Authors: Jack Weatherford
Beg-Arslan’s invasion deeper into Chinese territory created a sense of fear that propelled the discussion of alternate strategies toward planning for a necessary and quick response. The immediate question was not whether to build the wall, but whether to attack and fight the Mongols or to retreat and let them have the territory they were invading.
Commander Wang waited along the frontier of the Ordos for the Mongol attack. It would come soon, but he could not predict whether they would hit him with a frontal attack on his forces or try to bypass him and raid one of the cities under his protection. Would they loot his stores in a quiet attack under cover of the frequent dust storms from the desert, or would they focus all their fury directly on him, perhaps in a night effort to kill him and thus cripple his poorly trained and poorly supplied army?
Like the lonely commanders who had guarded this remote spot for more than a thousand years before him, Commander Wang stood at the edge of an immense empire, waiting and watching for the next onslaught. He knew that, in a truly concerted struggle, his embittered and disheartened men could not stop the Mongols. All they could possibly do was send a warning to the cities and then stand their ground and die one by one, in a vain effort to slow the assault by a few days and allow the city residents to flee or to hastily improvise some protective strategy. Commander Wang and his men were no more than guard dogs whose sole function in life was to bark at the right moment and then die.
At age forty-seven, far from the family he loved and the comforts of the life he craved, Commander Wang waited. To fill his time, he wrote poems, letters, and long reports, hoping he could still be a
part of civilized life by sending his words and name back to be read by someone in the city. From these words, we can see the kind of man that he was, or at least the kind of man he wished to portray to the desk-bound bureaucrats and the supernumerary courtiers who read his work back in the Forbidden City.
In an empire where military men ranked barely above the barbarians whom they were supposed to fight, Commander Wang stood out as a misplaced mandarin, a man trained to become an official in the government hierarchy, not in the military. His assignment to oversee the military command along the border came, in part, as a result of the constant mistrust that the imperial court had in its own army of misfits, exiles, and criminals sent to guard the country. Unable to depend upon them, the court, from time to time, sent out civilian administrators to bring them into shape and keep them from joining the enemy. Wang was more of a guard over the guards than a real functionary.
Knowing that the path to advancement in the Ming military ranks derived more from their ability to use language than weapons, the officers on the front cultivated a style of literary military writing, substituting words and metaphors for victory. As another officer had written: “I braved the snow storm to attack…. I ate dry provisions, drank water found along the route, placed myself under the danger of arrow and rock, and caused myself to suffer. I traveled the desert back and forth for three thousand
li
, and for more than forty days. I went to bed with my armor. At that time I thought that I would not be able to survive.” Fortunately for the author of this field report, despite failing in his military mission, he survived, managed to secure imperial favor, and lived out his old age in leisurely and comfortable retirement. After all, what cultivated official back in the comforts of Beijing could resist such a literary battle report?
But Wang liked being seen as a man of action, and he knew the value of a well-placed dramatic gesture. When he first appeared at court in 1463, he could not stand the long sleeves that covered the hands and impaired movement; so in a potentially serious breach of court etiquette, he cut down his sleeves to allow his hands to move.
Fortunately, the emperor approved of his innovative style, thereby saving him from the ever-vigilant eunuchs and their efforts to keep the young mandarins under control.
When he found himself stationed in the Ordos near the border with the Mongols, his tactical abilities and his military talents became more obvious as he found success in repeated skirmishes with the raiding tribes. In due time, the court relieved him of all his administrative civilian duties so that he could concentrate exclusively on the military ones.
By February 1472, Commander Wang controlled approximately 40,000 soldiers and territory covering three hundred miles of border in the Great Loop of the Yellow River. Yet a detachment of Mongols, probably under the command of Beg-Arlsan, attacked in a raid that decisively defeated Wang’s poorly trained army. After the defeat, the court in Beijing summoned Commander Wang to the capital for a high-level discussion of how to deal with the Mongol threat in the Great Loop. They wanted the tribes pushed entirely from the Ordos area and forced north of the Yellow River.
At the meeting, Wang became trapped between the demands of his superiors and the reality of the troops and resources at his disposal. Commander Wang knew clearly that to defeat the Mongols, he needed an army of 150,000—at least three and possibly four times the size of the one that he had. Yet it would be difficult to supply such a large army in an inhospitable and infertile frontier zone.
Wang devised a new strategy. He lacked the soldiers to defend the border he had, and he lacked the soldiers to pursue the Mongols, defeat them, and expel them from the Great Loop. It was his tactical ability, however, that his superiors had counted on when they placed him in charge. He could find a way when they had not.
His chance came in the autumn of 1473, when Beg-Arslan launched the surprise attack on Ningxia to the south. Commander Wang knew he could not catch up with the Mongols, since by the time he arrived at one ravaged city, the invaders would already be looting another. However, he had decided that if he could not defeat them on the battlefield,
he would strike at their civilian camp, where the raiding warriors had left their families and animals in presumed security. If he could not force the Mongol army out of China, he knew how to make them want to leave.
Commander Wang sent out reconnaissance missions into the deserts of the Great Loop. In October he received word that his spies had located Beg-Arslan’s Mongol base camp where the army had left their families near the Red Salt Lake.
From their perceived safety by the lake, the families could wait out the winter while their men raided one settlement after another and sent back the looted goods to the encampment. Late in the winter, while the Yellow River remained firmly frozen, the army would return across the ice into safe territory, where they could graze their animals and tend their flocks during the spring and summer before returning the following fall to resume the cycle of winter raids.
Knowing that the Mongols did not expect him to mount more than a token defense, Commander Wang abandoned the prior policy of waiting passively; he set out after the civilian camp. Wang Yue headed out with ten units of 1,000 cavalrymen in each. They marched some sixty miles in two days and nights, and when they neared the camp, the ten military units divided into two large pincers, surrounding the civilians. An effective strategy used by Ming forces in earlier fights with the Mongols involved trapping them along a river or lake that prevented their fleeing. Unable to swim, the Mongols could either die by drowning or by slaughter at the hands of the attackers.
The camp probably had the protection of a small guard, but Mongols depended less on military strength in such cases than on the ability of women, children, and animals to flee quickly. Normally, the Mongol guard set up stations some distance from the camp, and from this advance position they could see the dust of the approaching army, hear it, or simply feel the vibrations in the ground long before it came into the range of ears or eyes. Once alarmed, one of the sentries took responsibility to race back toward the camp and sound the warning to flee, while the remaining guard then attacked the invaders in a delaying ploy
to give the others more time to escape. This October attack by Wang Yue’s army, however, came during one of the windiest times of the year. The autumn winds sometimes whip across northern Asia, and as they cross the Gobi, they pick up huge quantities of sand and dust.
Just such a storm formed as the Chinese crossed the desert toward the Red Salt Lake. Initially, the Chinese warriors became distressed and nervous with the bad luck of the storm in a hostile and alien environment they already feared. One of them, however, suggested that they could use the storm as a cover while they continued their advance. Wang Yue rewarded the man for his ingenuity and bravery, and he ordered his army forward.
They struck the Mongol camp without warning from both sides. According to Wang Yue’s account, his men killed or captured 350 Mongols, mostly women and children. They looted the camp, herded up the animals, and torched the
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. Invigorated by their victory over the civilians, the soldiers sought another opportunity to attack. Wang Yue suspected that the Mongol army would soon receive word of the massacre and race back to find whoever in the camp might have escaped or, if possible, to rescue the captives. He set up an ambush and waited. As suspected, the Mongol soldiers came in pursuit of the Chinese attackers, and Wang Yue’s army fell on them, managing to retake much of their loot but with few casualties on either side. Although it was not an important strategic battle, the Mongols suffered a profound emotional loss.
At least in the short term, attacking the civilian camp produced the desired impact on the Mongols. As Wang proudly reported, “When the unfortunate Mongols learned of the massacre of their wives and children they fled with tears in their eyes and for a long time afterwards did not show up in Ho-t’ao.”
The few Mongols who managed to escape fled the area, and Beg-Arslan was forced to retreat with his Mongol warriors from the Great Loop; they crossed back across the Yellow River and temporarily disappeared back into the unknown wastes from whence they came. The defeat of the Mongols and the massacre in the Ordos achieved the
Ming court’s short-term goal of driving the Mongols back north of the Yellow River, but it did not extinguish the Mongol desire and determination to take and reoccupy their former territory. The retaking of the pasturelands south of Gobi became the primary objective of the Mongols under Beg-Arslan, and control of the Ordos ranked as the most important objective toward that goal. Like a wolf retreating into the brush or finding a cave to lick its wounds, the Mongols had left, but they certainly would return.
In the meantime, Commander Wang had become a hero, and a triumphant excitement surged through the court in the Forbidden City. He had achieved the first Chinese rout of the Mongols since Esen’s military capture of the emperor in 1449. Rather than detracting from the conquest, the clever ruse by which Wang had won the victory only added to his credit, since it cost so little money and was accomplished with so few troops. Commander Wang had fulfilled his superiors’ hopes for him when they had counted on his tactical cleverness to drive out the Mongols.
The Chinese military reports categorized the Mongol casualties together according to age and sex but gave no names or individual information. By contrast, the Mongol chronicles, as they almost always did with a horrendous or shameful loss, ignored the massacre with no mention at all. The Mongols never record the names of the fallen in cases such as these.
The Ming court lacked the will or the means to follow up on the victory in the desert. The Mongols withdrew, and the Chinese army could have retaken and occupied the entire Ordos. They could have crossed the Yellow River and driven the Mongols back up onto the Mongolian Plateau and north of the Gobi. Instead, the Ming forces abandoned offensive strategies and turned to the older defensive mode of rebuilding the wall.
For Manduhai Khatun, the encouraging news of the Chinese victory offered only limited grounds for optimism. The Ming commander
had stopped the advance of Beg-Arslan and Ismayil, but he had not killed them. The civilian massacre at Red Salt Lake forced the Mongol army farther back, but Beg-Arslan had lost few soldiers. In some ways he now posed a greater threat to Manduhai than before the defeat.
Despite the Chinese victory, the Ming court recognized that the expulsion of the Mongols from the Ordos would offer no more than a temporary abatement of the struggle. Knowing the reprieve would probably be brief, the Ming officials needed to make a long-term decision.
Lacking an alternative plan of action for a permanent solution, the central government finally acquiesced to Yu’s request to build a wall. Rather than wait for the autumn, both Wang and Yu were ordered to begin building different parts of it simultaneously. Yu began immediately in the spring of 1474 with a building corps of forty thousand men. Despite the uncertainty about the stability of structures erected along the highest ridges, Yu built the wall precisely as he had proposed it, stretching out approximately 600 miles or 1,770
li
. The total cost exceeded a million taels of silver, more than 1.7 million ounces. The final wall consisted of approximately eight hundred connected units of forts and beacon or sentry towers. It had a tower or other fortification about every three-quarters of a mile along the connecting wall.
Wang built his part of the wall farther to the west, and it stretched 387
li
, or 125 miles. Together, however, the two walls created an impressive barrier. Although the two commanders saw these fortifications as temporary measures until the Mongols could be pacified and peace imposed, they had initiated a major change in Ming military policy that would take more than a century to unfold. For the time being, however, the long-term effectiveness remained difficult to ascertain.
As the wall neared completion, both men received transfers. In 1474 Wang Yue was called to work in Beijing, and in the following year Yu Zijun received a new assignment and remained in public service almost until his death in 1489. During this time, he continued the building of walls and defensive measures for the empire. He applied his engineering skills to the design of only one offensive
creation—a large war chariot that could carry ten armed warriors at once. This forerunner of a tank or an armored personnel carrier proved too expensive and unusual, however, and never played a major role in steppe warfare.