Heirs of the Xiongnu: The Northern Wei
From his palace, Wencheng (452–465), emperor of the Northern Wei, directed one of the most stupendous masonry projects of Buddhism—comparable to the colossal statues of the Bamyan at the other end of the Silk Road. During his reign, sculptors completed five of the cave monasteries at Yungang, near his capital, Pingcheng (Datong), in northern China, and today a United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site.1 The complex eventually stretched nearly one-half mile, comprising fifty-three cave monasteries and fifty-one thousand niches for statues of the Buddha. The artists combined the traditions of Gandhara with those of China and the steppes to cut out of the sandstone cliffs the most beautiful Buddhist sculpture of China—for Emperor Wencheng was a most pious Buddhist. He also proved an effective, if ruthless, monarch, for he had succeeded his grandfather Taiwu by surviving the gruesome politics of the Wei court that shocked his Confucian officials. Even so, Buddhist writers remembered Wencheng fondly for his patronage of the faith.2 As he supervised the massive project honoring the Buddha, the emperor Wencheng could take comfort that his monumental celebration of the faith had won him the karma that perhaps would enable him to achieve nirvana in his own lifetime. His Buddhist subjects would have no doubts that their emperor was a Bodhisattva worthy of their obedience and reverence.3 The emperor Wencheng, under his personal name Tuoba Jun, betrayed his nomadic origins. He was the direct descendant of Tuoba Gui (386–409), who had united northern China and took the Chinese throne name Daowu of the Wei dynasty.4 The emperors of the Northern Wei descended from nomads of the Tuoba clan of the Xianbei tribe, once pastoralists of Inner Mongolia. Nomadic in origin, the Tuoba were not bound by Confucian ideals. They readily adopted anything of practical use. Wencheng was the first among his dynasty to embrace Buddhism, whose worshippers so obviously prospered in trade because of their piety.
Wencheng’s immediate ancestors had hardly been favorable to the teachings of the Buddha. His grandfather, the emperor Taiwu, had embraced the Daoist beliefs that were so popular among many of his Chinese subjects. He was the first of four emperors to persecute Buddhists in China.5 Taiwu outlawed Buddhism, closed its temples, and arrested its monks on grounds of treason. Daoist priests encouraged these measures, for they had long looked with suspicion on the mendicant Buddhist monks as rivals for the piety of the masses.6 Their misgivings were shared by the Confucian mandarins at the Wei court, who dismissed Buddhism as an exotic foreign superstition inconsistent with virtue.
Sogdian and Tocharian merchants from the Western Regions had carried Buddhism to Han China in the first century AD.7 Eastern Han emperors recognized and respected Buddhism as a legal faith even though many Confucian officials and scholars objected. The emperor Ming (57–75), who relentlessly waged war against the Xiongnu for control of the Western Regions, granted permission for the construction of the first Buddhist temple, the White Temple, near his capital, Luoyang.8 The faith, however, was long confined to the foreign merchants resident in China. Between the early first and early fourth centuries AD, wealthy merchant families in the cities of Transoxiana and the Tarim Basin reconciled their ancestral gods and rituals as previous incarnations of the Buddha, and considered success in trade as a merchant’s dharma. They expressed their thanks by endowing monasteries (vihana), which provided hostels for travelers, so that pilgrims such as Xuanzang in the seventh century could find food and lodging on their way from the Jade Gate to the Khyber Pass. Sir Aurel Stein found the treasure trove of commercial documents in the rock-carved monasteries of Mogao, decorated with magnificent fresco murals, near Dunhuang, the first major stop for caravans laden with Chinese silks heading west from the Jade Gate.
At the same time, these merchants, who were conversant in many languages, commissioned translations of Buddhist scriptures from Sanskrit into vernacular languages. Surviving Buddhist texts dating between the third and eighth centuries are translations in two distinct Tocharian languages at the northeastern cities of Karasahr (Chinese Yanqi) and Turpan, and the western city of Kuchea.9 At Khotan, along the southern caravan route, the translations are in Sogdian.10 In the later second century, the first translators of the Buddhist scriptures from Sanskrit into Chinese were An Shigao, styled a Parthian prince and likely a Sogdian speaker, and the Tocharian-speaking Kushan scholars Lokaksema (Zhi Loujiachen) and his student Zhi Yao.11 At the opening of the fifth century, a number of major schools were busily translating Buddhist scriptures into Chinese. At the same time, the Chinese Buddhist monk Faxian, whose travelogue is the earliest to come down to us, toured India for fifteen years seeking out Sanskrit manuscripts.12
The Chinese warlords who succeeded to the Han Empire, and then the barbarian nomadic conquerors who carved out their own states in North China, were despised by Confucian elites as untutored men of talent without virtue.13 These tough warrior kings found most appealing the vision of Mahayana Buddhism that all who pursued their allotted fate piously in this life according to the law of dharma might achieve nirvana and the end of the cycle of reincarnation. Filial devotion so important to both nomadic peoples and Chinese could also be expressed in the Buddhist concept of karma. The emperor Wencheng was not the first such ruler during this era of warring states to embrace Buddhism, but he proved the most important. He presided over the rewriting of the religious landscape of northern China for the next century and a half. In just over a generation after his death, over nine thousand Buddhist monasteries staffed by one hundred fifty thousand monks are reported in northern China.14 In response to the rising popularity of Buddhism, Daoists devised new rituals to lure converts back.15 They also presented their tenets of the way (dao) and detachment as the proper Chinese expressions of Buddhist dharma and nirvana. Despite three later persecutions, Buddhism, reconciled with traditional Chinese ancestor worship, was here to stay in China. At the same time, Buddhism gained many adherents among the nomadic tribes of the eastern Eurasian steppes who fought or allied with the later Northern Wei emperors.
The first Northern Wei emperors also remained faithful to their ancestral speech and mores, and so completed the process of transforming the society of Northern China since the late second century AD. Soon after defeating the Northern Xiongnu, Han emperors had steadily granted power to regional Chinese warlords who kept order along the Great Wall.16 No charismatic chanyu emerged to reunite the nomadic tribes under his hereditary rule. Councils of the leading men, comparable to the later Mongol kurultai, governed most tribes, and they elected leaders only in time of war. Small-scale raiding became a livelihood rather than an act of policy by a chanyu to extort better treaty terms from the Han court.17 With so many individual leaders to placate, the Han emperor soon found it more expensive to pay off many rulers rather than one powerful one. Later Han emperors thus turned to veteran Chinese governors, versed in frontier warfare, to check the habitual raiders who threatened to devastate and depopulate the lands south of the Great Wall. None of these nomadic invaders posed an existential threat, but instead, they contributed significantly to the rising fiscal demands by the Han court.18 In 184, three Daoist brothers stirred the peasants in Central China to revolt against the oppressive taxes and labor services demanded by the Han emperor Ling. This Rebellion of the Yellow Turbans, so named because rebels sported yellow scarves, collapsed in the next year, but it sparked a spate of revolts and protests for the next twenty years.19 Frontier warlords raised private armies and engaged nomadic tribal allies to put down Chinese rebels. It was only a matter of time when an ambitious warlord would turn his army against the Han emperor. In 220, the warlord Cao Pi compelled the last Han emperor to abdicate and declared himself the emperor Zihuan of the Wei dynasty.20 The new emperor Zihuan was immediately challenged by rival warlords in the south who carved out their own regional empires of the Shu Han and Eastern Wu dynasties. The turbulent era is immortalized in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the earliest of the four Chinese prose masterpieces. For the next sixty years (220–280), the Three Kingdoms of Wei, Shu, and Wu battled it out for supremacy.21 These civil wars during this era of the Three Kingdoms were contemporary with those waged by the three regional states of the Roman Empire.22 Rome, however, quickly regained unity under the soldier emperor Aurelian in 274; China failed to achieve lasting unity for the next three centuries despite a valiant effort by Sima Yan (266–290), who, under the imperial name Wu, battled to restore the grandeur and unity of Han China.23
In 311, the southern Xiongnu under She Le Chanyu renounced their allegiance to the Jin emperor Sima Chi (306–311) and audaciously sacked the former Han capital, Luoyang. The Xiongnu burned the imperial palaces to the ground, and captured and executed the emperor himself.24 The shock reverberated across East Asia with the same horrified disbelief felt about the sack of Rome by the Goths a century later.25 A Sogdian merchant, in an undelivered letter found by Sir Aurel Stein, lamented the event to his partners in Samarkand and reported that he had received no reports from his agents in Luoyang in the three years since the sack. In his own language, the Sogdian merchant called the barbarians Huna, most likely his generic name for nomads, but it might have also rendered the spoken Chinese pronunciation of Xiongnu at the time.26 Five years later, the Xiongnu sacked the other Han capital Chang’an. Meanwhile, the eastern Jin emperors Sima Rui (318–323) and Sima Yan (325–342) relocated the capital south, twice, and centered their lesser state on the rich lands of southern China.27
During the two centuries following the sack of Luoyang, two significant changes took place that have defined China ever since. First, many Han Chinese relocated from the Yellow River (Huang He),28 the cradle of Chinese civilization, to the southern lands of the Yangtze rich in rice paddies and silk farms. They arrived in such numbers that they transformed the linguistic and ethnic map of southern China, for they assimilated or expelled many of the indigenous peoples. These southerners came to regard themselves as the true Han Chinese, and by the tenth century, they comprised the majority of Chinese speakers. Their emperors of the Jin dynasty claimed the Mandate of Heaven and employed Confucian professional bureaucrats chosen by merit. Simultaneously, later Chinese historians lamented the arrival of the so-called Five Barbarians (Wu Hu) into northern and western China. Foremost were nomadic tribes of Xianbei or Xiongnu origin who settled in the valley of the Yellow River and northeastern regions known as the Sixteen Prefectures. Tribal leaders who had often served under Chinese warlords were now emboldened to seize power in their own name and to carve out kingdoms under Chinese-sounding dynastic names. These rulers quickly adopted Chinese methods of government, but they and their tribesmen turned themselves into a military caste, intermarrying with their Chinese counterparts. Many of these states proved short-lived, because the successors of the founder often failed to reconcile the competing demands of their tribal warriors with the needs of their Chinese officials and subjects.29 The most successful among the newcomers were the Xianbei, who had once been vassals of the Xiongnu. In large part, they owed their success to the lessons they learned from their predecessors, who had devised an imperial order based on Chinese administration, cities, and agriculture, but defended by a shield of nomadic horse archers.30 Tuoba Gui (386–409) made his Tuoba clan the masters of the Xianbei, and then united most of northern China for the next one hundred fifty years, thereby ending this era of warring states later dubbed the Sixteen Kingdoms.31 Under the Chinese throne name Daowu, Tuoba Gui proclaimed his dynasty to be the new Wei family, and so he claimed the legacy of the Chinese Wei emperors who had ruled so successfully over the northern half of the Han Empire in the third century.
During the fourth and fifth centuries, a distinct provincial Chinese society emerged that straddled both sides of the Great Wall. The newcomers, especially the Northern Wei, changed their Chinese hosts in many ways. For example, the upper classes preferred ayran, the mix of yogurt, water, and salt, over proper Chinese tea. Riding, archery, and proficiency in arms were expected of every ruler, even those who mastered calligraphy and the Confucian classics.32 The Chinese emperors of the Sui and Tang dynasties who would reunite China were themselves products of this martial provincial society. The newcomers retained the custom of steppes whereby women often fought alongside men.33 Hence, in the lands of the Northern Wei arose the legend of the first woman warrior of China, Hua Mulan.34 She took the place of her aged father and, disguised as a man, served in the army for twelve years and attained high rank. Upon discharge, she returned home and resumed her female identity, to the later shock of her comrades when they discovered that they had served under a woman. Hua Mulan, a most un-Chinese heroine, has been celebrated in ballads, romances, dramas, films, and TV series to this day.
Ironically, the Northern Wei emperors confronted new nomadic foes in Mongolia who shared a distant descent from the Xiongnu and whose monarchs were the first to use the title khan or kaghan. Rouran khans, whose ethnic origins and language are still disputed, were the first since Modu Chanyu to unite all the tribes on the eastern Eurasian steppes.35 The ethnic name Rouran was of obscure origin; Chinese chroniclers disparagingly bestowed it on these nomadic foes to designate them as wanderers or servants of the Wei emperor.36 When the Xianbei expanded into Northern China in the early fourth century, the Rouran tribes followed, settling on the steppes of Inner Mongolia, and in the Ordos bend and upper valley of the Yellow River. In the second and third quarters of the fourth century, a succession of able rulers had slowly united sundry tribes into a loose confederation that straddled both sides of the Great Wall. Their success came to the attention of the new Northern Wei emperor Tuoba Gui, or under his Chinese imperial name, Daowu, because he saw these same regions as the vital recruiting grounds for his own cavalry. In 391, civil war erupted between the two brothers Heduohan, ruling the western Rouran tribes (who was perceived as the greater threat by Tuoba Gui), and Pihouba, overlord of the eastern tribes.37 In 394, the Wei army intervened to tip the balance in favor of Pihouba, but the eventual victor, Yujiulü Shelun, son of Heduohan, rallied the western tribes and avenged his father by slaying his uncle Pihouba, his cousins, and their supporters.38 Then he and his followers had to flee across the Gobi Desert to escape retaliation from a second Wei army in 399. The Wei emperor henceforth was master of the strategic borderlands on both sides of the Great Wall, but he had, just like the first Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, compelled the nomads on the eastern steppes to organize. Once on the Mongolian steppes, Shelun relentlessly waged war to rebuild the second great nomadic confederation.39 He, just like Modu Chanyu, organized his diverse warriors in units based on a decimal system and imposed strict discipline.40 In 402, he assumed the title Khan of the Rouran. Shelun and his successors subjected nomadic peoples who spoke diverse languages, including Altaic dialects related to modern Mongolian and Turkish, and eastern Iranian languages. Rouran power centered on the Orkhon valley in Mongolia, and hence they too are claimed as progenitors of the modern Mongol nation. The Rouran khans steadily extended their sway west to Lake Balkhash and the Ili River. Yet this confederacy proved far weaker than the Xiongnu confederacy of Modu Chanyu. The Rouran khan never imposed effective authority over his vassal tribes because he faced Northern Wei emperors well versed in the same nomadic warfare. The Rouran khans could never mount serious attacks against China and so extort treaty terms from the Wei court as the Xiongnu had done. Also, by their relentless drive to dominate the steppes as far as the Altai Mountains, the Rouran khans drove Iranian-speaking tribes such as the Chionites and Hephthalites into Transoxiana and the Sassanid Empire of Persia. These migrations disrupted commerce along the Silk Road.41 Without the revenues from tribute or trade, the Rouran khan could not sustain an administration comparable to that of the Xiongnu or reward the loyalty of his subordinates and warriors with Chinese silk, or feed his people with Chinese produce.42 The khans were too often beholden to their council or kurultai. The Rouran khans had no choice but to encourage their vassals to raid for a livelihood rather than out of a strategic policy. Inevitably, the Wei emperors would take action.
During the fifth century, the Northern Wei emperors waged a war against their distant nomadic kinsmen as ruthlessly as the Han emperors had against the Xiongnu.43 The Northern Wei emperors were thus as much heirs to the Han emperors as they were to the Xiongnu chanyu. Tuoba Gui was no less determined than the Han emperor Wudi to crush the nomadic foe. Tuoba Gui sternly rebuked his Confucian ministers whenever they urged caution, favoring the virtue of peace over war with its high costs.44 The emperor lectured them bluntly on how he knew how to wage war against nomads. Given the pattern of seasonal migrations, the Rouran were weakest in the early spring. During the winter, the Rouran moved to their southern pastures close to the Chinese frontier. Swift-moving, veteran imperial cavalry of horse archers could surprise Rouran encampments while the nomads were still enduring the long fasting of winter. Imperial cavalry could drive off horses and livestock, capture women and children, and scatter the warriors, who faced starvation on the steppes. Repeatedly Wei generals conducted such attacks. In 429, the Wei emperor Taiwu, better known by his personal name Tuoba Tao, planned a campaign that netted reportedly three hundred thousand prisoners and millions of horses and livestock.45 Many captives were resettled along the northern frontiers as military colonists.
As long as Wei emperors maintained their frontier army and valued their ancestors’ martial skill, they had the upper hand against the Rouran. Besides horse archers, the Wei emperors could field Chinese infantry armed with pikes and crossbows, engineers, and supply trains that followed the strike forces of light cavalry.46 Their Chinese peasants raised the produce to sustain these armies; their Chinese craftsmen manufactured the arms and armor. At the same time, the Wei emperors warred against rivals in China, and expanded their domains from the frontiers of Korea west to the Jade Gate and Dunhuang at the western end of Gansu corridor.47 Success in warfare gained the Wei emperors legitimacy in the eyes of their Chinese subjects and security for the caravans arriving from the west on the Silk Road. They practiced war most effectively; in the words of the elder Marcus Porcius Cato, “war sustained itself” (bellum se ipsum alet).48
The emperor Xiaowen (471–499), the grandson of Wencheng, renounced his family’s military traditions and name, changing his personal name from Tuoba Hong to Yuan Hong.49 In so doing, he identified himself with the “originators” (yuan), the first celestial emperors to rule with the Mandate of Heaven. Kublai Khan too would adopt the same impeccably Chinese name, but Kublai Khan never committed the fatal blunder of Xiaowen of renouncing his nomadic identity and skill in war. Xiaowen ascended the throne at age thirteen under the regency of his step-grandmother, the dowager empress Feng, who was the favored consort of his grandfather, Wencheng.50 Chinese by birth, the dowager empress dominated palace politics through her network of clients: imperial eunuchs, mandarin officials, and spies. She had wielded influence at the court of the father of Xiaowen, the emperor Xianwen (465–471), who had also ascended the throne as a minor of eleven years of age. In contrast to imperial custom, Feng refused to join her deceased husband Wencheng by suicide, and instead advised her stepson, intrigued against his regent, and bribed officials. She was quite successful in selecting able generals who scored victories over rival warring states. To his credit, the young emperor Xianwen took seriously the Confucian virtues of statecraft. He cracked down on corruption, but in so doing, he clashed with his stepmother Feng. He also objected to her lover, a lowly official, whose brother was caught up in an ugly scandal at court.51 Weary of the incessant scheming at court, Xianwen abdicated in favor of his minor son Xiaowen and retired to study philosophy. The dowager empress Feng promptly asserted control over her step-grandson Xiaowen, and five years later reportedly arranged for the poisoning of her annoying, bookish stepson.52 Meanwhile, Xiaowen was given a proper Chinese education under the guidance of the dowager empress. He matured into an avid Buddhist and thoroughly Chinese ruler. He imposed a policy of assimilation, ordering intermarriage between his Xianbei and Chinese subjects, all of whom must dress in proper Chinese dress, assume Chinese names, and speak Chinese.53 He removed his palace from the frontier city of Pingcheng (today Datong) on the border of Inner Mongolia to the Luoyang, the former Han capital, where he could rule as a proper Chinese emperor served by Confucian officials.54 He even instituted land reform along the lines of the enigmatic emperor Wang Mang, whereby the imperial government confiscated private property and allotted the use of land according to each peasant family’s needs. Inevitably, the proud Xianbei generals and warriors objected vociferously to these changes, and twice they plotted to assassinate the emperor. Even so, the successors of Xiaowen remained at Luoyang and ruled as Chinese emperors. In the generation after Xiaowen’s death, the Wei Empire was rocked by revolts of both the Xianbei military caste and Chinese peasants. The Xianbei military elite resented their loss of rank, hated assimilation, and demanded a warrior emperor who would lead them to victory over the Rouran. Chinese peasants were outraged over corrupt officials who profited from land reform and demanded high taxes and labor services. In 535, a civil war over the succession resulted in the Wei Empire splitting into two warring lesser states. The senior line of eastern Wei emperors at Luoyang ended in 550, that of the western dynasty seven years later.55
The reign of Xiaowen also marked a turning point in the relations between the increasingly Sinified Wei emperors at Luoyang and the Rouran khans. They halted the expensive preemptive strikes against the Rouran tribes across the Gobi Desert. For such campaigns favored generals and warlords, both Xianbei and Chinese, on the northern frontier. Instead, Xiaowen and his successors deferred to their Confucian ministers, who favored the seemingly less costly and morally far more virtuous policy of the later Han emperors. They directed the gifts of the “Five Baits” to lesser khans who were encouraged to rebel against the Rouran khan.56 Fifteen years after the demise of the Eastern Wei dynasty in 535, this policy succeeded far beyond expectations. Rouran vassals, the Gök Turks, overthrew their masters and forged the third great empire on the eastern steppes—to the dismay of all Chinese rulers, northern and southern.57 In response to this new threat, in 581, the Chinese official Yang Jian at the court of Chang’an overthrew the then reigning Zhou emperor, a scion of a Wei military family. Yang Jian declared himself the emperor Wen of the Sui dynasty, and went on to reunite all of China.58 The emperor Wen, a devout Buddhist and able general, was himself the product of the military aristocracy of the Northern Wei, for only rulers skilled in the warfare of the steppes could impose unity and keep the new nomadic foe at bay.
The Northern Wei are seldom recognized for their achievements, and they are too easily dismissed as yet one more foreign dynasty in the kaleidoscope of ephemeral kingdoms during the 360 years between the imperial greatness of the Han, and the even greater grandeur of the Sui and Tang dynasties. Yet these heirs of the Xiongnu, the Northern Wei emperors, contributed decisively to the making of the northern Chinese society of today. They wrote the Buddhist religious landscape of stupas and monasteries that persists to this day. During the first century of their rule, they brought peace and prosperity to their diverse subjects, and so they amassed the wealth that enabled emperor Wencheng to commission the statues and cave monasteries of Yangyang, still considered masterpieces of Buddhist art in China. Foremost, for a century, they governed effectively by balancing the interests of their military caste and warriors of the steppes with those of their Chinese subjects. This was no small achievement, and an important lesson for Kublai Khan, one of the greatest nomadic conquerors who would rule all China. These pragmatic rulers, scions of the Eurasian steppes, thus stand as worthy heirs to the imperial legacy of the Xiongnu.
In confronting the second nomadic confederacy of the Rouran khans, the northern Wei emperors achieved considerable success with far less resources than the Han emperors. The Wei emperors never controlled the rich southern lands of the Yangtze basin, the vital tax base of any Chinese regime. They also never exercised any authority over the caravan cities of the Western Regions beyond the Jade Gate. They instead based their power on invincible horse archers furnished by the nomadic tribes just north of the Great Wall, whom Chinese chroniclers disparagingly called Inner Barbarians. For a century, they waged the nomadic way of warfare, and so they strategically, and often tactically, outfought the Rouran on the eastern steppes. Yet the clash between Wei emperor and Rouran khan had unintended consequences. The Rouran khans were driven to expand their confederacy to gain ever more warriors so that they could resist the Wei emperors. For just like the chanyu of the Xiongnu, the khan of Rouran faced the threat of his people’s starvation on the steppes should they be denied Chinese markets and produce. In their relentless westward advance to the Ural Mountains, the Rouran khans dislodged many tribes from their grasslands. They set off a series of migrations that triggered the eventual ethnic transformation of the peoples of the steppes from Iranian-to Turkic-speaking. The Altaic-speaking ancestors of the Huns of Attila might well have been pushed west to the grasslands north of the Caspian Sea, where they first came to the notice of the Romans.59 At the same time, other tribes speaking eastern Iranian dialects, dubbed Huna in Sogdian documents and Indian chronicles, turned southwest, crossed the Jaxartes River, and sought new homes in Sogdiana, Bactria, and northern India.60 They inevitably clashed with the Sassanid shahs and Gupta emperors. Foremost among these tribes of Huns were the Hephthalites, destined to succeed to the legacy of the Kushans.