If we approach this event as a breaking news story, rather than one of history, we might hazard a guess on its outcome. Outnumbered by twenty-five to one, what chance did the Mongols have? But in warfare not every significant factor is measurable. How do we measure the combat value of one man against another? Or the importance of leadership in battle?
If we add another historical fact – that the Ming force was led by none other than the Emperor himself – we might expect the odds to tilt even further towards a Ming victory. But the fact is that the Emperor was not in the mould of his great grandfather Yongle, the ‘Emperor on Horseback’, who had four decades’ worth of battle experience. The Zhengtong Emperor (who ruled from 1435 to 1449) was aged twenty-two. He had been sheltered and misguided, he was martially incompetent and foolishly persuaded by his eunuch tutor, Wang Zhen, to saddle up himself and command an army of untrained peasants. What makes the story more astounding is that the final showdown in the conflict took place so close to the unlocked gate at Badaling, at Tumu Bao, just fifteen kilometres away from the Wall.
Not only was virtually every Ming soldier killed but the Zhengtong Emperor was captured, becoming the one and only Chinese ruler ever held for ransom by his enemies. His half-brother assumed rule, taking the reign name Jingtai, but refused to pay up. Zhengtong’s ransom value depreciated to zero and he was eventually released. On his return to Beijing, he was kept in palace confinement, until 1457, when his half-brother fell ill. Zhengtong seized power and reigned for a second term, between 1457 and 1464, taking the title Tianshun.
The only Chinese emperor who reigned twice effectively ensured, much like Yongle had done, that his successors would be preoccupied by Wall construction. He showed that bold, brazen changes in strategy were ill-advised. When I saw the lock, I’d asked whether the enemy could in fact be locked out. In searching for the answer, I discovered that the defenders could not always be locked in.
30.
Point and Shoot
A blunderbuss
Even leaving aside its great age – 635 years – it feels strange, even macabre, to have this blunderbuss lying across my lap as I write. Called a shouchong, it was one of the world’s first metal guns made in quantity.
It’s as long as my forearm, from fingertip to elbow joint. It’s heavy enough to use as a light weight for strengthening the arms, and would also work very well as a cosh. It’s cold bronze, a dark, muddy colour with green, coppery flecks, and has a rather unpleasant smell, like stagnant pond water. I can just about insert my thumb into the end of its long, straight barrel, which leads to a bulbous gunpowder chamber with a touch-hole for ignition. I know that the two are connected because when I blow down the barrel I can feel air coming out of the touch-hole.
Put simply, this was a device for containing and directing an explosion at a target. A violent but controlled chemical reaction occurred in its strong tube, and the brunt of its force – a vortex of shrapnel, heat, shockwave, noise, smoke and stink – thrust along the barrel and burst out through the muzzle at an enemy. It’s terrifying to think that explosions from this weapon might have ended the lives of scores of people.
DESCRIPTION: A shouchong, or blunderbuss, an early form of shotgun, 43.5 centimetres long, cast in bronze
SIGNIFICANCE: Firearm whose use proliferated across northern China and throughout the Great Wall theatre of war during the fifteenth century
ORIGIN: Cast in 1378 at Yizhou, Shandong Province
LOCATION: Author’s collection, Beijing
This little monster’s name, blunderbuss – rather onomatopoeic to my ears for the damage that it threatens – is an alteration of the Dutch donderbuss, which means ‘thunder pipe’. I’d owned it for years before I thought to scrutinise its dents, patina and scratches closely. The inspection revealed a faint 44-character inscription in three columns on the barrel, in what I’d describe as scratchy character script. Thirty-eight are legible under a magnifying glass, and I read:
Long shotgun, number 748, weighing three jin and nine liang [1.95 kilograms], made in the eleventh year of the Hongwu Emperor [1378], under the supervision of Li Guo at the Yizhou Ordnance Factory.
So, sometime in 1378 this new weapon came out of a factory, and was taken to North China and the Great Wall theatre of war. A decade earlier, Han rule had been proclaimed by the founding of the Ming in Nanjing. Meanwhile, the Hongwu Emperor’s generals were pacifying the north, pushing the remnant Mongol forces back and building defences where they were urgently needed, across strategic passes.
State ordnance factories initially monopolised the manufacture and sale of these high-tech weapons for both security and market reasons. Demand for more of the latest forced a reform from around 1376, when the government licensed military units to make their own. Early in the 1400s the Yongle Emperor established China’s first specialised firearms and artillery division – the Shenjiying, or Divine Engine Corps – while a milestone treatise, the Huolongjing (‘Fire Dragon Manual’) was printed.
As the inscription on this blunderbuss shows, weapons were numbered. It’s estimated that some 100 000 such weapons – blunderbusses in various shapes and sizes – were cast during the Zhengtong, Jingtai and Tianshun periods alone (1435–1464). The fifteenth century in China was one of firearms research, development and proliferation.
The long-running Great Wall conflict gave sustained impetus to Chinese weapons development; pressure is a great pusher of progress. Interestingly, sentry posts atop the first battle platforms on what little Wall there was in the early decades of the century were stacked with weapons virtually identical to those used on the Han Wall 1500 years earlier – swords, spears, bows and crossbows. But the last few decades of the fourteenth century was a time of rapid technological development, when cold weapons met hot.
Officers and visiting commanders had new inventions hanging from their belts: leather nooses for holding the shouchong, pouches for gunpowder, and wooden rods for ramming barrels. We’re on the threshold of what was, quite literally, an explosion in weapons technology. ‘Thermal weapons’, such as boiling liquids, fire arrows and ignited animals, had been part of the Chinese arsenal for millennia; gunpowder weapons, such as grenades, mines, firearms and cannons, now redefined the meaning of ‘hot weapons’. The former relied on stored energy; the new genre produced their own. These were the opening shots of a weapons revolution that continues today. Thirty generations on, today’s descendants of Chinese blunderbusses are rifles which, in the hands of trained snipers, can put bullets through an enemy’s head from two kilometres away.
So what was so revolutionary about the shouchong? What advantages – marginal or major – did it give its users in the fifteenth-century, especially those fighting in the Great Wall theatre of war? Might it have greatly boosted the morale and performance of soldiers fending off an attack from the Wall in a siege situation? Or, in a worst-case scenario, might it have been a decisive weapon for fighting on the Wall itself?
For one, it was a personal weapon, a firearm. Two, it ejected not only fire, shock, gas and chemicals, but a physical missile, a projectile, the precursor of the bullet. Three, because of very advanced and long-established casting techniques, its strong metal barrel permitted the use of large quantities of gunpowder, allowing the creation and control of a very powerful explosive force, which was channelled through barrel and muzzle and aimed at a target – it was the beginning of ‘point and shoot’.
A forerunner of the shouchong had been the huoqiang, or firelance, made from bamboo tubes. These had limitations imposed by climate. In the south they worked a few times at most before they shattered, but in the north the aridity caused them to split. A fourth advantage, therefore, was that the blunderbuss was sustainable: it could be readied for use again and again. Finally, because it was new and mysterious, it held a definite element of terror for those facing it.
But how user-friendly was it, and how did it perform at the Wall, or forward of it, against fast-moving enemies on horseback? Load
ing the weapon was a particularly finicky process, firing it was potentially dangerous to the user.
The barrel was packed with a gunpowder projectile mixture. Flintlocks, matchlocks and triggers would not come until much later. Right now, the user of the shouchong had to spend considerable time loading the weapon. He’d carry set measures of gunpowder, or ding liang, in special pouches, specimens of which are found among the blunderbuss collection at the China Great Wall Museum at Badaling. Some pouches are roundish, leathersewn containers, a little larger than a clenched fist. However, it was important not to overload the shouchong with too much gunpowder. Newton’s Third Law of Motion – to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction – hints at the consequences.
So, after a soldier packed his shouchong with gunpowder, adding some solid matter to inflict extra damage, he would light a short, thin fuse. The explosive force, as well as propelling the matter out of the barrel, also produced an enormous recoil, threatening the firer himself with injury. If the shouchong was held in the hands at arm’s length, recoil might thrust the entire weapon back at great speed into the user’s ribs or abdomen. To control this, the shouchong was mounted on a wooden rod via its rear opening. This stand, the forerunner of the stock, transformed it into a much safer long-handled shotgun that could be pressed against the shoulder or, safer still, planted against the ground.
The blunderbuss’s name in English is hardly a good advertisement for its accuracy, as it conveys a sense of clumsiness and blunder. Its target area – or ‘point blank range’, defined as the distance within which a trained shooter could be guaranteed to hit his mark with every shot – was only fifteen metres maximum. The user had one shot only. Then the blunderbuss needed reloading, a process that took one minute at least – if he had everything at the ready.
If my commanding officer had asked me whether I wanted a shouchong instead of a crossbow or bow, without second thought I’d have chosen one of the familiars, something that I trusted, that was straightforward and fast. The availability of personal firearms did not advantage the Chinese measurably in the Great Wall theatre. At most, it possessed limited terror and awe value.
The shouchong represents an important stage in firearms development, but it would be a long time before it could be adapted, harnessed and tamed for easy, quick and effective battle use. Even one and a half centuries after our Hongwu Period shouchong was cast, firearms on the Great Wall were still used only with considerable trepidation. Commander Qi Jiguang (1528–1588) (see Object 36) cautioned in his Lianbing Shiji, or ‘Records of Military Training’, that while he had successfully employed firearms in the south, in the Great Wall theatre of war, where targets were mounted on horseback and fast moving, and where a northerly headwind prevailed, ‘hot weapons’ had suitability and reliability issues.
The Ming military benefited from the potential promised by the blunderbuss. It would be a few more centuries, and a fair bit more inventing, before political power grew from the barrel of a gun, to paraphrase Chairman Mao Zedong. In the early Ming, power still rested on the strength of bows and swords. It is the soldiers of today who are benefiting – and suffering – from the real progress.
31.
The Gift of Horses
‘Presenting Horses’ scroll painting on silk
In May 2012 an unprecedented event in China–Mongolia relations took place: the southerners sent their northern neighbours a gift of horses. Coals to Newcastle, ice to the Eskimos, and now horses to Mongolia? The irony is that for more than 2000 years, horses had made a strictly one-way journey into China – as battle horses in times of war, and as gifts in times of peace, or perhaps paraded as tribute or herded in exchange for Chinese commodities.
We’ve already met the horse and archer in combination, as cavalry. We’ve seen how the stirrup made cavalry more effective. And we’ve ridden the Mongolian horse to grasp its foundational importance as transportation, enabling the Mongols’ Asia-wide conquests. Our final encounter with the horse is different again, and somewhat baffling. Why were horses from ‘beyond the Great Wall’ constantly sought by successive Chinese dynasties? The key word here is constantly.
The question occurred to me when I was out of China, but admiring Chinese art, at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery in Washington D.C. As I faced a magnificent scroll more than four and a half metres in length, titled ‘Presenting Horses’, I was struck by the realisation that horses were an extremely repetitive subject.
An entire artistic genre of bronzes, pottery figurines and paintings has immortalised the horse as a prized possession in China for two millennia. The stampede that I see is led by the bronze ‘Flying Horse of Gansu’ – so swift of foot that it tramples a swallow – a stunning gilt specimen from Emperor Han Wudi’s tomb, a cluster of Tang tricolour glazed steeds, and a rear guard of paintings from the brushes of Han Gan of the Tang, Zhao Mengfu of the Yuan, and the French Jesuit Jean-Denis Attiret during the Qing. Just as cars today are not simply four-wheeled transport, neither were horses merely four-footed conveyances. Their quality separated the elite from the common.
It was during the Golden Age of the Tang (from the seventh to the tenth centuries AD) that horses were at the acme of their artistic status, a position attained in part through the masterful brushstrokes of Han Gan (circa 715–781) and his maverick technique. Rejecting the tradition of studying the works of previous masters, he found inspiration by observing live models, and spent much of his time watching horses in the flesh, from stables to palace precincts. This scroll that I faced shows three horses groomed and blanketed with embroidered rugs, led by foreign emissaries, probably from Central Asia. The scene bears a certain resemblance to grooms parading their horses before a race.
While the inscription over the large red seal translates as ‘Presenting Horses, Painting by Han Gan’, the museum believes the work actually dates from the Ming, eight centuries later. Thus, the painting illustrates the consistently high status of the horse over many centuries – as a national treasure, a military resource and a revered artistic subject. It is also an endearing appreciation of Han Gan’s approach to painting, which became a generic style to be copied (or faked) for appreciation or profit.
In most cases, however, horses lived for work, not artworks. They didn’t migrate freely across border regions but had to be won through barter or battle. Histories and documents detail, for example, how much tea was exchanged for how many horses. The trading of these very different resources illustrates the fact that the nomads’ horses were seen as superior: faster and stronger. They became a famous brand, and one of national importance. The adoption of cavalry warfare around 300 BC, under pressure from the Xiongnu, might be considered the start of China’s never-ending demand for qianli ma, or ‘thousand-mile horses’: fine steeds with speed and stamina, which might allow the Chinese to compete with their enemies on equal terms.
Reports of so-called tianma, or celestial horses, in the fertile Ferghana Valley, today’s Uzbekistan, were conveyed by imperial envoy Zhang Qian to Emperor Han Wudi in 138 BC. Subsequent imperial campaigns managed to secure only limited supplies of them, but enough to enable a full appreciation of their military value. General Ma Yuan of the Eastern Han, who lived from 14 BC to AD 49, professed: ‘Horses are the foundation of military power, the great resources of the state, and without them the state will fall.’
One thousand years later, the quest remained unchanged. It was becoming clear that China’s problem was not only the quality of the horses, but of the riders too. The Song Dynasty Grand Councillor Song Qi (998–1061), also a respected military adviser, noted:
China has few horses, and its men are not accustomed to riding; this is our weakness . . . The court constantly tries, with our weakness, to oppose our enemies’ strength, hence we lose every battle . . . Those who propose remedies for this situation merely wish to increase our armed forces in order to overwhelm the enemy. They do not realize that, without horses, we can never create an effective military force.
Ancient China faced four main problems in its efforts to provide its armies with enough horses. The fundamental challenge was procurement: horses were difficult to source, and even if some were obtained, they were seldom enough. Once procured, additional problems arose. Horses required care and maintenance, and any sizeable number created a distribution problem, particularly as large and suitable areas for grazing had to be found, and China was already intensively cultivated.
DESCRIPTION: Han Can Chengma Tu (‘Presenting Horses, Painting by Han Gan’), scroll painting in ink, colours and gold on silk thirty-five centimetres by 4.58 metres
SIGNIFICANCE: An artwork from a vast genre, showing China’s admiration of, and need for, war horses
ORIGIN: Late Ming, purporting to be the work of renowned Tang artist Han Gan (circa AD 715-781)
LOCATION: Freer Gallery of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.
Horses were not indigenous to China’s heartland. They prospered in the temperate and cold lands on its northern and western peripheries, directions in which China’s influence diminished. Only at certain times did the political climate present windows of opportunity for China to get horses from these regions. For example, when peripheral societies acknowledged the superiority of China, they indicated their respect through the offering of tribute. If the society became a vassal state, it had to present tribute annually. And as any savvy gift-giver will tell you, it’s best to give a foreign friend something they don’t have in their own country. For nomads of the steppe, horses fulfilled this function perfectly. Received with thanks, horses were shared among the imperial family and favoured military families. Otherwise, it was only in rare times of peace that cross-border trading opportunities gave China access to larger numbers of horses.
Great Wall in 50 Objects Page 15