Dealing with a Long-Term Problem: China and the Northern Barbarians

Part 1 - Geography - The Han, The Tang, and the Song.

(Pictured: a 3-camel caravan traveling across Mongolia circa 2020. You would have seen this same scene in the year 1000 years ago, and also 2000 years ago).

This is part 1 of a 4 part series. Part 2 - the Ming response - Part 3 - the Manchu Solution - Part 4, Who were the Northern Barbarians?

For a related series on Chinese attitudes towards their military see The Song, Ming, and Qing efforts to built a functional army - Part 1.

Introduction

People in the West think problems which have lasted for 500 or more years are intractable or unsolvable.

Let the Sage tell you about the problem the Chinese had with the Northern Barbarians. They had this problem from at least the time of Shi Huangdi (AKA: Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor) who ruled unified China in 225 BCE, all the way until the problem was finally resolved by the great Kangxi Emperor in the early 1700s. Yes, the Chinese had to deal with the problem of the Northern Barbarians for 2,000 years!

Geography Controls Much of History

China for most of recorded history was bounded on the north by the desert of Inner Mongolia. The desert of Inner Mongolia is not an absolute desert like the Empty Quarter of southern Saudi Arabia. It is a dry region which gets some rain but not enough to sustain any significant amount of farming. To live there requires either traders with food coming from the south, or the people needed to adopt a nomadic life-style, moving with resources - like herds of domesticated animals - always searching for new vegetation to eat.

The Chinese have preferred to live in settled communities surrounded by farmland since the dawn of their civilization. As the desert of Inner Mongolia does not support such a life-style, they didn’t expand their territory or control into this region.

About two hundred miles north of the Mongolian desert, there is more rainfall, snow falls in the winter, and much of the land looks like a vast open park, with some mountains, and some forests. (Photo at the top is the typical landscape). This land, called Mongolia, can support a sizable population of semi-nomadic hunters and herdsmen, which it did up until around 1950 - (now more than 70% of Mongolians live in a city). The people who lived here - somewhat inaccurately called Mongols - did not built cities, did not build houses, did not have writing, or pottery, or much in the way of civilized technology but they did have horses and a strong hunting/warrior ethos.

The Northern Barbarians loved to hunt and they loved to fight. For them, few things were more enjoyable than getting together in the summer when the horses were fed and tempers were high and riding south, across the desert into China. Once in the settled regions of China, they would loot, pillage, rape, and capture Chinese people as slaves. When the large but relatively slow Chinese armies mobilized to fight them, they would usually retreat back north - daring the Chinese to follow them into the desert. When the Chinese did attempt to fight the Mongols north of China, they lost far more often than they won, and at least one time their entire army was wiped out.

The Chinese could not figure out a solution to this problem.

• The desert couldn’t changed. It could never be made into farmland.

• The Northern Barbarians couldn’t be persuaded to leave the Chinese state alone.

• Trade didn’t stop the raids - though it helped.

• An ancient Chinese practice was: marrying princesses to favored barbarian chieftains. For a thousand years the Chinese believed there were only two things the Mongols actually liked: Chinese women and tea. This didn’t work.

• Fortifications didn’t work. For more about the failure of the so-called Great Wall of China see Part 2, the Ming response.

The Han Dynasty Approach - Continuous Warfare

The Han fought a war with the Northern Barbarian (called the Xiong Nu) which lasted for 40 years (133 BCE to 89 BCE). The Han outlasted the Xiong Nu who ended up breaking apart. Victory! Military power works! Well… in the short term yes. Over the long term… the problem just reappeared.

By 150 CE, tens of thousands of the new Northern Barbarians had adopted Chinese technology and training. These new northern barbarians largely outclassed the Chinese soldiers and started to exert political pressure on the fading Han state. In fact the fall of the Han Dynasty was a direct result of the military influence of these Half-Chinese-Half Barbarians. Specifically, Dong Zhuo was from the Xiongnu region of western China and he controlled an army of Chinese-speaking former Xiongnu warriors, including one famous hero of the Saga of the Three Kingdoms: Lu Bu.

By 310, these Half-Barbarian-Half-Chinese warrior tribes seized control over the entire Yellow River region - ruling what had been the cradle of Chinese civilization and culture. Most of the Chinese noble families fled south to the fertile area surrounding the lower course of the Yangtze River, and there they maintained a close approximation of traditional Chinese culture, while the Half-Chinese-Half-Barbarians waged war on them. This division of China between the Yellow River region and the Yangtze region lasted until 581 CE when Yang Jian seized control of the northern kingdom and then swiftly conquered both Szechuan and the Kingdom of Wu, thus re-unifying China.

The Tang Strategy - Wage War to Control the Near North

The early Tang policy was quite different from anything before in Chinese history. For thirty years, the Tang were led by the one of the most European-style leaders in China’s history: Li Shimin AKA Huangdi Taizu of Tang. Li Shimin was a man like Caesar Augustus. He was a warrior-general as a teen-ager, and for the rest of his life he was the prime mover and thinker of the kingdom. Under his skilled direction, Tang armies waged very successful wars against the northern barbarians: the Eastern Turks the Dong Tujue & the Western Goturks. From 635 CE to 900 CE, the Tang maintained military supremacy over all the northern tribes, even as the Tang lost internal cohesion inside China proper.

The Song - Military Failure, Paying Tribute, and Utter Defeat

The Song Dynasty, after unifying the various provinces of China by 980, tried to replicate the Tang system and failed. Their main enemy was the Liao Dynasty, which the great historian Fritz Mote thought highly of. The Liao combined vast military power along with a Chinese-style governmental organization. The Song could not defeat the Liao and actually paid tribute to the Liao from 1005 to 1120 (the Channyuan Treaty).

The Song also fought wars with another, smaller northern barbarian nation: the Xi Xia. These wars were generally inconclusive, much to the disappointment of the Song who greatly outnumbered the Xi Xia.

The Song had a brief moment of vindication when a small Jurchin tribe - under a man named Aguda - rebelled against the now-decadent Liao government. However for the Song, the result turned into an even greater problem as the Jurchins went from being grateful allies of the Song, to contemptuous enemies in the span of just six years. The Jurchin demolished the Liao by 1124 and then, two years later, they attacked the Song and captured about half of the Song territory including the Song’s capital city of Kaifeng. The entire Yellow river heartland of China was again under barbarian control.

The Jurchin - now calling themselves the Jin Dynasty - had a relatively short time of military greatness - roughly from 1114 to 1140. The Song paid them tribute from 1140 till 1230. The Song hated the Jin with a passion but felt they were unable to do anything except defend their remaining territory.

Again, things briefly looked sunny for the Song as the Mongols, starting with Genghis Khan, took over all of the Jurchin territory in a war which lasted from 1211 to 1234. The Mongols under Ogedei Khan finished destroying the Jin in 1234, with some modest aid from the Song. As usual, the barbarians having defeated one enemy of the Song became the new enemy of the Song. The Mongols launched raids on the Song one year after their victory over the Jin - 1235. Mongke Khan, the 3rd ruler of the Mongol Empire, invaded the Song in 1258 but he died while attacking a Song fort near Chongqing. Kublai Khan began the final war against the Song in 1265. - conquering all of the Song territory by 1276.

In 1280 CE, 1,500 years of Chinese efforts to manage the Northern Barbarians had turned into a complete defeat. China had been conquered by the savages from the north. All the victories, the treaties, the tribute, the princesses, none of this had worked. China’s vast population, superior technology, and unparalleled organizational skills had failed. The barbarians had won.

This is part 1 of a 4 part series. See: Part 2 - the Ming response - Part 3 - the Manchu Solution - Part 4, Who were the Northern Barbarians?

For a related series on Chinese attitudes towards their military see The Song, Ming, and Qing efforts to built a functional army - Part 1.