by Amy Chua
The An Lushan Rebellion was a turning point in Chinese history, marking the beginning of the long Tang decline. Prior to the rebellion, the Tang emperors had tried to blur the divide between Chinese and non-Chinese, pursuing deliberate policies of ethnic and cultural intermingling. For years, this policy proved surprisingly successful. Even as the empire expanded its dominion over more and more territory, Tang China drew strength and vitality— economic, military, and cultural—from the participation of foreigners at all levels of Chinese society. All this was to change. By the late eighth century, the openness of the Tang to foreign peoples and foreign ideas had become a source not of power but of division, insecurity, and violence.31
Even before the An Lushan Rebellion, incursions and insurrections by non-Chinese peoples like the Tibetans, the Western Turks, and the Nanchao had occurred in the frontier regions of the Tang territories. With the An Lushan crisis, these military defeats intensified and the Tang frontiers began disintegrating. Tibetan power expanded into China's western regions, and the Tang rulers lost control over the lucrative Silk Road. At the same time, regional military commanders across China—almost all of foreign descent—grew increasingly defiant of the Tang central government. Islam spread rapidly throughout the Tang's central Asian lands, eventually replacing Buddhism as the dominant religion. But whereas in the past the Tang rulers had welcomed Islamic practitioners and mosques as part of their cosmopolitan society, Islam now became a rival force and a threat to Tang power.32
In the late eighth century, intolerance seized Tang China and spread like a cancer. Chinese high and low began blaming foreigners for all of China's problems. An uneducated Turk, after all, had nearly brought down the Tang Empire. It was humiliating, moreover, that Ming Huang's government had permitted barbarians to so dominate China's military leadership.
Perhaps the most reviled of the “barbarians” were the Uighurs. In exchange for their support during the An Lushan Rebellion, the desperate Tang emperors lavished the Uighurs with gifts, Chinese royal titles, marriages with Tang princesses, and a monopoly on horse imports into China. The latter arrangement worked as follows: Each year the Uighurs brought to China tens of thousands of horses, many of them weak and sickly, and demanded forty pieces of silk for each horse. This rate of exchange was extremely unfavorable to the Chinese, and before long the Tang imperial coffers were depleted. None of this stopped the Uighurs from routinely abusing Tang officials, raiding imperial courts, kidnapping Chinese children, and killing Chinese citizens.
In the end, Taizong's experiment with a “universal empire” proved a failure. Tang China ultimately could not overcome the deep-seated, centuries-old Chinese contempt for and fear of barbarians. Unlike Rome, China never developed a concept of politicai citizenship that could apply and appeal equally to Chinese and non-Chinese alike. Rather, the overarching political and social identity that united China remained essentially ethnic—with barbarians on the other side of the line. When cracks appeared in the empire and non-Chinese groups like the Uighurs and Tibetans became an increasingly aggressive threat, native Chinese intolerance surged.
In 760, thousands of Arab and Persian merchants were slaughtered by Chinese brigands in Yangchow. In 779, the Tang emperor Dezong banished foreign envoys and banned non-Chinese groups from wearing Chinese dress. Imperial policy toward the people of the steppe changed. There was no longer even a pretense that the northern nomads were “equal partners” with the Chinese. At best, the barbarians were the “claws and teeth” of the empire whose duty it was to defend the Tang frontiers for the benefit of the Chinese.
As xenophobia set in, Tang cosmopolitanism rapidly dissipated. Chinese scholar-officials from the southeast, who had risen through the examination system, spread the idea that China's moral standards and superior culture had been polluted by the decadent barbarian-blooded aristocrats from the north. Among the literati, a movement grew to reassert traditional Chinese values and ancient Chinese literary styles. Foreign influences and ideas were now seen as corrupting, and the roads to central Asia were literally closed. In a historical pattern that would reappear many times, China turned self-destructively inward, cutting itself off from the rest of the world, trying to achieve “purity” by ridding itself of foreign elements.33
Tang intolerance intensified in the ninth century. In 836, an imperial decree prohibited Chinese from interacting with “people of colour,” referring to foreigners from Southeast Asia or beyond the Pamir Mountains, including Arabs, Persians, Indians, Malays, Sumatrans, and other groups. More striking still was the burst of religious persecution under Emperor Wuzong, an ardent Taoist. Manichaeism, the religion of many Uighurs, was first to be targeted. In 840, Wuzong ordered the execution of seventy Manichaean nuns, the destruction of Manichaean temples, and the confiscation of Manichaean lands. Five years later, in the great proscription of 845, the emperor struck at all foreign religions. Christian and Zoroastrian churches and temples were suppressed, and their priests forbidden from preaching, “in order that they may no longer corrupt” Chinese “simplicity and moral purity.”
Buddhism, above all, despite its sinicization and popularity among the Chinese, came under attack. The Buddhist church had grown increasingly decadent in the late Tang period, and whereas the imperial government was financially strained, the Buddhist monasteries were scandalously wealthy. Some of this wealth was enjoyed by corrupt monks, who broke the Buddhist vow of poverty to live in open luxury. Most of the church's wealth took the form of large monastic estates and precious metals cast as statues, bells, and other religious objects. Emperor Wuzong's proscription decree specifically accused Buddhism, which it labeled a “foreign religion,” of debilitating China, morally and economically.34
Partly to increase dwindling imperial revenues, Wuzong forcibly secularized 260,000 monks and nuns, returning them to the tax registers. More than 4,000 Buddhist monasteries and 40,000 smaller temples were shut down or converted to public use. Large properties belonging to the church were confiscated, and bronze statuaries melted down to make coins. But Wuzong's attempt to eradicate Buddhism proved unsuccessful. Many officials throughout the empire were sympathetic to Buddhism and quietly resisted the emperor's orders. Moreover, just two years after Wuzong's great proscription, a new emperor ascended the throne and reversed his predecessor's anti-Buddhist policies, restoring damaged temples and even building new monasteries. Although past its heyday, Buddhism in China would survive for centuries to come. By contrast, Manichaeism, Nestorian Christianity, and Zoroastrianism all eventually disappeared from China.35
The prestige and power of the Tang rulers declined throughout the ninth century. Regional warlords came to rule their own kingdoms, and the central government lost fiscal control. Between 875 and 884, another series of uprisings shattered the empire. The final collapse of the Tang dynasty was protracted and bloody. Changan was looted and ravaged. In Canton, rebels massacred 120,000 foreign merchants, including Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians. In 904, a regional commander named Zhu Wen captured the emperor, executing him along with his entire imperial entourage, including servants. The dismantled palaces of Changan were floated down the Wei River to Luoyang, where Zhu Wen had set up his own capital. The end of the Tang dynasty is usually dated as 907, when Zhu Wen slaughtered the last boy-emperor of the house of Tang.36
After the fall of the Tang Empire, China turned increasingly insular and xenophobic. Chinese in staggering numbers migrated from the north, where the barbarian threat was greatest, to the south, which would henceforth be home to the great majority of China's enormous population. Ironically, it would be the barbarians who a few centuries later would be tolerating the Chinese and creating history's next world-dominant power.
FOUR
Cosmopolitan Barbarians
Just as God gave different fingers to the hand so has He given different ways to men.
— MONGKE KHAN, CIRCA 1250
By the arms of Zingis and his descendants the globe was shaken: the su
ltans were overthrown: the caliphs fell, and the Caesars trembled on their throne.
— EDWARD GIBBON, 1776
Seven and a half centuries ago, on a high plateau in the Mongolian steppe, where today there is nothing but wild grass, herders, and the occasional Canadian mining convoy, there stood the royal tent city of Karakorum. From their yak-felt yurts— circular white tents that the Mongols call gers—illiterate Mongol khans ruled over an empire far larger than the Romans ever conquered. The nomadic Mongols had no science, engineering, or written language of their own. They had no agriculture and could not even bake bread. Yet they ruled over half the known world, ineluding the most magnificent cities of the time: Baghdad, Belgrade, Bukhara, Kiev, Moscow, Damascus, and Samarkand.1
In 1162, seventy years before Karakorum was erected, a boy named Temujin was born on a desolate hill in a harsh part of the steppe. At the time, the Mongols were a fragmented collection of kin-based tribes and clans, locked in cycles of attack and retribution, killing each other's men, kidnapping each other's women, and stealing each other's animals. Temujin's mother, Hoelun, was herself “stolen”: Temujin's father had abducted her shortly after her marriage to a man from a rival tribe. When Temujin was nine, his father was killed, but not before betrothing Temujin to a girl named Borte. Shortly afterward, Hoelun and her five hungry children were abandoned by their clan. As the harsh winter set in, the family survived by eating berries and roots and wearing “the skins of dogs and mice.” By the time he was sixteen, Temujin had killed his half brother, a taboo act under Mongol codes, and was a renegade on the run.2
How did this outcast, who became Genghis Khan, unite the warring tribes of the steppe and conquer more territory and people than any other man in history? How did the Mongols, lacking any sophisticated technology of their own, come to wield the massive siege engines—catapults, trebuchets, explosives, portable towers—that allowed them to defeat the great walled cities of medieval China, Persia, and eastern Europe? How did a relatively small band of nomads maintain and govern for 150 years an empire that stretched from the gates of Vienna to the Sea of Japan?
Undoubtedly, Genghis Khan was a brilliant military tactician. The Mongols were also utterly ruthless in battle. They poured molten silver into the eyes and ears of their enemies. They killed treacherous women by sewing up their orifices. Genghis Khan himself allegedly said that happiness was “to crush your enemies, to see them fall at your feet—to take their horses and goods and hear the lamentation of their women. That is best.”3
At the same time, Genghis Khan pursued policies that were remarkably tolerant, even by modern standards and certainly by comparison to contemporary rulers. While Europe was burning heretics at the stake, Genghis Khan decreed religious freedom for everyone. He also embraced ethnic diversity, deliberately breaking down the tribal barriers that had previously divided the people of the steppe and drawing into his service the most talented and useful individuals of all his conquered populations. Two generations later, his grandsons Mongke, Hulegu, and Khubilai followed the same strategy on an even larger scale, ultimately building the largest continuous land empire that has ever existed. Far more than their bloodthirstiness, ethnic and religious tolerance allowed the Mongols to achieve and maintain world dominance.
CONQUERING THE STEPPE
The first European to enter the Mongolian steppe may have been the friar Giovanni Di Plano Carpini. In 1246, after a year of crossing Europe on horseback, the elderly friar arrived at the capital of the Mongol Empire in Karakorum. In fact, Carpini was acting as a spy for Pope Innocent IV, who commissioned the friar to learn as much as he could about the Mongols who had terrified and conquered so much of Europe. The unimpressed Carpini described the Gobi steppe as follows:
Here are no towns or cities, but everywhere sandy barrens, not a hundredth part of the whole being fertile except where it is watered by rivers, which are very rare…This land is nearly destitute of trees, although well adapted for the pasturage of cattle. Even the emperor and princes and all others warm themselves and cook their victuals with the fires of horse and cow dung…The climate is very intemperate, as in the middle of summer there are terrible storms of thunder and lightning by which many people are killed, and even then there are great falls of snow and such tempests of cold winds blow that sometimes people can hardly sit on horseback. In one of these we had to throw ourselves down on the ground and could not see through the prodigious dust. There are often showers of hail, and sudden, intolerable heats followed by extreme cold.4
These were likely the same geographic conditions that faced the sixteen-year-old Temujin in 1178. The social conditions, however, were entirely different. In 1178, there was no Mongol Empire or capital—indeed, no Mongol nation. The steppe was inhabited by dozens of vaguely related, constantly warring tribes and clans. The Mongols’ closest relations were the Tatars, Khitans, and Manchus to the east and the Turkic tribes of central Asia to the west. But whereas the Tatars and the central Asian tribes had consolidated themselves into powerful confederacies, the Mongols in 1178 were subdivided into scattered rival bands headed by local chieftains or khans.5
Among the peoples of the steppe, the Mongols were near the bottom of the heap, seen as “scavengers who competed with the wolves to hunt down the small animals.” Nevertheless, among the Mongols themselves, some clans—for example, the Tayichiuds—claimed to be more “highborn” than others, and they asserted their dominance brashly. Later in his life, Temujin would break down the blood-based hierarchy of the steppe, replacing the entire kinship system with a new social order based on merit and personal loyalty. At age sixteen, however, Temujin was nothing and nobody. Moreover, the Tayichiuds sought to punish him for the killing of his half brother in their territory.6
The historical records get particularly murky at this point. It appears that Temujin was captured by the Tayichiuds, endured a period of enslavement, then escaped. Not long afterward, Temujin returned to the clan of his betrothed and claimed Borte as his bride. Although he knew of Temujin's problems with the Tayichiuds, Borte's father honored the promise he had made seven years earlier. One biographer speculates that Temujin at sixteen already had “some special attraction or ability” that impressed people. In any event, as a wedding present Borte's father gave Temujin a coat of black sable, the most valued fur on the steppe. This gift allowed Temujin to take his first step toward power.
Instead of keeping the coat, Temujin presented it as a gift to an influential elder named Torghil, also known as Ong Khan, leader of the powerful Kereyid tribal confederacy. Linked commercially with central Asia, the Kereyids, who were of Turkic origin, had a much more developed culture than the Mongols. The Kereyids also practiced a steppe variant of Nestorian Christianity, worshipping from their tents the powerful shaman Jesus, who had healed the sick and triumphed over death. More important for Temujin's purposes, the Kereyids were united and large in number, controlling a great expanse of the Gobi steppe. By giving Ong Khan his own wedding gift, Temujin symbolically acknowledged him as a father figure and established the first of many shrewd alliances.7
Over the next quarter century, this alliance would prove pivotal to Temujin's rise to dominance over the steppe. Early on, the Kereyids helped Temujin rescue his new wife, who was kidnapped shortly after their marriage by raiders from the Merkid tribe. By this time, Temujin had already acquired a small but loyal following. Together with Ong Khan's men, Temujin began to conquer various smaller tribes of the steppe, including most notably the Tayichiuds, the clan that had abandoned Temujin and his starving family when he was a boy. With each victory Temujin pursued the same basic strategy. He killed off the defeated tribal leaders, including most of the male “aristocracy,” then incorporated the rest of the tribe into his own following—not as slaves but as equal members.
By consolidating forces, Temujin and Ong Khan also defeated the Tatars, a tribal confederacy much richer than the Kereyids. Temujin is said to have been deeply struck by the sumptuous possessions of the
Tatars—silver cradles, pearl-embroidered blankets, satin and gold-threaded clothing even for children—the likes of which the Mongols had never seen. Further breaking down the traditional tribal bonds that long had divided the steppe, Temujin encouraged intermarriage, taking on for himself two Tatar sisters as additional wives. He also asked his mother to symbolically adopt as her own sons orphaned boys from each of the defeated tribes. Thus, Temujin's “brothers” included a Merkid, a Tayichiud, a Jur-kin, a Tatar, and so on.8
Although still subordinate to Ong Khan, Temujin was now in command of a significant intertribal, interethnic army numbering as many as 80,000. In 1203, Temujin ordered a reform that would radically transform the steppe of central Asia. For generations, the people of the steppe had been bound by male kinship ties. The more closely related two men were by blood, the more loyal they were supposed to be to each other. To break down the traditional clan- and lineage-based divisions that fragmented the steppe, Temujin reorganized the Mongol army. He divided his warriors into interethnic squads of ten, who were ordered to live with and defend one another as brothers, regardless of their tribal origin. The eldest of the squad was designated the leader, unless the group decided otherwise. Ten squads in turn formed a company, ten companies formed a battalion, and ten battalions formed a tumen, or army of 10,000, the leader of which Temujin personally selected. This intertribal, interethnic decimal system eventually came to organize not just the military but all of Mongol society.9