed under the Han.
The Han bureaucracy has been called by one of its recent exponents ‘the most impressive form of government that as yet had been devised in the world’.15 It was both pervasive and intrusive, insistent on participation, not unresponsive, but oblivious of representation. The entire population, 57.6
million as deduced from the first surviving count of AD 1–2, was registered among some 12 million family households. These were grouped into mutually responsible units of five or ten as in Qin times. The family groups were organised into hamlets, each with a headman, and the hamlets into communes, each with a chief. Neighbouring communes constituted a district or county, neighbouring districts a prefecture, and neighbouring prefectures a commandery (or one of the now few and much-reduced subsidiary kingdoms).
All the last three administrative units were manned by salaried officials who had been chosen on merit and posted from outside to avoid any local conflict of interest. Their functions were not simply extractive. Besides being responsible for registration and judicial duties, they organised relief and public works (roads, bridges, dams, granaries), regulated local markets and manufactories, and oversaw public order and security. Of the revenue they collected through taxation, whether in coin or kind, only part was remitted annually to the central government, the rest being retained for local expenditure. The same was true of the labour levies for civil and military service. Conscription (typically two years’ service for every adult male) and corvée labour (one month per year) did not normally mean transportation to the northern frontier or labouring on one of Chang’an’s imperial extravaganzas; terms were mostly served within the district or prefecture and to some mutually beneficial purpose, such as suppressing banditry or improving irrigation.