The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire (34 page)

By the 1470s, the black-market trade in horses had resumed in a
vigorous but unofficial way that benefited private merchants more than the government officials, who were barred from participating. The government officials divided into two camps. Some favored allowing the black market to operate because it prevented the large, armed Mongol convoys from marching on tribute missions to the capital. Others, however, regretted the loss of imperial revenues and control of the horses. By 1479, even the authorities had to recognize the importance of the horse trade, and in an effort to recoup control of the profits from it, the Ming monarch restored its legality as an official matter of policy.

The influential eunuchs in the court struggled to confine the horse trade to the traditional system of allowing barbarians to submit tribute. In the official ideology of the Chinese court, by coming to the court and seeing firsthand the world’s most opulent and advanced civilization, the barbarians would naturally become at least semicivilized. True civilization for the Chinese consisted of three primary parts: acceptance of Chinese writing; urban or otherwise sedentary living; and loyalty to the emperor. While barbarians probably would not adopt all three, the closer they came to doing so, the better, in the Chinese view.

To facilitate the spread of these three primary aspects of Chinese civilization during the Han Dynasty in the first century, strategists had recommended five types of bait certain to lure the barbarians, strategies still followed by the Ming Dynasty more than a thousand years later. The lures included luxurious clothes to corrupt their eyes; superior cuisine to corrupt their mouths; beautiful women and music to corrupt their ears; massive buildings, slaves, and granaries to corrupt their appetites; and, finally, wine and feasts to corrupt the minds of their leaders.

The Mongols rejected all three aspects of Chinese civilization; they had their own writing; they were committed nomads; and they would never bow to a foreign ruler. Manduhai needed trade, but she refused to go through any of the ceremonies of submission or the rituals of tribute, and she was not tempted by a single one of the five types of bait. The Chinese struggled to understand it. The rejection posed
more than a mere insult; it challenged the fundamental worldview of the Ming authorities and threatened to undermine their power if they could not convince a barbarian queen of their superiority.

When she looked southward beyond the Gobi and below the Mongolian Plateau, Manduhai saw enemies on every side, but she also saw home. She knew this land because she was born and reared there. This knowledge and experience gave her an advantage over Genghis Khan and earlier conquerors. Over millennia, the steppe tribes had focused on raiding and conquering cities because that was where the wealth accumulated. With such minute populations compared with the vastness of China, the steppe tribes could rarely conquer more than a few cities before spreading their armies too sparsely. The most successful conquerors had formed dynasties by leaving behind a thin stratum of the Mongol elite at the top of the local social hierarchy, but rarely did these regimes last for long. The enormous population of China eventually swallowed the barbarians or spit them out again.

Sentiment and nostalgia make poor diplomacy, and even worse military strategy. The emotion behind Manduhai’s move remains difficult to ascertain, but she had a clear strategy for specific military and commercial goals. The army that controlled the Silk Route controlled the trade. To maintain the east-west unity of the Mongol people that she had imposed through war, she needed the cooperation of the Mongols south of the Gobi to obtain trade goods. If she could keep the trade goods flowing, whether through military force or by a more peaceful means, she could keep the Mongols united.

Focusing on an external goal and foreign enemies offered a small opportunity to keep the quarrelsome Mongol tribes from directing their hostility toward one another. Manduhai realized that she could protect her government and nation by channeling that aggression toward the Muslims and the Ming armies.

Manduhai proved unwilling merely to sit north of the Gobi, as her first husband had done, and wait for caravans of traders to arrive with
whatever goods they happened to have left over, demanding whatever price they could. She needed to control the caravans from their source to determine which goods they carried and in which direction they flowed. She needed to develop a new approach to China. She had learned from the negative example of the Golden Prince how difficult it was to unite the Mongols north of the Gobi with the ones south of the Gobi in a concerted effort. Even if united, she knew that they could not control China.

In contrast to the expansive territorial acquisition favored by prior generations of steppe conquerors, Manduhai pursued a strategy of geographic precision. Better to control the right spot rather than be responsible for conquering, organizing, and running a massive empire of reluctant subjects. Control of the area between the Tuul River and the Orkhon gave her power over central Mongolia; control of Zavkhan gave her power over western Mongolia. Now, rather than trying to conquer and occupy the extensive links of the Silk Route or the vast expanse of China, she sought to conquer just the strategic spot from which to control them.

Facing the Wall

M
ANDUHAI MAY HAVE BEEN THE
KHATUN
AND
B
ATU
Mongke the khan, but by claiming the office of
taishi
, foreigners such as Ismayil and Beg-Arslan still had a stranglehold on Mongolia by controlling the Gobi and thereby all the trade with China. Not yet strong enough to confront them directly, Manduhai consolidated her authority north of the Gobi. Although she steadily increased her power, ever since Genghis Khan’s conquests more Mongols actually lived south of the Gobi than north. A majority of the Mongols remained loyal to Beg-Arslan and Ismayil rather than to Dayan Khan and Manduhai.

To make Dayan Khan ruler of the whole people, as promised in his title, Manduhai had to win the loyalty of the southern Mongols. Unable at this juncture to mount a military offensive across the Gobi, she chose a more sensible, but still risky, plan. For now, she would let the massive Chinese army contend with Beg-Arslan and his aggression in the hope that they might crush him. The danger, however, was that if the Chinese could not defeat him, Beg-Arslan might emerge with an even stronger claim to being the right ruler for all the Mongols.

Beg-Arslan and Ismayil turned their attention away from Mongolia because the continued crumbling of the Ming defenses presented them with new raiding opportunities. Under Beg-Arslan’s control, the southern Mongol army was gradually nibbling away at the Chinese
borders, pushing back the Ming forces. Under its weak and distracted emperor, the Ming Dynasty had become an empire in retreat. Beg-Arslan sensed that he might now make his biggest conquest by challenging the Ming for command of the Gansu Corridor and thereby the doorway into China. To occupy the corridor, he needed to attack the Chinese stronghold at Yinchuan, the main city of modern Ningxia. This was the final place besieged by Genghis Khan back in 1227, and it was near here that he died. Thus, in addition to its tremendous strategic and commercial value for anyone seeking to dominate trade, the whole area had acquired deep symbolic importance in the cultural psyche of the Mongols.

If Beg-Arslan could seize this place so closely associated with the memory of Genghis Khan, he would have all the greater hold on the Mongols serving around him. Manduhai’s claim to legitimacy derived from the blood link of Dayan Khan to Genghis Khan, but if Beg-Arslan controlled such an important site, it would show that Genghis Khan and the Eternal Blue Sky supported him. Victory in battle would always surpass any other type of legitimacy. Beg-Arslan could claim the mandate of Mongol history.

Beg-Arslan’s strongholds at the Turfan and Hami oases were too far out in the desert to function as supply bases for the conquest of Ningxia and control of the Gansu Corridor. He had moved his troops much closer to his target, into a great loop in the Yellow River. The immense river, known to the Mongols as the Black River, to the Turkic people as the Green River, and to most of the world as the Huang Ho or Yellow River, begins its nearly three-thousand-mile journey toward the sea from the Kunlun Mountains in Tibet, flowing north across the Asian continent. Without an obstacle blocking its course, the river could continue northward across Mongolia and Siberia and out to the Arctic, but the giant Gobi and the massive Mongolian Plateau bar its way. The river forms a large loop before turning eastward and heading to the Pacific instead of the Arctic.

The land enclosed by the Great Loop covers about 83,000 square miles, or an area about the same size as the Korean Peninsula. The
river provides for agriculture along its sides if irrigated, but the interior area can only support grazing. The topography consists of a plateau that rises up to an average altitude over three thousand feet.

The landscape offers steppes of dry gravel, salt lakes, and shifting sands that farmers and sedentary people found alien and hostile, but which the Mongols found inviting and comforting to their aesthetic sensibilities and beneficial to their pastoral way of life. In contrast to the incredibly hot deserts of the interior or the wet agricultural lands of the river plains, the inner loop offered land sufficiently fertile for grazing, but not appropriate for extensive agriculture. It formed a miniature Mongolia, only farther south and with a more benign climate; threateningly close to the Gansu Corridor, it was also the ideal strategic outpost for the Mongols, from where they could easily strike at the heart of Chinese civilization and commerce.

In a series of elegant battlefront reports that survive from the Ming commander Wang Yue, a clear picture of the issues emerges. He suggested a novel tactic of using trade to lure in the Mongols and then attacking them. Because it proved difficult for the Chinese soldiers to go out and find the Mongols, Wang Yue proposed that government officials should send out large supply trains whose movements could be easily monitored by the Mongols and which would pose tempting targets for their raids. Thus the Mongols could be lured in close and then attacked by the waiting military. Although the policy would not prevent Mongol raids entirely, it would discourage them “to dare to penetrate deeply.” Wang Yue began implementation of his policy with campaigns against the Mongols in the summer of 1470 and again in 1471. Although they produced few casualties, they succeeded in heightening the tensions along the border.

After only seven months on his assignment at the frontier a rival officer, Commander Yu Zi jun, opposed Wang’s offensive strategy. Yu prepared an alternative report, hoping to prevent the Mongols from raiding the frontier settlement at Yulin by reviving an ancient, but long neglected, approach of building a wall. According to his proposal, the
wall should be made stronger and larger than the walls of earlier dynasties by constructing it of earth to a height of about thirty feet. Rather than just enclosing specific populated areas, it should be erected along the top ridges of the mountains to provide maximum visibility for spotting approaching marauders and for the relay of signals from one part to another. The signaling alone allowed the creation of an unprecedented long-distance communication network, permitting information to travel faster than a horse, thereby creating the possibility for the coordination of military action along a lengthy line at a much faster rate than the attacking cavalry could facilitate.

Yu proposed building the wall as a more humane response to the Mongol problem, and, as such, it seemed to him more appropriate for a beneficent, civilized nation such as China. The wall would prevent invasion without harming the barbarians. Then, as the Chinese literati had maintained for hundreds of years, the exposure to the complete superiority of Chinese culture would, inevitably in its own natural way, pacify and civilize the steppe warriors. Thus, unable any longer to wage war on the Chinese, the Mongols would become civilized.

The wall would cut across the base of the Great Loop that the Mongols had called the Ordos; eventually, the wall would begin and end at the Yellow River, thereby protecting the agriculturally productive lands within the loop. Yu saw no reason to allocate men and resources to defend empty land that was not productive.

The senior military officials rejected Yu’s plan as too expensive, whereupon, at the end of 1472, he wrote another report offering a cost-benefit analysis that showed how his superiors could, in the long run, save money by building the wall. The financial argument also carried a strongly implied but unstated message. The wall would prevent the soldier-farmers stationed on the border from selling their crops to the Mongols or, worse yet, deserting to the Mongols and farming for them. The desertion rates on the border had risen steadily, and the openness of the border prevented the central authorities from exercising power not merely over the steppe tribes, but also over their own
soldiers. The carefully constructed wall would keep the Mongols out and keep the Chinese in. From the wall and its watchtowers, the guards could just as easily keep watch over the farming soldiers as they could the approach of potential enemies from the steppe.