Our object is a magnificent scroll painting on silk showing Ming Beijing’s Imperial Palace, nowadays known as the Forbidden City, Yongle’s jewel in the crown of his ‘north capital’ at the edge of the Han Chinese world. Superficially, it appears to have no direct connection to the Ming Great Wall. But if our field of view expands, and if we fast-forward just one century, to 1513, we’d see the Great Wall looming at the top of the painting. And if this were an interactive work, we might see plumes of ‘wolf smoke’ – the alarm signal sent from the frontier’s watchtowers, notifying of an enemy approach (see Object 28) – rising on the northern horizon and being relayed across the plain to the city.
The connection, therefore, is the city’s very proximity. The Imperial Palace is ridiculously close to the border region. And by moving it there, from the centre to the edge, Yongle inadvertently influenced the building of the Wall to the immediate north of the capital for the rest of his dynasty, some 220 years. We can learn how and why by exploring the painting – by walking through it, from bottom to top, in the company of those in the know.
Running along the base of the painting are red gates and grey ramparts of the Huangcheng, or Imperial City Wall. Passing between guardian lions and carved marble pillars (huabiao), we enter the palace precincts, to be welcomed by Kuai Xiang, whose placement hints of his importance: he was the palace’s chief architect. He tells us about its superb materials, sourced empirewide, and its craftsmen. There’s no doubting its beauty, grandeur and quality. But, as any discerning investor might, we also want to know about the location. The architect sends us up to the next stage of our visit.
DESCRIPTION: Large painting of Beijing’s Imperial City. Circa 1.7 metres in length; silk
SIGNIFICANCE: Earliest illustration of Ming Capital on the edge of the Great Wall theatre of war
ORIGIN: Beijing, late Ming Yongle Period (1403-1424)
LOCATION: National Museum of China, Beijing. Ancient China permanent exhibition
As we cross a bridge spanning the Golden Stream, the palace’s large ceremonial halls, built along its central axis, loom ahead. Engulfing us now is a mist of richness: we are surrounded by golden roofs. Here, the palace’s principal geomancer explains how the orientation of the architecture is balanced and harmonious from a fengshui perspective. Still we wish to know exactly how safe from attack the palace really is. We’re sent along to the Board of War.
The Minister of War suggests that if we want to understand the palace’s location in relation to its surroundings, we should ascend Jingshan, the artificial hill created by the excavation of the perimeter moat. There, we gain a bird’s eye view. Naturally, we are seduced by the view south across the magnificent palace cityscape, a sea of golden-tiled roofs, but the minister points out the dangers as we look north.
On the horizon just fifty kilometres away, we see mountains which separate China proper from nomadic homelands. He concedes they form a natural barrier, but cautions that they contain passageways made by rivers, valley passes that, if exploited, give access to invaders coming from the north. Quite frankly, he says, it’s too early to tell how successful Beijing will be; the safety of Yongle’s capital rests on speculation. Just as Genghis Khan wrote a new chapter in the history of the nomads by coming to rule China, Yongle cherished an equal but opposite plan, and was eventually lured into attempting to make it a reality: he led northern expeditions onto the steppe which aimed to eradicate the perennial threats of the nomads, and thus do away with the need of a Great Wall. If the Mabei huangdi, or ‘Emperor on Horseback’, could achieve this military goal, his city’s status, safety and future as capital would be assured. But if he failed, the city’s vulnerable location would be threatened, which might force a retreat to Nanjing.
Yongle was guided by his experiences and instinct, and ignored history. As a boy, he’d come north because his father had introduced the frontier defence policy known as fan wang, or ‘guarding the border with the blood of princes’. The Prince of Yan was given one of nine border fiefdoms, around today’s Beijing, to administer. He loved Beifang, the North, and excelled in the martial life of riding, hunting and combat, which later proved vital in his defeat of his nephew.
Once he became Emperor, Yongle naturally tilted towards the north, where his military allegiances were rooted. The Mongols, lacking the charismatic leadership of Genghis Khan, had become fragmented, and two groups remained troublesome to the Han: the Oirats and Tatars. Now Yongle prepared to confront them on their homeland of the steppe.
‘The immense desert is my sword, the celestial mountains my dagger, using them I sweep away the filth, forever I pacify the Gobi,’ wrote Yongle in the wake of an initial victory.
Fourteen years into the campaign, on his fifth Northern Expedition, Yongle’s effort capitulated in an immense military fiasco. The Emperor on Horseback lost an estimated 200 000 men, even more draught animals and his own life, as he tried to maintain supply lines that stretched as far north as the Great Eastern Steppe and as far east as today’s Manzhouli. Yongle had been defeated by distance and terrain. The lesson was clear: attempts to defeat the nomads were futile; they could only be contained.
Through his ambitious offensives, Yongle inadvertently laid the foundations for an unprecedentedly elaborate and extensive Great Wall, which would, for the next two and half centuries, protect his vulnerably located Beijing. The concluding lines of a poem written by a general surnamed Xu in the 1620s, and inscribed on a stone tablet unearthed in 2001 at Beijing’s Nine Windows Tower, summarise the Wall’s eventual success: ‘Now our mighty empire is safely nestled behind the all-powerful Coiling Dragon, there’s no need for us to retreat south for protection.’
28.
Into Thin Air
The wolf smoke alarm signal
Were dead Wall builders buried in its core? Does the whiteness of the Wall’s mortar derive from ground-up human bones? Can it be seen from the Moon? Were smoke signals warning of the enemy’s approach really made by burning wolf dung?
Among the Great Wall’s catalogue of legends, that of lang yan, or ‘wolf smoke’, is unique and intriguing: it exists to this day, being firmly embedded in the Chinese language as a phrase to warn of danger. In Xiandai Hanyu Cidian, or ‘A Modern Chinese Dictionary’, this ancient term is denoted as having entered the language in poetry as long ago as the Tang Dynasty, around the ninth century.
Twelve centuries on, explanations of the legendary signal still smoulder in villages beside the Wall. Farmers explain that when the so-called barbarians were sighted by soldiers stationed in the watchtowers, they emitted ‘wolf smoke’ as an alarm signal. It was black and thick, they relate, and it rose as a straight plume, high into the sky. As we know, there’s no smoke without fire: surely the signal has some connection to the wolf? Was wolf smoke really made by putting dried wolf dung on signalling fires? Or is just a metaphor for the barbarians, who were likened in character to preying wolves?
While filming a documentary scene some years ago, I stood atop a watchtower to demonstrate that one of the main functions of a fenghuo lou – literally, ‘a making-fire building’ – was signalling. In the rubble of the tower’s pufang, or sentry post, I ignited a small bale of straw. It burned rapidly, sending wisps of grey-white smoke into the milky sky. To turn up the contrast, I dropped a small black lump into the flames, telling viewers that to make the smoke visible, dried wolf dung was used. As the smoke blackened, however, I made a confession: ‘I didn’t have time to search for wolf dung, so I’ve cheated by using a smoke bomb, just like the ones used in war movie re-enactments . . .’
Joking aside, the question of dung immediately puts the ‘wolf smoke’ question to a stern practical test. The national survey of the Ming Great Wall, organised by China’s State Administration for Cultural Heritage between 2007 and 2009, found that the Beijing Municipality had 388 kilometres of Wall, along which once stood some 1510 towers. If we estimate that each tower had a basket of wolf dung ready for use at each sentry post, and
that each bucket of dried dung weighed two kilograms, then approximately 3000 kilograms of dung – three tonnes – would have been needed to supply the capital region’s watchtowers alone. If we extrapolate for the whole of the Ming Wall, we are talking about a very large amount of dung – and therefore a very large amount of time required for its collection.
The Mongolian wolf is gregarious, living in a rigidly territorial pack that can number between ten and several tens of animals. Studies show that a pack’s territory varies greatly, depending on the availability of prey, ranging from a few tens to a few thousand square kilometres. While searches for wolf dung may have been difficult and time-consuming when the Ming Wall was operational, the challenge five centuries on is very different. Wolves exist where there is prey, and prey such as gazelle exist where there is steppeland. Vast areas of North China’s steppeland has been destroyed by over-grazing, by the increase and spread of human populations (which have risen almost fourteen-fold from approximately 100 million in 1600 to 1.4 billion in 2014), and by a slew of environmentally destructive modern practices.
DESCRIPTION: Lang yan, or ‘wolf smoke’
SIGNIFICANCE: A frontier alarm system that signalled an enemy attack
ORIGIN: Watchtowers along Great Wall, including Ming defences
LOCATION: Momentary existence, now dissipated
The wolf is also overburdened with negative connotations in Chinese folklore and psyche, even more so than in many other parts of the world. In English, for example, ‘to keep the wolf from the door’ means to ward off starvation or poverty. In China the same phrase would mean to prevent the wolves of the north – the barbarians – from attacking. The wolf became hated, and it is now regionally extinct, or on the brink of extinction, across large areas of North China, including much of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, which shadows the ancient Great Wall theatre of war. It is not surprising, then, despite increased study of the Great Wall, that no Wall scholars or university researchers have probed the ‘wolf smoke’ question experimentally. Wolf dung is nigh on impossible to find.
Regardless of whether wolf smoke was generated using dung or not, it was a transitionary, fleeting object, and is now one of the Wall’s idiosyncrasies. Might a local zoo be able to help by supplying wolf dung? No, because dung relates to what is eaten. As the writer Shi Tiesheng remarked, ‘A wolf in a cage becomes a dog.’
In Mongolia, the wolf still sits at the top of the food chain, preying on a host of large mammals – from gazelle, ibex and marmots to sheep, goats, cattle and horses. During my own recent Mongolian expeditions in uninhabited desert and sparsely populated steppe, while I have seen ‘fossilised’ wolf tracks on saltpan flats beside a brackish lake, I found no coprolites.
According to Dr Kirk Olson, a biologist who has studied Mongolia’s large mammals for ten years, although the wolf is revered in Mongolian history – it is said that Genghis Khan’s ancestors were descended spiritually from the blue-grey wolf – in practice it is hunted and feared. ‘Nobody is studying the Mongolian wolf, and sadly most of the images one now sees of it, show it fleeing or shot dead.’
A detailed and intimate portrait of the Mongolian wolf was presented to the world in a semi-biographical fictional work, Wolf Totem, written by Lü Jiamin. He lived and worked with herders in Inner Mongolia for twelve years, from the start of the Cultural Revolution until 1978. In his bestselling work (penned under the name Jiang Rong), contemporary China’s most successful book in the West, the Han author sees parallels to the nomadic–China conflict in the contest between the wolf and its prey, between the pack and the herd, between the swift and the immobile, between the wild wolf and the domesticated dog. Unsurprisingly, as a Han aware of the idiom ‘lang yan si qi’ – literally, ‘wolf smoke all around’, but meaning something like ‘engulfed by the flames of war’ – his curiosity leads him to burn the wolf dung he collects, as an experiment.
He wrote: ‘The fire got larger as the wolf dung burned, smelling of urine and burned fur, but there was no black smoke, it was nothing special, it was just light-brown smoke like that from burning sheep droppings and wool; it was even lighter than burning twigs!’ So the burning question was answered more than thirty years ago. ‘Wolf smoke’, it seems, was not made by burning wolf dung: rather, metaphorically, it warned of the approach of the wolves, attacking northern nomads.
For me, wolf smoke also conveys a new signal: the cry of the wolf, warning as much of modern catastrophe as it did in ancient times. Few have found wolf dung to burn because the wolves have almost gone, taking refuge in what few pockets of safety they can find. The wolf ’s prey has gone because its habitat has gone. And that happened because man arrived, to graze, then overgraze, to live and then overpopulate, to take water from the streams, then to suck it from the ground, to mine and move on to mine more, without any reclamation. Man has turned land that was once pristine grassland into a wasteland speckled with disparate tufts, pushing all that lived there towards extinction, and leaving us, the so-called highest mammal of them all, alone on a wasteland to contemplate our follies.
29.
A Calamitous Sortie
Iron gate lock
The objects I’ve chosen so far on our off-Wall journey are not just antiquities; most are also functionally quite remote from the average person’s life today. This object, a lock, isn’t. I’ve already used locks several times today – to secure my bike, my gym locker and of course my front door. This huge specimen, which is the largest lock I’ve ever seen, once secured the most important gate on the entire Ming Great Wall. It’s no exaggeration to dub it the lock on Ming China’s front door.
If we try to imagine the millions of stone blocks and bricks as the mass ranks of soldiers making up the Ming Wall, then this lock is unique, their supreme commander. It reflects pivotal decisions: for example, whether to remain locked and stand one’s ground, or be opened and allow an army to go out, to proceed through the Wall. Examining this lock lets us ask the top brass a direct question: is it really possible to lock the enemy out?
To look for answers, I travel first to the China Great Wall Museum at Badaling, where the mighty lock is exhibited. I reach the mouth of the Juyong Pass at Nankou after fifty kilometres’ driving. Still on sentry duty on the western and eastern shoulders of the pass entrance are beacon towers that once relayed signals between the Wall and the capital. As I proceed north up the nineteen-kilometre-long pass, the gradient steepens, the mountains gather in, the fortifications curl all around and remains of the Walls, in ruins or rebuilt, are traversed, one after another. Finally, at the top of the pass, on the crest of the ridge, just before the descent, comes the most important – and most famous – section of the Great Wall: Badaling. It is right here that the lock probably stood on duty, the supreme commander.
DESCRIPTION: A large gate lock, cast in iron, 1.03 metres long, and weighing 16.7 kilograms
SIGNIFICANCE: Thought to have been a main gate lock in the Juyong Pass at the Badaling Great Wall
ORIGIN: Excavated in 1997 during road construction work on the Badaling Expressway
LOCATION: The China Great Wall Museum at Badaling, Yanqing District, Beijing
The gate itself is but a couple of arms’ lengths in width. Despite its rebuilding, I can see what it would have been like originally. Holes in the masonry have been filled, but a large framework once supported swinging wooden doors here. At waist or chest height, holes in the tunnel wall would have once held a long bolt to ensure battering rams would not break the gates open. On those gates there were hooks on which the lock was attached. Everything indicates that this is a location of massive strategic importance – for both sides of the conflict.
So what precisely is this location, and what was at stake here? There is no better way to understand a guankou, or strategic pass, than by ascending the Wall at Badaling on a clear morning. Part view, part map, a 360-degree panorama illustrates the opportunities of the geography. For an invader, the pass is a key pathway between
high mountains. At its southern end the North China Plain unfurls, a ‘straw-mat’ leading to Beijing. But if the defenders fortified this location well, and fought well, they had a clear opportunity to lock the enemy out and turn them back.
This is a place to ponder the history of the Great Wall, the history of China. Although I can see a lot, I know there’s a lot more Wall to the west and east, and many other Walls before this Ming Wall. Why, then, many wonder, was there more or less the same old approach – Wall building in different shapes and forms – for so long? Did the Ming Emperors ever get fed up, disillusioned – cramped – by their stagnant approach towards the same old enemies?
The restoration of Han rule of North China in the early Ming saw the land return to its original owners for the first time in nearly 500 years. Ming rulers were rightly preoccupied with the northern frontier, and it’s no wonder they made a border wall the cornerstone of their defence plans. As it evolved its success depended on a multitude of factors. Was it strictly a defence to stay behind, thus limiting expansion? Or could it be used more like a shield – as protection, but one from which defenders could emerge periodically to advance, to push the enemy further back?
Few lines, other than modern national borders, represent absolute divisions. During the early Ming, rulers tried to win control of the land beyond the Wall by establishing forward garrisons – or, in the case of the Yongle Emperor, by launching far-reaching northern offensives. Just twenty-five years after Yongle’s failed fifth expedition of 1424, in September 1449, the gates in the Juyong Pass were unlocked to allow passage of a 500 000-strong Chinese army, en route to a direct engagement with the Oirat (Western) Mongols, who had reunited under Esen Khan, leader of 20 000 cavalrymen.
Great Wall in 50 Objects Page 14