Great Wall in 50 Objects

by William Lindesay

  I was intrigued because something about the Great Khan’s portrayal matched what I’d just seen. I had spent an afternoon in the National Museum of Mongolian History examining a hatangu degel, literally ‘a robe as strong as iron’, or a coat of plates, and armoured boots. These components of an all-covering suit of armour were vividly represented on the bottle’s label.

  To my mind, this was stereotypical armour. It was metal, worn to stop missiles. Uncomfortable, yes, but you’d be protected, not punctured. And it was heavy – about twenty-five kilograms in total, by my guess. Armour like this was originally the preserve of the Khan and his generals, and only later became readily available to the cavalrymen who campaigned west into Central Asia, and south into China’s heartland. Seeing it inspired me to look back at the Mongols’ armour, or the lack of it, for the various types speak to the style of combat that prevailed at the time.

  According to Mongoliin Nuuts Tovchoo, or ‘The Secret History of the Mongols’, in 1201, when Temüjin Khan, who had sustained a neck wound from an arrow during battle with the Tayichiud, regained consciousness in his ger in the night, he was craving airak, or fermented mare’s milk, but there was none in the camp. His deputy commander, Jelme, set off to steal some from the enemy’s camp, across the valley. Rather than donning his armour and setting off with a group of armed men, he did the opposite: he stripped off, went alone and carried nothing – and he returned before dawn with a bucket of curds.

  Roaming through the ger encampment in the dead of night, Jelme was exploiting a taboo: his nakedness. Rather like a shield, he knew, his nakedness would act as his defence, literally deflecting looks away from him. If anyone did see him, they’d assume he was one of their own, out from his bed to relieve himself. This bizarre incident teaches us a subtle lesson about the use – or not – of armour; different types had advantages or drawbacks in various situations.

  During combat, the steppe tribes at this time were limited to armour made mainly from natural materials, if they had any at all. The minimalist style featured jackets made up of around 150 pieces of leather, each about half the size of a credit card, stitched together. Once made, each leather piece was coated with hot fish glue, the superglue of its day, whose properties had been long known to nomads. It set rock-hard when it cooled. Such armour was extremely lightweight, and, being lamellar, it allowed an archer on horseback flexibility of movement. Furthermore, its use did not greatly burden the horse: such a waistcoat in Ulaanbaatar’s national museum weighs only six kilograms.

  At this early stage, some armour may have featured what initially appears to be a luxury lining: silk. Over the centuries, Han Chinese had from time to time engaged in strictly regulated trading with their nomadic adversaries as a pacification policy, or sometimes as a means of buying peace. Only harmless commodities for civilian use were permitted; anything that could be used militarily – for example, anything metal, which might be reworked into spearheads, arrowheads, swords or armour – was banned. Wine, medicines, tea and textiles formed the bulk of legally traded goods and gifts. Almost certainly by accident, the Mongols discovered a military use for the most unlikely of garments: silk underwear. They learned that an arrowhead, even at great velocity, did not puncture finely woven silk. Rather, it would push the fabric ahead of itself, into the flesh, encasing it in a condom-like protection. This prevented any poison on the arrow’s tip from entering the bloodstream, and allowed a relatively swift and clean withdrawal.

  The armoured waistcoat and boots exhibited in Ulaanbaatar’s National Museum are classified as state treasures, and they represent the zenith of the Mongols’ personal defence apparel. Although they come from different regions, the two pieces date from the ‘mid-Mongol’ period, around the early fourteenth century, during the Yuan Dynasty, and form two components of a complete protective suit that would also have included a helmet, shoulder guards, vanbraces (protection for the forearms) and a tasset (protection for the thighs). This full coverage reflects a change in warfare style adopted from necessity, as the Mongols’ campaigns took them further south. Combat now had a slower pace. It often involved protracted sieges of walled towns; when clashes occurred, they were direct engagements which demanded complete protection. A full set of armour – from helmet to boots – might have weighed forty kilograms. Gradually, as the Mongols gained access to the resources of conquered lands and the skills of their artisans, this kind of armour became available to all their soldiers.

  DESCRIPTION: Armoured waistcoat and boots

  SIGNIFICANCE: Defensive apparel of Mongol cavalry

  ORIGIN: China/Mongolia, Yuan Dynasty, early fourteenth century

  LOCATION: National Museum of Mongolian History, Ulaanbaatar

  The ‘coat of plates’ is a metal lamellar design of thin iron plates attached to a woollen felt-wadded garment, with dual functions. First, it protected the warrior’s most vulnerable area, his torso, which, being large and containing vital organs, was the most likely to be struck and sustain serious injury. And second, its backing provided some warmth. Although campaign winters were much warmer than those on the steppe, Jiangnan, or South China conditions, were notoriously damp and chilly for several months each year.

  The boots are also a combination of utility and protection. Stout boots were a must for riders who spent long hours in the saddle, and who had to mount and dismount quickly while engaging in close combat. These unique objects are also among the first known safety boots. Small metal plates (from China) are sandwiched between locally made pressed wool felt on the inside, for warmth and comfort, and hide from Central Asia on the outside, for robustness and to block the wind.

  Collected in 1953 by Dashragha, an old herder woman in Arkhangia Aimag, a province of north-central Mongolia, these size forty-two boots are ruptured. Dashragha did it herself, so she could give plates from the boots to local men going off to serve in the army – a way to empower the new soldiers with the courage of the boots’ previous owners. These dead man’s boots allow us to follow in the footsteps – or, rather, to stand in the stirrups – of the Mongols, who from firm footings like this conquered China on horseback.

  26.

  Horsepower

  The Mongolian horse

  At every museum I visited during my off-Wall journey in search of objects that would bring the Great Wall’s story to life, I had a specific target in mind. But I also took the opportunity to ask curators for their own suggestions, hoping to meet ‘fascinating strangers’ I knew nothing about. At Ulaanbaatar’s National Museum of Mongolian History, I asked Professor Saruulbuyan for his thoughts.

  On a previous visit, museum staff had brought out the suction pads, lifted away the glass of exhibition cases, and allowed me face-to-face meetings with antiquities. I sensed the weight and felt the sharpness of arrowheads by touch. I experienced the peace of mind – and strength – of warriors who encased their bodies from head to foot in heavy armour.

  ‘It seems you’ve omitted one object, the most important one – the Mongolian horse,’ stated Saruulbuyan. ‘Mongols could have fought bare-chested, bare-handed, but they couldn’t have walked barefoot. Without the horse they couldn’t have traversed such great distances over hostile terrain.’

  Yet the horse is an anomaly among antiquities: it’s a live animal. I might have sidestepped that problem by choosing an antiquity that depicts a horse – there were many such totems in the museum – but surely, in shying away from the living subject itself, I’d be ignoring the best source of evidence. Since I was interested in the horse as a means of transportation and movement, and the most direct evidence for that was the horse itself, then I simply had to include it. It’s a living continuity.

  The global stable contains several hundred breeds of horse, and the Mongolian is one of the least impressive in terms of height: it’s just fourteen hands, about one metre and forty-five centimetres fully grown. But it’s robust, stocky and incredibly strong, and possesses tremendous endurance. Cantering at twenty kilometres per hour,
a distance of 160 kilometres per day was well within its capability. And each warrior had as many as three fresh horses corralled at the rear, part of a huge reserve herd which, used in rotation, could ensure that the advancing force kept up a high speed.

  Mongolian horses provided more than just transport, of course. In a survival situation – when crossing the tract of desert separating today’s Mongolia from China, for instance – a warrior could drink the blood from a nipped vein in his horse’s neck for a protein-rich drink. Elsewhere, the animal could be butchered, boiled and eaten.

  The horse had always been revered as a means of nomadic transport, but Genghis Khan and his heirs used it for the ultimate conquest. Horses carried Mongols to battle in distant lands, and the victors benefited greatly from the looting that followed. Horsepower literally took the Mongols from poverty to wealth. However, although they were aware that they could obtain much from the Chinese whom they defeated, they knew they needed their own Mongolian horses – and this was the reason they took so many with them. Horses demanded maintenance, and the primary requirement for that was good pasturage. The further south they travelled, the more difficult that became, to the great detriment of the horses’ health.

  As its name suggests, the Mongolian Horse is native to Mongolia’s heartland – its steppeland and mountains – which are cool, high-altitude places, carpeted with lush, sap-rich grasses. But to the south of today’s Inner Mongolia, the terrain, altitude, climate and vegetation were different. Beyond lay the North China Plain, the first of many landscapes unknown to the Mongols, and to its south was the Han territory of the Southern Song, with its genuinely alien terrains and unfamiliar climates.

  China’s ancient Wall builders had traditionally incorporated natural features such as narrow mountain ridges, cliffs, gorges and marshland into their border defences, a strategy understood and described by writers from Sima Qian to Aurel Stein, and now termed jie shan, or ‘borrowing the mountain’. Aware that the North China Plain presented a ‘straw mat’ to invading cavalry, the earliest Northern Song strategies against the Qidans and Jurchens had included use of revamped (probably) Northern Qi Walls, ‘military management of rivers’ – which involved the damming of channels to deepen upstream depths, and the sabotaging of bridges to deny the enemy’s use of them – the deployment of portable ‘deer antler’ obstacles (like a cheval de frise), horse traps using caltrops, and the planting of saplings to cultivate thick, impenetrable palisades.

  In 1134 the Song were finally forced to retreat much further south, foregoing the Yellow River, which froze annually and had failed to stop the Jurchens from taking the Northern Song capital of Kaifeng. Instead, the Southern Song exploited a chain of three geographical features as their border. In the west, the Sichuan Basin was, in the words of the Tang poet Li Bai (AD 701–762), ‘harder to reach by road than heaven’. Meanwhile, the wide, icefree Han Shui tributary of the Changjiang (Yangzi River) defended the central region. In the east, and flowing to the coast, was the Huai River, with similar qualities.

  DESCRIPTION: EquusferuscabaUus, the Mongolian horse

  SIGNIFICANCE: Enabled the Mongol conquest of China

  ORIGIN: Indigenous to Mongolia

  LOCATION: Throughout Mongolia

  One century later, as the Mongols had taken the Jin from behind, they approached the south proper, the last stronghold of the Southern Song. The farther south they travelled, the further out of their depth the Mongols’ horses were: they became lacklustre, lethargic and diseased. Genghis Khan’s campaigns against the adjacent Western Xia and the Jin in the north had allowed him to pull his armies back onto the Inner Mongolian Steppe to let his horses recuperate, but the campaign launched against the Southern Song by his son Ögedei Khan (who reigned from 1229 to 1241) meant that ‘commuter’ warfare like this was no longer an option; the distance was simply too great. The Mongol war machine was forced to slow down. Horses were deprived of their staple of quality grass, and the men were deprived of meat and dairy foods. They considered grain and vegetables to be for animals. War became slower and seasonal.

  The Changjiang was up to 800 metres wide in its lower reaches, the largest water barrier the Mongols had ever seen. They had to use captives to build pontoon bridges. Further south they met an almost impenetrable maze of tortuous waterways, interspersed with swampy ground. Their horses had thrived beside cold, fast-flowing rivers back in Mongolia, but in the subtropical climate of South China they succumbed to hoof-rot, as the men did to trench foot and malaria, as well as a host of other diseases to which they had no resistance. Möngke Khan, leader between 1251 and 1259, died of cholera.

  The Mongols faced even greater difficulties during the second half of their China campaign. Their bows, too, disliked the humid and wet south. Laminated in the aridity of Mongolia, they ‘exploded’ – an archer’s term describing when the laminated faces sheer away – when subjected to long-term 90 per cent humidity.

  The Mongol–Song War that began in 1235 finally concluded in 1279. These forty-four long years were ominous for the Song (the number ‘forty-four’ sounds like ‘death-death’ in today’s Mandarin), and opened a new era in nomadic history, for the Mongol conquest was a first: no other nomads had ever managed to take all Han territory under their rule. The Southern Song had given the Mongols their most protracted and toughest war. Of their 100 million population, 11.5 million died in the war, making it one of the bloodiest conflicts in history, even by twentieth-century standards.

  Kublai Khan, who reigned from 1260 to 1294, was told by a Chinese advisor: ‘While you can conquer a nation on horseback, you cannot rule it from horseback.’ The Mongolian horse, one of the shortest in the world, had proven itself to be a colossus, having taken the Mongols to their limits: geographically, to the far southern end of China, spatially, from emptiness to urbanisation, and politically, from ruling fewer than 1 million to conquest of a dynasty a hundred times larger.

  The Mongols ruled China under their Yuan Dynasty until 1368, when they were ousted and pushed back to their distant, northern homeland by a Han restoration. Horses once again grazed contentedly on the lush steppe, ready to be saddled and ridden in future attacks. It remained to be seen whether the Mongols could unify to exploit their full strength, or whether the new masters of China, the Ming, could build a Wall great enough, or do something else, to stop their well-proven horsepower.

  Part Four

  Core

  Objects from 1368 to 1644

  As the Mongols were ousted by the nascent Ming, Hongwu, the dynasty’s founder, sent his princes to defend the frontier. The most capable became Yongle, the ‘Emperor on Horseback’, and chose the site of the former Mongol capital for building Beijing, the ‘North Capital’. But how would this city on the frontier be made safe?

  Yongle led expeditions deep out on the steppe, but he died alongside most of his army on the disastrous fifth adventure. His legacy was a vulnerable capital. The mountains to Beijing’s north became lynchpin sections of the world’s largest building site, which extended along the whole frontier, from desert to sea. Beijing’s population grew to three-quarters of a million, making it the world’s largest city.

  In 1448 the Zhentong Emperor led a frivolous sortie just outside the Wall, and was captured and held to ransom. In 1550 Mongols attacked the Wall, defenders abandoned it and looters got through. In 1644 the Wall witnessed a decisive battle – not fought on the outside but the inside, and not between Ming and Mongol but between a rebel army and Manchus. Imperial cowardice, court corruption and military treason caused the Ming’s demise. What was an almost perfect Great Wall looked on as a mere bystander.

  27.

  Frontier Palace

  Silk painting of the Imperial City

  Who in their right mind would build a magnificent new capital within the Great Wall theatre of war? Successful invaders from the north had done so, repeatedly. But defenders, native Han dynasties? Never.

  Property values, as real-estate agents profess, a
re not just about buildings; location matters. A mediocre building in a good spot may fetch more than a luxurious building in a bad one. So, why abandon your secure capital, Nanjing, and go to the trouble of building one of the most beautiful capitals in history in a very unsafe place? The only possible reason is that you expect something big is about to change – or perhaps you are going to make that change happen yourself.

  Following victory in the four-year civil war against his nephew, the new Ming emperor, Yongle, who would rule from 1402 to 1424, abandoned Nanjing, the capital established by his father, the Hongwu Emperor, whose thirty-year reign had ended in 1398. Yongle broke with the time-honoured tradition of siting capital cities in good locations. For 1600 years Han imperial seats had sat safely in the heart of their territory: this land was a buffer against invaders, as it might take weeks to traverse it on horseback.

  For example, Xi’an – which literally means ‘Western Safe’ – clearly pronounced the advantage of its location. For 1200 years the vicinity had been chosen by all the major Han dynasties – Zhou, Qin, Han and Tang – as their seat of rule. By contrast, the site chosen by Yongle, on the northern edge of the dusty North China Plain, and not even beside a major river, had only previously appealed to nomadic invaders coming from the north. Cities of various names – Yanjing, Zhongdu and Dadu – had been built there on the same spot, one after another, and all because their builders all had northern roots.