Horses for the Emperor of China
The immense crowd of warriors, mandarins, eunuchs and servants pack the courtyards and terraces of the newly built Forbidden City, straining to get a view of the emperor. His dais rises so high above the ceremonial bridge he seems to be floating in the sky with the apsaras. He is pronouncing criminal sentences on a common prisoners, heads drooping down by the weight of wooden cangues locked around their necks. Some he orders flogged, some maimed, very unlucky ones decapitated. A handful are pardoned. Sentences are carried out on the spot by impassive, muscled executioners. Gore quickly pools on the granite paving stones of the courtyard of justice. Normally honored guests, ambassadors from far away Samarkand, are being forced to watch the proceedings, with an increasing sense of foreboding.
This is not a scene out of Turandot, but neither is it a typical day of justice for the denizens of the Forbidden City. The Yongle emperor of the Ming, whose name we usually associate with refined blue and white porcelain, has orchestrated this show of power and cruelty to send a message to the embassy. Some years earlier Samarkand’s ruler, Timur, or Tamerlane, had thrown Yongle’s ambassadors into prison, and assembled a huge army to invade China. Timur dreamt of reestablishing the empire of Genghis Khan from Baghdad to Beijing. His advanced age, a freak blizzard and too much alcohol all contributed to Timur’s death on the frontier of China, and the resulting retreat of his army. The recently enthroned Yongle narrowly escaped a dangerous encounter with an undefeated world conqueror. The ceremony today in the Forbidden City is part of his plan for revenge.
Why did the ambassadors throw themselves into the mouth of beast? It had taken them over a year to reach Beijing from Samarkand (then the capital of Timur’s heirs, an empire that included today’s Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and much of Iran). They could have simply let Yongle stew. But their empire in the 15th century was a major exporter of fine horses, and Ming China one of the biggest customer. The horse trade explains why the ambassadors undertook this arduous, and potentially dangerous mission to Beijing.
When the ambassadors first crossed into Chinese territory, riding at the head of a caravan of precious, they met with generous hospitality. The local governors put them up in comfortable guest houses, fed their horses with fresh alfalfa, organized friendship banquets, and entertained their guests with singing and dancing girls and boys, who also extended post-show companionship. The Iranians had anticipated more frosty treatment, before they could offer their apologies and present their horses to the emperor, so they were very pleased with all these attentions. They let down their guard as they approach Beijing. Here they promptly underwent a cold bath.
These proud horsemen, who never walked anywhere, were ordered to dismount at the outside-most gate of the Forbidden City. They had to walk for what seemed like an eternity between serried ranks of soldiers, armed to the teeth with bows, maces, swords and halberds. At each gate they expected to come into the imperial presence, but found always yet another walkway flanked by soldiers in blackened steel armor, and another 100 yards to trudge forward. They had to trudge up stairs to what looked like an audience hall, and then exit the out the back to yet another hall. Then Yongle kept them waiting, standing, in the sun, for hours while he conducted his exercise of justice. Deeply humiliated, the ambassadors from Timur’s realms kept them composure and waited for his summons.
At last the emperor dismissed his executioners, and summoned the ambassadors to come forward. The armed guards pushed them forward so that they almost involuntarily performed the kow-tow, or fell flat on their faces. They offered their diplomas, written in vermillion ink, explaining their mission in the several mutually understood languages- Persian, Turkish and Chinese. At the signal from the presiding mandarins, the gift horses from the ambassadors’ caravan now ambled into the courtyard for the emperor’s inspection. It was customary, in trade with China, to offer part of the merchandise as a gift, in order to dispose the buyer kindly for the commercial goods.
Horses from the western realms, then ruled by Timur’s heirs, were famous throughout Asia. China had been procuring them for centuries. 1,400 years before, the Han dynasty of China had launched an army 100,000 strong across the steppe in order to bring back just 30 horses from Ferghana, not far from Samarkand. More recently, Yongle had sent the great admiral Zheng Ho to transport horses back from the Persian Gulf, an immense undertaking. Horses so transported to China were famed as “1000 mile runners” and “Celestial Horses”.
In the Chinese heartland wet climate and waterlogged soils provided poor conditions for raising horses. This is why China always had to import them. Where pastures existed, land-hungry farmers gradually pushed out herders. Nearby Mongolia and Tibet raised poneys used to hard work and harsh weather. These served as the workhorses for the Chinese empire, but not the mounts of an emperor. Horses from Samarkand grew two or three hands taller than any of these animals. Now as the grooms presented the gift horses and showed off their points, the ambassadors peered anxiously up as the dais to ascertain the reaction of the emperor.
His response was not long in coming. “I understand that Azerbaijan has fine horses, belonging to Yusuf, Sultan of the Black Sheep Turkmen.” His words hit the ambassadors like a whip across the face. One part of Iran that they had not managed to control was the rich grazing land of Azerbaijan, ruled by their wily rival, Yusuf. Not only was Yongle apparently dissatisfied with the gift horses, he compared them unfavorably to those of their enemy. The emperor summarily dismissed them and retired to his inner chambers. Worse was in store for the embassy.
The fact that the emperor of China knew about the horses of Azerbaijan and the distant sultan Yusuf testifies to the fundamental importance of horses in Chinese statecraft. “Horses are the pillar of the state. When horses lack, the state will fall,” opined a Han dynasty general. China used its diplomacy to control the steppe, to ensure a steady supply of horses for cavalry, post horses and civilian use. It sought fine horses for prestige, and even for geomancy, i.e., magic, as the different coat colors of horses symbolized for them the cardinal directions, white for the west, black for the north, grey for the east, and sorrel for the south. Horses played an important role in religious ceremonies. The imperial family was interred with sacrificial horses. This why all embassies from the horse-rich west brought racy steed to the imperial court.
There was little evidence that the latest gift horses were having the effect desired. As the ambassadors sat glumly around in their guest quarters, they heard a great tumult. Stepping outside, they learned that the emperor had gone riding on one of the gift horses and had been thrown, breaking his arm. They immediately set out for the emperor’s bridle path, and threw themselves flat in the dust, with their arms stretch out in front of them, awaiting their sentences—to be executed like the criminals of the morning’s ceremony.
The emperor had indeed angrily ordered his courtiers to go round up the ambassadors and to execute them summarily. But as they set his arm and put it in a sling, his wrath dissipated. By the time he remounted another horse, he had regained his composure. He rode imperiously up to the Iranians, lying prostrate beside the road, and ordered them to stand up. “The horse you gave me”, he explained calmly despite his pain, “was no good. It threw me. When nations wish to establish friendly relations, it is good that their gifts be worthy.”
The frightened ambassadors replied, with much servility, that this particular horse had belonged to the great Timur himself, and that therefore it was the worthiest present they could have made to the emperor. “I understand”, said Yongle, “But then perhaps it has not been ridden in a long time and therefore is no longer good for the saddle”. The emperor rode off, leaving the Iranians to meditate on this close call, and on the sorry success of their embassy so far.
In the end the emperor must have concluded that he had taught the Iranians enough of a lesson. They had seen his might, his anger, but also his mastery of statecraft. They were allowed to return to Samarkand and tell of the Great Ming Khan (as they styled him in Persian), and there would be no more threats of invasion ever again. Yongle left them with a parting barb, “When you come back remember to bring me horses from Azerbaijan!” Perhaps the ambassadors managed to do this, because they did launch subsequent missions, and secured the right to trade with China, and most importantly, to sell their horses. So in this respect, at great expense and risk to their lives, the ambassadors sent from Samarkand accomplished what they had set out to do.
Timur’s empire broke up, but the new rulers of Samarkand continued to sell horses to China down to the middle of the 19th century. Much of the prosperity of Central Asia and western China depended on this trade. It was only in the 20th century, when petroleum-powered transportation replaced horses for military purposes, that the former realms of Timur turned into a poverty stricken backwater. When I bought a horse in Herat in 1975 the dealer promised me “you can ride this horse to China”. I took this to be a nice verbal flourish, but perhaps somehow the memories remained of the once flourishing horse caravans that traveled to distant Beijing.
Deconstructing Nomad Empires
In the Bible Adam and Eve get to name everything. That was the last recorded instance of people agreeing what names should be given to what. Confucius argued that misnaming things would lead to societal chaos. History writing requires naming the protagonists, and defining their relationships. Not coincidentally modern history writing emerged more or less at the same time as the science of numismatics, since ancient coins proved to be a sure method for identifying the names of ancient rulers and their dynastic connections to one another.
How do we know when we name an ancient people if this name corresponded to their own sense of whom they were? Identity politics existed in ancient times just as today. Peoples often assumed prestigious names for political reasons. The European Avars, according to their steppe rivals, did not descend from the formidable Avars of Asia—they had been slaves to the latter, and they had run away and misrepresented themselves as the real thing. The so-called Heavenly Turks subdued a number of steppe peoples, the Uyghurs, the Nine Oghuz, the Karluks, and the Kirghiz. But because their life-style as horse breeders appeared so similar to the Muslims of Oxiana, all of them wound up being recorded in Persian and Arabic texts as Turks, and this name has stuck.
Modern identity and even international politics place great importance on ethnicity, often seeking to identify the roots of current ethnic groups in a more or less legendary past. Reality offers us intersectionality, an inconvenient dilemma for historians and nationalists alike. I stayed once in a “Kurdish” village in southeastern Turkey. The male villagers, surprisingly however, spoke Turkish while the women spoke Arabic. When my hostess found out that I understood Arabic, she was tickled pink. Whenever I spoke to her husband in Turkish she remonstrated with me, “Ihki ‘arabi, ya Dawud!”
In this book I try to avoid essentialism around either ethnicities such as Turks, Pashtuns, Tajiks or Tibetans, i.e., the assumption that the people we know today existed in the same guise in the past. For example, some historians emphasize the continuity of ancient peoples, using erudite, but often controversial, onomastics to connect the ancient Tokharians with the later Wusun or the Yuezhi. Are these the “same people” or are they merely the same name for different peoples, like the Welch of Britain and the Welsche of Switzerland? In any case the reader still must follow, as in a Russian novel, a huge cast of hard-to-remember names.
To make the narrative easier to follow, and avoid having to split hairs about the language or the DNA haploid types of ancient peoples, I do not name specific protagonists unless absolutely required to do so. I found it unavoidable to speak of the Scythians (but do not differentiate between them and the Sokolatai, Sauromates, Sakas and Alans), Turks (in all the flavours in which they came in ancient times), the Khitans (but not the Xianbei, the Ruanran or the Avars). I also pass over the many exonyms, i.e., the names that the Indians or the Chinese used to refer to groups like the Turks or the Afghans. To help readers who may want to consult a standard history like the Cambridge Histories, I append a list of all my simplifications. I also call all the rulers of the steppe “khan” at the expense of the qaghans, tekins, tarkhans and idikuts. I can’t help but thinking that Edward Lear had a hand in inventing these titles.
Likewise I avoid the essentialism “nomad”. The word suggests to most readers an immutable and isolated lifestyle that sets the nomads apart from the farmers. Recent fieldwork emphasizes the continuities between herding and farming, and between rural and urban living in the steppe. What does appear to be a major distinction between the two lifestyles is horse breeding. This gets around the problem that some peoples practice long distance migration (like the Mongols) involving the whole community, whilst others practice transhumance (like the Kurds of Iran), where only the shepherds move the flocks. But both the Mongols and the Kurds raise horses. This is a full-time occupation, and gives the peoples who practice it a distinctive lifestyle, even if their agricultural and animal husbandry practices may differ from one region to another. Some of them herd camels, some buffalos or even yaks, but the constant feature of the horse breeders is that they live symbiotically with large herds of horses. Horse breeding as a lifestyle is not only highly characteristic of the steppe peoples, it is also a very homogeneous and conservative lifestyle. Archaeological and anthropological evidence points to a strong continuity in the lifestyle of the steppe horse breeders, even as we see the Turks replacing the Scythians, and the Mongols replacing the Turks.
I don’t use the word “tribe”, if I can help it. Many readers assume “tribe” has a fixed meaning, whilst it does not. Anthropologist delight in deconstructing the use of the word tribe by steppe peoples. One investigator asked the Shahsevan Turkmen of Iran about their tribal organisation. Informants mentioned the existence of 4 to 18 tribes and issued conflicting genealogies. Few of the tribal names seemed older than the early 1800s. The steppe tribes can best be thought of as political parties. Just as the Democrats of Thomas Jefferson’s time are not today’s Democrats of Biden, the Tatars of Genghis Khan’s time are not the Tatars of the Russian Federation. Like political parties, tribal groups have emerged and disappeared. In lieu of “tribe” I prefer to use the word peoples. For very large groupings a term like confederation is justified. When we talk about a small group with a defined marital policy (i.e., endogamous vs exogamous), we can call it a clan. Tribe is anything in the middle and maybe nothing.
I have had to make the distinction between settled and steppe states, but the distinction should be less than meets the eye. French anthropologist J.P. Digard contrasts the steppe society of “horsemen” (cavaliers) and the settled society of “squires” (écuyers). Both groups used horsepower for political purposes. The steppe is more coloured by the horsemen because they form such a big percent of the population. In the steppe everyone rides. In settled society horse riding is a sign of social class. The squires play an important role in the settled states because they represent the horse power.
Both kinds of states ruled settled and steppe peoples, though in different proportions. States originating on the steppe relied on horse power to govern. Their khans did not build monumental capitals or palaces, but rather travelled around their realm with magnificent tent encampments. They did this to show themselves to the ever-mobile horse breeders on whose political support they relied for power. Their power was based on loyalty, not on ownership of land. Rulers of settled states often based their power on ownership of lands (crown lands). They built capital cities that functioned symbolically like mandalas, focusing the power of the heavens onto a single city, to a specific palace, to a throne room. Settled people came to pay obeisance to the king. The king did not travel to see his subjects.
Settled and steppe states practiced violence in an equal measure. As the Pirate of Penzance sung, “But many a king on a first-class throne/If he wants to call his crown his own/ Must manage somehow to get through/More dirty work than ever I do.” Both settled states and steppe states jealously managed the balance of power between themselves and other actors. Clients who waxed too powerful underwent preemptive attacks. Struggling independent states found themselves victims of their neighbour’s ambition. Frequently raiding served to test the balance of power. The outbreak of wars, less frequent, not all of them very violent, allowed states to adjust the balance of power by small degrees, rather than risking existential conflicts. In the same way the kings and the khans managed the rivalries between princes, sub-chiefs, and ministers, banishing and executing them occasionally, to preserve their own prestige. When they flinched in this duty the vizier or sub-chief did not hesitate to make replace his master. Kings and khans also promoted, demoted and executed the members of their harem, and again for the same reason, to recalibrate the power dynamics the women’s quarter. Likewise the women replaced the kings and khans with their brothers or sons when the opening arose. I see little difference in the behaviour of the settled states or the steppe ones in this respect. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.