Empire of Horses Page 10

  What materials could be both carried easily and burned? There were two: silk and strips of wood, usually bamboo. Silk was an equivalent of paper, on which scribes could write, artists could paint, artisans print with woodblocks, and officials make their marks with bronze or wooden stamps. Bamboo breaks neatly into long strips, giving a smooth surface for writing. The strips could then be bound together in the right order to make long messages or scrolls. Many thousands of these strips have survived in graves and in the bone-dry sands of China’s deserts. Both silk ‘pages’ and bamboo strips could be rolled up and transported.

  Bamboo strips, being cheap to make, were used for routine communications, like sending orders to border troops manning the Great Wall. Silk was a luxury material available to both courts. Highly prized by the Xiongnu, it was sent north by Han in huge quantities as part of the peace-and-kinship treaty. Having got it, they flaunted it. Sima Guang records that the Han court objected to the Xiongnu habit of using ‘oversized scrolls’, which they considered a wilful display of arrogance. All of which makes it almost certain that Empress Lü and Modun wrote to each other on silk.

  The next question raised by the silk letters is: what language did they use? Since Xiongnu was never written – as far as we yet know – it had to be Chinese. Are we to assume Modun spoke and wrote the language of his enemies? Probably not. (A millennium later, when the Mongols ruled all China, their emperors were notoriously ignorant of Chinese, starting with Genghis’s grandson, Kublai Khan.) But there was close contact between the cultures, in terms of trade and diplomacy. Officials came and went. Meng Tian’s Straight Road led north across Ordos, and was probably kept in good order, at least in peacetime, to make sure the exchanges were as fast and safe as possible. It is fair to assume that Modun had a team of bilingual secretaries to read and translate the empress’s letters, and draft his own replies. In fact, one of them, Xiyuqian, is named in a later exchange.

  Other illiterate leaders have had similar arrangements. Attila, the fifth century AD leader of the Huns – possibly a remote descendant of Modun’s, as the last chapter explains – had close relations with the Roman empire, trading with and attacking both the eastern, Greek-speaking part and the western, Latin-speaking part. Before he helped destroy it, the Roman empire, like Modun’s, exchanged hostages with the Huns. And like the Han and the Xiongnu, the Romans and the Huns also exchanged letters. Attila had his bi- or trilingual secretaries. Same thing with Genghis Khan in the thirteenth century, even more so because he acknowledged his own illiteracy, ordered up a script for Mongolian and had a multilingual secretariat that could read and write in Mongol, Chinese, Khitan, Persian, Tangut and more as the empire grew.

  Surely, like all officials, Modun’s secretaries kept copies? After all, they would have supervised not only the correspondence but the terms of the many-times-renewed peace-and-kinship treaties. Somewhere, perhaps, in some undiscovered grave, lies a collection of silks that will bring alive the inner workings of Modun’s government.

  Modun recognized that wealth flowed from China only because war and peace remained in precarious balance. China followed the path of appeasement only because the Xiongnu were seen to be unstable, uncontrollable barbarians. To get gifts, Modun had to act the wild man; to avoid retaliation, he had to act the diplomat. It was a tricky balancing act, but if it could be managed he would have his cake and eat it. So raids continued, recorded in 188, 183, 182 and 181 BC. These last three marked a new phase in their attacks. They came in the far west, from Ordos, now firmly under Xiongnu control. They struck today’s Lintao, the extreme western point of the Great Wall. A successful breakthrough here could have opened the way to the Wei Valley, to a road that was a predecessor of the Silk Road, and, some 500 kilometres downstream, to Chang’an. Han cavalry stopped them, but the threat remained.

  The Empress Dowager Lü’s death in 180 BC led to a bitter dispute over the succession, resolved with the accession of Wen, aged twenty-two, another of Gaozu’s descendants. Wen was a well-meaning man, determined to do his best for his people. Not ruthless enough for the times, but – uniquely – famously frugal, and therefore popular, or at least that is how Sima Qian presents him. During his twenty-three-year reign he built no new palaces, added no new carriages, and ordered hardly any new clothes. Sima Qian, critical of his own emperor’s ruinous expenditure, approved of Wen’s frugality:

  The emperor always dressed in thick, coarse silk. He would not allow his favourite, Lady Tian, to wear gowns that trailed on the ground, nor would he have curtains or hangings with embroidered patterns on them. Thus he set an example for the empire in the simplicity of his way of life.

  Wen was not the man to stand up to Modun. The peace-and-kinship deal remained in place, which, in Sima Qian’s view, was a lot better than declaring all-out, risky, self-destructive war as his own Emperor Wu would do (a subject that forms a major theme in the next chapter).

  Well financed by Chinese ‘gifts’, Modun secured his authority and his empire. He was even able to turn an apparent lack of authority to his advantage.

  In 177 BC, his third-in-command, the Wise King of the Right, launched a not-so-wise attack east of Ordos, where his troops ‘plundered, slaughtered, pillaged and dispensed all atrocities imaginable’. When Han mobilized in retaliation, the Xiongnu beat a hasty retreat. Perhaps the attack had Modun’s sanction, perhaps not, but in any event Modun followed up by sending the Wise King of the Right westwards into present-day Gansu to drive out the remaining inhabitants, the Yuezhi. He had attacked them once already, but this was on a different scale.

  The same campaign seized the small kingdom of Loulan, which is now a sand-blasted site in the middle of the Desert of Lop by a dried-up lake, Lop Nor, where China conducts its nuclear research. Back then it was a thriving city on an earlier version of the Silk Road. It lay at the mouth of a river, now the dried-up Kuruk, which was once part of a river system flowing from the Tian Shan Mountains. Later, Loulan fell into ruin when its river shifted course and Lop Nor became a ‘wandering lake’, before both river and lake vanished. Loulan, too, vanished. Its ruins were rediscovered by the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin in 1900. But in 176 BC it became the western outpost of the Xiongnu empire, and remained so for seventy-five years.

  Modun knew that the original assault could threaten the arrangement he had with Han China, so once again he played the diplomat. He wrote to Emperor Wen a letter that was part mock-contrite, part threatening. Sorry about the invasion, which ‘indubitably unravelled the harmony between us’, (or ‘cut off our fraternal friendship’, in another translation). But it was not his fault. In part it was the emperor’s, because he, Modun, had sent an envoy who had vanished – detained? Defected? Who knew? – and had received no envoy in return. In part, it was the fault of the Wise King of the Right for reacting without ‘seeking prior approval’. He had been reprimanded, and – as if it were a punishment – sent off westward, to attack the Yuezhi, where …

  … praise to the benevolence of Heaven, having endowed our warriors with great spirits and making our warhorses robust, we have completely vanquished the Kingdom of Yuezhi. Their tribal members have either surrendered or been killed; the kingdom is now completely under my control … and their neighbouring states, Loulan, Wusun, Hijie and twenty-six others13 have all been subjugated to us, the mighty Kingdom of Xiongnu. All the warriors of the various tribes [‘all the people who draw the bow’, in another translation] are now under my control and unified into one grand entity.

  He overstated: the Yuezhi may have been defeated, but they were still a force to be reckoned with, and would not be totally destroyed for another fourteen years. The letter makes clear that the Xiongnu were not now an ethnic or racial group – perhaps they never had been – but a political entity, an empire. The implication was obvious: if Modun chose to turn his armies on Han, it would be a walkover. But Modun was (he implied) a reasonable man. As reasonable as any other ruthlessly ambitious empire-builder in need of cash. Also (he claimed) a
lover of peace. He would rather ‘repudiate wars to allow our warriors and horses respite’. The best thing would be to ‘return to the old treaty … and let our young people reach adulthood and our old people live peacefully’. To show goodwill, he was sending ‘my Gentleman-of-the-Palace Xiyuqian to present my wishes in writing, and to present one camel, two riding horses, and two carriages with teams of four horses’. Please keep your people under control, he urged, ‘if Your Majesty does not wish to see the Xiongnu near the frontier’. Then, as a final, peremptory PS: ‘When my envoy arrives, send him back immediately.’14

  Emperor Wen was in a quandary: attack or placate? His advisers were in no doubt: ‘Since the chanyu has just conquered the Yuezhi and is riding on a wave of victory, he cannot be attacked.’ So the emperor replied with soothing words, delivered by two emissaries. If Modun really intended not to dwell on past malice, his proposal of renewed peace was welcome, because ‘Han and Xiongnu are sworn brothers.’ There is no mention of the Xiongnu envoy who had mysteriously disappeared. Perhaps peace could be ensured with the gifts that came with the letter – an embroidered and lined silk jacket, a brocade-lined gown, a decorative comb, a sash and a belt both adorned with gold, 30 pieces of brocade, 40 pieces of thick, red silk and 40 pieces of green silk. He was happy to forget the problem with the Wise King of the Right. ‘Please order your officers not to break our treaty.’

  Would that have worked? Probably not, because Modun was a ruthless, devious, self-made dictator and Wen was a pushover. We will never know because later that year, 174 BC, Modun died, probably in his sixties, after ruling for thirty-five years. Had he been merely ruthless, devious and dictatorial, his empire might have collapsed into a struggle for the succession. But, like Genghis Khan and very few other great leaders, he had a long-term vision, which meant appointing a successor and setting up a system that guaranteed the appointment. Under his system, his authority passed seamlessly to his eldest son, Laoshang, and then on for the next ten generations and 150 years, ensuring the rule of his family and the stability of his empire.

  Postscript

  Did the chanyus and emperors really write to each other on silk? A find by French archaeologists suggests another possibility. The evidence comes from a chariot buried in a Xiongnu élite grave (Gol Mod 1, tomb T20, which we will get to in Chapter 11). Like others, the chariot had a parasol held up by flexible wooden struts, which ended in bronze tips with hooks to hold the canopy. One of the bronze tips had some sort of fibrous material around it, as if the driver had used it to jam the tip on to its strut. Under microscopic analysis, the fibres turned out to be hemp. The archaeologists, Guilhem André and his colleagues, suggest that this is the remains of a bit of paper.15 A lacquered bowl in the same grave has an inscription dating it to 16–13 BC. Tradition says that paper was invented in AD 105, but this find suggests the Chinese were making paper over a century before. If true, perhaps those royal letters were not on long-lasting silk but on fragile paper, which would explain why none have been found.

  1 Thomas J. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier (see Bibliography).

  2 Owen Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of China (see Bibliography).

  3 Tsagaan Törbat, Khunnugiin jiriin irgediin bulsh (see Bibliography).

  4 These details are from Paul E. Klopsteg, Turkish Archery and the Composite Bow (see Bibliography). Shooting for distance, so-called ‘flight’ archery, is a sub-culture. Today, with modern materials and specially designed arrows, hand-held bows can be made to fire three-quarters of a mile. The world record for a bow drawn purely by muscle-power is 1 mile 268 yards (1.8 kilometres), done by Harry Drake on Ivanpah Dry Lake, California, in 1971. Using his own specially designed bow, he lay on his back, pulling with both hands, with the bow braced by his feet.

  5 In Eregzen (ed.), Treasures.

  6 William Honeychurch, ‘The Nomad as Statebuilder’, in Journal of World Prehistory (see Bibliography).

  7 The dominant direction was south, towards the sun. Nomads still pitch their tents facing south. When looking south, left is east.

  8 Herodotus (Histories, VII, 83) says that the Persians had a regiment of ten thousand, ‘and these Persians were called “Immortals” because, if any of them made the number incomplete, being overcome either by death or disease, another man was chosen in his place, and they were never either more nor fewer than ten thousand’.

  9 And aided by the Xiongnu conquest of the Wuhuan, a group living to the east, in present-day Manchuria, forcing them to pay annual tribute, which they did for the next 200 years.

  10 What was she doing on campaign? Was this perhaps more of an attempted occupation than an invasion, with families and herds as well as soldiers? Possibly the chanyu decided to pull back having seen that the surroundings were not suitable for herders.

  11 In contrast to Sima Guang, Sima Qian downplays the Xiongnu attacks after the 198 BC treaty. His agenda was to show that war was bad and peace good. His account suggests that the treaty worked. In Jonathan Markley’s words in Peace and Peril, ‘Sima Qian created a false impression without ever having actually lied.’ (See Bibliography.)

  12 Ban Gu, The History of the Former Han Dynasty (see Bibliography).

  13 And more in due course. Sources list up to 36.

  14 These quotations combine versions from Markley (Peace and Peril) and Yap (Wars).

  15 Guilhem André et al., ‘L’un des plus anciens papiers du monde exhumé récemment en Mongolie’, Arts Asiatiques (see Bibliography).

  6

  THE GRAND HISTORIAN’S HIDDEN AGENDA

  ALMOST ALL WE THINK WE KNOW ABOUT THE XIONGNU comes from one man, the historian Sima Qian and his monumental Shi Ji. The book covers the whole history of China down to Sima Qian’s own day in 130 chapters. A brilliant synthesis of oral and written sources, it is to China what the histories of Herodotus or Thucydides are to western culture: original in structure, content and style; fundamental; judicious; and full of anecdote, dialogue, character and colour. And it is based on records and real events. In the words of his translator and biographer, Burton Watson:

  Undoubtedly he heard the speeches of many of the men he described, listened to the deliberations of the courtiers, consulted files of official documents kept in the palace, and observed the effects of various government policies when he accompanied the Emperor on tours through the provinces. He had personally visited some of the barbarian lands that were being brought under Han rule by the Emperor Wu’s foreign conquests, and in other cases he no doubt heard from the generals themselves the accounts of their wars and hardships.

  His history is obviously important, and it remains as popular as ever, as does the man himself. His tomb lies in the grounds of a temple dedicated to him in Hancheng, 150 kilometres north-east of Xian. A fifty-eight-part TV series on his boss, Emperor Wu, started transmission in 2005, which was the 2,150th anniversary of Sima Qian’s birth. The series was mostly based on the Grand Historian’s work. Given its virtues, it is – as Jonathan Markley1 puts it – traditionally considered to be ‘objective truth simply because Sima Qian said it’.

  But it’s not. Can the writing of history ever be objective? The Grand Historian’s history certainly isn’t. Judged by modern standards, he lacks rigour. On the other hand, he’s all we have, so it’s important to try to understand his distortions, in the hope that historical facts will emerge from his absorbing fictions. Luckily, the other great historian of this age, Ban Gu (AD 32–92), whose work overlaps Sima Qian’s, did not share his predecessor’s agenda and provides different material that allows a better understanding both of events and Sima Qian’s biases.

  To assess Sima Qian – to read between his lines – scholars point out five ways in which his reporting is distorted:

  •He had an agenda, which can only be understood with an unchronological step into the future. Sima Qian was writing during the reign of the brilliant, empire-building Emperor Wu (141–87 BC), the ‘Martial Emperor’, who gave up on peace and tried to solve the Xiongn
u problem with war. We shall see the outcome in due course, but it threatened to undermine China’s economy. Throughout history, writers, when wishing to criticize their own bosses, have directed their venom at substitute targets. So it was in the case of Sima Qian. His aim was to show up the faults of his own emperor by emphasizing similar faults and contrasting virtues of previous ones. Often, he fixed the evidence to suit the theory.

  •He used sources that he did not list. He had access to countless documents stored over many centuries, but he does not tell us what they were. When he quotes the advice of ministers, he may be quoting directly, or he may be putting his own words to their brushes. When he quotes ‘letters’, we have no idea whether he does so accurately, or whether the quotes are a way of adding spurious authenticity. The only way to check up on him is to use other sources, of which there are very few, while some apparent sources actually relied on him, with further additions of their own – distortion upon distortion.

  •He used his imagination to bring his narrative alive. In particular, he is shameless in his use of dialogue. He gives his characters long speeches that could not have been recorded. He may have captured the spirit of an utterance, but the only truly authentic ones are in his own voice, as commentator on events or as autobiographer.

  •His history is not a single narrative, but an encyclopaedia of articles and topics. Each of the 130 chapters is a mini-history, many going over the same ground, each with its quotes, character assessments and anecdotes, often with alternative facts. He was not too concerned if he contradicted himself.

  •To cap it all, Sima Qian had deeply personal reasons to write as he did. Much of his history is very much ‘his story’, his tragedy.

  All of which make him a most unreliable narrator. Sima Qian himself pointed this out, obliquely, quoting Confucius, who ‘in his writings about the current age, and in his criticisms and praise, had to avoid certain matters’. To tell the truth about the present, it had to be mirrored in a well-spun, vivid version of the past.