But in the practice of government Wudi favoured concepts and policies more in keeping with those promoted by the Qin First Emperor. Wudi too travelled extensively, refined and consummated the sacrificial rites to be conducted at various sacred summits, and became obsessed by life’s transience and the lure of the immortals in their Paradise Islands of Penglai. Since Han Gaozu had neglected to realign his new dynasty with one of the Five Elements (or Phases), in 104 BC Wudi made good the deficiency. The calendar was revised, a Grand New Beginning announced, and ‘earth’, the element that overcame Qin’s ‘water’, acclaimed as that by which Han ruled. Its complementary colour was yellow and its appropriate number five, though it does not appear that wheel gauges were altered accordingly. The dynasty was thus belatedly synchronised with the waxing and waning of the elemental Phases, and the legitimacy of its having supplanted Qin affirmed in terms, not of the Confucian’s beloved Mandate, but of an esoteric theory more often associated with Daoism.
There is no evidence of legalist precedent being invoked by Wudi to restore the full severity of the First Emperor’s laws and punishments; but the courts were busier and the convict population greater than at any other time under the early Han. Taxes were increased; state monopolies of iron and salt (in 119 BC) and liquor (98 BC) were introduced to raise additional revenue; and convicts, slaves (usually prisoners of war or debt defaulters), conscripts and corvée labourers were mobilised on a massive scale. Roads, flood prevention schemes and imperial monuments accounted for some of this activity; so did the newly ‘nationalised’ foundries and salt-workings, in which unpaid labour was the norm (it would today be called ‘slave labour’). But the main reason was war. ‘Wu-di’ means ‘The Martial Emperor’, and though he seems seldom to have inspected his troops and never to have led them in battle, his reign was one of incessant campaigning, mostly in that great wilderness, devoid of familiar place-names and features, that lay on and beyond the northern frontier.
Here, in an arc extending from the Korean peninsula to Xinjiang, across thousands of kilometres of forest, steppe and desert, China’s sedentary agriculture blended into a harsh and interminable realm of nomadic pastoralism. As in Africa and the Middle East, the relationship between ‘the desert and the sown’ was an uneasy one, potentially beneficial to both but fraught with mutual misunderstanding and suspicion. In east Asia, distinctions in lifestyle and culture between the windswept nomad encampments and the huddled farming hamlets were compounded by differences of race (though this may have been more perceived than real), governance, language, literacy and much else that each held dear in the way of accomplishment. China, ‘the land of caps and girdles’, as Sima Qian calls it, was one thing; the yi (‘barbarian’) country, a land of pelts and trousers, quite another.
But if the social and economic distinctions were clear cut, the vegetational divide was anything but. Cultivation fingered into the steppe; shifting sands invaded the crops. Irrigation could transform desert as dramatically as desiccation could terminate farming. Extensive grazing grounds interrupted the patchwork fields to the south; rich oases dotted the western deserts. While the rivers were few, their watersheds indeterminate and their valleys too agriculturally valuable to be turned into frontiers, the mountains were far, their contours generally surmountable and their directional trends unhelpful. The demarcation of a frontier, let alone its regulation, looked impossible across such terrain and would tax imperial China for centuries.
The Qin First Emperor had not been deterred. His Qin forebears had long experience of dealing with their nomadic neighbours, and Meng Tian’s great push into the Ordos of c. 218 BC had been conducted so as to secure, once and for all, Qin’s northern and north-western flanks. The resulting network of forts, watchtowers, walls and roads – the ‘Great Wall’ of later tradition – might have served well had it been maintained. But the costs were prohibitive, and the years of civil war that followed the death of the First Emperor proved fatal. Troops had been withdrawn, colonists drifted back to the south, and the ‘forward policy’ was abandoned.
Arguably, though, it was the original advance into the Ordos and neighbouring steppe to the east and west which was of more consequence. Deprived of valuable grazing, and with informal trade across the new frontier restricted, the herdsmen beyond it for once made common cause. Effective leadership came courtesy of the Xiongnu, a tribe or lineage that rapidly became the nucleus of a great confederacy. Under Maodun, a young Xiongnu prince who slew his father to claim the title of shanyu (chanyu), or king, in 209 BC, the Xiongnu confederacy swept east, west, south and north, routing Chinese and non-Chinese alike. Shanyu Maodun reclaimed all the lands taken by Meng Tian and penetrated deep into what are now Hebei and Shanxi provinces. Thus, while Liu Bang and Xiang Yu had been fighting to the death on the banks of the Yangzi, Maodun had made free with the northern commanderies and ‘was able to strengthen his position, amassing over three hundred thousand skilled crossbowmen’, according to Sima Qian.
In English ‘Xiongnu’ is sometimes rendered as ‘Hun’. As to whether these two words really represent the same original when mangled by Chinese and Latin pronunciation, there is, however, no consensus; learned opinion blows one way then the other, like the wind across the Eurasian steppe. Certainly the Huns who invaded Europe were nomadic pastoralists like the Xiongnu. They too fought on horseback, terrorised an empire and had to be bought off at great expense. But that was centuries later and half a world away. Judged by the few words that have been identified, the Xiongnu spoke a Siberian language and may well have come from there. Equating them with the Huns of European history is useful only insofar as any mnemonic signage, however dubious, is welcome when negotiating the unfamiliar wastes of inner Asia’s remote past.
Since the steppe peoples left no account of their affairs and were said to be illiterate, nearly all that is known of them comes from Chinese sources. But without much in the way of prior records, a historian like Sima Qian had to rely on quizzing contemporaries with frontier experience, collecting observations of his own and using his imagination. The last unexpectedly extended to representing the nomadic point of view; for his early foray into anthropology and for his supposed ‘barbarian’ sympathies, the Grand Historian has been complimented.3
The Shiji’s section on the Xiongnu themselves is far longer and more informative than that on Nanyue. Evidently the steppe confederation presented Han statesmen with something more than the threat of dynastic and military embarrassment. It was a confrontation in which the empire’s future extent was being projected and its identity forged. With uncanny foresight Sima Qian seems to have surmised the course of subsequent history and anticipated the part that would be played in it by later frontier peoples – Tibetan, Khitan, Turk, Mongol and Manchu to name but a few. In measuring zhongguo’s centrality, stability and cultural superiority against a nomadic ‘other’ of marginal, itinerant and barely literate pastoralists, the Grand Historian set an historiographical convention that would become an historical reality. Han versus Hun was just round one.
Sima Qian conveys this idea by treating the Xiongnu as a recurrent phenomenon prefigured by those non-Xia indigenous peoples such as the ‘Rong’ and ‘Di’ who had been assimilated in Zhou times, and by quoting the stereotypical opinions of his contemporaries. In Chinese, the term ‘Xiongnu’ was explained as meaning ‘Furious Slave’. They were commonly compared to wolves and other predators. A visitation from the Xiongnu was ‘like a flock of birds’ descending on a cornfield. They came ‘like a sudden wind’ and left ‘like a mist’ but ‘with the speed of lightning’. Among such ‘barbarians’, aggression and avarice were inherent and, without long exposure to the refinements of civilisation, nigh incorrigible. The Han would need to be patient, even magnanimous, to overcome them.
Han Gaozu, when not chastising his kings (several of whom had indeed fled ‘northward to the Xiongnu’), had led a personal crusade to expel the Xiongnu in the winter of 200 BC. It did nothing to redeem his military reputation and ended in disaster. Frost-bitten and outmanoeuvred by the Xiongnu rough-riders, the Han forces had been surrounded at Pingcheng, a place near Datong on the Shanxi/Inner Mongolia border. The emperor himself