beyond the Great Wall, on the way to Smash the Hu, Gao Linfeng didn’t show it. I dropped her off at the town’s massive entrance gate, which had been built by the Ming; she thanked me and waved as I headed off toward Slaughter the Hu.
The towns along this road were heavily fortified, and they were also emptying fast. Everywhere I stopped, residents told me that most young people were already gone. Life here had never been easy—there was a long history of instability, and for centuries these remote areas had been shaped by the impersonal and sometimes violent demands of the outside world. In the old days, these were the borderlands: places like Smash the Hu could engage in Chinese-style agriculture, sometimes marginally, but north of here the land was suitable only for grazing. Herdsmen naturally developed a high degree of mobility, whereas the Chinese were rooted to their farms. They made for good targets, and the clash of cultures was often vicious. “They come like hurricanes and disappear like lightning,” a Chinese minister wrote during the second century BC, describing the nomads. “Moving with no constant settlement is their way of life, which makes it difficult to control them.” One emperor said that fighting the herdsmen “is like attacking a shadow.” Another official described them as “covetous for grain, human-faced but animal-hearted.”
Most nomads weren’t invaders—generally they had no interest in occupying land. They wanted Chinese goods, not Chinese culture; and this perplexed emperor after emperor, dynasty after dynasty. It wasn’t like that in the south, where the empire spread largely through cultural impact rather than military force. The American historian Arthur Waldron has written a book called The Great Wall of China, in which he describes some of the clashes in the north during the Ming dynasty. He told me that it’s critical to understand the Chinese perspective. “To them, it wasn’t Chinese civilization,” he said. “It was civilization. It would naturally appeal to anybody, regardless of their ethnicity, in the same way that dentistry with Novocain would appeal to anybody. And by and large that was the case. As the empire expanded to the south, it wasn’t that Chinese people moved in, but that locals changed their customs. They cooked up phony family trees, they built shrines—they did the same thing that anybody does when they’re trying to enter a new culture. To this day, this is the strength of the Chinese. It’s not force. It’s not that they’ve got spies or secret police. It’s that there is something about being a part of this Chinese world that is appealing to the people around it.”
“The horse nomads are the first people to whom this has no appeal at all,” Waldron continued. “And this baffles the Chinese, because they’ve always banked on any outsider getting hooked on the culture. But the horse nomads don’t do it. They just come in and they rape and they pillage and burn. It posed the same problem for the Chinese as Americans have with al Qaeda, with the people who just hate us. Americans often feel like they just need to know us better. Give them a good old American barbecue, show them what life here is like; they’re bound to like it! But it just doesn’t work. There was a similar fault line in Chinese culture. There was a fault line between a tremendous confidence in the strength of the culture and an awareness that force may have to be invoked.”
Over the centuries, the Chinese response fell on both sides of this line. Sometimes they attacked the nomads, and their methods could be just as brutal as anything done by the “barbarians.” Chinese soldiers searched out camps, and they slaughtered women and children. They engaged in ecological warfare—they set fire to miles of pastureland, to prevent nomads from feeding their horses. And the Chinese prepared defenseworks, building miles of walls across the north. This tactic was especially important to the Ming, who were often too weak to take the offensive.
The problem of the nomads was complex, and so was the Chinese solution. A dynasty like the Ming combined strategies: they tried offensive maneuvers; they built walls for defense; and they also relied on trade and diplomacy. Ming emperors sometimes gave goods and official titles to Mongol leaders, and they sponsored trade fairs at key points along the border. Slaughter the Hu was one such site—during the Ming it became a famous market where people from beyond the wall could exchange goods with the Chinese. But trade was always imbalanced, because nomads had few products that the Chinese wanted, apart from horses. And the government administered such sites closely, in part because they didn’t want Mongols to trade for metal that could be used to make weapons. In the end, the cultural divide was insurmountable.The Chinese were good at producing grain and goods, and they controlled the trade fairs; the Mongols didn’t have the administrative capabilities but they were brilliant raiders. Sooner or later, the conjunction of these two very different groups always resulted in violence.
Nowadays, foreigners still wanted Chinese goods, but they didn’t have to go all the way to Slaughter the Hu to find them. And once again the demands of the outside world had changed this remote place. The Great Wall still ran through the middle of town, which had high garrison walls, and ruined towers rose throughout the valley. It was the most fortified part of the north that I had visited thus far, and it was also the quietest. The main street was little more than a truck stop—a sleepy row of cheap restaurants and auto repair shops that served people going somewhere else. That was all that remained of the local economy; the lure of southern factory jobs had defeated this place in a way the nomads never had. Slaughter the Hu was dying—I didn’t see a single young person out on its dusty streets.
DRIVING SOUTH AND WEST, I followed a long line of signal towers that paralleled the Cangtou River. Ever since I had left Hebei, the land had been getting steadily poorer, and now I reached the highlands of north-central China. The people here live atop loess—thin, dry soil that was originally blown south from the Gobi and other deserts of the northwest. Over millennia, wind redeposited layers in this part of China, where the yellow earth can be as deep as six hundred feet. The soil is fragile but fertile, and at one time the region was forested, but centuries of overpopulation stripped it bare. After the trees were gone, people began carving the hills into terraces, until the landscape acquired the look of a desperate human construction: a layered cake of dust. Rainfall is rare—around ten inches annually—but even such small amounts of water can tear through the brittle soil. Creekbeds disappear into gullies; sometimes a tiny stream burrows its way hundreds of feet below the surrounding hillsides. Most peasants live in yaodong, simple cave homes that have been dug out of the loess. The caves are cool in summer, warm in winter, and disastrous in an earthquake. Ming dynasty texts report that a major tremor in 1556 killed hundreds of thousands of people.
The Great Wall wasn’t a primary reason for the environmental degradation, but undoubtedly it contributed. Everywhere the wall went, it swallowed resources, and the Ming administrators documented the costs of construction. In recent years, an American historian named David Spindler has analyzed the figures for one wall-building project, estimating that for each brick that was fired and set in the wall, soldiers had to burn sixteen and a half pounds of wood. Even in areas where they built the structure out of tamped earth or unquarried stones, they needed wood for cooking fires, and garrison income depended heavily on logging. Spindler’s research shows that during the Ming, only 60 to 70 percent of the wall’s operating budget came from the state, and the rest was made up for by soldiers, often through logging. Some officials complained that this was counterproductive—by stripping the land bare, they only made it easier for horseback raiders.
Four centuries later, the tamped-earth structures seem like the only permanent features on this fluid landscape. I drove past hillsides that had collapsed into ravines, and crop terraces that seemed likely to crumble away tomorrow—but the signal towers still looked ready for war. Their square forms were visible for miles, riding the tops of the terraced hills. Beside the road, one tower had been decorated with a single character:
