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 would have been captured but for the intercession of Shanyu Maodun’s queen, who urged clemency as a basis for negotiation. Gaozu and his forces were permitted to beat an ignominious retreat, and after further defections and incursions, the first in a series of treaties that would last for sixty years had been signed in 198 BC.
Known as ‘peace-through-kinship’ (heqin) treaties, their terms were unflattering to Han sensibilities. The Xiongnu were accorded equal, or ‘brotherly’, status; and in return for an undertaking to curtail their incursions, the shanyu was to receive an imperial bride and an annual gift of silks, grain and ‘other foodstuffs’. Effectively tribute, these gifts could also be supposed a bribe or even an investment in that the Xiongnu might become addicted to Chinese products, then dependent on them. Likewise scruples over the export of an imperial princess were stifled by hopes of her giving birth to a half-Han shanyu, or at least exerting a favourable influence on Xiongnu policy. Face could always be saved; but the facts spoke for themselves. In retrospect, imperial China’s first international commitments in the second century BC bear an uncanny resemblance to its last in the nineteenth century AD; though ostensibly between equal parties, both were decidedly ‘unequal treaties’.
With each treaty renewal, the size of the annual tribute/bribe payable to the Xiongnu increased; gold, ironware and liquor were added, while the grain and silk components soared to astronomical proportions. Nor did the Xiongnu incursions in fact cease. They were on a lesser scale but just as frequent, those responsible often being Han renegades or tribal affiliates over whom the shanyu exercised little control. Han resentment grew proportionately. It had peaked in 192 BC when a communication from Shanyu Maodun to the Dowager Empress Lü mischievously suggested that, since both had been widowed and were of a certain age, they might find agreeable consolation in one another’s company. This was too much for the dowager empress, who was all for calling out the army. Cooler counsels prevailed, however; indeed, the final response from one of a normally vain and vindictive disposition plumbs the depths of abasement:
My age is advanced and my vitality is diminished [wrote the dowager empress]. Both my hair and teeth are falling out, and I cannot even walk steadily. The shanyu must have heard exaggerated reports [of me]. I am not worthy of his lowering himself. But my country has done nothing wrong, and I hope that he will spare it.4
Another reading of the shanyu’s original letter interprets his desire ‘to exchange the things that I have for the things that I do not have’ as referring not to caresses but trade.5 If this is correct, it introduces a factor that would soon become central to Han–Xiongnu relations. For the Han policy of making the Xiongnu reliant on Chinese produce was paying off. In subsequent negotiations, access to the markets that had sprung up along the frontier is mentioned among the Xiongnu demands as often as tribute, and its refusal would become highly provocative.
Despite frequent setbacks, Han Wendi and Han Jingdi had continued the ‘peace-through-kinship’ policy. Nostalgia for a Han golden age in the first half of the second century BC would owe much to this costly calm before the storm. Meanwhile Shanyu Maodun’s successors greatly extended their Xiongnu empire, especially to the west, where the Yuezhi people were driven out of the Gansu corridor and Xinjiang to beyond the Pamirs. This prompted a suggestion, credited to the teenage Wudi, for a Han envoy-explorer to try to make contact with the Yuezhi and sound them out about an anti-Xiongnu alliance. A palace official called Zhang Qian volunteered for the task and in c. 138 BC, accompanied by a servant who was good at bringing down game, plus a small military escort, this explorer Zhang disappeared into the desert sunset. He was soon intercepted and taken captive by the shanyu’s troops. How would the emperor feel, asked the shanyu, if the Xiongnu sent emissaries traipsing across China to open diplomatic relations with Nanyue? The mission was an affront to Xiongnu sovereignty and Zhang was to be detained by them indefinitely.
He would in fact escape, but not until ten years later. Resuming his journey, explorer Zhang then vanished into the unknown a second time. He had probably been completely forgotten when in 126 BC, thirteen years older, geographically wiser than any contemporary and lately escaped from yet another spell in Xiongnu captivity, he and his huntsman-companion came trotting back into Chang’an. By then Han–Xiongnu relations had plummeted into all-out war. Nothing would be more timely than central Asian intelligence from an intrepid traveller who deserves recognition as both the pioneeer of the ‘Silk Road’ and the first to play the ‘Great Game’.
On the other hand, nothing would be more challenging than discoveries with a shock value comparable to those that awaited Columbus. For according to explorer Zhang, Han China was not alone in the world: out there, there were other ‘great states’, as he called them. Their people lived in cities; and they too ‘kept records by writing’, an extraordinary revelation. They ‘made their living in much the same way as the Chinese’; and shockingly, they were quite unaware that zhongguo, now taken to mean ‘the Middle Kingdom’, was anywhere near the middle.
EXPLORER ZHANG AND THE WESTERN REGIONS
After coming of age, in 135 BC Han Wudi had signed another ‘peace-through-kinship’ treaty with the then shanyu. The matter had sparked a heated debate in Chang’an, and this had flared again in 134 BC when, with Xiongnu suspicions disarmed by the latest tribute bonanza, prospects for a surprise counter-strike, not to say a perfidious one, seemed particularly favourable. Old arguments were rehearsed, revenge of Gaozu’s defeat at Pingcheng was reinvoked, and Wudi now sided with the hawks; an elaborate plan was approved for luring the shanyu into an ambush in the town of Mayi (in northern Shanxi).
This time there was no disaster, just dismal failure. The Xiongnu got wind of the trick, wheeled about, vanished into the steppe, and repudiated the treaty. Five years of ‘phoney war’ ensued. Xiongnu raids continued but so did the frontier markets, at which cross-border trade flourished as never before. It was all part of the plan. In autumn 129 BC, when the markets were at their busiest, Han armies swooped on four of them. Despite the element of surprise, only one attack was moderately successful. Xiongnu losses were put in the hundreds, Han’s in the thousands, and Pingcheng remained unavenged. But two years later Wei Qing, brother of the emperor’s favourite consort and one of half a dozen charismatic generals to emerge at this time, redeemed the Qin First Emperor’s conquests by retaking the Ordos. It was ‘the
