by John Keay
As witnessed by monk Xuanzang on his return journey through Xinjiang in 645, the harvest was substantial. All inner Asia was opened to Chinese penetration, and the so-called ‘Western Regions’ – an elastic term at the best of times – were stretched to their utmost. Under Tang Gaozong and Wu Zetian new protectorates were established over these frontier regions whose dependent territories sprawled in a great arc from Manchurian Andong on the Yellow Sea through what are now Outer Mongolia and eastern Kazakhstan to the deserts of Khorasan in north-eastern Persia/Iran. China’s empire would never again be so vast. On paper – itself a commodity symbolising both the novelty and fragility of the new imperium – Tang China was indeed ‘the greatest power in Asia at this time’.19
But it would be wrong to suppose that the frontier protectorates were subject to a level of control comparable to that in China’s domestic provinces and prefectures. Protectors-general exercised a theoretical command over vast areas, parts of which, such as those beyond the Pamirs or the Tian Shan, could be reached only by months of travel and might be quite inaccessible for long periods of the year. The protector-general was responsible for their pacification, but his role was as much supervisory as punitive, diplomatic as bureaucratic.
The term used for a protectorate’s far-flung components, whether prefectures or military commands, was jimi, meaning ‘control by loose rein’. Subordinate but autonomous, jimi territories were designated to fit within a military and administrative framework that satisfied imperial criteria, yet they were otherwise barely distinguishable from the political entities they replaced. The jimi prefects and commandants were themselves often non-Han, typically former rulers of the regions they controlled who had tendered their submission in return for recognition; their staff and military establishments were also substantially non-Han. They could be called on to assist in frontier defence, to dispatch or accompany tribute missions to the capital annually, and to lodge their sons there as security for their loyalty. The tribute might include some element of tax revenue, especially in respect of the settled and easily assessable oasis-states of Xinjiang. In return the jimi prefects enjoyed hereditary tenure and might receive titles, brides, revenue grants and food subventions from the imperial government, plus presents of greater value than those tendered as tribute.
The ‘loose rein’ chafed little, and least of all in peripheral regions like northern (i.e. Outer) Mongolia, Ferghana, Sogdiana and the trans-Pamir region, whose submission could only be described as nominal. Such tracts, so impressive on the map, would prove a liability. Conservatives like Wei Zheng, Tang Taizong’s crusty old adviser, had remonstrated vehemently against their inclusion and would not have been surprised at the ease with which some were about to be detached. As in Korea, Chinese ambivalence in military matters, and the ad hoc forces available for deployment, were woefully inadequate for maintaining an imperial colossus when challenged by other empire-builders.
The first of these challengers was Tibet. The amicable relations reached between Srong-brtsan-sgam-po and Tang Taizong had broken down around 660, the bone of contention being again the status of the Tuyuhun people in the treeless and boggy no man’s land that was Qinghai. By now, after various missions and a long stand-off over a Chinese envoy’s refusal to kowtow to the Tibetan king, the Tang should have realised that the Tibetans were not a mere confederation of nomadic tribes. An ambitious kingdom and would-be empire, Tibet had developed an integrated military, an effective administration and a literate culture based on its own grammar and script (an alphabetic one derived from a form of Sanskrit). The adoption of a distinctive and largely indigenous form of Buddhism (Vajrayana) was under way, metallurgical skills were highly developed, and Tibet’s mixed economy included artisans and traders as well as farmers and pastoralists.
Through the 660s the Tibetans pushed outwards, reclaiming the Tuyuhun lands in Qinghai and penetrating into both Sichuan and Xinjiang. In the last, they joined forces with disaffected local kingdoms and remnants of the Western Turk qaghanate to sever the southern Silk Road as used by monk Xuanzang. Then with the capture of Kuqa in 670 they virtually eliminated the Chinese presence throughout western Xinjiang and the Pamirs. The Tang retained control of the northern Silk Road from Turfan over the Tian Shan via what is now Urumqi to Ferghana, where a military base was established at Tokmak on the Issyk-kul. They also mounted a determined defence of the Gansu corridor against the Tibetans with a major expedition of 670 into Qinghai. This was heavily defeated, as was a repeat performance in 678. ‘I am afraid that the pacification of Tibet is not something that you can expect to accomplish between dawn and dusk,’ concluded an all-too-prescient submission to the imperial court of about this time.20
China’s two decades of domination in Qinghai and southern Xinjiang gave way to what has been called the first Tibetan empire. But Wu Zetian was far from reconciled to the situation. Though urged to write off what were called the ‘Four Garrisons’ (Tokmak, Kuqa, Kashgar and Khotan) of Anxi, the protectorate that corresponded to the Western Regions, she bided her time and in 692 in fact recovered them. Then she reinforced them. Thirty thousand troops were now permanently stationed in Anxi, with similar build-ups in other frontier protectorates. Against sustained and organised opposition, the traditional one-off, out-and-back ‘punitive’ expedition could no longer guarantee the security of the empire. Instead the frontier regions were to be policed by large permanent troop concentrations; and these, because of the difficulty of rotating soldiers so far from home, increasingly consisted of long-service recruits, both Han and non-Han, with a decidedly professional, even mercenary, approach to soldiering.
The empress had effectively buttressed Tang Taizong’s imperial construct but at some damage to both Confucian principles and centralised authority. For supplying and remunerating such garrisons would strain the economy and deplete the resources, military as well as financial, available at the centre. Worse, in the longer term these heavily militarised protectorates and provinces would prove as fractious as the peoples they were supposed to be controlling. In upgrading the defences of its extended frontiers against external attack, the dynasty exposed itself to attack from within its traditional frontiers. Even the great Tang Xuanzong would fail to resolve this dilemma and would eventually pay the price.
Nonetheless, Xinjiang and Ferghana had been safely restored to the fold. Not without interruption, they would continue under Tang supervision for another fifty years. Tibet, though, remained an enigma. When offering allegiance it often confused matters by demanding reciprocity, and when offering battle it often cheerfully proclaimed that it did so out of loyalty. As the seventh century drew to a close, succession disputes within the Tibetan leadership led to a lull in hostilities. It ended in 700 with resounding Chinese victories and a peace settlement that was thrashed out in the dying days of Wu Zetian’s reign. Sealed with a Chinese bride in 707, the terms of the settlement were vague but again implied an equality of status that future emperors would find intolerable.
Attacks and counter-attacks would continue along the length of the Tibeto-Tang frontier. Interminable and indeterminate, this zone ran all the way from the tousled hillsides beside the Mekong in Yunnan to the glacial gravel-beds of the upper Oxus in Afghanistan and the upper Jaxartes in Kyrghyzstan. The flashpoints were ever in the middle, where it brushed the Gansu corridor in Qinghai and veered towards Chang’an. But at its extremities the Tibetans were no less active and there found strange foes who quickly became staunch allies. In Yunnan these were the peoples of the emergent kingdom of Nanzhao, whose subsequent defiance of the Tang would destabilise the whole of south-west China including Vietnam. And in far Ferghana, the Tibetans’ new ally was even more formidable, he being Qutaiba bin Muslim, military governor of the now Ummayad province of Persian Khorasan.
Islam had arrived in central Asia within decades of the Prophet’s death. After rolling back Persia’s Sassanid empire much as Alexander of Macedon had its Achaemenid empire, the Arabs first briefly took the Sog
dian city states of Bukhara and Samarkand in 708/9. At about the same time, Qutaiba bin Muslim’s counterpart in south Asia established an Arab bridgehead in India with the conquest of Sind in what is now Pakistan. Both initiatives were directed from Baghdad, headquarters of the Ummayad caliphate’s western viceroy.
The Chinese responded to the new presence by affording sanctuary to Pheroz (Firuz), a son of the last Sassanid ruler of Persia, and by encouraging their Western Turk jimi to resist the newcomers. But anything approaching a head-on clash between the two imperial juggernauts, the one triumphant throughout west Asia and the other throughout east Asia, failed to materialise. The Tang no more halted the Arab advance than did the Arabs the Tang advance. Both ground to a standstill in the political dust-storm stirred up by the Turks and Tibetans. When in 751 Arab and Tang forces did finally come face to face on the Talas River in Ferghana, the battle proved less bang than whimper. The victorious Arab and Tibetan forces failed to follow up their triumph, and the defeated Chinese had already written off Ferghana. World history was the only loser.
For the Tang, the Tibetan menace, though barely contained, had in fact been decisively overshadowed since as early as the 680s, when a greater threat emerged, or re-emerged, in the north. Though Tang Taizong had picked off the Eastern Turks of Mongolia in the 630s, in the early 680s they reformed under dynamic new leadership, repudiated their Tang protectoral status and, like a swarm returning to the hive, set up a Second Turk Qaghanate along the Orkhon River near what is now Ulan Bator in Outer Mongolia. From there they spilled across the Gobi, and with scant regard for either garrisons or walls, harried the Chinese provinces of Shanxi, Shaanxi and Ningxia. The new Eastern Turks demanded tribute-cum-trade plus the return of Turks who had been resettled within the empire; they undermined Wu Zetian’s authority by insisting their relationship was exclusively with the Tang emperor, not a Zhou empress; and like the Xiongnu of old, they commanded the supply of bloodstock on which the horse-loving Tang court, no less than its cavalry, had come to depend. They could not be ignored.
Exchanges, largely hostile but also commercial and diplomatic, dragged on for a quarter of a century. Under the great Qapaghan (Bag Chor, Mochuo, r. 695–716), the new qaghanate rivalled any of its predecessors, including that of Shanyu Maodun in Han times, and exacted enormous sums from the imperial exchequer as blood money. But any Turk plans for territorial enrichment at the expense of core China were held in check, partly by bolstered defence arrangements such as those introduced in Anxi and partly by the relentless pressure being experienced by the Turk qaghanate along its farther frontiers.
This pressure, though poorly understood by historians, would have been familiar enough to the Turks; it had powered their own eruption two centuries earlier. North-east Asia’s capacity for demographic upheaval was again making itself felt. As if spewing from ethnic geysers somewhere in the vicinity of where Siberia, Manchuria and Mongolia meet, a whole new generation of peripatetic peoples had begun herding its way into history.
Their names enter the records in the mid-seventh century, among the more familiar being Kyrgyz, Uighur and Khitan. They in turn would be followed by Jurchen, Mongol and Manchu. Like the Xiongnu and Xianbei, each attracted support from other ethnic groups to become composite peoples whose identity was dictated by the language group to which the leading clans belonged. And poorly differentiated at first, they would assume these distinct identities only as they entered the Chinese arena and steadily hijacked its history. Their impact can scarcely be exaggerated. By the thirteenth century a traveller like Marco Polo could genuinely suppose that ‘Cathay’, a name derived from ‘Khitan’ hegemony, was the appropriate designation for the Middle Kingdom, that its renaissance was down to Mongol rule, and that ‘khan’ (that is ‘qaghan’) as in ‘Kublai Khan’ was the normal title of its emperor. Fatimid Egypt as sampled by, say, a Frankish spice merchant would have been just as misleading, its Islamic present and Graeco-Roman past obscuring its pharaonic heritage.
Of the newcomers, the Kyrgyz, a Turkic-speaking people, would be the most peripheral; gravitating westward through and round Mongolia, they would play only a cameo role in the affairs of the Middle Kingdom. The Uighur, who also spoke a Turkic dialect, might have followed a similar trajectory; but as ferocious horsemen, they were sidetracked into contention for supremacy on the Mongolian steppe. Their presence attracted overtures from Wu Zetian in her tussle with the revived Eastern Turk qaghanate and began the long association between the Uighur and the Tang. As allies the Uighur would be of special assistance to Tang Xuanzong in his own tortuous dealings with the Eastern Turk qaghanate; and in 745, when the Turk qaghanate fell, it was the Uighurs who would succeed it in Mongolia with an essentially Uighur ‘Third Turk Qaghanate’. This would render even more crucial service to the Tang in their greatest hour of need, rescuing the dynasty while ravaging the empire on at least two occasions. The Third Qaghanate lasted nearly a century (745–840) before the Uighurs were finally dispersed, many of them resuming their westward drift to Xinjiang, where they would remain.
Rather different were the Khitan (Qidan). Their language has been called ‘proto-Mongol with Turkic borrowings’, and their cultural identity ‘Turko-Mongol’. How and where they acquired this pedigree, and what other than some vocabulary they shared with the later Mongols, is uncertain; but they had been known to the Chinese since the third century and by the seventh were established along the Manchuria–Mongolia border. In 648 Tang Taizong, pursuant to his abortive invasion of Korea, had secured their nominal allegiance. But in 695, when Wu Zetian had her hands full with the Tibetans and Qapaghan of the new Eastern Turks, they rose in unexpected revolt. Two imperial armies, one commanded by an impressive twenty-eight generals and the other reportedly consisting of 200,000 men, were rushed to the rescue only to be routed near where Beijing now stands. The Khitan then halted their advance and pitched camp in northern Hebei. In a reign replete with crises, this was possibly the greatest. Yet the empress, despite her years, handled it ‘with a calm and decision that were wholly admirable’.21 Qapaghan was bought off, in fact persuaded to lend his assistance against the Khitan; a determined effort was made to recruit more troops; and in 697/8 the Khitan were at last defeated. Though they withdrew, and after a dalliance as Turk allies accepted imperial suzerainty under Tang Xuanzong in 714, it was not the last that would be heard of them. The Khitan would remain an irritant for more than a century and then become major contenders for power in China itself in the tenth century.
LIKE A BREATH OF SPRING
They swore to wipe out the nomads, no thought for themselves, Five thousand in sable and brocade, gone to barbarian dust. Pity them – these bones by the shores of the Uncertain River – to those who dream in spring chambers, they are still men!22
In his ‘Song of Longxi’ (Longxi being a remote outpost in western Gansu) Chen Dao, a ninth-century poet, highlighted the human cost of an extended empire by juxtaposing the frontier’s cruel oblivion and the homeland’s fond recollections. Poetry, like remonstration, could be a form of protest; and since poets were products of the Confucian education system, extravagant military adventures often came in for criticism in their verses.
No dynasty was graced by so many poets, or such famous ones, as the Tang. Around 50,000 poems survive from the Tang period, and of its over 1,400 known poets at least two – Li Bo (701–62) and Dou Fu (712–70) – are generally considered to be, in their different ways, without peer. Li Bo, ‘a Mozart of words’ and ‘the Chinese Byron’, was the more versatile.23 Probably in 751, the year in which Tang armies were defeated by both the Nanzhao kingdom in Yunnan and the Arabs and Tibetans on the Talas River in Ferghana, he composed a lament called ‘Fighting South of the Ramparts’. In it, an old campaigner describes how he and his comrades crossed the Tian Shan and watered their horses in ‘Parthian seas’, how they fought on the northern border last year and are fighting in Xinjiang this. The enemy never has anything to lose, ‘the fighting and marching never stop
’; swords clash, riderless horses ‘neigh piteously’, and men die; crows peck at their guts and festoon the withered trees with their entrails;
Captains and soldiers are smeared on the bushes and grass:
The General schemed in vain.
Know therefore that the sword is a cursed thing
Which the wise man uses only if he must.24
Poetry exposes contemporary sentiments and activities that elude the plodding official histories. But it travels badly. Apart from the difficulties of translation and the challenge of conveying things like rhyme, tonal rhythm and wordplay, China’s poetry expects more of the reader than that of most other traditions. Poets wrote to engage one another, not to reach out across the land and down the ages to a vague and indeterminate general public. Since composition was a vital part of the Confucian curriculum and especially of the jinshi examination, all well-educated persons aspiring to high office were poets of a sort and could appreciate virtuosity among their peers. It was ‘a companionable art for private and social use’ by an initiated, discerning and allusion-conscious elite. Moreover, its speciality lay in conveying not just the imagery that survives the rough handling of translation but the poet’s state of mind and the subtle flickering of his emotions. According to one authority, ‘learning to be a good reader of Chinese poetry is an art as fine as being a good poet’ (a dictum that has sometimes been supposed valid when applied to Chinese history and the historian).25
Inland waterways provided imperial China with its main arteries of trade and communication. The Grand Canal, a series of channels linking the Yangzi delta with the Yellow River and Beijing, is still very much in use. It was cut by the Sui emperor Yangdi (604–17) but has been constantly realigned and widened. Paddle-powered shipping (with anything from two to twenty paddle-wheels) was developed during the Song dynasty in the twelfth century. And from this period dates the great Qingming scroll depicting frantic riverside commerce.