Northern Barbarian Culture was an Evolutionary Response to China

Part 4 of the Series

This is part 4 of a 4 part series. Part 1 - the Geography, the Han, the Tang, and the Song Part 2 - the Ming response - Part 3 - the Manchu solved the problem

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

How to Explain the Northern Barbarians

For a long time, the Chinese officials regarded the problem of the Northern Barbarians as unsolvable (for simplicity the Sage will call the Northern Barbarians: the Mongols for the rest of this essay). As far as the Chinese experts in history and government were concerned there was no solution. China’s government just had to live with the problem till the end of time. As the Sonoma Sage showed in Part 3, the Manchu did come up with a solution, so the Chinese experts were wrong.

What the Sage realized a few years ago was that the Mongol culture was curiously anti-Chinese. Essentially everything the Chinese valued, the Mongols eliminated from their culture.

Here are some of the things the Mongols eliminated:

• Fixed settlements. The Mongols had no cities, towns, or villages. From this one feature, much else flows. The origin of the modern capital of Mongolia - Ulan Bator - is a very large Buddhist shrine, which had been on wheels slowly traveling around Mongolia for several hundred years. One day in 1780, the shrine stopped moving. After a year, it was taken off its wheels and it never moved again (see the History of Ulaanbaatar). Around this now-motionless shrine, a large collection of huts was built. Then more people came to sell souvenirs and food to the visitors who came to pray at the temple, and so the first city of Mongolia was born. There had been no known cities in Mongolia at any time before this!

• Writing. The Mongols didn’t write anything until Ghengis Khan captured a scribe named Tatatonga (~1215) who knew the writing system of the Goturks (the Western Turks). As mentioned in Part 1, the Goturks ruled Central Asia from the 600 till 715 but their writing system lived on after the Islamic conquest of their lands. Tatatonga converted the ancient script to match the slightly different sounds of Mongolian speech. Even after this script was created, the Mongols wrote very little, a few inscriptions, a few religious books and - maybe - the Secret History of the Mongols. Essentially all Mongolian literature dates from after 1850.

• Peace. The Mongols loved to fight. They loved stealing animals from other tribes. Stealing women from other tribes was a core cultural value, as it was the ideal way to obtain a wife. A brave young Mongol man got his friends together, they would ride to the camp of another clan and while his friends created a ruckus, the groom grabbed young woman, rode off with her, raped her, and made her his wife. As one can imagine, this behavior did not lead to harmonious relations between the various Mongol clans. However, it did lead to the breeding of generations of men who valued courage and reckless behavior above all else.

• Pottery and technology in general. The Mongols didn’t make ceramics, nor did they carve jade, or make bronze ornaments or statues. The Mongols traded horses for everything they couldn’t make but needed such as metal cook pots and swords. Other art and silk they stole from China. Doubtless the Mongols had captured hundreds of Chinese men who knew how to make ceramics and metal art, but they weren’t interested in learning this skill. After all, kilns can’t move (not until the modern era).

The Sage could go on but it should be clear: the Mongols disliked everything the Chinese valued. But why did the Mongols do this?

Other Eurasian Steppe societies built towns and cities. Other peoples of Central Asia learned technologies and made their own artworks in metal, stone, and pottery. The Mongols could have easily created cities like Samarkand or Astrakhan - capital cities with buildings and walls, housing a number of literate scholars and officials, yet surrounded by hundreds of miles of grassland for the nomadic herders to live in.

The Mongol rejection of Chinese values was an evolutionary response to the Chinese state

In the early days, around 100 BCE, as mentioned in Part 1, the Han fought with the Xiong-Nu for 40 years. Ultimately, the Han won the war. Many Xiong-Nu settled at the edge of Chinese lands and over time, they became more Chinese and less barbarian. This process was continuous over the next 1,000 years. The Mongols who wanted to settle down could do so, at the edge of Chinese civilization, or by joining the Liao state, or later the Jin state, or later the Mongol Yuan Dynasty.

The people who stayed in Mongolia were the die-hards. The ones who stayed in Mongolia were the men (and women) who century after century rejected the option of settling down, in a house, in a fixed location. The Mongolians who built no cities were the product of generations of men who had resisted the temptations of settled life.

The Mongol ethos became: we don’t live like the Chinese in any way at all. While they are slaves, we are free. While the Chinese work their fields and pay taxes to their rulers, we owe nothing to anyone. While the Chinese rulers spend their days reading endless pieces of paper, we ride in the open air, and see the stars at night.

In strategic terms - as mentioned in Part 3, if the Mongols never built a city, then they could never be defeated. With no fixed abode, they could retreat for months, or even years away from Chinese armies. Most historians believe that the Huns started out as clan of the Xiong-nu but when the other clans submitted to the Han Dynasty, the Hun tribe headed west, slowly crossing all of Asia before they finally arrived in Europe in 430 AD.

Another example: In 1600, under pressure from Russia to the north, and the Durrani Empire to the south, the huge Oirate tribe of Mongols split into different groups, one of which left central Asia entirely and rode to the lands between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea (this became the Kalmyk Khanate). The Oirats tribes who remained in their homeland (modern Xinjiang and Kazakhstan) were ultimately annihilated by the Manchu in the 1700s, as mentioned in Part 3.

The Sage has no doubt that if the Mongols had built cities, the Chinese would have destroyed them. If the Mongols had created settled communities, the Chinese would have captured the residents and taken them back to China. The Mongol lifestyle was - in a very real sense - an evolutionary response to the powerful Chinese state south of them.

Note: there was an alternative way to live next to the Chinese state: never attack China. Look at Korea: no Korean state ever attacked China (from Silla, to Goryeo, to Joseon). Look at Vietnam: the Vietnamese attacked China exactly once in it’s thousand year history.

The Chinese had a Grudging Respect for the Mongol Life

There were two things the Chinese admired about the Mongols.

1. The Chinese liked Mongolian music. The Sage won’t go into the history of Chinese music at this time. What the sage will say is the the Mongols have exerted a powerful influence over Chinese music. The Mongols brought melodies, instruments, and dances from Central Asia to China. The Chinese then incorporated these into Chinese Music. The Mongols doubtless invented many of their own songs - after all, singing to your animals is an ancient tradition.

2. Many Chinese men respect and admire Mongol martial skills. There was a time when the Chinese had their own heroes who could fight from horseback and hit targets with arrows at full gallop. The Chinese know that they set aside their warrior ethos more than a thousand years ago in exchange for poetry and reading the ancient texts of Confucian scholars. They know in their hearts that this was not an ideal trade. In the 1600s and 1700s, the Manchu prided themselves for their ability to live in both worlds: the world of the literate Chinese scholar and the world of the Mongol hunter. It was a difficult balancing act but the Manchu pulled it off for nearly 200 years.

Note: If it seems the Sonoma Sage dislikes the Mongols that’s because the Sage does dislike the Mongols. In the Sage’s opinion, the Mongols under Genghis Khan and his descendants were - on balance - a disaster for humanity. The few good things the Mongols did were dwarfed by the terrible things the Mongols did, not only to China, Korea, Dali, and Vietnam - but also to the central asian Khwarazmian Empire, the city-states of Russia, northern & central India, and yes, to the Abbasid Caliphate. The Mongols brought destruction and death to most of Asia. On net, they destroyed a hundred times more than they created.

That said, the Sage knew one Mongol; he was a friendly young college student who helped me Korea. Modern Mongols have nearly nothing in common with the Mongols of the past. All the warrior genes have been weeded out of the population by centuries battles and defeats. By 1870, it was estimated that 70% of the men living in Mongolia were Buddhist monks! Quite a change from the days of Genghis Khan.

This is part 4 of a 4 part series. Part 1 - the Geography, the Han, the Tang, and the Song Part 2 - the Ming response - Part 3 - the Manchu solved the problem

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