Back to the mask. We cannot look into this Qidan’s eyes, but we can try to look through them. What did this middle-ranking Qidan nobleman see on the social and political frontiers of his world? He witnessed a change in his people’s way of life, from ger tents to fixed abodes, as well as the waning in importance of age-old tribal and family ties, which were supplanted by the array of relationships one develops in a town or city.
He saw the Qidans change from being looters and raiders to being builders, traders and diplomats. Perhaps diplomacy was the Qidans’ greatest achievement. As the Qidan Liao coexisted with the Song, they enforced a change in attitudes. During the early years of the reign of Song Zhenzong (AD 998–1022) the Qidans were dubbed ‘cowards of the north’, ‘hideous barbarians’ and ‘wolves’. (The legendary border region alarm signal termed lang yan, or ‘wolf smoke’, may derive from this era; see Object 28.)
Later in Zhenzong’s reign, under military and diplomatic pressure, the Qidans’ customary sourness and derision was dropped in exchange for polite accommodation, kinship and respect. Our man of the millennium witnessed the Qidans becoming a ‘brotherly kingdom’, a ‘northern state’ and eventually ‘the Great Liao’. He experienced the era of national ‘signage’ being edited in their favour, respectfully, with an imperial decree abolishing place names with derisory meanings, such as those which included lu, meaning ‘coward’, and hu, ‘barbarian’. He participated in the ascent of his people, going south, seizing land and enforcing an elevation of their position in the eyes and minds of the Han.
21.
The 75, 15, 10 Formula
A pottery hand grenade
While walking in the lee of a fine section of rammed-earth Wall in Ningxia, I found many glazed potsherds (see Object 6). When I walked outside the Wall, and a little further away, I found an oddlooking fragment that was different. It too was glazed and curved, thick-walled, but it had several broken spiky nodules. I estimated that, when whole, it would have been about the size of a large apple. I was holding a fragment of a hand grenade.
I guessed it had been thrown long ago from the top of the battlements – maybe as a test throw, or perhaps to halt some charging nomadic cavalrymen. But all I’d found was a fragment of its shell, the container. I found a perfect example in Shanhaiguan’s Great Wall Museum, but even that specimen was missing the most interesting component – the propellant, the gunpowder – and this is the Song story we’ll now explore.
The invention of gunpowder was one of mankind’s greatest accidents: alchemists who were trying to concoct imperial elixirs accidentally discovered its astounding properties. What they formulated by mixing potassium nitrate (KNO3, commonly called saltpetre), sulphur and carbon did not prolong life; it did the exact opposite, shortening it with abrupt efficiency. Huo yao, or fire medicine, if mixed in proportions of seventy-five per cent saltpetre, fifteen per cent sulphur and ten per cent carbon, not only burned exceedingly well, it exploded with a flash and thunderous noise. The formula is mentioned in Wujing Zongyao, or fire medicine, if mixed in proportions of seventy-five per cent saltpetre, fifteen per cent sulphur and ten per cent carbon, not only burned exceedingly well, it exploded with a flash and thunderous noise. The formula is mentioned in Wujing Zongyao, or ‘A Collection of the Most Important Military Techniques’, written around 1044, having been commissioned by the Song Renzong Emperor during his campaigns to resist Tangut and Qidan threats. Better weapons were sought that would put the Song ahead in the arms race.
From the outset, the nomads had held the technical advantage with their excellent composite bows and horse/archer combination. The Chinese copied them, and then came up with the mechanically ingenious crossbow mechanism (see Object 17) and the stirrup. Now, it seems, in the Song, they are poised again to call the shots by pioneering a new era of arms: ‘hot’ weapons that relied on gunpowder.
This all sounds neat and logical – until we consider what actually happened during the Song. The dynasty presided over the largest loss of territorial sovereignty in Chinese history: first from the Northern Song to the Southern Song, and then from the Southern Song to the Mongol-founded Yuan Dynasty. This suggests that the advantage of gunpowder existed only in theory, and not in practice.
Glazed grenades like the one I found provide some clues. If delivered on target, they could be lethal, but otherwise they were just bangs and flashes. What matters most in any weapons advantage is the accuracy of delivery. While close combat depended on strength, skill and bravery, longer-distance weapons that projected missiles – whether cold or hot – relied on a wider combination of qualities, including strength, skill, speed, adeptness, instinct and coordination.
Archers and crossbowmen were thoroughly trained, and then they honed their skills until they were instinctive. Crack archers could quickly and precisely adjust the range and trajectory of their arrows and bolts to hit moving targets. Their weapons became extensions of their own arms. Weapons that projected burning or exploding missiles were more complex and more hazardous. They were slower and more dangerous to load, and thus were less suited to moving targets.
The Song arsenal generated a bizarre array of new weapons for firing and tossing missiles of all shapes and sizes, but generally they were better suited to use in urban environments, particularly counter-siege situations. Such conflicts featured large deployments of besieging troops, and cavalry en masse that presented itself as a large single target, whether static or charging.
Frontier warfare was different. Grenades were not suited to elaborate mechanical launching. For one thing, trebuchet-type weapons were too bulky, too complex and too expensive to be deployed at regular intervals along the frontier’s defences. Moreover, they were only suited to striking large and static or slow-moving targets, while in the Great Wall theatre of war most incidents were characterised by sudden attacks and retreats. Mechanical launchers could not be finely tuned, and lacked that irreplaceable human skill of nimbleness, adjustment and instinct.
No, it must be that grenades were thrown from the Great Walls in the time-honoured way, demanding strong and nimble arms, especially when the target wasn’t static. A throw’s weight and trajectory depended on the circumstances: how fast the target was moving, how long the fuse had been burning for, and even what the prevailing weather conditions were. Most vital of all was the thrower’s sense of anticipation. Showers of grenades, all aimed at a single target area, would surely have been an especially deadly tactic.
To enhance the thrower’s grip, the grenade had nodules on its surface – the disastrous potential consequences of a mis-throw are obvious. The nodules would have also enhanced the shrapnel effect when the porcelain case fragmented. And why were the grenades glazed? To ensure that, once prepared and stored for use, the arms were not affected by damp, rain or snow. And perhaps also to make them look even more impressive.
DESCRIPTION: A glazed pottery hand grenade
SIGNIFICANCE: Perfection of gunpowder formula during the Northern Song, circa 1044
ORIGIN: Ming Dynasty, circa fourteenth century; found in the early 1990s during reconstruction work of the Juyongguan Great Wall, Changping District
LOCATION: Shanhaiguan Great Wall Museum
It may seem strange that even during the Ming, some four centuries after the Song gunpowder revolution, the delivery of a grenade still relied on a nimble and powerful arm. Another four centuries on, during World War I, grenades were still thrown by hand, illustrating the very long time it took for a mechanical technology to be developed that would offer a superior launch method.
Song weaponry was more suited to defence than attack. The advantage of gunpowder was theoretical rather than practical, and in 1127 the Song and its tens of millions of Han Chinese retreated south, where – paradoxically – they created a dynasty of unprecedented innovation, population growth, increased productivity and bustling commercial life. Yet it was short-lived, and destined to fail: there was nowhere further south to which it could retreat. As Winston Churchill
said of Dunkirk in 1940, hoping to temper Britain’s euphoria at rescuing half a million Allied troops from Normandy’s beaches, ‘Wars are not won by evacuations.’
22.
Mapping History
‘Handy Maps of the Past Dynasties, Chronologically Organised’
If you’re setting up home anytime soon, you might be well advised to save a few cubic metres of living space, and a tree for the planet, and forget about buying what has long been considered essential within the home of any educated family: a bookcase. You’d be better off buying a tablet or an ebook reader.
In August 2012 the UK arm of the world’s largest bookseller announced that sales of its ebooks had overtaken sales of its printed books for the first time. Like it or not, wherever you’re reading this, and in whatever language, you’re witnessing the biggest change in publishing since it took off in Song Dynasty China some 900 years ago.
The printing revolution is interesting enough, and relevant to our story. Over the centuries, the reprinting and copying of maps has left us with numerous editions of Lidai Dili Zhizhang Tu, or ‘Handy Maps of the Past Dynasties, Chronologically Organised’. The oldest, an original Song edition, is housed at Toyo Bunko, the Oriental Library in Tokyo. This historical atlas is essential reading at this stage of our off-Wall journey, because it depicts a Great Wall symbol on each of its forty-four maps. I consult one closer to my home, a Qing copy kept in Peking University Library’s Rare Books Collection.
Although it’s a printed edition, the first stage of its production was the copying out, by hand, of every line and character, as book printing required the carving of wooden printing blocks – in reverse – for every page. This was a laborious, costly task, and only worthwhile if subscriptions were sold in advance, to cover the cost of months of labour by scholars and artisans – literate men with wood, chisels and especially dexterous hands. True craftsmen.
The original book therefore gives us an insight into printing, one of China’s ‘four great inventions’ (the others were the compass, paper and gunpowder). This technology became the foundation of the publishing industry, which catered to the emergent educated class’s demand for knowledge, the best means by which to get up the social ladder and become wealthier in an increasingly competitive world. The Chinese preoccupation with examinations, still prevalent today, began back then, in the mid-1100s.
In turning the pages of this ‘Handy Atlas’, therefore, we are not only surveying the historical geography of China from the Song back into a semi-mythical time, we’re also witnessing the birth of popular education. Woodblock printing would put more knowledge into the minds of more people than ever before, just as digital technology today has opened up a new era of information dissemination, allowing any author to reach potentially billions of people.
The atlas is one of nine cartographic objects that I’ve chosen for the Great Wall 50. Visually, it is the dullest: it’s monochrome and unimpressively small, just twenty-three by thirty centimetres, dwarfed by the likes of the original Huayi Tu (see Object 13), imperially commissioned during the Tang and said to have measured seven by three metres. Yet these differences demonstrate this atlas’s very different social purpose, and call to mind its target audience.
The atlas was designed and produced to appeal to a particular market. It was printed cheaply, without frills, because it was meant to function as essential study material. Its first buyers were probably the parents of aspiring young men about to sit civil service entrance exams in the early 1140s – their first step towards becoming government officials. The editor of this atlas was not trying to impress an emperor, or court officials, or the military’s top brass. He was doing quite the opposite – summarising and simplifying history for students.
DESCRIPTION: Lidai Dili Zhizhang Tu, or ‘Handy Maps of the Past Dynasties, Chronologically Organised’; a hand-copied edition from the Qing Dynasty
SIGNIFICANCE: An historical atlas showing the presence of Great Walls before the twelfth century
ORIGIN: Compiled by Shui Anli during the Southern Song Dynasty, circa 1140
LOCATION: Rare Books Collection, Peking University Library
The editor’s challenge was to present history in a simple and clear form that examinees could easily remember. The product had to condense a wealth of historical information into as few pages as possible. It had to fit on a modest table, not a minister’s desk; when opened, it’s exactly the same size as a National Geographic magazine. The author, said to be Shui Anli, prioritised visuals rather than characters. This would be a new way of looking at history, simplifying and clarifying it by means of maps – one for each era. The Lidai Dili Zhizhang Tu is the world’s oldest known historical atlas. Europeans didn’t think of presenting history on maps in a single book until the sixteenth century.
So, let’s consider the historical information the atlas contains. We see a battlement symbol representing a Great Wall on each and every page. What these depictions represent, or misrepresent, requires some careful thought.
As we turn the atlas’s forty-four pages, a pattern emerges: things become repetitive. The shape of China remains more or less the same, as does the route of the Great Walls. It seems the author is ignorant of the fact that the size and shape of China’s sovereign territory changed from era to era – and, post-Qin, from dynasty to dynasty. Similarly, the presence of a Great Wall is generalised. Rather disappointingly, these maps shed no light on the various routes of the different dynastic Great Walls, or of the predynastic long walls which preceded them. Superficially at least, the atlas is monotonous and, for the Wall scholar, inaccurate.
To make the most of this atlas, we need to focus on what we do have. One thing to note is the mandatory inclusion of a Great Wall, not always as an active defence but as a geographical marker. For example, it’s anachronistic, if not an historical blunder, that one of the atlas’s spreads shows ‘A Map of the Nine Regions of the Shang Dynasty’ which depicts a Great Wall: there were none at that time, circa the late second millennium BC. The cartographer aimed to orient maps users by including a Great Wall symbol as a boundary of China. On later maps in the atlas – for example, that of the Song – the Great Wall’s presence indicated its existence as ruins. It therefore functioned as an historical marker, just as contemporary maps of the People’s Republic show the line of the Ming Great Wall’s ruins.
But generalisations have pitfalls. Including a Great Wall as a standard geographical feature led users to think that China had always had a Great Wall – that it was something built and repaired, passed on, inherited and maintained. In fact, only sixteen out of sixty-six legitimate dynasties ever built or rebuilt previously existing Walls. Constructing functional Great Walls was a recurring strategy, but certainly not permanent or chronologically continuous. Nor were the Walls geographically static, as the atlas suggests.
Yet the greatest irony of the atlas is the map showing contemporary Song China. As elsewhere in the atlas, the Great Wall is indicated by a stylistic rampart, etched with turrets, which stand like disciplined sentries along a battlement stretching between the Gobi Desert and the ocean, giving the reader the impression of total defence across the empire’s northern periphery. Barbarians are mentioned ‘outside’ the Wall, but their actual territorial gains inside the Wall are ignored, undrawn, unacknowledged.
By the time of the atlas’s printing, the Western Xia, Liao and Jin had successively taken vast areas of the Song’s north, forcing the border south. This map is evidence of how maps can be manipulated by political orders for self-protection. Wouldn’t it have been folly for an emperor to authorise the production of maps that showed his government’s incompetent loss of territory? That would be tantamount to revoking his own mandate from heaven.
Professor Jerry Brotton, of Queen Mary University, London, and author of the bestseller A History of the World in Twelve Maps, summarises the pros and cons of our Song atlas: ‘The overwhelming majority of maps put the culture that produced them at their centre. [Thei
r] perspective literally centres individuals, it elevates them like gods, inviting them to take flight and look down upon the earth from a divine viewpoint . . . gazing at what can only be imagined by earthbound mortals . . . the map’s dissimulating brilliance is to make the viewer believe, just for a moment, that such a perspective is real.’
The ‘Handy Atlas’ is thought to have been printed in the tens of thousands during the Southern Song; if that’s correct, it would have permitted an unprecedented number of people to ‘take flight’ and see the history of China from the air. But its phoney geography concealed the true, grim state of Song China’s contemporary defences: the barbarians were in fact well south of the Great Wall border. The future was set to become grimmer in the face of the most unified nomadic threat ever to materialise in the north.
23.
Harnessing Sun and Wind
Gold-tipped trident of a spirit banner
While most Chinese people typically associate the likes of Meng Jiangnü, Qin Shihuang and Qi Jiguang (see Objects 2, 11 and 36, respectively) with the Great Wall, I frequently hear a different name when I ask people of other nationalities whom they associate with the structure. The most common response is Genghis Khan.
Great Wall in 50 Objects Page 11