Arthur Waldron, The Great Wall of China, 1990
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Some Chinese, to be sure, wanted exclusion and at various time s advocated wall-building to accomplish it. But others argued for trade and diplomacy, or in effect for peaceful coexistence with the nomads. It occurred to me that rather than being a given, almost an aspect of Chinese [3] culture, wall-building was a policy about which people disagreed, and ought to be studied as such. Thus the first outlines of the present work began to take shape. … [4]
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… Even the route of the Great Wall shown on most maps today is uncertain. … the wall routes shown in them are based on library sources and not on fieldwork. Even the best maps … are not free from errors. … the abundance of conflicting yet exact figures that can be turned up for the length of the Great Wall. Joseph Needham cites an “officially accepted” Chinese estimate from 1962, of 3,702 miles. When Richard Nixon visited China i 1972, the New York Times gave he figure as 2,484 miles while Time magazine favored 1,684. A few years later, in 1798, the China News Agency announced that there were 31,250 miles of wall, without making clear the exact meaning of the figure, while Orvile Schell, wring in the New Yorker in the autumn of 1984 gave he length as 4,000 miles. … Yet clearly, in the absence of surveys and reliable cartography, it must be admitted that the figure cannot be known. [5]
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… The basic conviction has has thus emerged from my research is that the idea of a Great Wall of China, familiar to me since childhood, and with which I began my work, is a historical myth. It is important to understand what I mean by this. The phrase “historical myth” is not intended to suggest that the Chinese did not build walls, or what accounts of their northern frontier fortifications are fanciful or invented. Chinese have been constructing border walls of various kinds since the seventh century BC. The enterprise has been recorded in the histories, and travels, and more recently archaeologists as well, have described some of the remains of these walls. The problems is not with the existence of walls in Chinese history, but rather with the way they we understand and interpret them. [6]
In the past, the numerous questions posed by the evidence about how and why walls were built, what they looked like, and how long they survived, as well as, most basically of all, about what significance they should be given in any general understanding of Chinese civilization, were resolved by reference to a single Great Wall thought of as having a unified history and a single purpose. It is that concept, and the many ideas based on or derived from it, that I am convinced is a myth. Removing it from our historiography will require us to reconsider much that we thought we already knew. But just as importantly, it will reveal the existence of important questions, hitherto concealed by belief in the myth, that must be considered.
… while a number of Chinese dynasties built border fortifications, these did not forma single structure. … rather than being aggregated under one rubric, and considered as part of a single phenomenon, these walls must each be examined and understood in their own historical context. Recognition of this fact, however, leads to a new and basic interpretative question: namely, why did some dynasties build walls while others did not? [7]
… variety of possible approaches to the steppe, ranging from peaceful coexistence based on trade and diplomacy, to outside conquest, to attempted assimilation. … To understand a dynasty’s wall-building then will require considering a larger picture: essentially, the strategic and political origins of what today we might call its “national security policy.”
… “the recovery of the Ordos,” the territory of the great bend of the Yellow river, into which the Mongols moved in the mid-fifteenth century, and which from the background for Ming decisions to build the vast system of border fortifications which in retrospect have been named “The Great Wall.” [8]
… China’s northern frontier has not been walled, but rather quite open. Since no Great Wall has ever supplied a ready-made boundary for them, each dynasty has had to define for itself where its political sway would end. Far from agreeing on a single line, they have made a great variety of choices. … [9]
.. we know very little about the celebrated Qin wall. … [16]
… puzzling that we find little mention of it in the immediate post-Qin period. Scholars of the Qin dynasty noted how the Qin wall seemed to drop out of the historical record as one entered the succeeding Han dynasty. Then, and in records of the Chin dynasty that followed it, armies are described as leaving outposts or crossing mountains, but not walls. … throughout the whole middle period of Chinese history there is very little mention of a Great Wall. … Marco Polo, who is said to have visited China in the late thirteenth [21] century, never mentioned the Great Wall either, an omission that led to much puzzlement … Nor was the Wall ever a subject of traditional Chinese painting. … [22]
… the evidence of the Chinese language itself. … The commonest of the Chinese phrases usually translated as “Great Wall” is changcheng, a term which can be found in the Shichi, 1st century BC. But since the word are used there to refer to a variety of walls, built both by Chinese and by nomads, they cannot mean “The Great Wall.” Rather they must be read literally as “long wall” or “walls.” … [27]
… Unfortunately, it is now being implanted even in Chinese historical texts, where it is not uncommon to find the phrase “Great Wall” supplied in brackets where the text may say something quite different. And in today’s standard Peking edition of the dynastic histories, the phrase changcheng is side-scored, as if it were a proper noun. Examination of historical texts, however, confirms the linguistic evidence that outside of certain literary contexts it is not. We find many fortifications, but no “Great Wall.” … [28]
… the nomadic realm offered possibilities to individuals within the Chinese realm, who from time to time migrated out or defected. To deal with this problem, “the statesmen from China” were prompted “to build walls that limited their own expansion as well as defending them against attack.” This Chinese-initiated process of demarcation in turn created nomadic hostility by cutting off trade with them and the general conclusion is that walls were build for “keeping in, not keeping out,” and hostilities with the nomads are not so much their cause as their con- [30] sequence. … as well shall who in more detail below, it is not true to the latest understanding of the origins and dynamics of nomadism, as explained, for example, in the recent work of Professor Anatoly Khazanov.((Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World)) … [31]
… beginning in the centuries just before the creation of a unified Chinese empire by the state of Qin in 221 BC, and almost until the nineteenth-century, Chinese states faced unrelenting nomadic challenges. During those centuries, the question of how to deal with the nomads became a defining theme of Chinese history. … [32]
… Walls were one possible way of dealing with the problem, and they were favored by certain dynasties: the Qin, the Han, the Northern Chi, the Sui and the Ming in particular were notable wall-builders. But walls were by no means the only, or even the favored, expedient. Other strategies included attempt to divide and conquer the nomads militarily, or to control them peacefully by such means as diplomatic relations, royal marriages, and subsidies. None of these strategies proved entirely satisfactory, however. diplomatic relations and trade could be criticized as humiliation and expansive, offensive warfare was both costly and extremely risky; while wall-building consumed tremendous resources without in most cases provide very effective. Just as importantly, wall-building conflicted, in its attempt to excluded certain peoples and territories, with the universalistic tendency in Chinese culture. … [33]
.. Yet until modern weaponry finally shifted the balance, nomads possessed a powerful military advantage over settled peoples, and from one end of Eurasia to the other, they were feared as the most dangerous of adversaries. … [34]
… Against the threat posed by the nomads, the Chinese, like other settled people, had no reliable military solution. … Realistically, one must ask where there are ways of managing the nomadic threat by other than military means. Are there nomadic needs which settled people can use as a source of leverage? Are there way of drawing nomadic societies into some sort of political structure? Can a settled society hope, by using economic and diplomatic means, at least to reduce hostility with the nomads to a point at which it can be tolerated and coped with? If the answer is no, then exclusion and wall-building make a certain amount of sense. But if the response is yes, then wall-building will appear as an unnecessary wasteful, and even provocative, choice of policy. Ancient Chinese writers debated these question, and modern anthropologists continue to do so. … [34]
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… the Xiongnu were believed to inhabit the north “where the land is cold ad the killing frost come early.” The Shihchi repeatedly calls the Xiongnu lands “unfit for habitation; they were nothing but swamps and saline wastes. in military skirmishes, then ‘cased’ by Chinese troops, the Xiongnu hid “north of the desert in a cold bitter land where there is not water or pasture.” … in the early period … offensive warfare was a favorite option. … But these early offensives proved ultimately futile. … The realization that the nomads could not simply be defeated led the Han to develop policies that sought to manage the threat either by economic and diplomatic means alone, or by using these in combination [39] with military measures.
… The new approach was called hochin, literally “peaceful and friendly relations,” and was followed for nearly sixty years. It combined the establishment of kinship and political ties with the opening of markets on the borders an the payment of subsides to the nomads by the Chinese. A treaty made in 198 BC between the Han and the Xiongnu provided that a Chinese process was to be married to the nomadic ruler, the Shanyu. In addition the Chinese were to make annual payments to the Xiongnu, including milk, wine, rice, and other kinds of food, each in fixed amounts, and the Han and Xiongnu were to equal (“brotherly”) states.
… It is sometimes said that the payments the Han made to the nomads were a grave burden, but this appears not to have been the case. Nevertheless, a clearly increasing trend is evident in the first century BC, with the mount of silk floss presented, for example, increasing five-fold, from 6,000 to 30,000 chin, or about 7,800 to 39,000 pounds, between 51 BC and 1 BC. … the name hochin became shorthand for almost any attempt at accommodation of the nomads … [40]
… famous memorial by Jia Yi, 201-160 BC, which criticized the hochin policy followed by the emperor Wen of the Han. … “The population of the Xiongnu does not exceed that of a large Chinese xien or district. That a great empire has come under the control of the population of a distinct is something your ministers feels must be a source of shame for those who are in charge of the affairs of the empire.”((See further De Bary, William Theodore. Sources of Chinese Tradition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1960.))
… “The situation of the empire may be described as like that of a person hanging upside down. The Son of Heaven is the head of the empire. Why? Because he should remain on the top. The barbarians are the feet of the empire. Why? Because they should be placed at the bottom. Now, the Xiongnu are arrogant and insolent on the one hand, and invade and plunder us on the other hand, which must be considered as an expression of extreme disrespect toward us. And the harm they have been doing to the empire is boundless. Yet each year Han provides them with money, silk floss and fabrics. To command the barbarian is the power vested in the Emperor on the top, and to present tribute ot the Son of Heaven is ritual to be performed by the vassals at the bottom. Hanging upside down like this is something beyond comprehension.”
… incompatibility with Chinese ideas of hierarchy. .. Criticisms such as Jia Yi’s, and a general feeling that as the Han dynasty grew stronger it no longer made sense to be so accommodating with the Xiongnu, led to a reversal of the policy, and in 133 BC a new series of Chinese offensives. … [41]
Just as hochin became a synonym for appeasement, so Wuti’s campaigns became a byword for militarism and the empty pursuit of glory which gradually exhausted the state with prolonged warfare. … if trade and diplomacy were politically unacceptable, and conquest was impossible, then perhaps, some literati argued, fixed and secure defensive frontiers could somehow be established militarily. One early and enduring proposal was for the settlement of troops along the borders where they would support themselves by growing their own food at so-called tuntien, or military farms. … [41]
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Kao Lu concludes his memorial by summarizing the “five advantages of long walls,” a phrase which has informally become its title.
We calculate that building long walls has five advantages. First, it eliminates the problem of mobile defense. Second, it permits the northern tribes to nomadize [beyond the wall] and thus eliminates the disasters of raiding. Third, because it enables us to look for the enemy from the top of the wall, it means we no longer wait [to be attacked, not knowing where the enemy is]. Fourth, it removes anxiety about border defense, and the need to mount defense when it is not necessary. And fifth, it permits the easy transport of supplies, and therefore prevents insufficiency. … [45]
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… The widespread use of frontier walls ended abruptly, however, with the victory of the Tang dynasty, 618-906. For reasons that are still not altogether clear, the Tang was able to break the destructive stalemate between the nomadic and settled polities which had led its immediate predecessor, the Sui, to carry out massive defense work. With Turkish tribal auxiliaries, and light cavalry which displaced the heavily armored mounted forces of the earlier period, the Tang was able to take control of large sections of the steppe. Walls were no longer necessary: building them became, in retrospect, a sign of military weakness. … Modern scholar stress increasingly the many nomadic elements, including ancestors in the Tang ruling group. This cosmopolitanism clearly affected their foreign policy — even making it possible for early Tang emperors to be accepted simultaneously as kaghans by the nomads. … [47]
the Song lost their original foothold in the north … the Song retreated south … The Song did almost no wall-building. … [48-49]
… In such a multinational polity, frontier walls lost any usefulness. It was not until the Mongol empire began to fragment, and its components to redifferentiate themselves, that wall-building was once again undertaken by Chinese. … [51]
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,,, walls in Chinese history are above all the products of policy decision: the study of their ruins, therefore, can be a kind of archaeology of foreign policy. … The Ming began in the fourteenth century with an open frontier, and ended, almost three hundred years later, having the most carefully closed border in pre-modern Chinese history. … [55]
… the Ordos lies just to the north of the modern province of Shaanxi, and thus commands the valley of the Wei river to the south, the location of the early Chinese capitals such as Chang’an; while the later imperial city of Peking lies not far to the east, and is also easily accessible to horsemen dwelling there. Unless the territory is held, the capitals become vulnerable. Owen Lattimore makes much the same point. Normally he lays great stress on the distinct ecological bases of nomadic “barbarian” and settled “Chinese” societies, writing, for example, that the economic logic of Chinese history dictated an exclusion of the former,s because generally “it was best to administer as ‘Chinese’ only territory in which it was possible to promoted the increasingly intensive agriculture on which the new standard of empire was based,” and that did not include the steppe. But this was not true of the Yellow River loop. “The Ordos,” he writes, ” a re-entrant of the steppe — a wedge pointing southward into China — was an exception: the Chinese needed to take it over for strategic reasons.”((Owen Lattimore, Inner Frontiers of Asia, 462)) Ming officials understood this point as well. The problem form them was how to act on it. …
… Ming strategic policy passed through three phases. The first of these lasted … roughly from the founding in 1368 until a catastrophic defeat of a Ming expeditionary force by the Mongols at [56] at place called Tumu in 1449. During this phase he northern frontier appears to have been open: the dynasty’s security rested not on any tangible defense system, but rather on the military prestige the early rulers built up by active campaigning in the steppe. Ming military policies of this early period resembled, in their broad outlines, those of its Mongol predecessors.
But during the second phase, which we will suggest began after the Tumu defeat, and which lasted for most of the fifteenth century, the Mongols lost the skill and the wherewithal to continued to project power into the steppe. At the same time, the Mongols, who had been greatly disrupted by Ming policies in the early phase, began to regroup and reorganize, and to pose a growing threat to the dynasty. This became particularly acute when they moved into the Ordos, in which either Chinese nor nomads had previously established any sort of enduring presence. To the new threats of the late fifteenth century the court was able to adopt no consistent response: instead, it shifted intermittently from offensive to defense approaches.
The third phase began after the defeat, in the late 1540s, of proposals that the security problems should be solved once and for all by means of a massive campaigns to conquer the Ordos and re-establish a position of power in the steppe. Unfortunately, by this time the Ming no longer had an army that could carry out such a campaign, as was clearly demonstrated in 1550, when a Mongol raiding party reached the gates of Beijing virtually unhindered. So instead of trying to fight the nomads on their own terms, as they had in the early years, the dynasty tried simply to exclude them by ever-more-ambitious wall-building. … [55]
… most educated Chinese of the Ming thought of the steppe peoples who had been kin to the Mongols as “barbarians,” and strong currents of thought opposed every sort of tie with them. Distinguishing between the “civilized” and the “barbarian,” the hua and the yi, was after all one of the central themes of the system of thought that, by defining a common culture, gave a degree of coherence to the vast lands of China. Anything that muddled the distinc-[58] tion might threaten that unity, and would be looked on most unfavorably by most of the educated class, even if it made good sense as security policy. … Nomadic attempts to trade or establish diplomatic ties were rejected, which meant that the steppe peoples had no choice but to raid China to obtain the goods they needed. Warfare worsened, and brought with it an increasing need for walls. … [59]