Modu Chanyu and the Great Wall of China
At age thirty-eight, Qin Shi Huang (221–210 BC) declared himself the first emperor of China. He had ascended the throne of the kingdom of Qin at age thirteen, and over two decades of tough campaigning, he defeated every rival king and ended the era of Warring States. Qin Shi Huang forged a new imperial state, China, named after his original realm.1 He imposed cultural unity by ordering the destruction of all scrolls not in Chinese and imposing one language and one script of ideograms.2 Three years before his death, he projected his supreme power granted under the Mandate of Heaven by constructing his stupendous Epang Palace.3 Although only the massive forecourt was ever finished, the complex in its unfinished state still awed the court historian Sima Qian, who described it two generations later.4 Even in death, Qin Shi Huang would not renounce his grip on power, because he was buried in a mausoleum beneath his palace with a life-sized terra-cotta army of six thousand warriors clad in lamellar armor, and chariots to command in the next world.5 Each officer or soldier was carefully cast to represent an individual who had followed his ever victorious emperor in life. The discovery of his tomb in 1974 dazzled the world just as it must have dazzled his subjects. Later Han emperors had to content themselves with far fewer, and much smaller, terra-cotta warriors in their tombs, but Chinese rulers long followed the burial rites of Qin Shi Huang.6
Foremost, Qin Shi Huang marked off China as a single realm by tearing down the border walls between the former warring kingdoms, and by extending the northern defenses of the former kingdoms of Yan, Zhao, and Qin into a single system: the Great Wall. The Great Wall of China stretched over three thousand miles (or ten thousand li) from the ports on the Liaodong Peninsula near the border with Korea to the Yumen Pass, the gateway to Gansu (or Hexi) corridor, in the west.7 The Great Wall immediately became the symbolic frontier between the civilized Han peoples of China and the nomadic barbarians, collectively called the Hu, who had menaced the rival Chinese kingdoms since the eighth century BC.8 Meng Tian, Emperor Qin’s top general, conceived of and executed the project. Each year, Meng Tian conscripted tens of thousands of peasants as well as mandarin critics of the emperor who had been sentenced to what was for them a lethal punishment of laboring on the Great Wall.9 This first version of the Great Wall was not the grandiose walls to which millions of tourists on buses from Beijing flock each year and photograph. These masonry walls were built by the Ming emperors over sixteen centuries later. In the third century BC, Chinese workers raised ramparts of rammed earth shaped into great blocks from soil, lime, chalk, and binding material.10
The workers first excavated a fossa, or deep ditch, as the wall’s first barrier, and the soil was used for making blocks of rammed earth. Workers also built wide platforms at regular intervals along the wall upon which they constructed timber or stone watchtowers. Behind the wall, Meng Tian had depots, headquarters, and highways constructed. Nor was the Great Wall continuous. Only the most vulnerable points, such as wide plains, mountain passes, and river crossings, required fortification. In place of walls across long sections of the system, Meng Tian incorporated natural barriers of mountains, rivers, and desert. Even so, Qin Shi Huang undertook the first of many stupendous building projects that have ever since distinguished China as the most effective, centralized state on the globe. Over the next five years, Qin Shi Huang mobilized laborers and resources equivalent to fielding an army one hundred thousand strong. The Great Wall awed Chinese and barbarians alike, conveying to them his universal rule under the Mandate of Heaven. Qin Shi Huang rightly took great pride in his wall. He ordered the construction of a grand highway from his capital, Xianyang, today in central Shaanxi province, to the first sections of wall built on the northern banks of the Ordos triangle.11 After the first year of construction, in 214 BC, he conducted a tour of inspection of the wall, in what was yet another ostentatious display of his supreme power.
Qin Shi Huang was never so naive as to expect the wall alone could seal off China from nomads. Patrols, garrisons, and diplomacy would do this. Nor was the Great Wall just a prestigious warning to the hordes of northern barbarians, because for the past two centuries, nomadic raiders were more of a nuisance rather than a threat.12 Instead, the Great Wall was an integral part of a well-thought-out policy of imperial expansion. To this end, the emperor Qin Shi Huang also imposed conscription on all his subjects, calling up for ten years of military service peasants who were relentlessly drilled to professional levels by the emperor’s officers.13 Peasant draftees joined units with rituals and symbols that inspired devotion to their emperor and comrades. They were generously rewarded upon honorable discharge with pensions and legal privileges. Qin and Han emperors could mobilize against the nomadic cavalry of the Xiongnu disciplined armies comprising three hundred thousand infantry and twenty thousand chariots. In 215 BC, Meng Tian fielded such an imperial army one hundred thousand strong (some of whom may well be depicted among the terra-cotta army in the emperor’s mausoleum). Based on the terra-cotta statues from the emperor’s tomb, Qin soldiers comprised overwhelmingly heavily armored infantry with pikes, and backed up by crossbow men and chariots. Qin and later Han armies lacked cavalry, because the small horses of China were only suitable for chariot teams rather than riding.14 Meng Tian expelled the Xiongnu from their pastures in the upper valley and the great bend (often called the Ordos triangle) of the Yellow River.15 He also cleared out other nomads to the northeast in the lands later known as the Sixteen Prefectures. Garrisons and villages of thirty thousand peasant colonists followed the advance of the imperial army. Once the new lands were consolidated behind the Great Wall, Meng Tian twice commanded expeditions three hundred thousand strong that attacked the Xiongnu, who had retreated to the steppes of Mongolia. The Qin army was the first Chinese army ever to march north from the wall, over three hundred miles (one thousand li) across the Gobi Desert, against nomads on the eastern Eurasian steppes. In logistics and planning, the Qin campaigns equaled the Scythian expedition of King Darius three centuries earlier. Meng Tian captured and deported thousands of prisoners, horses, and livestock, but he could not break the power of the Xiongnu.16
He was frustrated by the lack of conventional military objectives and the refusal of the Xiongnu to offer decisive battle. In crossing the Gobi, Meng Tian encountered grueling logistical problems, and his army sustained high casualties due to dehydration, disease, and desertion. It is a testimony to Chinese organization that Meng Tian and his army did not starve on the steppes, but they had to be sustained by a supply train of tens of thousands of bearers and thousands of carts. The Xiongnu easily spotted the ponderously advancing Qin army so that they always enjoyed the strategic initiative, and they could harass the invaders from afar. Twice Meng Tian scattered the Xiongnu and torched their encampments; each time he declared victory and withdrew to the wall. Yet Qin Shi Huang was perhaps too successful. By building the Great Wall, Qin Shi Huang ironically forced the barbarians to unite and attack China. At the time of the death of Qin Shi Huang, Chinese chroniclers report three barbarian tribes north of the wall: the Donghu, dwelling on the easternmost steppes; the Xiongnu, who had fled to central Mongolia; and to the west of the Xiongnu in the Tarim Basin and its adjoining steppes, the Yuezhi (later known as Tocharians or Kushans).17 The Xiongnu were by far the weakest. Within a year of the emperor’s death, a new chanyu or leader of the Xiongnu, Modu, seized power and went on to unite Iranian-, Tocharian-, and Altaic-speaking nomads into the first imperial confederation on the Eurasian steppes.18 At his death, the Xiongnu Empire stretched 2,500 miles across the steppes, from Lake Baikal and the Altai Mountains, east to the Amur River, and south to the upper valley and the Ordos bend of the Yellow River.
The charismatic Modu Chanyu (209–174 BC), the first known conqueror of the steppes, so impressed the Chinese historian Sima Qian that, writing two generations later, he recorded anecdotes of the conqueror’s bravery and genius in his monumental narrative account of the Han dynasty, Shiji, or Records of the Grand Historian.19 Sima Qian possessed the same keen understanding of the nomadic barbarians of his day as did Herodotus of the nomadic Scythians.20 Modu’s father, Touman Chanyu, never trusted his precocious son, so he favored as his heir the pliant half brother of Modu. Touman even sent Modu as a hostage to the ancestral foe, the Yüeh-chih, in hopes that they would murder the young prince in reprisal for his raids against them. Instead, Modu charmed his hosts, ingeniously stole a horse, and escaped to the acclaim of the younger warriors among the Xiongnu. His father had no choice but to receive Modu back at court. Modu immediately formed a bodyguard of ten thousand warriors trained to shoot at anyone, including members of court, on his personal command. At a practice match, Modu deviously directed his bodyguard of archers to slay his own father. Acclaimed the new chanyu, Modu quickly dispatched his half brother, his stepmother, and all of their supporters.21
At his accession, Modu Chanyu, age twenty-four, and the Xiongnu faced the threat of extinction. The emperor Qin Shi Huang had driven the Xiongnu out of their rich pastures south of the Yellow River’s great bend, constructed the Great Wall, and attacked across the Gobi. Modu Chanyu, the son of a father humiliated by defeats at the hands of the Qin army, had to rally his people lest they die of starvation or fall victims to their more powerful neighbors who were beyond the reach of the Qin armies. Foremost, Modu Chanyu aimed to recover the lost pastures south of the Yellow River and the vital northeastern Chinese provinces later dubbed the Sixteen Prefectures. Stock raising on the Mongolian steppes and hunting in the Siberian forests were insufficient to sustain the Xiongnu. They had to have access to millet and other produce of Chinese agriculturalists.
In 209 BC, Modu Chanyu grasped that true nomads were poor nomads, but he also realized that the disparity in military power between his Xiongnu and the Qin Empire made the conquest of even the lost lands unlikely. At its height, in ca. 150 BC, the population of the Xiongnu Empire perhaps numbered one million, whereas the Han Empire of China totaled fifty-four million subjects.22 Although later Chinese chroniclers reckoned the full levy of the Xiongnu at two hundred thousand, no chanyu ever mobilized so large a force. Modu Chanyu himself operated with far fewer horsemen, probably never more than twenty-five thousand. Modu Chanyu, however, overcame the odds against him due to his genius and the unexpected turn of events in China.
Modu Chanyu soon exploited the mobility of horse archers against a Chinese frontier army of infantry committed to defending cities and sown fields. He conducted lightning raids that netted huge profits in captives, livestock, and booty on a scale beyond previous brigandage or trade. He also lucked out because the death of Qin Shi Huang plunged China into political crisis. Neither of Qin’s two sons who followed in quick succession could maintain the unity of the empire in the face of so many rebels. Modu Chanyu was thus free to raid at will until 206 BC, when the lord of Western Chu, Liu Bang, overthrew the last Qin ruler, Ziying, and reimposed unity. Four years later, he declared himself emperor under the throne name of Gaozu of Han.23 The Han emperors were destined to rule for the next four centuries, and they founded the classic Confucian state.24 But as a usurper, Gaozu had to check Xiongnu raiders and to restore order along the Great Wall if he were to win over his subjects to his claim to the Mandate of Heaven. In 200 BC, the emperor Gaozu suffered an embarrassing reverse at the hands of Modu Chanyu on a plateau near Mount Baideng (today Datong, Shaanxi).25 Modu Chanyu had laid siege to the city of Taiyuan, but he retired to the steppes when the imperial army under Gaozu approached. Gaozu pursued too far into the steppes so that he was lured into an untenable position on the arid plateau without water and cut off from his supplies. Gaozu and his army narrowly escaped destruction by bribing the Xiongnu to let down their guard.
Gaozu could not afford any more such reverses. He had learned from bitter experience the difficulties of waging war on the steppes. He had suffered unsustainable logistical costs and high attrition among his soldiers and horses, who were not easily replaced. To be sure, Chinese rebels posed a far greater political threat to him than the Xiongnu, but the high cost of battling nomadic foes strained imperial fiscal and military institutions, and so risked yet more rebellions. Furthermore, victory on the steppes netted little of value to the imperial treasury. Campaigns beyond the Great Wall against the Xiongnu were at best preemptive strikes that gained neither rich booty nor new provinces profitable to tax. Imperial armies could be far more profitably deployed against Korea, with its lucrative mines, or the lands of the Yangtze basin rich in rice paddies and silk farms.26 The clearheaded Gaozu calculated the advantages of peace over the ruinous costs of continuing frontier war. He opted for a tribute system (ho-ch’in), popularly known as the “Five Baits,” whereby he could exit the war and still maintain the fiction of his celestial supremacy. His plan was to pacify the Xiongnu by addicting them to Chinese goods.27 In 198 BC, the emperor Gaozu adroitly switched policy from confrontation to accommodation. He sent his polished diplomat Liu Jing, who negotiated the first treaty with the Xiongnu.28 This treaty defined future relations between many a Chinese emperor and nomadic conqueror. Modu Chanyu received an alliance and a Chinese bride (hegin), and so he was hailed a brother of the emperor. In return for a nominal submission (a pledge of loyalty that carries no weight), Modu Chanyu could expect each year Han envoys arriving from the imperial capital of Chang’an (today Xi’an) to renew the treaty. They also conveyed precious gifts of silk, gold plate, jewelry, weapons, and spices, which he then handed out to members of court, the lesser kings (kuli), and his commanders in return for loyal service.29 Furthermore, the Xiongnu were granted trading privileges along the Han frontier so that they readily obtained millet, rice, and finished goods vital for surviving on the steppes. Modu Chanyu and his successors, in turn, provided horses for the Han armies as well as felt, leather, and woolen goods. Henceforth, Modu Chanyu had the revenues to secure the loyalty of his own subjects and his vassal tribes, and so to impose order, for the first time, over the entirety of the eastern Eurasian steppes. And so, for a price, he also assured the timely arrival of caravans from the Tarim Basin that brought to the Han court jade and other exotic luxuries from the West. Both courts profited from the alliance, but this alliance depended upon both parties upholding their end of the bargain.30
For twenty-five years, Modu Chanyu must have basked in the aura of respectability whenever Han envoys showed up to utter polite greetings and to present Chinese princesses, along with their great troupes of eunuchs and servants, destined to be consorts of members of his royal family. Furthermore, no one doubted that Gaozu had admitted defeat, because he relinquished control over the Ordos triangle and the Chinese agricultural communities of the Sixteen Prefectures. Modu Chanyu regarded as invaluable these Chinese subjects whose produce and labor fed the Xiongnu. Over time, northern Chinese provincials and Xiongnu fused into members of a distinct frontier society that straddled the Great Wall. They lived in a symbiosis with each other, exchanged ideas and goods, and intermarried. Of mixed ancestry and culture, they would come to play a decisive role as interpreters and mediators between the world of the steppes and the Chinese Empire. Hence, future nomadic conquerors and Chinese emperors strove to control these frontier lands.
Modu Chanyu had gained far more from the treaty than Gaozu. Foremost, he was now free to subject all the tribes on the eastern Eurasian steppes, and weld them into an imperial confederacy. Upon concluding the treaty with the emperor Gaozu, Modu Chanyu turned next against the Yuezhi.31 The Xiongnu feared most the Yuezhi, whose ancestors had taught the Xiongnu (and the Chinese as well) to use the horse and wheel in the Bronze Age. The Yuezhi were quickly brought to heel, as were other tribes speaking eastern Iranian dialects or the Tangut languages of Manchuria.32 His own Xiongnu apparently spoke an Altaic language, which would have been related to modern Turkish and Mongolian, and so today the government of Ulan Bator claims Modu Chanyu and the Xiongnu as their progenitors. In grammar, syntax, and morphology, Altaic languages differ radically from Indo-European languages and the tonal languages of the Chinese and Tibetans. Yet for the first time, Modu Chanyu overcame the ethnic and linguistic diversity that had long divided the nomads on the eastern Eurasian steppes, and so he added the warriors of all the tribes to his own. His military power rested upon horse archers, but he adapted Chinese organization and writing, drew revenues from the subjected agriculturalists in northern China, and exploited the caravan trade between the Tarim Basin and China.33 In constructing the first imperial order on the Eurasian steppes, Modu Chanyu wrote the script for subsequent steppe conquerors from Attila the Hun to Genghis Khan.
Modu Chanyu grasped the need for the two pillars of every authoritarian regime, an army and bureaucracy. He looked to his more wealthy and powerful rival to the south, Han China, for inspiration. The Scythians and Sarmatians lacked both, and so their confederacies never attained the effectiveness of the Xiongnu Empire.
First, Modu Chanyu reorganized his warriors, who were traditionally marshaled by clan and family, into imperial units based on a decimal organization.34 This same organization was later used by the Gök Turks and Mongols, the two most successful steppe barbarians after the Xiongnu. Although the Xiongnu excelled in riding and archery, they engaged in raiding their neighbors in bold acts of cattle rustling or wife stealing. Against Chinese settlements, Xiongnu raiders operated in larger groups, but they too hardly constituted a disciplined army. Modu Chanyu turned his warriors into soldiers. He imposed discipline on them and a clear chain of command on his officers, who were appointed and promoted on the basis of merit and personal loyalty. Every able-bodied male Xiongnu had to become a soldier if Modu Chanyu were to match the Han armies. With such an army, Modu Chanyu waged three decades of victorious campaigns against the Han Empire, to extort ever greater sums of tribute, or against rival nomadic tribes, who were either subjected or expelled. In response to Chinese aggression and the Great Wall, Modu Chanyu forged the first nomadic imperial army and his own strategy of imperial expansion.
Second, Modu Chanyu had to impose his undisputed rule over his Xiongnu and the growing number of vassal tribes. He co-opted family and clan leaders, whom he ennobled with high-sounding titles of Chinese origin, fancy gifts, and grants of pastures so they became, in effect, members of an imperial aristocracy.35 Descent still counted, but so did the favor of and loyalty to Modu Chanyu. The top twenty-four were elevated to regional rulers or kuli. Above them, he appointed two deputies: the Wise King of the Left (East), designated the heir presumptive, and the Wise King of the Right (West), each with his own officials to collect tribute, levy warriors, and enforce law. Hence, Modu Chanyu could issue orders that were obeyed. None of the previous nomads, the Hu barbarians reported in Chinese chronicles since the eighth century BC, possessed any such organization.
The Chinese court feared, but perhaps secretly admired, the imperial administration created by Modu Chanyu, who attracted many willing mandarins to his service. The most infamous, the eunuch Zhonghang Yue, is still condemned in China today as a traitor.36 Sent on a mission by the emperor Wen, in 174 BC, he defected to Jiyu, the son and successor of Modu Chanyu. He betrayed Chinese state secrets and advised his new barbarian master to reject Chinese gifts and to extort better terms by raiding. The eunuch renegade was hardly alone. Modu Chanyu and his successors could easily find numerous Chinese scribes to keep records on wooden tablets and to write up their demands as directives and laws. Modu Chanyu’s officials devised their own script based on the Chinese ideograms imposed by the emperor Qin Shi Huang. Modu Chanyu’s successors expanded and reformed this bureaucracy, and so they created an imperial institution with its own collective memory. It might well have persisted long after the fall of the Xiongnu Empire, and inspired the later Gök Turk and Mongol kaghans who appreciated the power of writing.37 In the opinion of some scholars, Attila the Hun too might have inherited this respect for literate, foreign officials who could turn his commands into written words and record the tribute or levies of warriors owed. The Roman secretary Orestes, who headed Attila’s bureaucracy, later, with the fall of his master’s empire, promptly returned to imperial service and put his own son Romulus Augustulus on the throne as the last Western Roman emperor.38
To Modu Chanyu, Chinese ideograms were a form of drawing, for calligraphy was always appreciated by the Chinese elite. The first Chinese writing, preserved on the Oracle Bones during the Shang period, was designed for divination—a practice of the shamans revered by all steppe peoples.39 Under the Emperor Qin Shi Huang and his Han successors, writing and calligraphy were put at the service of an emperor to enforce his Mandate of Heaven. Chinese ideograms painted on beautiful scrolls had the advantage that they could be read by literate officials who spoke mutually unintelligible languages. In contrast, the Scythians and Sarmatians on the central and western Eurasian steppes, as far as we know, never devised their own script based on the alphabets and cuneiform of their southern neighbors, the Greeks and Persians, respectively.40 There are two possible reasons for this. First, a Scythian lord would have learned of writing from a Greek merchant, plying his wares, or from a curious traveler such as Herodotus who was taking notes. Merchants from the Persian Empire also would have employed alphabetic scripts for either Aramaic or one of the Anatolian languages. The alphabet was simple and easy to learn, but it hardly had the dignity of Chinese calligraphy or the advantage of Chinese ideograms that they could be read by those speaking mutually unintelligible languages. Furthermore, neither was used widely in divination nor associated with royal power. The Great King of Persia never prized calligraphy as did the Chinese emperor. King Darius himself confessed that he did not have time to learn literacy, for his scribes kept records in Aramaic and read to him, translating the Aramaic into spoken Persian.41 Cuneiform, long the preferred writing of the Near East, was passing out of general use, and Persian kings limited its use to commemorative inscriptions. The Scythians never would have seen the great Achaemenid monuments, such as the trilingual inscription of the Behistun Rock, which narrated royal deeds in ornate cuneiform.
Second, Modu Chanyu must have been impressed by Chinese imperial officials versed in calligraphy and a canon of classics. Qin Shi Huang ruled China through such officials operating on the principles of the Legalist philosophy justifying that might makes right; his Han successors preferred the Confucian tradition. The mandarins, whatever their philosophical leanings, upheld the emperor’s Mandate of Heaven not just by writing administrative documents but also by propounding the principles of a sophisticated imperial ideology. Modu Chanyu was but the first of many nomadic conquerors to embrace Chinese political ideology and ceremony that cast him as the Son of Heaven. Finally, these mandarins were far more numerous than any of their counterparts who served kings and emperors in the Near East or in the Mediterranean world. This is illustrated by a single statistic about the Roman Empire of the Principate and the Chinese Empire of the Tang or Song dynasty. The two empires were comparable in size and population. The Roman emperor of the first and second centuries AD governed the most effective imperial order in the Western tradition before the modern era. He had one senior imperial official for every four hundred thousand subjects. Each senior official was expected to provide his own immediate staff from among his family members, freedmen, and slaves. The Chinese emperor of the Tang or Song dynasty appointed one senior official for every fifteen thousand subjects, and these officials were supported by an army of professional scribes, accountants, and lawyers.42 In imperial China, Modu Chanyu could thus see numerous professional officials promoted by a rigorous examination system that required command of the classic texts and calligraphy. He also could buy these bureaucrats. No Scythian or Sarmatian ruler ever saw such a system.
For Modu Chanyu and his successors, their power rested on the flow of gifts from the Han emperor, and so they were keen to exploit rather than to destroy China. Yet their power was vulnerable, because Modu Chanyu had precipitated the reunification of China under effective Han emperors, who turned China into the most powerful bureaucratic empire in its day. In time, they would inevitably come to resent the humiliation and expense of paying tribute to mere Hu barbarians since each new chanyu would demand more gifts of silk. It is recorded that between 51 and 1 BC, the number of silk fabrics distributed as gifts to the Xiongnu court rose from eight thousand to thirty thousand pieces.43
The accompanying gifts of gold, silk floss, and rice were likewise increased. After over sixty years of peace and prosperity, the emperor Wudi (141–87 BC) wearied of rendering ever more tribute to the arrogant barbarians, and so he chose war over diplomacy. In so doing, he committed the Han dynasty to destroying the empire of the Xiongnu.44 Yet, ironically, the centuries-long struggle also destroyed the first Chinese Empire. For, during those same sixty years, Modu Chanyu and his heirs too had forged a nomadic empire that could match the Han Empire on nearly equal terms.