Empire of Horses Read online

  He deserved to die, Sima Qian goes on, for reasons that had nothing to do with the veins of the earth. His crime was not standing up to the First Emperor: ‘He was a noted general, but he did not make powerful remonstrances [to the emperor] at this time.’ He allowed himself to be governed by the First Emperor’s Legalist agenda. He should have acted like a good Confucian. He did not ‘alleviate the distress of the common people, support the aged, care for the orphaned or busy himself with restoring harmony among the masses. [Instead] he gave in to the ideas [of the emperor] and conscripted forced labour. Is it not fitting that he and his younger brother should meet death for this?’

  Though hardly a fitting end, Meng Tian committed suicide. In Suide, which locals claim was his HQ, he is considered a hero. A stele standing beneath trees in the town’s No. 1 Middle School commemorates him.

  1 Here and in later sections, the words in quotes are direct from the original translation, others (not in quotes) are adapted.

  II

  PEAK

  5

  THE FIRST EMPIRE OF THE STEPPES

  IN 221 BC, THIS WAS THE APPROXIMATE SITUATION ON THE grasslands (though little is certain, for no one has made sense of all the groups and sub-groups). In Ordos and neighbouring areas the Rong and Di were combining to form the Xiongnu (or were perhaps being taken over by them). In Mongolia, there was a scattering of tribes, none of any distinction. Further east were the Dong, usually known as the Dong Hu, the ‘Eastern Barbarians’ (though some burial sites suggest that some Xiongnu groups were already adopting new ways, abandoning the old slab burials and rock-pile graves for rings of stone over much deeper pits). The west, today’s Gansu and Xinjiang, was dominated by the Turkic group, the Yuezhi. Further west were the Wusun, in today’s eastern Kazakhstan. More about these two later.

  Then China unified, and so did some of the nomadic tribes. Scholars have argued about the nature of this response. Did they act as a mass, as if driven by some deep historical force, the force being China? That idea was proposed by the great Mongolist Owen Lattimore in the 1940s, and accepted recently by (among others) Thomas Barfield, Professor of Anthropology at Boston University.1 Lattimore argues that the Xiongnu – indeed all nomadic empires centred on Mongolia – were ‘shadow empires’ that arose ‘as secondary phenomena in response to imperial expansion by the Chinese’.2 It’s a hypothesis that has drawn criticism from others, because it is impossible to prove, and because some later nomadic empires arose when China was divided. But in the case of the Xiongnu, it’s persuasive.

  Perhaps the Xiongnu would have risen anyway. But what actually happened was a matter of luck: they acquired a charismatic leader, a man of drive and vision, a counterpart to the First Emperor, and a forerunner of Genghis Khan, who unified the Mongols almost 1,500 years later. The rise of the two – unified nation and great leader – feeds into an old controversy about revolutionary change. Should we be explaining such changes by looking at great social forces or the characters of great men and women? In this case – both.

  Scholars – especially those trained in Marxist interpretations of history – have also argued about what sort of an empire it was. Until recently, empires were defined in terms of conquest, land ownership, wealth and class exploitation. But nomadic empires did not necessarily claim land, since wealth was measured in terms of herders and flocks, which have no fixed territory. Besides, cattle-wealth was hard to accumulate. As a result of severe ice-storms that occurred roughly every decade or two, herds were subject to catastrophic losses that affected rich and poor alike. With little or no agriculture to provide surpluses of food, no class system could emerge (at least, not in the early stages of the empire). What emerged in Ordos was something new.

  Then in the 220s BC there came the big change detailed in the previous two chapters: wars between the states, from which Qin emerged victorious, then Meng Tian’s advance in 214–210 BC, revealing a new agenda: the seizure of territory that had for centuries been the domain of the nomads.

  Tumen, still the chanyu of the Xiongnu in Ordos, had no chance against the massed forces of Qin. He led his people across the Yellow River, to safety north of the Gobi, in the grasslands of central Mongolia. To be chased out of one’s homeland is a terrible thing. As proud warriors, would they settle down quietly? Not a chance. They responded, and would very soon rise from tribe to empire.

  Technology also helped. Finds in Xiongnu tombs suggest that their bows became significantly more effective to counter the threat from Chinese crossbows. Of course, crossbows could have been seized or bought, but they are too cumbersome to use on horseback. For horse-archers, the bow was the ideal weapon. The recurved ends were of bone, bending away from the archer, extending the ‘draw’ and increasing the power. The lower limb of the bow was shorter, which does not affect the performance, but (say some toxophilites) makes it easier to swing the bow over a horse’s neck as you change the direction of fire – vital if, as seems likely, the Xiongnu could shoot both right- and left-handed.

  The Xiongnu bow – and the bows of all subsequent nomadic cultures – was an object of remarkable qualities. Almost anyone could have a bow, and most had one. In a 2004 survey of thirty-five Xiongnu graves with bows (or rather the bone bits – the wood, horn and sinew having rotted away), the Mongolian archaeologist Tsagaan Törbat showed that 17 per cent were those of women and 6 per cent were those of children.3 They would have been relatively lightweight versions. War-bows were on a different scale. To force a really ‘heavy’ one out of its reverse curve, string it and draw it you needed arms and shoulders strong enough to do a one-arm pull-up, and fingers calloused by years of use (though later archers used a thumb-ring with a hook on it to pull the string).

  The power of this weapon was astonishing. At close range, say 50 to 100 metres, arrows from a ‘heavy’ bow have the penetration of many types of bullet. The right sort of arrow with the right sort of head can slam through half an inch of wood. Through armour, too. The range is equally astonishing, as the earliest inscription in Mongol reveals. It was carved on a metre-high stone, probably in 1226. Found in 1818 in southern Siberia near today’s Mongolian border, it was made when Genghis Khan had just returned from a triumphant campaign in the Muslim world. He ordered a celebration during which his nephew Yesunge decided to display his legendary strength and skill. The stone records the extraordinary result: ‘While Genghis Khan was holding an assembly of Mongolian dignitaries … Yesunge hit a target at 335 alds.’ An ald was the distance between a man’s fingertips with arms outstretched, about 1.6 metres. So Yesunge’s unspecified target – a tree, perhaps, or a tent – was some 500 metres away. In the eighteenth century, English archery experts became fascinated by Turkish bows, because they outperformed English longbows. Longbows may shoot 350 yards. But on 9 July 1794, in a field behind Bedford Square in London, the Turkish ambassador’s secretary, Mahmoud, shot 415 yards against a breeze and 482 yards with it. Mahmoud modestly said this was nothing: his master, the sultan in Istanbul, was an even more powerful bowman. Turkish records claim the sultan lived up to his reputation, firing an arrow almost 900 metres.4

  I have a ‘Hun’ bow, made by the Hungarian master of horse-archery Lajos Kassai, which looks identical to a Xiongnu bow as reconstructed in Mongolia in a drawing by B. Batsaikhan.5 It is 1.57 metres long, and the lower limb is 10 centimetres shorter than the upper one. My longest shot is about 200 metres. Pathetic. It’s capable of much more, if only I had the strength to draw it fully.

  Xiongnu archers carried their arrows in a birch-bark case slung on their backs, and must have reached back over their shoulders to reload. This requires considerable skill, because you have to align the arrow exactly right to fit the nock on to the string, and do it fast, while galloping, using one hand to hold the bow and the other to fit the arrow, while guiding the horse with your knees. Bareback, and almost certainly without stirrups. It took Kassai years to master the technique. Xiongnu males must have done it from childhood to build both the expertise
and (like longbowmen in medieval England) the muscle. Iron arrowheads, too, evolved into a dozen different forms, some with two tines, some with three, with barbs or without. Some had bone inserts with a hole that made the arrow whistle, useful both in deer-hunting, because the sound makes a deer freeze, and for signalling in battle. These became a permanent part of the nomad’s bow-case. For close-quarter fighting, the Xiongnu also had double-edged swords, or at least the top people did. All of this must have been serviced by specialist bow-makers, fletchers and blacksmiths who in turn depended on ore-miners, woodcutters and breeders of birds for the right sort of feathers. On all these industries the sources are silent (except a mention of whistling arrows, which we’ll get to shortly). Only the graves speak.

  Again Sima Qian is the main source for what happened. He does not say where he got his information. Not from direct experience, because he did not speak the Xiongnu language. He says he travelled to the frontier, and his account focuses on the adjoining territory; of the regions further north, in Mongolia and southern Russia, he says virtually nothing. Possibly he heard reports from the many Chinese visitors to the chanyu’s court, who would have picked up versions of Xiongnu history, sanctioned no doubt by the imperial founder, Modun, himself (as Genghis Khan and his heirs sanctioned tales about his rise). Possibly, when the earth and the laboratory reveal deeper truths, we will discover that Tumen and Modun were only the latest expression of changes that had been evolving for some time, without dramatic events and characters to focus them. Meanwhile, this is how Modun seized power from his father, in Sima Qian’s dramatic – and increasingly incredible – version …

  Modun, remember, has been sent to the Yuezhi (or demanded by them) as a guarantor of the Xiongnu’s good behaviour. His father, Tumen, still determined to keep his second son as heir, attacks the Yuezhi, knowing that they will kill Modun in retaliation. But the prince stages a dramatic escape, stealing a horse to gallop home. His father is impressed by his bravery, gives him a generous reception and bestows upon him his own troops. But he does not reinstate him as heir, and Modun nurses his resentment. Soon he is planning to take revenge on his father. Intending to ensure the loyalty of every one of his soldiers, he drills them into total obedience. ‘Shoot wherever you see my whistling arrow strike!’ he orders. (This is a rare case of a written source being backed by hard evidence. Several whistling arrowheads have been found in Xiongnu graves.) ‘Anyone who fails to shoot will be cut down!’ Then he takes his band hunting. Every animal he aims at becomes a target for his men. He takes aim at one of his best horses. The horse dies in a hail of arrows. But some soldiers hesitate, and these are executed.

  Next, he takes aim at his ‘favourite’ wife. Is this credible? The more you think about it, the more it isn’t – just one of the many inconsistencies in this story. Anyway, she dies, and so do those who waver. Then Modun shoots at one of his father’s finest horses – and somehow the father does not react? Another unlikely element in a tale full of many unlikelihoods. In folklore, things often happen in threes, and this makes a dramatic third. More arrows, another death, and this time there are no waverers. Now Modun knows all his men can be trusted. Finally, ‘on a hunting expedition, he shot a whistling arrow at his father and every one of his followers aimed their arrows in the same direction and shot the chief dead’, filling him so full of arrows that there was no room for another. Finally – and this may reflect a truth, since other autocrats have committed similar atrocities – Modun secured absolute power by going ‘on a bloodletting rampage’, killing his stepmother, her son (Tumen’s heir and his own half-brother) and all those he suspected of opposing him.

  In 209 BC, one year after the death of the First Emperor, Modun became the new chanyu of the Xiongnu, and began to turn himself from a tribal chief into the ruler of an empire. How he achieved this may be folklore dressed up as history, but there seems to be no reason to doubt his emergence, his authority and his impact.

  Seeing a threat in Modun’s ambitions, the nearby tribe to the east, the Dong, demand a tribute as a sign of submission. They suggest a stallion that belonged to Tumen. Modun’s advisers are horrified at the idea of handing over a national treasure, but Modun overrules them: ‘The Dong are our neighbours. Why provoke them over a single horse?’ Next, the Dong demand one of Modun’s wives. Again the advisers are angered: ‘This is the greatest insult! Let us show them what we are made of!’ Again Modun refuses to break the peace: ‘Why bother losing our accord over a woman?’ Finally (another triplet of events is emerging) the Dong king – ‘his ego being greatly inflated’ – demands a bit of wasteland measuring 1,000 li (500 kilometres) from north to south. This time his advisers said, ‘Yes, the wasteland is useless to us. Give it to them.’ At this, Modun flies into a towering rage: ‘Land is the essence of our nation! How could we possibly cede it?’

  This was an odd thing to say for a nomad, whose traditions measured power in tribes and herds, not in land-ownership. If true – and it may have been an assumption by Sima Qian or his unknown source – these words suggest that Modun was already set on building an empire.

  Then, mounting his horse, he bellows, ‘The last person to mount will be decapitated!’ Modun’s forces strike like lightning against the Dong, who are sitting on their laurels having concluded the Xiongnu are cowardly. ‘With this one battle, the Dong were decimated.’

  Now Modun had a problem, common to many other empire-builders. He had a large army, followers hungry for wealth and a court with rituals and ceremonies to be followed. All this was expensive. He was, no doubt, naturally ambitious to extend his rule, but in any event expansion was a necessity. An empire needs to grow to fund more growth. Like a storm-tossed ocean, his growing domain washed up against the frontiers of all his neighbours, the next in line being the new dynasty that had emerged to the south.

  He could do this because he revolutionized his society. Somehow, he devised an unknown but persuasive ideology. The obvious comparison is with Genghis Khan, whose empire was built on both a similar way of life and an ideology of world rule. But it didn’t start like that (as several scholars have pointed out, notably Igor de Rachewiltz, translator of the Secret History of the Mongols). It started with the anarchic conditions of Mongolia in the twelfth century, with clan fighting clan, and the character and skills of Genghis. A father murdered and many threats to his own life implanted a determination to create security, which could only be done by unifying all the feuding clans of Mongolia, and then holding them together with booty from more conquests. At this, Genghis was a genius. As de Rachewiltz put it in an email to me, quoting the sixteenth-century French poet Rabelais: ‘L’appétit vient en mangeant’ (‘The appetite comes by eating’) – conquest inspires more conquest. The result was ever-growing success, and an empire. It was only after his death in 1227 that his son and heir Ogedei devised an ideology to explain past conquests and inspire future ones – the Muslim world, China, and ultimately world rule under the guidance of the Mongol deity, Tengri or Khökh Tenger, Blue Heaven, as it is in Mongolian. As a later ruler, Guyuk, wrote to the Pope when the Mongols were approaching Europe: ‘How could we ever have been so successful if God had not been with us?’

  Tenger or Tengri (spellings vary) meant both ‘sky’ and ‘heaven’ in many Central Asian languages, in both senses, meteorological and divine. In Mongolian, ‘the blue sky’ is both a cloudless sky and God. English confuses the two as well: God is in his heaven, the heavens opened. Tenger was the overarching deity of the Central Asian form of Animism, which revered countless lesser spirits of the natural world: animals, rocks, rivers, trees, mountains. Tenger was a remote entity, honoured then and now in Mongolia only with little rituals, like placing gifts of old banknotes, empty bottles and bits of silk on piles of stones (ovoos) marking high places, or flicking liquor skywards with the third finger. But it was not worshipped in an established church. The only access to Tenger was through shamans, who could supposedly sense the will of Heaven when in a trance. There was ther
efore no formal ideology under Modun or his heirs. Apparently, he never claimed that Tenger was on his side. Perhaps the circumstances did not call for divine backing, which was what Genghis’s heirs claimed to explain his conquests. Initial stages may have been peaceful: as William Honeychurch, Associate Professor of Anthropology in the University of Michigan, points out, ‘the material record argues for more gradual changes in regional integration grounded in local political precedent as a first step towards the nomadic state’.6 The sources suggest that Modun had the charisma to unify the clans without violence, and then feed them on enough conquests to keep them happy. His conquests hit a wall, literally, in the south, unlike Genghis, who broke through it and whose heirs took all China. Thereafter, rewards came to Modun from raiding across the border (though under his heirs the empire would expand westwards). On this basis he had the drive, intelligence and leadership skills to create stable rule by forging a system of government that was remarkably sophisticated and effective.

  This is how the system worked:

  It consisted of the chanyu and an aristocracy of three royal clans that formed a government, with direct rule over heads of local administrators and officials in charge of services, like a ‘pony express’ for carrying messages and supplies for the military, and festivals that sustained the chanyu’s authority. Sons and brothers of the chanyu had the top jobs.

  The Xiongnu population was governed by a pair of viceroys who were designated ‘left’ and ‘right’. Both bore an honorific term that Sima Qian says meant ‘wise’. There is no way to check, but everyone accepts his word. The Wise Kings of the Left and Right ruled the eastern and western parts, the Left (eastern)7 King being the chanyu’s eldest son and designated heir. The two kings appointed their own officials. Beneath them were twenty-four ‘great chiefs’ who were heads of units of ten thousand – a very rough figure, presumably counting just the men. The chiefs’ families intermarried with the imperial lineage, thus ensuring that everyone had a stake in the system. Their support for the chanyu was crucial, especially at the time of succession. They were in effect an electoral college. Modun’s empire was centralized, but also federal. For instance, if the heir was too young, the chiefs could and did choose a brother of the dead chanyu.