Yishiha belonged to the Haixi subgroup of the Jurchen, and, when his group was run over by the Chinese in 1395, he was captured and castrated. He began his eunuch career by serving imperial concubines of Jurchen origin. In the spring of 1411 Yishiha led a party of more than one thousand o‹cers and soldiers who sailed on twenty-five ships along the Amur River for several days before reaching the Nuerkan Command Post. Yishiha’s immediate assignment was to confer titles on chiefs of local ethnic groups, giving them o‹cial Ming cachets and uniforms, and seeking new recruits to fill out the o‹cial ranks for the commission. In order to mollify the groups who had made contact with the claimant Mongols, Yishiha returned to the region in 1413 and showered the local chiefs with food, clothing, utensils, and agricultural tools. During this journey, Yishiha also attempted to convert the Oroqen and other groups in the region to Buddhism, and later, in 1417, he established a prefectural Buddhist registry to expand his missionary e¤orts. In 1414 he ordered the erection of a stone monument on a cli¤ overlooking Yongning Temple (near what is now the Russian village of Tyr), on which he inscribed his important activities in Chinese, Mongolian, Jurchen, and Tibetan.27 According to a seal issued by the Ming Ministry of Rites that was recently discovered in Yilan County, Helong-jian, Yishiha also visited Sakhalin Island in 1413 when he established the Nanghaer Guard and conferred a Ming title on a local chieftain. “Commander Seal of the Nanghaer Guard” (Nang Ha Er Wei Zhi Hui Shi Yin) was engraved in eight large Chinese characters on one side, and the date (tenth month, tenth year, Yongle reign) was marked on the other side.28 All told, Yishiha made a total of nine missions to this desolate but strategically important region, serving as Yongle’s expansionist agent. According to The Great Ming Administrative 158
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Code (Da Ming huidian), the Ming established 384 guard units and twenty-four battalions in what is now Manchuria, but these were probably only nominal o‹ces.29 After the death of Yongle, the Ming court ceased to have substantial activities there, and almost all of the o‹ces established by Yishiha fell into the hands of Jianzhou Jurchen, whose chiefs Nurhaci (1559–1626) and Hong Taiji fought against Yongle’s descendants and ultimately brought down the Ming dynasty.30
Yongle’s gruesome years of battling with Mongols, who were superb horse-men, gave him a good idea of the critical importance of service horses.
Consequently, one of his top military priorities was the maintenance of a strong cavalry with su‹cient horses for combat readiness, peacetime defense, and logistic transportation. Edward Farmer uses some impressive figures to demonstrate Yongle’s penchant for horses. When Yongle assumed the throne, there were fewer than forty thousand horses in China, but the figure doubled in five years, increased to 623,000 in fifteen years, and, by the time of his death, had surpassed the 1.5 million mark.31 Yongle obtained his horses from his own stock-breeding farms, from vassals who provided horses as tribute gifts, and from border groups along the western and northern frontiers who traded horses for tea. In 1406 Yongle opened up four pasturage o‹ces known as the Pasturage O‹ce (Yuanmasi) in northern Beijing, Liaodong, Shaanxi, and Gansu, for which he hired expert breeders. As a result, he could count on roughly two thousand horses per year from Liaodong and between thirteen thousand and fourteen thousand more from Shaanxi.32
But the supply from his stock farms was not su‹cient to meet his military needs, and from time to time Yongle had to ask his vassal states to send him additional horses. Under Yongle, China had found renewed confidence, strength, and authority as the leader of the Asian world; consequently, China’s neighbors yielded one by one to the blandishments of a new Chinese order.
Besides, tribute gifts and the horses-for-tea trade were a two-way street that benefited both China and other states. For example, Korea—the Ming’s number one vassal—regularly sent high-quality horses to the Ming court, and during the summer of 1423 alone gave Yongle ten thousand service horses. But Yongle always reciprocated, in this case awarding the king of Korea a substantial amount of silver bullion and fabrics. Since the benefits of exchange with Yongle’s government were so great, even the chief of tiny Tsushima Island, located between Korea and Japan, presented Yongle with tribute horses when visiting the Ming capital in 1405.33 When Yongle had seized power in 1403, he dispatched a messenger to Hami (Qomul) to order its ruler, Engke Temur, to trade horses for Chinese goods. Engke Temur, who desired to maintain regular trade rela-159
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tions with China, first presented 194 high quality steeds as tribute and then traded 4,740 more for Chinese tea, fabrics, and other goods. One year later, Yongle invested Engke Temur as Prince Zhongshun (Loyalty and Obedience).34
Other small states previously dominated by the Mongols also began to gravitate toward the new order, and Turfan, a small but richly exotic oasis on the edge of the vast deserts of Taklamakan, was another example. Beginning in 1409 the chief of Turfan periodically sent his steeds, which were renowned for their spiritedness, to Yongle. Because Turfan was an important stopover on the northern Silk Road and also the crossroads of a number of di¤erent cultures, Yongle wanted to make it a military outpost for his empire’s western flank.
In 1422 its chief, Yinjiercha, together with Engke Temur of Hami, presented a total of 1,300 horses to Yongle. The emperor subsequently made him an assistant commissioner-in-chief, and his descendants, who later inherited his Ming title, dutifully sent tribute horses to the Ming court every three years.35 In his determination to build a cavalry juggernaut, Yongle even required the red-blooded Mongol chieftains, who had been defeated and were now Yongle’s vassals, to send him tribute steeds. In 1420, for example, the Tartar chief Aruytai (d. 1434) and the Oirat chief Esen (d. 1455) each sent nine hundred horses to Yongle, their new overlord.
In order to increase his supply of horses, Yongle also developed trade with the western and northern frontiers. At the onset of the dynasty, his father had established a number of so-called Tea-Horse Trade Bureaus (Chamasi) to barter tea, salt, textiles, and silver coins for horses bred by indigenous peoples along China’s borders. The most notable trade bureaus were set up at Yongning, Naxi, and Baidu (all in Sichuan), where tea and salt abounded, and also at Hezhou and Taozhou in Gansu, and Xining in Shaanxi, where the tea-for-horses trade covered such broad areas as Tibet, Ningxia, Mongolia, and Central Asia.36 After Yongle moved the Ming capital to Beijing, the significance of the Sichuan bureaus diminished, even though its tea, called pacha, continued to be collected and delivered by porters to the Shaanxi Tea-Horse Trade Bureaus in exchange for Tibetan horses. The trade, a government monopoly, was generally based on the supply and demand of the commodities available and was conducted with goodwill from both parties. Yongle’s o‹cials, most of whom were eunuchs, served both as purchasing agents and police of the market. Yongle wanted to ensure that such trade took place only once every three years and that tea was not smuggled or traded illegally.37 But he also wanted to make sure that no one cheated the border people with bad tea. This was important because in this kind of trade, price and quality had become valuable signs of goodwill. Of course the exchange rate fluctuated from time to time, but sur-160
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viving records indicate that fine horses were always exchanged for high-quality tea and jaded horses for inferior tea. During Yongle’s reign, 120 catties of tea were required in exchange for a stallion of a rare breed, seventy for a common service horse, and fifty for an ordinary horse. According to Mitsutaka Tani, an authority on the Ming horse administration, half a million catties of Sichuan tea could be exchanged for some 13,500 horses from the border people in one year.38
The tea-horse trade su¤ered from occasional interruptions whenever the Mongols became active and aggressive along the western and northern frontiers and when they plundered the border groups who produced the horses.
In order to maintain a steadier supply of horses and also to search for another flank to help the Ming withstand such recu
rrent attacks, the state turned farther to the west, to what is now Xinjiang, to establish a “Chinese order.”
However, winning over the peoples who lived in this vast, barren area proved both di‹cult and expensive. The oasis communities’ location in immense, arid deserts and their physical isolation made it extremely di‹cult for the Ming court to maintain long-term, reliable relationships with them. And these peoples moved around seasonally, spoke di¤erent languages, and, over the centuries, had drawn their heritage from such diverse ethnic groups as the Uygur, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmen, and Mongols—whose overlord Tamerlane (1336–1405) claimed to descend from Chinggis Khan. In fact, the aging Tamerlane was leading an army of two hundred thousand men to recover China for his Mongol cousins when, fortunately for Yongle, he died at Otrar, in what is today’s South Kazakhstan, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest Ming outpost, on February 17, 1405. It was a stern warning that a danger continued to exist on the western frontier. Yongle’s envoys, who had been to Samarkand and Herat, in particular, repeatedly advised Yongle about the importance of establishing a good relationship with Tamerlane’s successors.39
On the other hand, since bad weather often caused the pastoral nomads to su¤er from periodic food shortages, the Ming court realized that if it could supplement them with reliable food resources, garments, silks, and the like and help them maintain group stability, it should be able to lure them into the Ming orbit and make them function as a bu¤er between China and the militant Mongols. Such strategic thinking—that peripheral stability always bolsters a center’s security—inevitably entailed the establishment of seven Ming commanderies in the far western region. The Ming o‹cial records identify these seven guard units as Anding, Aduan, Quxian, Handong, Shazhou, East Handong, and Chijin. Ming o‹cials referred to the Anding, Aduan, and Quxian people as the “Sari Uygur,” who lived west of the Great Wall’s westernmost 161
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terminal of Jiayu Pass, where the timeless Taklamakan and its occupants had changed little over a millennium. The other four commanderies belonged to the Yugu Mongols, and they generally herded their livestock around the corners of Gansu, Qinghai, and Xinjiang. Since both bravado and fear were part of their lives, their survival instinct told them that the prevailing order of the fifteenth century was that of China and that they had to work with the Chinese for a more secure future. In the past the Yugu Mongols had utilized extended pasture and had traveled constantly to hunt for prey and search of water and food. After receiving Ming investiture and pledging their allegiance to the Chinese cause, they gradually moved eastward and settled in the foothills of the jagged Qilian Mountain range. By Yongle’s time the border people of the Handong commandery reportedly were grazing their livestock near Xining and erecting their yurts around Qinghai Lake (also known as Koko Nor).40
The Anding commandery was established in 1370, and four years later its chief, Buyan Temur, formerly a Mongol prince, attended the Ming court in Nanjing. In 1375, after surrendering all of his Mongol gold and silver tablets to Emperor Hongwu, he was installed as a Ming prince in command of both the Anding Guard and the Aduan Guard. Two years later internal strife rendered the commandery ine¤ective. However, in 1396 the Ming court sent Chen Cheng (d. 1457), a native of Jiangxi and a doctoral degree holder of the class of 1394, to restore its functioning. O‹cial Ming documents indicate that Anding was located “1,500 li southwest of Ganzhou, neighboring Handong on the east, Shazhou on the north, and connecting with Xifan in the south.”41 During the last quarter of the fourteenth century, the Anding people resided along the southern rim of the Heavenly Mountains (Tianshan), whose craggy peaks loomed over the Silk Road. When Yongle ascended the throne, he sent messengers to reconnect with this group and its chief, Hasan. Hasan came to the Ming capital and presented rare animals and elegant horse saddles to His Majesty, and received silver ingots and lined garments in colored silk in return. In the ensuing years, Yongle granted the Anding people the right to trade their horses for Chinese tea at the exchange rate of two bolts of fabric for a high-quality stallion and one bolt for a gelding. In 1406 the Anding people asked for and received Yongle’s permission to move to Kuerding, at the western edge of the Tarim Basin. Throughout his reign, Yongle kept in close contact with this far-flung vassal group. Both the Ming envoy Chen Cheng, who led missions to Samarkand in 1414, 1416, and 1420, and the eunuch Qiao Laixi, who journeyed to Tibet in 1424, passed through Anding. The o‹cial History of the Ming Dynasty (Ming shi) states that the Ming functionaries at Anding survived until 1512, a total of 137 years.42
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The Aduan commandery, on the other hand, is believed to have been located at what is now Khotan, along the southern edge of the Tarim Basin. The Aduan people used horse-drawn carts to buy and sell goods at the bazaar, content to trade their famous Khotan jade and precious stones for Chinese spices and cloth.
Near the end of the fourteenth century, the commandery was devastated by the invasion of Islamic forces and lost all contact with the Ming court. When Yongle became the emperor in 1403, he managed to reconnect with this group, and during the winter of 1407 its chief, Xiaoxuehuluzha, attended the Ming court, presented tribute to His Majesty, and was reinstated as a Ming assistant commissioner. However, the weaker Aduan group was later absorbed into the more powerful Quxian group, who also traveled regularly and lived in extreme environments. For a long while, the Quxian herdsmen dotted their yurts around the shores of Lop Nor (Ming documents refer to it as Xihai, or West Sea), taking advantage of its water and immense grasslands. In 1406 Yongle ordered this group of more than “forty-two thousand yurts” to settle at Yaowanghuai, a sliver of an oasis along the southern rim of the Heavenly Mountains. They frequently fought the warriors from Turfan, and, possibly because the price of war had become so prohibitive, they decided to move their herds closer to the Ming border in southern Gansu and eventually to Qinghai, where they continued to function as a Ming commandery until 1512, when the Mongol forces led by Aertusi and Yibula broke them up.43
The desire to exchange for benefit brought various vacillating Mongol groups into the Ming orbit, but in addition, their belief that Ming China would protect them, sustain their ethnic identity, and help them cope with demographic change motivated many ethnic groups in the Taklamakan deserts to accept the Chinese order. In 1397 the Handong commandery was established right at the nexus of Gansu, Qinghai, and Xinjiang. As soon as Yongle ascended the throne, the Handong chief, Sonanjilasi, accompanied by his brother, attended the Ming court. Both of them received o‹cial Ming ranks, uniforms, and money. During Yongle’s reign, this commandery had about 2,400 yurts and 17,300 people and dutifully fulfilled its obligations as a Ming outpost vassal. In 1418 Yongle dispatched the envoy Deng Cheng to Handong to ascertain if there was any potential danger. Later, during the early sixteenth century, the Handong commandery was laid waste by the militant Mongols, and its people were dispersed over the deserts. Those who escaped to the protection of the Ming authorities were later relocated to an agro-military colony at Ganzhou.44
Another group of marginal Mongols, who once settled in Shazhou (present-day Dunhuang) also expressed their desire to serve under the Ming suzerainty. As early as 1391 their leader, a Mongol prince by the name of Aruygeshiri, 163
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sent horses and other tribute to Emperor Hongwu. In 1404 Yongle invested their chief, Kunjilai (d. 1444), as the commander of the Shazhou Guard, with all the prestige, honor, and cachet of Ming authority. At the time the Shazhou commandery was created, it was located in the northwest desert corridor of Gansu, near the Xinjiang border to the east and the Qilian Mountain range to the west. For centuries, Shazhou was an important caravan stop on the Silk Road linking the rich Orient to the rock-ribbed underbelly of Central Asia.
Because of the area’s strategic and commercial importance, the Yongle government reconstructed the old Yang Pass and Hongshan Mountain passes and repa
ired their beacon towers sixty-four kilometers southwest of Shazhou.45 In 1410 Yongle promoted Kunjilai assistant commissioner and awarded twenty other Shazhou warriors with various military honors and ranks. In 1424 an insouciant Oirat chief sent valuable tribute to the Ming court, but along the way to Beijing, it was stolen. Somehow, Kunjilai was able to recover it for Yongle.
Subsequently, Yongle gave him silks and money and advanced him through the next military rank to become one of the vice-commissioners of the Gansu region. But Shazhou constantly faced threats from Hami and the Oirat Mongols as well as from the accumulating sand, which could obliterate its grasslands and cut o¤ its water supply in a matter of days, so that by 1444 only some two hundred households and about 1,230 herdsmen still lived there. Consequently, the Gansu grand defender removed all of them to Ganzhou, taking this small Mongol group under his protection.46 The vacant Shazhou was, however, repopulated by a rebellious group from the Handong commandery who fled eastward and sought Ming permission to erect their yurts at the deserted outpost.
The request was granted, and the so-called East Handong Guard was created in 1479, more than half a century after the death of Emperor Yongle. Like other commanderies, this marginal Mongol group, struggling in a desolate no-man’s land, ultimately lost contact with their Chinese protectors and, after 1516, ceased to send tribute to the Ming court.47
In this forlorn region lived another Yugu Mongol group, whose chief, Kuzhuzi, brought some five hundred of his people and surrendered to the Ming authorities in October 1404. But Yongle chose a di¤erent warrior, Talini, to be the group’s battalion commander and, as usual, gave him money, uniforms, and a seal. This commandery, Chijin, was first located inside Jade Gate Pass (Yumenguan), a little more than two hundred li west of Jiayu Pass. This was the easternmost of the seven far-flung Ming commanderies. In 1410, six years after its installment, Yongle upgraded its battalion status to guard and promoted Talini to the position of assistant commissioner of the guard. Henceforth, the Chijin commandery regularly sent to Yongle’s court the best horses its herds-164
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