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  BARBARIANS AT THE WALL

  The First Nomadic Empire and the Making of China

  JOHN MAN

  CONTENTS

  List of Chanyus

  Timeline

  Maps

  Introduction: A New Broom Sweeps the Chinese Skies

  Part I: RISE 1 Mastering the Steppes

  2 Into Ordos

  3 The Growing Threat of a Unified China

  4 Meng Tian and the Straight Road

  Part II: PEAK 5 The First Empire of the Steppes

  6 The Grand Historian’s Hidden Agenda

  7 A Phoney Peace, a Phoney War

  8 The War, the Wall and the Way West

  Part III: COLLAPSE 9 Decline and Fall

  10 Princesses for Peace

  11 The Shock of Surrender

  12 A Crisis, a Revival and the End of the Xiongnu

  13 From Xiongnu to Hun, Possibly

  Epilogue: A Lasting Legacy

  Picture Section

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Picture Acknowledgements

  Index

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  John Man is a historian with a special interest in Asia and the nature of leadership. His books, published in over twenty languages, include bestselling biographies of Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan and Attila the Hun, as well as histories of the Great Wall of China, the Mongol Empire and the Amazons.

  Also by John Man

  Gobi

  Atlas of the Year 1000

  Alpha Beta

  The Gutenberg Revolution

  Genghis Khan

  Attila

  Kublai Khan

  The Terracotta Army

  The Great Wall

  The Leadership Secrets of Genghis Khan

  Xanadu

  Samurai

  The Mongol Empire

  Saladin

  Amazons

  For Ge Jian, with thanks

  Introduction

  A NEW BROOM SWEEPS THE CHINESE SKIES

  In the spring of 240 BC, astronomers employed by the nineteen-year-old King Zheng of Qin, deep in the heartland of modern China, reported the appearance of a comet. It was in fact the comet now named after Edmond Halley, the British astronomer who in the early eighteenth century discovered that it returned every seventy-six years. To Zheng’s astronomers this comet, like all comets, was a heaven-sent omen of change – possibly good, possibly disastrous. Comets were commonly called ‘broom stars’, because, wrote a sixth-century Chinese historian, ‘the tail resembles a broom … Brooms govern the sweeping away of old things and the assimilation of new ones.’fn1

  As in the heavens above, so in the earth below: King Zheng, ruling with the Mandate of Heaven, was already something of a comet himself, the newest of brooms. In the course of five centuries of incessant warfare, states, mini-states and city-states had whittled themselves down to seven. Among them, Qin (pronounced ‘Chin’) was the hardest of the hard, with an army honed for conquest. Being the first among equals was not enough for Zheng. He wanted to be the one-and-only ruler. It took nine years of war. In 221 BC, Qin emerged as the core of today’s China, with Zheng as its First Emperor, ruling in this world and (he assumed) the next, as tourists by the million can see when they admire his spirit warriors, the Terracotta Army.

  But the Great Comet of nineteen years earlier foreshadowed more than just change. Disaster also loomed, from beyond the borders of Zheng’s new empire. To the north, in the vast grasslands and semi-deserts of Inner Asia, were tribes with a very different lifestyle: no cities, no farms, an endless supply of horses, and fearsome skills with bows and arrows. For centuries, they had been little more than gangs, making pinprick raids on the Chinese heartland. But now they suddenly became a real danger.

  Though famous in China and Mongolia, few westerners know about this people. To Mongolians, they are Hunnu or simply Huns. The Chinese for Hun is Xiongnu, pronounced ‘Shiung-noo’. Because Chinese written sources dominate the history of this relationship, that’s how they are generally known today, though mainly to specialists.

  They deserve better. They lacked many elements that are in theory essential to statehood, yet they forged the first nomadic empire – the third greatest land empire in history before the rise of modern super-states (the first and second being the Mongol empire and the medieval Muslim empire). They are the reason China reaches so far westward. They inspired one of the world’s best-known monuments, the Great Wall. They were remarkably successful, lasting some three hundred years, making them the most enduring of the many successive nomadic empires. And they are possibly the ancestors of the tribe that under Attila helped destroy the Roman empire in the fifth century AD.

  Finally, their emergence is evidence that opposition – in this case from China – inspires divided peoples to unify. Until recently, the explanation for the rise of the Xiongnu was based on Chinese xenophobia – that the nomads were dreadful people, the antithesis of everything civilized; that the violence was all on their side; and that China, the fount of civilization in Asia, was the innocent victim of their predatory habits. Today, many academics claim the opposite. They argue that the rise of the Xiongnu backs a great historical ‘truth’, an equivalent of Newton’s Third Law: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Let world historians argue about how generally true this may or may not be, but it seems to explain what happened around 200 BC, when Chinese force begot a counter-force on the grasslands of Inner Asia. Or, in human terms, a powerful charismatic leader on one side inspired a leader of similar qualities on the other. In this view, it was the First Emperor, China’s unifier, who started the confrontation. His empire-building acted like a hammer on heated iron fragments, forging the nomads together for the first time. For over three centuries, the two remained in a precarious and violent balance, despite the vast 40:1 difference in population, until China proved there was no law after all, by using overwhelming force to shatter and scatter the Xiongnu.

  But their way of life remained. Over the next 2,000 years, it underpinned another seventeen nomadic and semi-nomadic ‘polities’ – chiefdoms, super-chiefdoms, kingdoms, empires – with an average duration of 157 years.fn2 The greatest was the Mongol empire (1206–1368), which at its height ruled all China and most of Inner Asia. Its founder, Genghis Khan, saw himself as the heir to a tradition of imperial nomadism reaching back over a thousand years to the Xiongnu. Mongolians today claim them as ancestors, with both cultural and genetic links.

  This is the story of the Xiongnu: how they arose, how they affected history, how they vanished, how we know about them, and how archaeology is adding another dimension of understanding to the written sources.

  I

  RISE

  1

  MASTERING THE STEPPES

  In the spring of 1913, a Russian geologist named Andrei Ballod, working for a newly established gold-mining company, was surveying among the pine-covered hills of northern Mongolia. He came across mounds that had been dug up some time in the past. Thinking these were old gold-workings, he organized a team to excavate one of them. Almost four metres down, his diggers hit a covering of wood and reeds. Underneath, they found an open space and a puzzling collection of objects – a jug, an axle-cap from a wagon wheel, bits of horse-harnesses, and some strangely shaped pieces of gold and bronze. Ballod realized this was a burial mound. The finds were obviously important, so he sent some of them to the Imperial Russian Geographical Society’s East Siberian branch in Irkutsk, with a covering letter headed ‘The Ancient Tombs of Unknown People’. The Russian scientists were as puzzled as Ballod, but there was nothing to be done, given the imminent chaos of the First World War and revolutions in both Russia and Mongolia.

  Ballod d
ied. His finds remained in limbo for eleven years.

  Then, early in 1924, the famous Russian explorer Petr Kozlov arrived in what is today Ulaanbaatar on his way to Tibet. A member of Ballod’s team mentioned the finds to Kozlov, who despatched a colleague, Sergei Kondratiev, to check out the site. It was March and the ground frozen, but Kondratiev’s workers hacked further into Ballod’s mound and found a timber-lined shaft. Realizing this was a major discovery, Kozlov changed his plans – lucky for him, because he had been recalled to face charges of ‘anti-Bolshevik leanings’, which might have meant a death sentence. It turned out that Noyon Uul (Royal Hills) as it is now named was one huge burial site, covering almost 20 square kilometres, with 212 tumuli. A few test shafts revealed that the graves had been robbed, and had then become waterlogged and deep-frozen – which was fortunate, because everything the robbers had not taken had been deep-frozen as well.

  Kozlov’s team excavated eight mounds. Under coverings of rock and earth, they found sloping approaches to 2-metre-high rooms made of pine logs, carpeted with embroidered wool or felt. Inside each was a tomb of pine logs, and inside that a silk-lined coffin of larch. The construction of the rooms was superb, with silk-covered wooden beams neatly inlaid into side walls and supports set in well-made footings.

  Every grave was a mess, with treasure troves of objects, some 2,000 in all (most of them now in St Petersburg), all strewn about among human and animal bones. Not a single skeleton had been left intact. Almost all the gold had been taken, but enough had been left to show that these had been wealthy people. They loved handicrafts and foreign goods: some objects suggested links with China, even Rome and Greece. Amongst other things, the graves contained patterned felt, lacquered wooden bottles, bronze pots, spoons of horn, knee-length underpants of wool and silk, bronze buckles, fur hats, jade decorations, axle-caps, golden jewellery, silver plates with yaks and deer in bas-relief, felt carpets and tapestries embroidered with male heads and animals. The men braided their hair, often using bone hairpins. In Noyon Uul, 120 braids were found, cut off and thrown on to the floors in the rituals of mourning. In the words of one Xiongnu expert, Ts. Odbaatar, ‘Perhaps the braids were a symbolic way for the attendants and servants to join their master in spirit, while not having to sacrifice themselves.’fn1

  Who were these people? When were they buried? We know now that this was the first evidence of the Xiongnu. At the time, no one had a clue. The answers came slowly, and then – after the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s post-Mao liberalization – with a rush, detailed in later chapters. But the Xiongnu did not exist in a vacuum. They were the products of a long historical process that had opened up the Asian heartland – a new way of life adopted by several major groups and many smaller ones, all sharing similar traits and all commonly treated as a single culture: the Scythians.

  For 99.9 per cent of our 2.5 million years on earth, we humans were hunter-gatherers, making the best of seasonal variations, the habits of animals and nature’s bounty. About 12,000 years ago, as the glaciers of the last Ice Age withdrew, warmer climates gave rise to two new ways of living. The first, from about 7500 BC onwards, was farming, which allowed for permanent settlements and larger, more complex societies. Populations rose. Villages became cities, and life became both political (from polis, Greek for a city-state) and civilized (from civis, Latin for ‘citizen’). As every schoolchild used to know, early civilizations arose around the continental edges and along the great rivers of Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

  But there was another world in the heartland of Eurasia that was no use to anyone – an ocean of grass stretching from the Far East to Hungary, from the northern forests of Siberia down to the deserts of western China. Gazelles and horses and wolves thrived, but not hunter-gatherers, because grassland creatures were hard to kill. Here, most large rivers, which elsewhere were the life-blood of civilizations, flow north, into Arctic wastes. Winters are cruel. Grasslands were best avoided.

  But once farming had provided herds of domestic animals, farmers spread into the oases that dot the deserts and grasslands of Inner Asia. From these islands of agriculture, farmers could develop another lifestyle entirely, known as pastoral nomadism, the formal term for wandering herders. It was not an easy step, nor was there a clear division between new and old, for the evolving culture still relied on hunting, agriculture and animals.

  Before those on the margins of the civilized, citified, farming world lay that universe of grass which, when they learned to use it, would provide for food, mounts, increased populations, armies, and eventually empires. No such ends were in sight, of course, when people first dipped their toes into the sea of green. Progress out on to the grasslands must have involved countless trials, errors, dead-ends and retreats, as animals that were once prey were captured, bred, tamed, and at last ridden. Several species proved amenable: reindeer on the borderlands of Siberia and Mongolia, yaks in Tibet, camels in the semi-deserts. One in particular became the key that unlocked the wealth of the grasslands: the horse.

  Horses were first domesticated around 4000 BC on the steppes north of the Black Sea. The evidence is a bit with tooth-marks and horse teeth with bit-marks. People were breeding the wildness out of these flighty creatures, reconfiguring them for tractability, strength and endurance. A knife dating from around 2000 BC, found on the upper Ob River, shows a man holding a tethered horse. A thousand more years of enforced evolution produced a creature that was still stocky, thick-necked and shaggy, still as tough as ever, but with the inbred guts to gallop to the point of collapse, even death, as happens occasionally in Mongolia’s long-distance National Day races.

  Horses were used to pull lightweight chariots, used in warfare, and heavy wagons, which allowed for long-distance migration. They were also ridden. That’s what really opened up the grasslands. With nothing but a bit and reins, riders could herd horses, sheep, cattle, goats, camels, reindeer and yaks. Saddles helped, but were not a necessity. Iron stirrups even less so, because a rope looped round the toe does the job (the first iron stirrups probably date from the second century AD). To stay with your herds, you needed a tent – which evolved into today’s warm, cool, wind-shouldering domes of felt – and a wagon or a few camels or horses to put it on. With herds and horses and the expertise to use them properly, grass became food, fuel, clothing and more – the stuff of new life.

  It was still a harsh world, a second best. People on the brink of nomadism were probably pushed into it. In the borderlands of China in the second millennium BC, when Chinese civilization was well under way, farmers from the fertile but densely populated regions moved north in search of new lands. They put pressure on marginalized local groups, who were forced to explore other ways to make a living in the even more marginal grasslands. They were also pushed by a change of climate around 1500 BC, when colder and drier conditions forced people to abandon agriculture and take up herding instead. Evidence for these changes emerged from the soil in the 1960s. The pottery was of worse quality – coarse red or brown clay fired at lower temperatures – and horse bones appeared alongside other animal remains. It seems the farmers were halfway to becoming nomads.fn2

  Which turned out not to be quite such a marginal way of life after all. This new grassland culture received a boost when a decline in solar activity brought a further climate change around 850 BC. As the milder, damper climate spread, pastures became richer, life easier, and herds and populations grew. These new nomads had more than their horses and herds. They knew how to forge bronze and then iron for swords and arrowheads.

  Why bronze? Ancient peoples had long known how to mine and extract copper, lead, gold and silver. Copper was the most widely used metal, but it is relatively soft. If it is mixed with tin (among other constituents), it becomes harder, as some genius discovered in south-eastern Europe about 4500 BC. The discovery spread across Eurasia, which is why bronze is used as the name for an age in human social development between stone and iron. By about 1600 BC, kingdoms of today’s Ch
ina were using it to make pots and other big ritual items, and steppe people, who had no use for heavy bronzeware, began to use it to make lightweight belt-buckles and horse decorations (on which more in Chapter 2).

  Pastoral nomads were natural warriors, their skills honed by hunting, both as individuals and in groups. One tool used for hunting made a formidable weapon. This was the recurved bow, which ranks with the Roman sword and the machine-gun as a weapon that changed the nature of warfare. Who first invented it and when is much debated, but there are rock drawings of bows in Spain and Norway that are over 5,000 years old. Homer made it an object of power when he wrote about the Trojan War, which may have taken place around 1250 BC. By then it was the weapon of choice across all Europe and Asia.

  This bow looked like a three-foot semicircle of nothing much. The curve is like part of a spring, turning away from the archer. (Later designs had a flat belly and ‘ears’ that seem to curve in the wrong direction. We will get to these.) The elements – horn, wood, sinew, glue – were all readily available to steppe-dwellers. The trick was to combine them correctly. This must have occurred as the result of chance discoveries. A hunter breaks his basic wooden bow and discovers that a strip of deer-horn is whippy enough to make a rudimentary bow. He finds that boiled animal tendons produce a powerful glue. Perhaps he learns that glue can also be made from special bits of fish: fish-glue was a prized item of trade across Asia. A tendon pulverized with a stone reduces it to threads, which prove useful as binding. He notices that the bow, now mended with glue and sinew, actually works better. Wood has wonderful qualities, as the English longbow shows. That’s fine for infantry. But smaller bows for use on horseback need more than just wood. Horn and sinew are both whippy in their own way. Horn resists compression, and forms the bow’s inside face. Sinews resist extension, and are laid along the outside. Bowstrings are of gut, arrows of wood. Feathers, which both direct and spin the arrow like a rifle bullet, come from any large bird’s wing or tail (they have to be from the same side of the bird, because the feathers from opposite sides are not parallel and counteract each other, slowing the arrow in flight).