FOUR
The Northern Frontier
For two thousand years, the primary military and diplomatic preoccupation of the Chinese empire was the northern frontier. From the Xiongnu tribes that menaced the Qin (221-206 B.C.E.) and Han (202 B.C.E.-220 C.E.) empires to the Manchus who conquered China as the last imperial dynasty, the Qing (1644-1912 C.E.), premodern China was harassed, intimidated, and partially or even fully conquered by its northern nomadic neighbors. Indeed, the history of premodern China's foreign relations is largely a history of war, or preparation for war, with the nomads. Steppe empires built by Xiongnu, Türks, Uighurs, and Mongols menaced China from a distance, while “conquest dynasties” such as the Tuoba Wei, Kitan Liao, Jurchen Jin, and Manchu Qing succeeded in imposing alien rule over portions or all of historically Chinese territory.
The New Tang History (Xin Tangshu), a work largely written and edited by the Song dynasty Confucian scholar Ouyang Xiu (1007-1072), contains specific strategic recommendations for dealing with the threats posed by the nomads:
Our Chinese infantrymen are at their best in obstructing strategic passes, while the barbarian cavalrymen are at their best on the flatlands. Let us resolutely stand on guard [at the strategic passes] and not dash off in pursuit of them or strive to chase them off. If they come, we should block strategic passes so that they cannot enter; if they withdraw, we should close strategic passes so that they cannot return. If they charge, we should use long two-pronged lances; if they approach, we should use robust crossbows. Let us not seek victory over them.
They are like unto all manner of insects, reptiles, snakes, and lizards. How could we “receive them with courtesy and deference”?1
Of course, this passage also reflects deep frustration and hostility. This was typical of many eleventh-century Chinese intellectuals who were greatly distressed by China's past and present humiliations at the hands of its “barbarian” neighbors to the north. Ouyang Xiu's literary career flourished at a time when portions of northern China had been conquered and ruled for several decades by the barbarian Kitans and their Liao dynasty (916-1125). He had no way of knowing it, but the situation would only worsen after his death; the Jurchens and their Jin dynasty were to conquer the northern half of China early in the twelfth century, and by the end of the thirteenth century all of China would fall to the Mongol conquerors of Khubilai Khan, grandson of Chinggis Khan.
The region inhabited by the “barbarians” was the Eurasian steppeland, an enormous belt of land that extended, with some intervening desert and forested lands, from the Carpathian Basin of Hungary in the west to Korea in the east, and from the Manchurian, Siberian, and Russian forests on the north to the Caucasus, Pamirs, and Yellow River (including a portion of the North China plain) on the south.2 A generally arid, continental climate prevails throughout most of the steppeland region, which often experiences extremes of summer heat and winter cold. China was by no means the only civilization to be menaced by mounted archers from this region. The Middle East, and particularly Persia, was also much imperiled by them, and barbarian threats to Europe are recorded by Herodotus (ca. 485-425 B.C.E.), who described the Scythians, and Ammianus Marcellinus (ca. 330-395 C.E.), who covered the Huns known to the later Roman Empire. Nevertheless, approximately one-third of the length of the steppeland bordered on China's north, and China more than any other Eurasian civilization clashed with nomadic warriors and empires.
WHY ALL THE FIGHTING?
Historians who have considered the long and troubling history of Sino-nomadic warfare have often sought to adduce reasons for it. The traditional Chinese explanation expressed revulsion at the harsh and nonsedentary ways of nomadic tribes and implied that warlike tendencies were somehow ingrained in their natures, which seemed less than fully human. These attitudes are perhaps best typified by the great Han-dynasty historian Sima Qian (c. 145-87 B.C.E.), who in his Historical Records (Shiji) describes the Xiongnu as shiftless, primitive, shameless, and pugnacious:
Map 4.1 Eurasian steppelands SOURCE: Provided by David Wright. Drawn by Elaine Ng.
As early as the time of Emperors Yao and Shun and before, we hear of these people, known as Mountain Barbarians, Xianyun, or Hunzhu, living in the region of the northern barbarians and wandering from place to place pasturing their animals. The animals they raise consist mainly of horses, cows, and sheep…. They move about in search of water and pasture and have no walled cities or fixed dwellings, nor do they engage in any kind of agriculture. Their lands, however, are divided into regions under the control of various leaders. They have no writing, and even promises and agreements are only verbal. The little boys start out by learning to ride sheep and shoot birds and rats with a bow and arrow, and when they get a little older they shoot foxes and hares, which are used for food. Thus all the young men are able to use a bow and act as armed cavalry in time of war. It is their custom to herd their flocks in times of peace and make their living by hunting, but in periods of crisis they take up arms and go off on plundering and marauding expeditions. This seems to be their inborn nature. For long-range weapons they use bows and arrows, and swords and spears at close range. If the battle is going well for them they will advance, but if not, they will retreat, for they do not consider it a disgrace to run away. Their only concern is self-advantage, and they know nothing of propriety or righteousness.3
There is really nothing uniquely Chinese about Sima Qian's description of the Xiongnu and their lifestyle; as A. M. Khazanov has pointed out, Ammianus Marcellinus describes the Huns in much the same terms.4
Sima Qian does not directly comment on the significant tactical and operational advantages the nomads enjoyed over the Chinese. The nomads' military superiority was primarily the result of their mobility and their superb horsemanship and marksmanship. Equestrian skills, which nomads learned at a very early age, were of course important for herding their animals from one pasturage to another. But they were also useful for hunting, something nomads also engaged in to supplement their diets and hone their military skills. The nomads' ability to shoot arrows accurately while riding their horses at full gallop gave them an enormous tactical advantage over the huge armies of infantrymen that Chinese generals often fielded against them. In addition, of course, the figure of a galloping nomadic cavalryman offered a difficult target for Chinese archers to hit. The nomads' mobility was often their greatest defensive as well as offensive asset. Because they had no cities or villages to defend, they often allowed Chinese armies to pursue them out into the steppes, there to be weakened by logistical difficulties and their own inability to live off the grasslands.
Sima Qian, perhaps because he was so overawed by the military acumen of the nomads, also failed to note that China's population always vastly outnumbered that of the steppes. In ecological terms, the “barbarians” he so deplored were pastoral nomads. They were pastoral because they domesticated and husbanded animals (mainly sheep), and nomadic because they were highly mobile, riding on horseback or on simple carts from one naturally occurring stretch of grassland to another in the steppes north and west of China's borders, living in collapsible and portable tentlike shelters made of wooden latticework frames covered with felt. Pastoral nomads chose not to corral their animals and feed them cultivated hay the way their agricultural neighbors in China did, and they valued the mobile life of the nomad over the stationary life of the farmer. Their mobility demanded a simple and efficient economy, and as a result nomads were seldom as wealthy or technologically innovative as their sedentary neighbors.
They were also never as populous. An ecology based on pastoral nomadism might sustain more people per surface unit of land than an exclusively hunting and gathering one does, but neither way of life can come close to matching the demographic sustaining power of agriculture. But militarily, pastoral nomadic societies made up for their small populations and technological backwardness with superior mobility and tactical skills. Nomadic cavalrymen were often quite literally able to run circles around large groups of Chinese foot soldiers, shoot arrows into their midst, and then quickly withdraw out of the range of Chinese archers. Nomadic cavalrymen greatly outmanned by Chinese foot soldiers could and often did achieve smashing victories against them.
The Chinese attempted to develop countermeasures against such tactics. Sustained campaigns into nomadic territory in what is now Mongolia did occasionally weaken nomadic power, as did the Han Emperor Wudi's massive excursion into the Xiongnu homeland in 119 B.C.E. But such campaigns were rare because they imposed huge financial and logistical burdens on the Chinese state. Other responses to the nomadic threat were more tactical in nature. One type of long weapon was used to trip or injure the hoofs of the nomads' horses, but this of course was useful only when the nomads attacked Chinese infantrymen at close range. Another obvious countermeasure for the Chinese was to learn to be cavalrymen themselves. Mounted Chinese warriors did sometimes prove effective against nomadic warriors, but this was the exception rather than the rule. For most Chinese, horsemanship was an acquired skill, not second nature as with their opponents. In short, Chinese cavalrymen by themselves could rarely hope to match the skill of the mounted nomadic warrior on the battlefield. In addition, Chinese horses were seldom as good as the horses bred out on the steppes, possibly because the nomads took measures to keep their best stock from falling into Chinese hands.
Modern historians have suggested other theories to explain the prolonged pattern of Sino-nomadic warfare. Some have suggested that the basic ecological incompatibility of agricultural and nomadic peoples inevitably produced periodic misunderstanding, friction, and open warfare. Others maintain that famine or drought in the steppe regions might have led nomadic peoples to attack sedentary civilizations for food. This theory, while appealing upon first glance, must be regarded at most as an insightful piece of speculation because it can neither be proven nor disproven; there is simply not enough meteorological information in historical sources. More recent attempts to explain Sino-nomadic warfare are by Mongolian historian Sechin Jagchid, Russian anthropologist A. M. Khazanov, and American anthropologist Thomas J. Barfield. In his book on the subject, Jagchid briefly describes the ecology of pastoral nomadism and then argues that the Chinese were almost always the ones at fault for outbreaks of Sino-nomadic hostility and warfare, because the nomads needed three basic commodities that their simple pastoral economies could not produce: grains, textiles, and metals. When the Chinese were willing to permit mechanisms such as intermarriage of royal families, tribute missions, and border markets to facilitate the transfer of these goods to the nomads, peace prevailed. But when the Chinese, for whatever reason, closed down these mechanisms, nomads were ultimately driven through sheer economic necessity into raiding China. Thus, in Jagchid's view, the nomads were essentially peaceable and were far from the warlike people characterized in almost all imperial Chinese historical materials. Jagchid's argument is essentially economic and has been called the “trade-or-raid” thesis.5
Thomas J. Barfield's perspective is quite different. While he agrees with Jagchid on the material dependency of pastoral nomads on the Chinese, he sees the nature of this dependency in different terms. What the nomads needed from the Chinese, he argues in his important survey of Sino-nomadic interaction, was not subsistence commodities but luxury items, which nomadic empires used to strengthen their weakest link: that between local chieftains and regional rulers. Barfield's is, then, essentially a political argument.6
A. M. Khazanov's perspective on this question also emphasizes the material dependency of nomadic societies on civilized societies. But Khazanov points out that conquest, when and where it was possible, was the most profitable way for pastoral nomads to secure the items they needed from civilized societies: “Wherever nomads have the corresponding opportunities their raids and pillaging become a permanent fixture.”7 Thus, the nomads may have been more rational than some traditional historians have thought. Raiding was in fact probably the easiest way for the nomads to get what they needed from China, but they were astute enough to know that they very often could not get away with this for very long.
THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA
One very common misconception about the northern Chinese frontier that must be dispelled right from the start concerns the Great Wall of China. The standard textbook account claims that it was either constructed or connected from earlier wall segments during the Qin dynasty in order to keep the “Huns” and other “barbarians” at bay; over the centuries thereafter the Wall was supposedly alternately shored up or allowed to fall into states of disrepair, but its site was always known. The best-preserved sections of the Great Wall today, near Badaling (not far from Beijing), are the results of Ming dynasty repairs. Historian Arthur Waldron, however, questions this and argues that the Great Wall of China as we know it today is not an ancient structure, but was built for the first time during the Ming dynasty.8
Even a brief perusal of a good Chinese historical atlas will show that the Wall did not usually define precisely the geographical extents of Chinese and nomadic polities. Moreover, ecological boundaries between sedentary and pastoral nomadic societies were sometimes fluid and seldom were neatly demarcated by anything as dramatic and final as a fixed wall. Thus, theories about the Great Wall of China that see it as a definitive ecological, linguistic, and cultural demarcation or emphasize the inherent permanence of China's “walled frontier” should probably now be revised or discarded altogether.9
But Waldron has not completely proven his case. There remains, for instance, the matter of an eleventh-century poetic reference to the Wall (or a wall) by Su Song, a Song dynasty literatus who twice travelled to the Kitan Liao state in the eleventh century in diplomatic missions. In a poem he wrote in 1077 upon crossing Gubei Pass, a well-known point along the modern Great Wall, Su Song noted that he was once again crossing over “the ten-thousand li wall of the Qin monarch.”10 It is of course possible that this is a literary trope, but its focused geographical and chronological specificity by a scholar-official who twice travelled by Gubei on diplomatic business seems at least to indicate that Su Song knew that some sort of Qin wall was once here. That the Ming also chose to run its Great Wall through Gubei suggests that both dynasties understood its strategic importance.
HAN AND XIONGNU
The Xiongnu, sometimes identified with the Huns known to the late Roman Empire, were the first great steppe empire to threaten the security of an organized and unified Chinese state. The Xiongnu and the Han dynasty, in fact, rose to power at roughly the same time. During the very early years of the Han dynasty, the founding emperor, Gaozu (Liu Bang), was defeated in a major battle with the Xiongnu and narrowly avoided capture. The Han both feared and respected the Xiongnu after this, and for the next few decades the so-called intermarriage (heqin) system was the basic framework for diplomatic relations between the two powers. The original peace agreement, which was expanded over the years, contained the following provisions:
1. A Chinese princess given in marriage to the leader of the Xiongnu.
2. Fixed annual payments of food, silk, and wine to the Xiongnu.
3. Equal or “brotherly” status between the two powers.
4. A fixed border between the two powers.11
The intermarriage system endured as the basic vehicle for Han-Xiongnu relations until the Han emperor Wudi (r. 141-87 B.C.E.) cancelled it and initiated hostilities with the Xiongnu in 133 B.C.E. Wudi seems to have concluded that the provisions of the intermarriage system were demeaning to China and that the Chinese had endured insults and humiliation at the hands of the Xiongnu long enough. As part of his overall program of territorial expansion, Wudi decided to face down the Xiongnu militarily and outmaneuver them diplomatically. Han Wudi's strategy was fourfold:
1. To push the Chinese frontier back to the old Qin boundaries.
2. To ally with the Yuezhi and Wusun, old adversaries of the Xiongnu.
3. To expand into the Tarim Basin and occupy a long segment of the Silk Road there, thus “cutting off the right arm” of the Xiongnu by depriving them of their revenues from the oasis city-states there involved with overland trade.
4. To launch destructive punitive expeditions into Xiongnu territory.12
In 119 B.C.E., Han armies drove deep into Xiongnu territory and destroyed an important headquarters of the shanyu, or leader of the Xiongnu. Three decades later the two powers had more or less exhausted themselves and stalemated each other into an uneasy period of détente. By Wudi's death in 87 B.C.E., however, it was becoming clear that the real losers in the decades-long confrontation were the Xiongnu. Their defeats at the hands of relatively minor nomadic adversaries in the 70s and 60s B.C.E. indicated their internal weakness, and a Xiongnu civil war also did much to further weaken their power and prestige. By 54 B.C.E. the majority of the Xiongnu agreed to surrender to the Han.
During his lifetime, Han Wudi had long insisted that the Xiongnu accept a new framework, the so-called tribute system, for relations between the two powers. The elements of the new system were much more symbolically favorable to the Han than the old intermarriage system elements had been, so the Xiongnu had long feared and resisted the tributary system in the belief that it would entail actual subjugation to the Han. They repeatedly demanded the restoration of the intermarriage system, but the Han would not assent to this. The tributary system contained three major elements:
1. Far from receiving a royal princess from the Han in marriage, the Xiongnu would now send a hostage from their royal family to reside at the Han capital.
2. The Xiongnu shanyu, or an envoy personally representing him, would come periodically to China to pay homage.
3. The Xiongnu would send tribute to China in return for imperial gifts from China.13
After 54 B.C.E. and the surrender of the majority of the Xiongnu to the Han, the Xiongnu quickly discovered that this “tributary system” was, in reality, a sham that did not involve actual submission to Han power. The Chinese demanded mere ritual and material submission to the Han emperor, and in return for this they bestowed imperial gifts out of all proportion to the value of the tribute. Thus, tribute missions turned out to be enormously profitable to the Xiongnu, and soon they were requesting permission to conduct them more and more frequently. The tributary system was in fact an institution that the Xiongnu could manipulate for their own material benefit, as they had the former intermarriage system. Chinese intellectuals eventually caught on to the Xiongnu attitude, which they interpreted as “insincerity.”14
By 43 B.C.E. the Xiongnu had resolved their differences and reunified themselves, and they continued to manipulate the tributary system to their own advantage. They now saw it more or less as the same old intermarriage system, but in a new ritualized package that seemed to make the Chinese feel better. The tribute system provided peace until 8 C.E. and the usurpation of the Han throne by Wang Mang, who like Han Wudi before him changed relations with the Xiongnu and tried to subjugate them. The Xiongnu balked at this and went to war with Wang Mang's new regime, which at any rate was overthrown in 23 by Han restorationists. Then the Xiongnu themselves disintegrated into civil war by the late 40s, resulting in a north-south split among the Xiongnu: the Southern Xiongnu submitted to Han authority, while the Northern Xiongnu remained independent and defiant. In 89 the Southern Xiongnu and the restored Han dynasty attacked the Northern Xiongnu and greatly defeated them. Most of the remaining Northern Xiongnu then submitted to the Han, but a small, defiant minority followed a leader to the north and west, far away from Han China. A controversial theory dating to the eighteenth century attempts to equate these Xiongnu with the Huns who entered the Carpathian Basin in Hungary in 375 and eventually, under the leadership of Attila, threatened Rome in 452.15
CHINA'S FIRST CONQUEST DYNASTIES
In Chinese history the period from the collapse of Han in 220 until the complete reunification of China under the Sui dynasty in 589 is known as the Six Dynasties, a period during which pastoral nomadic peoples took advantage of China's division and internal weakness and conquered the northern portion of the country, while a series of weak native Chinese dynasties ruled in the south with their capital at Jiankang (modern Nanjing). One such dynasty, the Eastern Jin, harbored ambitions against the barbarian occupiers of northern China and seemed for a time to be making good on its vow to reunify China under its rule. In 383 the Eastern Jin turned back a barbarian invasion at the Battle of the Fei River in Anhui, and by 417 the dynasty had reconquered a portion of the Silk Road. By 420, however, the Eastern Jin fell due to internal strife, and barbarian rule over the north was assured for another 168 years while a series of shortlived native Chinese dynasties ruled over southern China. Southern and northern China had more or less fought one another to a standstill that lasted from 420 until the Sui reunification of China in 589. From the fourth through the sixth centuries, several barbarian peoples conquered portions of northern China and ruled over it with semibarbarian, semi-Chinese regimes that were dubbed “conquest dynasties” by early twentieth-century Japanese historians of China. These differed from the classic steppe empire model established by the Xiongnu in that they actually occupied and governed Chinese territory; while the Xiongnu often fought with the early Han and intimidated it into establishing the intermarriage system, the early Xiongnu seldom if ever seriously thought of actually occupying and administering Chinese territory. The conquest dynasties, on the other hand, were familiar enough with Chinese ways that they learned the rudiments of governing an agricultural society and collecting taxes.
Barfield has pointed out that throughout Chinese history, most of the conquest dynasties (with the very significant exception of the Mongolian Yuan of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries) seem to have been “Manchurian” in origin, or from the area the Chinese now call the Northeast. This is probably because the natural environment of the region accommodates all ecologies, including agriculture, pastoral nomadism, and hunting and gathering. Manchuria was thus a sort of training ground or experimental laboratory for barbarian peoples who harbored ambitions of conquering portions or all of China. Several more conquest dynasties followed in Chinese history: the Kitan Liao (916-1125), the Jurchen Jin (1126-1234), and the pre-Yuan Mongols (1234-1279) ruled over significant portions of northern China, while the last two conquest dynasties, the Mongol Yuan (1279-1368) and the Manchu Qing (1644-1912), succeeded in conquering all of China and ruling as alien emperors. Thus, in the last 1,003 years of imperial Chinese history, alien regimes conquered and ruled over some or all of Chinese territory for 730 years, or more than 70 percent of the time. Serious historians of China cannot, therefore, ignore or skim over times when non-Chinese peoples ruled China.
Conquest dynasties have been called “dualistic” because they applied “barbarian” laws and administrative techniques to the non-Chinese peoples and Chinese methods to the Chinese. Conquest dynasties might thus be thought of as multicultural, or at least multiethnic. The first significant conquest dynasty was the Tuoba Wei, which ruled a portion of northern China from 386 to 439 and over all of northern China from 439 to 535.
TANG CHINA AND THE TÜRKS AND UIGHURS
The Türks, or Tujue as they are known in Chinese histories, had their homeland in the Altai Mountains and were originally subjects of the Rouran. But during the mid-sixth century they overthrew their Rouran masters and themselves became rulers of the steppe, with a far-flung empire from Manchuria in the east to the Caspian Sea in the west. Civil war had broken out among them by 581, however. This seriously weakened their empire and divided them into Eastern and Western segments. The Eastern Türks themselves also fell into civil war, and one of the rival khans submitted to the Sui in 584. Eventually the Eastern Türks helped Tang forces capture Chang'an from the Sui in 617, the year before the Tang dynasty was founded.
The founding emperors of the Tang dynasty (618-907) were ethnically part Türk. The first Tang emperor, Li Yuan (Tang Gaozu, r. 618-626), was a cautious man vis-à-vis the Türks, but his son, the young Li Shimin (Tang Taizong, r. 626-649), was more confrontational. He proved his mettle on two separate occasions during the 620s. In 624, while still a prince and during the Türks' menacing of the Chang'an region, Li Shimin rode out with a hundred men to challenge rival Türk khans to personal combat. When they refused, he spread misinformation among them that destabilized their polity. In 626, right after Li Shimin had deposed his father and assumed the Tang throne, the Türks threatened Chang'an again, probably wishing to probe the new emperor's strength and resolve. Much to the distress of his advisers, Li Shimin galloped out of the gates of Chang'an and rode to the Wei River with only six men. He berated the Türk khan across the river for his aggression. When an attendant remonstrated with him for despising the enemy in this manner, Li Shimin responded that he wanted to disabuse the Türks of their notion of internal Tang weakness. Bad weather, internal divisions, and major Tang campaigns against them eventually led to the submission of the Eastern Türks to the Tang in 630, and with this the first Türk empire came to an end. Li Shimin reigned as emperor over the Chinese and Heavenly Khaghan over the Türks, and several thousand prominent Türk families moved to Chang'an and became Tang government officials.
Türk submission to Tang China began to unravel after Li Shimin's death in 649. His successor, Gaozong, generally favored the indigenous Chinese elite at the expense of the Türk officials. Discontent among the Türks arose with a new generation that lacked its parents' and grandparents' memories of the great Taizong. Rebellion against the Tang broke out in 679, and in 680 many Türks abandoned their defense posts at the Tang frontier and fled back to their homeland in Mongolia. The Türk empire was soon reborn, and its leaders immediately began attacking China again, not to invade and hold Chinese territory, but to intimidate China into making economic concessions.
In fact, the Bilgä khaghan, one of the major leaders of the second Türk empire who reigned from 716 to 734, urged his people to avoid the mistakes of their predecessors under the first empire by staying away from China; better for them to exploit China from a distance than to approach it too closely and risk being drawn into the Chinese morass. He literally carved in stone his admonitions to the Türks of his generation:
Deceiving by means of (their) sweet words and soft materials, the Chinese are said to cause the remote peoples to come close in this manner. After such a people have settled close to them, (the Chinese) are said to plan their ill will there. (The Chinese) do not let the real wise men and real brave men make progress. If a man commits an error, (the Chinese) do not give shelter to anybody (from his immediate family) to the families of his clan and tribe. Having been taken in by their sweet words and soft materials, you Turkish people, were killed in great numbers. O Turkish people, you will die! If you intend to settle at the Choghay mountains and on the Tögültün plain in the south, O Turkish people, you will die!…If you stay in the land of Ötükän, and send caravans from there, you will have no trouble. If you stay at the Ötükän mountains, you will live forever dominating the tribes!16
The second Türk empire endured until 744, when internal succession disputes weakened it and the Uighurs, who were former subjects to the Türks, came to power and established their own steppe empire, the wealthiest and most sophisticated that East Asia had yet seen. The Uighurs built a capital city and central storehouse of sorts called Karabalgasun, in modern Mongolia. They were a more stable polity than the Türks because their linear or vertical succession system made transitions to power much less ambiguous and controversial. The Uighurs developed a writing system for their language and seem to have learned even better than the Türks how to exploit and intimidate China from a distance. They secured annual payments of silk from the Tang and got the best of the silk-horse trade that developed between themselves and the Chinese. They also intermarried with the Tang imperial family, and during the middle of the eighth century the Uighurs helped the Tang quell the great An Lushan uprising. Uighur horsemen sometimes rode haughtily through the streets of Chang'an, but the Tang Chinese endured this because they knew they owed their dynasty's survival to them. Ultimately, however, the riches extracted from China and stored at Karabalgasun proved too big and irresistible a target for other steppe peoples. In 840 the Kirgiz, a warlike tribe living along the Yenisei River, swept down into Karabalgasun and destroyed it. The Uighur empire could not endure the loss of its capital and collapsed soon thereafter. The Kirgiz, for their part, retreated to their Yenisei homeland and were not heard from again in Chinese history. Other northern frontier peoples closer to home would soon emerge to threaten China's northern borders and even conquer large sections of northern China.
SONG CHINA AND THE KITAN LIAO AND JURCHEN JIN
A proto-Mongolian people known as the Kitan came to power in Mongolia, Manchuria, and northern China in 907, the same year as the fall of the Tang. (China did not achieve lasting national unification until 960 and the founding of the Song dynasty.) The Kitan regime eventually became known as the Liao and ruled over Manchuria, southern Mongolia, and parts of northern China (including modern Beijing) as a classic conquest dynasty until 1125, when it was destroyed by the Jurchens, who ruled over an even greater portion of northern China as the Jin dynasty (1126–1234), a conquest dynasty par excellence.
A portion of northern Chinese territory that came to be known as the Sixteen Prefectures of Yan and Yun had been lost to the Kitans in 936, and the founding Song emperor refused to consider China completely reunified until this territory was recovered. As it turned out, however, the Song never did govern this territory, although two attempts were made in the late tenth century to recover it militarily. In 979 the Song attacked the Liao but was beaten back with heavy losses; during the campaign even the Song emperor Taizong himself was injured by two arrows. He tried again in 986 to recover the territories and met with some initial success, but was ultimately forced to withdraw after Liao generals managed to cut his supply lines. The accession in 997 of Zhenzong, the timid and naive third Song emperor (r. 997–1022), emboldened the Kitan to make their own incursions into Song territory. Low-level clashes between the two states broke out between 1001 and 1003, but the real conflict began in the summer of 1004, when Kitan cavalry launched several reconnaissance raids deep into Song territory. By the fall the Kitans' hostile intentions were obvious even to Zhenzong, and he reluctantly began making preparations for a major military confrontation with the Liao. He accepted advice from his two imperial counsellors to rally the Song troops and overawe the Kitan by personally leading an expeditionary force from Kaifeng (the Northern Song capital, just south of the Yellow River) to Shanyuan, the first major town on the north side of the river.
Meanwhile, the Kitans were advancing steadily southward into Song territory, and by late 1004 they seemed poised to overwhelm Shanyuan, cross over the Yellow River, and advance to Kaifeng. Zhenzong wavered in his resolve and momentarily considered withdrawing to Jiangsu or Sichuan, but ultimately his bravest and most competent imperial counsellor, Kou Zhun, persuaded him to proceed with the expedition to Shanyuan in January 1005, which according to Song sources had the desired effect of rallying and encouraging the troops. Meanwhile, Song armies had managed to outflank the main Liao offensive and had made their way northward, thus threatening to cut off the Liao armies deep in Song territory. Both sides recognized that they had fought each other to a standstill, and peace negotiations began in November, although sporadic fighting continued. Peace was concluded at Shanyuan on January 19,1005. The Song essentially bought off the Kitan; if they would stop menacing Song territory, the Song would drop its territorial claims to the Sixteen Prefectures and would agree to annual payments to the Liao of 100,000 ounces of silver and 200,000 bolts of silk.
The Treaty of Shanyuan began over a century of peace between Song and Liao and made the eleventh century one of the most peaceful, prosperous, and innovative (both technologically and intellectually) in Chinese history. Minor skirmishes and disagreements over border delineations broke out in the 1040s and again in the 1070s, but for the most part the peace held. The treaty also led to the exceptional development of “equal diplomacy” between Song and Liao, with a body of Chinese diplomatic language and ritual that regarded the Liao not as an inferior or tributary state, but as a full-fledged equal. After the fall of the Liao to Jurchen forces in the 1120s and the withdrawal of the Song capital from Kaifeng to Hangzhou, annual payments and equal diplomatic treatment on the Shanyuan model were transferred to the Jurchens and their Jin dynasty, although for a brief time from the 1140s to the 1160s the Southern Song was forced to accept the humiliating self-designation of “vassal” (chen) vis-à-vis the Jin.
THE MONGOL CONQUEST OF CHINA
The rise of the Mongols and their world empire was an important geopolitical and military development in thirteenth-century Eurasian history. In 1206 a conqueror named Temüchin united by force the tribes of Mongolia and was proclaimed Chinggis (Genghis) Khan, or supreme khan of nomadic peoples north of China. In 1209 Chinggis Khan attacked the minor border state of Xi Xia and secured its nominal submission. His campaigns against the Jin began in 1211 and continued intermittently throughout his life. At his death in 1227 Chinggis Khan had not fully subjugated the Jin; that task was left to his son and successor, Ögödei Khan (r. 1229-1241), who accomplished it in 1234.
The final conquest of the Jin left the Mongols the rulers of the steppe and of northern China. During the rest of his reign Ögödei Khan concentrated on campaigns against Russia and eastern Europe. His nephew and ultimate successor, Möngke Khan (r. 1251-1259), expanded the Mongol world empire in different directions with campaigns against the Middle East, Korea, and China. Mongolian armies under the command of Möngke's younger brother Hülegü set out for the Middle East, where during the 1250s they conquered Persia, sacked and butchered Baghdad, overthrew the Abbasid Caliphate, and encountered European Crusaders in the Holy Land. The Mongol campaign against Korea began in 1252, and by 1258 their general Jaliyar had conquered the peninsula.
Meanwhile, in 1256 Möngke and his younger brother Khubilai launched a campaign against a much greater prize than either Korea or the Middle East: Southern Song China. Popular stereotypes about the weakness and effeteness of the Southern Song's military notwithstanding, the conquest of Southern Song China was the most difficult military task the Mongols undertook. The Southern Song fought bravely against the Mongols and was finally conquered in 1279, nearly three decades after the Mongols began their attack.
The campaign was complicated by several factors, chief among them the terrain. Much of northern China is flat and relatively dry, and Mongol cavalry usually made short shrift of any resistance offered them there by Chinese infantrymen. In southern China, however, a wet climate and mountainous terrain frequently made progress on horseback tough going, as did the ubiquitous irrigation ditches, waterways, and muddy rice paddies. The heat and humidity of central and southern China were also distressing to the Mongols, who on at least one occasion suspended a campaign until autumn brought more tolerable temperatures. And then there was always the Yangzi River that bisected central and southern China. Any conquest of all China would necessarily mean that the Mongols and their allies would need to deal with the Yangzi. This, in turn, meant that they would need a large navy. The Mongols knew nothing about building or using a navy. In this campaign they were aided and advised by scores of Chinese defectors who had concluded that the political future of China was with the Mongols rather than the moribund Southern Song government.
Möngke's strategy was to attack down the Yangzi River from Sichuan in the west with a naval force that he hoped would destroy the economic foundations of Southern Song China. Möngke envisioned a grand multi-pronged attack that would defeat the Southern Song: He would come down the Yangzi with his naval force, while Khubilai moved down through Hubei and other generals advanced along China's east coast. In planning and strategy it all looked quite good, but in 1259 the entire offensive was called off because of Möngke's death in Sichuan. The Mongols now had to convene a grand tribal council or khuriltai to select a new khan.
After much nasty politicking and bickering, Khubilai was enthroned in 1260 as the new khan. When his overtures to the Southern Song were rebuffed, he resumed the China campaigns, which were to be a central preoccupation of his for the first nineteen years of his reign. The Southern Song proved to be a very tough nut to crack, and there are even scattered indications that the Chinese defenders of the dynasty used some gunpowder weaponry against the Mongol invaders. The Mongol naval attack on the fortified city of Xiangyang on the Han River (a northern tributary of the Yangzi) was waged for five years before the city surrendered in 1273. Chinese, Jurchen, Korean, and even Persian engineers and strategists helped out during this key siege and built a great catapult and mangonel to hurl huge stones at Xiangyang's walls.
After the surrender of Xiangyang, Khubilai chose the Mongol general Bayan to continue the China campaign. Bayan's armies swelled with Chinese defectors such as Lü Wenhuan, the gallant defender of Xiangyang, who were convinced that the Mongols would be the new rulers of China. Bayan's sheer numbers, the high morale of the Chinese defectors who threw in their lot with him, and the tactical advantage afforded by his superior artillery made him invincible. Bayan occupied towns along the Yangzi that surrendered to him and utterly devastated those such as Changzhou that repeatedly resisted his overtures. In January 1276 the Southern Song capital at Hangzhou finally surrendered to the Mongols and submitted the dynasty's official seal to Bayan. A few die-hard Song loyalists fled farther south and set up a scion of the Song royal family as a claimant. On March 19, 1279, however, these pretensions came to an end when the last Song emperor, a child, perished in the arms of a Song loyalist who jumped with him into the sea off southern Guangdong province. From this time until his death in 1294, Khubilai reigned as Grand Khan of the Mongol world empire and as emperor over China.
YUAN CHINA
The Mongols started out as a steppe empire but ended up a conquest dynasty. This political transformation from intimidation to administration was remarkable and seems to have been begun by Möngke and finished by Khubilai, two grandsons of Chinggis Khan who had grown up with some familiarity with the Chinese world and probably some knowledge of the early Tang emperors' dual positions as khans of the nomads and emperors to the Chinese.
Khubilai and subsequent Yuan emperors did not please everyone among the Mongolian elite. Mongol accommodationists approved of Khubilai's adoption of Chinese-style administrative techniques for China. Steppe traditionalists, on the other hand, were suspicious of this and deplored Khubilai's seeming fascination with the Chinese world. They seem to have resented Khubilai's removal of the capital of the Mongol world empire from Karakorum in Mongolia to Beijing in China. Thus, as with emperors of native Chinese dynasties, Khubilai had to worry about threats and challenges from the northern frontier. At the very beginning of his reign, Khubilai was challenged by a hardline steppe partisan named Ariq-böke and fought a four-year civil war before finally defeating him. Another steppe dissident and rival named Qaidu was a continual challenge to Khubilai.
Yuan administration in China after Khubilai's death was very unstable and unpredictable because it was determined by the orientations or worldviews of the much lesser emperors who succeeded him. Yuan governance after Khubilai was a comedy of jarring errors and lurching inconsistencies as accommodationist and traditionalist emperors sought to reverse the policies and approaches of their predecessors. By the 1350s Yuan rule over China was so disorganized and decentralized that a native Chinese insurgent named Zhu Yuanzhang was able to overthrow the dynasty in 1368. Zhu became founding emperor of the Ming dynasty and spent much of the rest of his life recentralizing imperial power and concentrating it in his own hands. Ming administrative centralization and political “despotism” was probably more of a reaction against Mongol government than a continuation or result of it.
MING AND MONGOLS
The Ming was the only major native Chinese dynasty that did not have a powerful unified nomadic steppe empire on its northern border. This may well have been, as Barfield argues, because the Ming largely refused to accommodate the Mongols commercially, thus depriving them of the material prerequisites of nomadic empire.17 After all, Ming China had thrown off the Mongol yoke with the greatest of difficulty and was quite fearful of contributing to its own reconquest. But this very fear of Mongol revanchism also led to seemingly incessant nomadic raiding on China's northern frontiers. Definitive peace between Ming China and the Mongols was not reached until 1571, near the end of the dynasty.
The first Ming emperor (Taizu; r. 1368-1398) and his son (Chengzu, or the Yongle emperor; r. 1402-1424) personally led campaigns deep into Mongolia, probably not for conquest but to keep the Mongols divided and off balance. After about 1400, the Mongols were increasingly divided into two competing groups: the Western Mongols or Oirats in the Altai Mountains and the Eastern Mongols in central and southern Mongolia. Construction of the Great Wall began during the Yongle emperor's reign, and thereafter there seem to have been few if any Ming excursions north of it. As early as 1389 three Mongolian groupings known as the Three Commanderies submitted to the Ming and served in the Ming armies in order to escape recriminations by other Mongols. These Mongol tribes and also several Jurchen groups who submitted to the Ming around 1400 were allowed to offer tribute to China twice a year, which as usual proved handsomely profitable for them.
By the mid-fifteenth century, however, these tribute relations were largely disrupted as Esen-tayisi came to power and attempted to establish a steppe empire unifying all Mongols under his rule. Esen was an Oirat and not a member of the Chinggisid lineage, so he could not lay claim to the title of khan, but only to tayiši, more or less “grand master.” For his legitimacy he maintained a Chinggisid khan as a puppet and claimed to be acting on his behalf. In 1449 Esen launched a huge attack on Ming China in three columns and managed to march nearly all of the way to Beijing. A chief eunuch at court, perhaps thinking of the Shanyuan precedent, convinced the Zhengtong emperor (r. 1435-49) to go out and meet the Mongols in battle. This turned out to be a disastrous strategic miscalculation, however, because Esen surrounded the imperial encampment at Tumu and eventually captured the emperor. Thinking that he now had a valuable bargaining chip for pressuring the Ming into concluding a tributary alliance with him, he pressed his attack on Beijing but failed to take the city. And the Ming, as it turned out, responded to the capture of the Zhengtong emperor simply by enthroning another, Jingtai (a monarch whose posthumous title, Daizong, means something like “substitute emperor”), who reigned from 1449 to 1457, when the old emperor finally reclaimed his throne, this time as the Tianshun emperor. Seemingly deprived of the value of his imperial captive but apparently still fearful of recriminations lest any harm befall him, Esen gave the hapless emperor back to the Ming in 1450. Esen was eventually assassinated in 1454 or 1455 by jealous and disgruntled Mongols who were disappointed with the failure of his China campaign and resentful of his outright assumption in 1453 of the title of khan. With his death the frequency of tribute missions diminished, and by 1500 they had fallen off altogether.
By the mid-sixteenth century, the main raids on Ming northern frontiers were led by the Altan-khan (1507-1582) of the Tümed Mongols from his base at Guihua. Unlike Esen-tayiši, the Altan-khan was a member of the Chinggisid lineage and could thus legitimately be called “khan.” The purpose of his raiding was to compel the Ming to reinstitute the tribute system that had previously applied to the Three Commanderies. The Altan-khan's raids grew larger until, in 1550, Mongol cavalrymen once again were at the very walls of Beijing. This frightened the Ming court into establishing border markets and allowing the Altan-khan to present tribute, but mutual suspicions and antagonisms soon led to the curtailment of the missions and the border markets, and fighting broke out anew.
Definitive peace between Ming China and the Altan-khan was not established until 1570, largely due to the intelligent policy recommendations of Wang Chonggu, a border official who understood the reasons for the raids. Wang convinced the Ming court to reopen border markets and establish tribute relations with the Altan-khan in 1571, after which the Mongol raids dropped off sharply (although they did not cease altogether) and peace with the Mongols largely prevailed. From 1571 to the end of the dynasty there was little further threat from the Mongol quarter to the security of the Ming empire. By the early seventeenth century the Ming's foreign policy and defense preoccupations were primarily with another frontier people: the Jurchens, a Manchurian people of mixed ecology who would eventually become known as the Manchus and conquer all of China by the end of the seventeenth century.
For most of its history, imperial China was either threatened or conquered, partially or fully, by its northern nomadic neighbors. It seems that major native Chinese dynasties were invariably either threatened by steppe polities at various stages of organization or else overrun by conquest dynasties. Imperial China's failure to solve its barbarian problem definitively before the advent of the Manchu Qing dynasty was a function neither of Chinese administrative incompetence nor of barbarian pugnacity, but of the incompatibility and fixed proximity between very different societies, ecologies, and worldviews. Many statements in historical records strongly suggest that the Chinese and the nomads had clear ideas of their differences and were committed to preserving them against whatever threats the other side posed. A tidy apothegm from Carlyle, “All battle is well said to be misunderstanding,” is placed at the front of Sechin Jagchid's work on Sino-nomadic relations, a book dedicated “to the myriads of people who, because of misunderstanding, suffered and died along nomadic sedentarist frontiers.”18 But it may be that the Chinese and the nomads clashed so fiercely and for so long not because they misunderstood each other, but because they understood themselves and each other only too well. For them, battle and conquest are perhaps best said to have been understanding after all.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
The best single-volume survey of Sino-nomadic relations is Thomas J. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China, 221 BC to AD 1757 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). Barfield's book is based on previously translated primary sources, and some of his theories and perspectives are controversial. But the book is still a good survey for beginning and advanced students alike. Sechin Jagchid and Van Jay Symons, Peace, War, and Trade Along the Great Wall: Nomadic-Chinese Interaction through Two Millennia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989) is also based on primary materials but seems more difficult to read because it is topically rather than chronologically organized. Anatoli M. Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) is a fine anthropological treatment of the historical interactions between pastoral nomads and civilized societies, including China. Owen Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of China (New York: American Geographical Society, 1951) and Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers, 1929-1958 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962) remain important reading, although some of Lattimore's conclusions now seem somewhat inadequate.
The single most important book on Han-Xiongnu relations is still Ying-shih Yü, Trade and Expansion in Han China: A Study in the Structure of Sino-Barbarian Economic Relations (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967). Tang-Türk relations are covered in detail in Pan Yihong, Son of Heaven and Heavenly Qaghan: Sui-Tang China and Its Neighbors (Bellingham: Western Washington University, 1997). Aspects of Tang-Türkic relations are also covered in Christopher I. Beckwith, The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia: A History of the Struggle for Great Power among Tibetans, Turks, Arabs, and Chinese during the Early Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). Liu Mau-ts'ai, Die chinesischen Nachrichten zur Geschichte der Ost-Türken (T'u-küe), 2 vols. (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1958) is also an important work. Colin Macker-ras, The Uighur Empire According to the T'ang Dynastic Histories: A Study in Sino-Uighur Relations, 744-840 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1972) is a documentary study of Tang-Uighur relations, but unfortunately it contains some errors of translation.
The most extensive treatment of the Treaty of Shanyuan in a Western language is still Christian Schwarz-Schilling, Der Friede von Shan-yiian (1005 n. Chr.): Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der chineschen Diplomatie (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1959). On Song diplomacy and foreign relations in general, see Morris Rossabi, ed., China among Equals: The Middle Kingdom and Its Neighbors, 10th-14th Centuries (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983). On various aspects of Song-Liao diplomacy, see Jingshen Tao, Two Sons of Heaven: Studies in Sung-Liao Relations (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988).
David Morgan, The Mongols (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) is a solid and readable general survey of the Mongol world empire. Paul Ratchnevsky, Genghis Khan: His Life and Legacy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991); Thomas Allsen, Mongol Imperialism: The Policies of the Grand Qan Möngke in China, Russia, and the Islamic Lands, 1251-1259 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987); and Morris Rossabi, Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988) are all biographies of individual Mongol khans. Chinggis Khan's attacks on the Jurchen Jin are treated in detail in Henry Desmond Martin, The Rise of Chingis Khan and His Conquest of North China (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1950).
The field of Ming-Mongol relations is largely dominated by Henry Serruys, whose major book-length studies include “Sino-Mongol Relations during the Ming II: The Tribute System and Diplomatic Missions (1400-1600),” Mélanges Chinois et Bouddhiques 14 (1969); “Sino-Mongol Relations during the Ming III, Trade Relations: The Horse Fairs (1499-1600),” Mélanges Chinois et Bouddhiques 18 (1975); and “The Mongols in China during the Hung-wu Period (1366-1398),” Mélanges Chinois et Bouddhiques 11 (1956-59). Dmitrii D. Pokotilov, History of the Eastern Mongols during the Ming Dynasty from 1368 to 1634 (Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1976) is also a useful survey. Arthur Waldron, The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) contains much coverage of Ming-Mongol relations. The nonpareil account of the capture of the Ming emperor Zhengtong in 1449 is Frederick W. Mote, “The T'u-mu Incident of 1449,” in Chinese Ways in Warfare, ed. Frank A. Kierman Jr. and John K. Fairbank (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 243-272.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
There is still no authoritative and up-to-date survey of Sino-nomadic relations that draws on both primary sources and modern scholarship. The history of China's first conquest dynasties during the Six Dynasties period is so complicated that it would probably make writing (and reading) a book-length monograph on the subject quite difficult. Three biographies of important Mongol khans are now available, but one still needs to be written on Ögödei. Morris Rossabi's biography of Khubilai covers aspects of Khubilai's campaigns against Southern Song China, but a full-length study in English of the entire scope of the conquest would be useful.
NOTES
1. Ouyang Xiu, Xin Tangshu [New Tang history] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975), ch. 215A, p. 6025.
2. A concise geographical description of Central Eurasia and the steppelands can be found in the chapter by David C. Montgomery in Denis Sinor, Inner Asia: A Syllabus (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1969), 7-17.
3. Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian, vol. 2, trans. Burton Watson (Hong Kong and New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 129.
4. Anatoli M. Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 8.
5. Sechin Jagchid and Van Jay Symons, Peace, War, and Trade Along the Great Wall: Nomadic-Chinese Interaction through Two Millennia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
6. Thomas J. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China, 221 BC to AD 1757 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
7. Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World, 222.
8. Arthur Waldron, The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
9. See, for example, Owen Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of China (New York: American Geographical Society, 1951), 21-25, and Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers, 1929-1958 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 73-84. By no means do I mean here to denigrate the whole of Lattimore's scholarship or to downplay his important role in establishing and popularizing Sino-nomadic relations as a field of historical inquiry.
10. David C. Wright, “Wealth and War in Sino-Nomadic Relations,” Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies 25 (1995), 138. The passage reads “Qin wang wanli cheng” and is from Su Song, Su Weigong wenji, vol. 1 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1988), ch. 13, p. 169.
11. Ying-shih Yü, Trade and Expansion in Han China: A Study in the Structure of Sino-Barbarian Economic Relations (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), 43-44.
12. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier, 54.
13. Yü, Trade and Expansion, 43.
14. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier, 60, 63.
15. For a brief outline of the debates surrounding this theory, see David C. Wright, “The Hsiung-nu-Hun Equation Revisited,” Eurasian Studies Yearbook 69 (1997): 77-112.
16. Talat Tekin, A Grammar of Orkhon Turkic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 261-262.
17. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier, 230-231.
18. Jagchid and Symons, Peace, War, and Trade Along the Great Wall, v.