Empire of Horses Read online

  Sima Qian, probably born around 145 BC, possibly up to 10 years later, owed his inspiration to his father, who among other roles looked after the archives and started the Records. When his father died in 110 BC, his son took over. As Grand Historian2 at court, all went well, until disaster struck.

  One of his themes was the threat posed by the Xiongnu, which he knew something about, because when he was a boy, they had penetrated to the heart of China. They were kept in check by handouts of cash and silk. But no emperor of a unified China could claim the Mandate of Heaven and at the same time tolerate ‘barbarian’ rulers who drained the Chinese economy and were liable to launch raids whenever they felt like it. The man who grasped this nettle was Sima Qian’s emperor, Wu (141–87 BC). Wu was a monarch of genius – autocrat, statesman, strategist, artist – with a reign long enough to follow through on his long-term strategy. His fifty-four years on the throne was unmatched for 1,800 years. His despotic ways mirrored those of the First Emperor, and his achievements – his laws, institutions and conquests – would mark China from then on. His answer to the Xiongnu menace was to set the boundaries of China wider, and to do that he decided to escalate the rumbling rivalry into a full-scale war.

  From this decision flowed many consequences – for the Xiongnu, for China, and for Sima Qian.

  As we see in a later chapter, the war was catastrophic for both sides. Repeatedly, the opposing armies thrust into each other’s territory. A dozen times – almost every year – the Xiongnu went on the offensive. Eventually, Wu would come to see that conquering the Xiongnu with direct assaults was impossible. The only way to win was to outflank them. But that decision, so significant for China’s future, was slow in coming.

  Meanwhile, war continued. In 99 BC another campaign ended in total catastrophe. An army of 5,000 men with wagonloads of food and arrows struck northward under a general named Li Ling, an acquaintance of Sima Qian. ‘We never so much as drank a cup of wine together,’ he wrote. ‘But I observed that he was clearly a man of superior ability … I believed him to be truly one of the finest men of the nation.’ This was the man who was soon to become the focus of the historian’s attention, and the unwitting cause of his tragedy. His story is told in a later chapter.

  In brief: Li Ling led his force for a month across the Gobi and the Mongolian heartland. It was not a big force. Perhaps Li Ling was confident that his repeating crossbows would win the day. But these terrifyingly effective weapons were no match for the Xiongnu horsemen. Li Ling staged a fighting retreat over grasslands and the Gobi’s gravel plains to the mountains where he and his wagons were trapped. The surviving Chinese – only half of the number that had set out – fled through a narrow valley, while the Xiongnu tossed rocks down on them, blocking escape until night fell. That night, Li Ling took ten men and galloped clear, only to be hunted down and forced to surrender, later opting to work with his captors. Just 400 of his men, armed with clubs made from the spokes of their wagons, made it back home.

  Emperor Wu was so furious at Li Ling’s defeat that ‘he could find no flavour in his food and no delight in the deliberations of the court’. His officials responded to his mood by accusing the general of treachery for not committing suicide and by punishing his family. Only later did the emperor relent, blame himself for not sending another brigade of archers as a back-up, and reward the survivors.

  For Sima Qian, however, Li Ling’s treatment was scandalous. He was unaware, of course, that Li Ling had actually committed himself to the Xiongnu, and would never return home. His defence of the general, with its dire aftermath for him personally, is included in one of the strongest, most heartfelt and moving pieces of writing in Chinese literature.3

  True, Sima Qian and Li Ling were not close, but, he said, Li Ling was a man of superior ability, filial (that great Confucian virtue), trustworthy and modest. His behaviour had been exemplary. He had led his small force deep into Xiongnu lands, where he had been ambushed and captured (the story is told in detail in Chapter 8). Though a captive, he was surely awaiting an opportunity to fight again for the emperor (not so, but Sima Qian had no way of knowing that):

  His constant care was to sacrifice himself for his country … A subject who will go forth to face ten thousand deaths, giving not the slightest thought for his own life but hurrying only to the rescue of his lord – such a man is rare indeed! Now … officials who think only of saving themselves … vie with each other in magnifying his shortcomings. Truly it makes me sick at heart!

  Unfortunately for Sima Qian, Li Ling’s superior was the eldest brother of the emperor’s favourite concubine. To exculpate the No. 2 would be to blame the No. 1, which was inconceivable, since he was still in office at the behest of the emperor himself. Sima Qian was summoned to explain his opinions, and spoke again in Li Ling’s defence. He had always shared hardships with his officers and men, always commanded loyalty, always served his emperor to the best of his abilities. ‘But I could not make myself fully understood,’ Sima Qian wrote, with outward humility and bitter irony. ‘Our enlightened ruler did not wholly perceive my meaning.’

  There was no money to buy his freedom; no one spoke up for him. He was charged with attempting to deceive the emperor, arrested, tried, condemned and sentenced to castration.

  He wrote of his experience to an old friend who was at the time accused of some unspecified offence and was under threat of execution. In his memorial, he equates himself with the lowest of the low. The least a man can achieve is to bring no shame on his ancestors, or himself. Below such a person, he writes, is one who is bound with ropes, and below him, in a descending sequence of degradation, is the prisoner, the fettered, the beaten, the shaven-headed, the manacled, and the mutilated. Finally, lowest of all, is the eunuch. ‘Alas! Alas! A man like myself – what can he say? What can he say?’

  He might have committed suicide to avoid the humiliation, as others did, but chose to endure castration, because – he said – if he died he would soon be forgotten. His death would ‘make no more difference to most people than one hair off nine oxen’. They would just assume ‘my wisdom was exhausted and my crime great’. A gentleman would surely settle the affair in accordance with what is right. ‘Even if the lowest slave and scullion maid can bear to commit suicide, why shouldn’t one like myself be able to do what has to be done?’ he asks, and then answers his own question. ‘The reason I have … continued to live, dwelling in vileness and disgrace without taking leave, is that I grieve that I have things in my heart that I have not been able to express fully.’ Yes, castration was the grossest humiliation, but there was worse: ‘I am ashamed to think that after I am gone my writings will not be known to posterity.’

  I wished to examine all that concerns heaven and humankind, to penetrate the changes of the past and present, putting forth my views as one school of interpretation. But before I had finished my rough manuscript, I met with this calamity. It is because I regretted that it had not been completed that I submitted to the extreme penalty … if it may be handed down to those who will appreciate it and penetrate to the villages and great cities, then though I should suffer a thousand humiliations, what regret would I have?

  His higher purpose demanded telling the truth (as he saw it) about his emperor and the imperial excesses, not simply the military campaigns, but the ruthless commandeering of men to build and guard the Great Wall, the burdens of taxation, overspending on vast palaces, and an obsession with death that led to a lunatic hunt for the ‘elixir of immortality’ and to decades-long labour to build a tomb that would outdo the First Emperor’s.

  But, having received his punishment, Sima Qian still had his position as a court official. He could not be direct in his criticism. So he was indirect, attacking the First Emperor and the rulers of the next dynasty instead of Wu. In the case of the First Emperor, the result was an overblown portrait, which, in Burton Watson’s words, skilfully set ‘examples of the grandiose rhetoric employed by the monarch to celebrate his achievements’ against ‘
grim accounts of the cruelty, folly and oppression of the populace’. Sima Qian also had a go at the First Emperor’s officials for ‘bowing too readily to the will of the ruler, for accommodating themselves too readily to the trend of the times, instead of endeavouring to reform it’. The same criticism applies to the Han rulers after the collapse of the Qin. He was at pains to emphasize their attempts to deal with the Xiongnu peacefully, as a contrast to Emperor Wu’s pursuit of all-out war, with its appalling losses in men and cash.

  That part of his history was a small part of the very ambitious whole – a complete history of the world as he knew it, namely China, from its beginning to his own time. The structure of the Shi Ji is totally original. It is an encyclopaedia in 130 ‘chapters’, comprising articles on dynastic annals, chronologies, topics (rites, music, astronomy and others), noble families, individual biographies and accounts of foreign lands (including the Xiongnu). A century after his death in 86 BC, the Shi Ji was copied, revised and extended by Ban Gu and by his brilliant sister Ban Zhao, China’s first woman historian and one of its greatest scholars. Both works, the Han Shu (Book of Han, sometimes called the Book of the Former Han, as opposed to the Hou Han Shu, the Book of the Later Han) and the Shi Ji were copied many times, with many errors and interpolations. Sorting fact from fiction and error is a considerable academic industry, let alone the ongoing work of translating the various texts, which demands another level of expertise and explanation.

  Sima Qian’s fate was more than a personal tragedy. He was certain that his emperor was on the wrong track, wasting the nation’s resources on a hopeless quest for victory. His views were powerfully reinforced by the way he was treated, so that his account is infused with prejudice, against war and against his emperor. It is almost everything that a history should be – vast in scale, comprehensive, colourful, persuasive, and often (surely) as true as can be, since he experienced much of what he reports. The problem is to sort fact from prejudice and fiction, which is difficult, because he influenced every history that came after him, including this one.

  1 Associate Professor of History, California State University, Fullerton.

  2 Tài Shi . His actual position was Grand Astrologer. Because of his life’s work, he later became known as the Grand Historian.

  3 It is preserved in Ban Gu’s Han Shu (ch. 62) and included as an appendix in Burton Watson’s fine translation, Records of the Grand Historian.

  7

  A PHONEY PEACE, A PHONEY WAR

  MODUN WAS DEAD, AND THE PEACE MIGHT HAVE DIED WITH him. But his heir, Jizhu (usually referred to by his Chinese title, Laoshang, Venerable-Supreme), followed the letter of the deal cut by his father, as did Emperor Wen. The emperor’s first recorded act after Modun’s death was to choose a ‘noble princess’ for the new chanyu, an unnamed daughter of the royal family. She would have been sent off in some style, in a carriage, guarded by outriders, and accompanied by a eunuch, one of a notoriously recalcitrant, influential and self-serving group of officials. This eunuch, Zhonghang Yue, came from the state of Yan, one of those taken over by the First Emperor almost fifty years before and then crushed again by Han. In fact, Yan’s crown prince had fled to the Xiongnu. The eunuch, having found new employment with the Han government, was very unhappy with the idea of leaving the comforts of Chang’an for northern wastelands, but had to follow orders. Old resentments surfaced. ‘If the court insist that I go,’ he said, ‘it will be a great calamity for Han.’ His reluctance and his threat were ignored by his superiors. He departed determined on revenge.

  Before we get further into this story, with its colourful quotations, it’s worth re-remembering that the details are invented. It was Sima Qian’s style to bring his narrative alive with fictional dialogue, a technique followed by Sima Guang over a thousand years later. No doubt there is a core of truth to the events and people involved and their characters, because reports travelled between the courts, but what follows is at best a ‘faction’ – a melding of fact and fiction – not verbatim drama. Moreover, it is so carefully argued that it is surely a device by which Sima Qian can express his own critical views of his society. ‘The Zhonghang Yue dialogue recalls a classical use of the wisdom of foreigners to indirectly critique the self, especially during times of political decadence.’1

  After about two months of travel – some 2,000 kilometres at an average of 25 kilometres a day – Zhonghang Yue would have been happy to arrive at the Xiongnu capital. Which looked like what? We have no idea, because no one left a description of it. Chinese sources refer to a place called Long Cheng (Dragon City), but the Xiongnu would not have given their base a Chinese name, and anyway no such site has been identified. For that very reason – the lack of physical evidence – all we can do is make a guess at what Yue saw, based on Sima Qian’s notes and on the even greater nomadic empire built by Genghis Khan and his heir Ogedei some 1,200 years later.

  The two empires were comparable in many ways – clans, tribes and vassals united to form a nation and an empire by a charismatic leader, a lifestyle based on herding, a tradition of riding and horseback archery, big round tents of felt, the same foods (mainly meat and kumiss), a lack of luxuries and a desire to get them from the major source, China, either by trade or robbery. These elements were common to those who lived on Mongolia’s grasslands for 2,000 years. Some still underpin countryside living today (ignoring others that make life easier, like satellite dishes, TVs, mobile phones and motorbikes).

  But conquests, tributes and trade created new wealth, and also stability. To rule an empire, you need administrators, who need payment of some kind, whether herds, slaves or luxuries, anything to enhance status. That leads to a desire for permanence, and an interest in building. Before Genghis started on the creation of his empire, he was based at a little place – more village than town – called Avraga, on the Kherlen River in the homeland of the Mongols in central Mongolia. With nearby mountains to hide in, it was a good spot from which to raid or trade with China, which lay a few days’ gallop away across the Gobi. Here, as Japanese archaeologists have revealed, were a line of stone houses, a paved temple and a stone base for a palace-tent. It was, in effect, a capital-in-waiting. But it was no place to rule a new nation, certainly no place to rule an empire, because it was too far east – not central enough. Previous rulers, preceding the Mongols, had discovered that, and made their HQs further west, in the valley of the Orkhon River. That’s where Genghis decided to place the seat of his government. He died before work got under way, leaving it to Ogedei, his heir and third son, to build the Mongol capital, Karakorum (of which there is nothing left except an archaeological site, with its stones forming the walls of a nearby monastery). By western standards, it wasn’t much of a place: a palace, a wall with four gates, a dozen temples, two mosques and a Christian church (the Nestorians, an orthodox sect, were well established in Asia). To one of the few western visitors, the monk William of Rubruck, it was no more than a village, its Chinese-style palace vastly inferior to countless buildings in Europe. But there was much more to it than its buildings, for it had a semi-permanent penumbra of tents and on special occasions many hundreds more, housing traders, officials, officers and envoys.

  The Xiongnu had similar needs, and could have built a similar capital. They certainly had the ability to build, or use Chinese artisans and slave labour to do so. Prisoners and defectors, living in settled communities of farmers, provided a core of foreign labour. The results have been excavated from many graves (which we will look at later in this chapter) and about twenty fortified settlements, some earth-walled, some with stone walls. I was at one of the earth-walled sites a few years ago – Dövölzhin on the Terelzh River, in the southern foothills of the Khentii Mountains, and a few kilometres from the broad valley of the Kherlen, which would later become the heartland of the Mongols. It is a square of 200 metres per side, made by a ditch and a low rampart, a not-very-impressive barrier no more than 3 metres high. Today, you can drive over the grassy ridges and hardly
notice them. The wall surrounded a central building – beams, clay walls and a roof of locally made tiles, some of which were stamped with a Chinese character.2

  The most impressive of the stone-built sites is Ivolga, in southern Siberia, south-east of Lake Baikal. Ivolga was a fortified village facing the Selenge River, walled on the other three sides, with over fifty stone buildings, most of them half buried, some with stone heating ducts. It had a population of 2,500–3,000, many working as farmers and fishermen, but also including potters and metal-workers. A cemetery held 244 individuals, buried in little ‘shaft-pits’, without any of the large burials that are common further south. It was not, apparently, used as a capital. Today, it is open for tourists, signposted in Russian, Mongolian and English: ‘Hun City’ (suggesting once again that the Xiongnu were the forefathers of Attila’s Huns, a subject for the last chapter).

  But the Xiongnu were traditionally nomads, and proud of it. You can administer an empire from tents. The chanyu could summon his people to the gathering place known as Long Cheng in Chinese sources, which became a centre for annual celebrations and sports. It must have been all tents, horses and wagons, because there’s no trace of it. So why build at all? Not, surely, for the Xiongnu themselves. Perhaps to house officials – like scribes and translators – and labourers and farmers unused to nomadic lifestyles, who could make tools and weapons and grow crops to feed themselves and their masters. Such communities might have felt the need for Chinese-style walls for defence, though none match the Terelzh ‘fortress’, which looks more like a caravanserai than a fortress. There are half a dozen such places in Mongolia. Perhaps the chanyu had special campsites built where he could spend time as he toured his empire.3