What Am I Doing Here? (24 page)

He was, however, an improvement on his predecessor, Shih-Huang-ti, the Great Unifier. He did not hound the intelligentsia and burn their books. He preferred to manipulate his subjects, not slaughter them. And like all selfpossessed people he was prey to doubt. Why should the Yellow River want to burst its man-made dykes? ‘You're breaking the laws of nature,' he shouted at the flood, but the flood raged on. How upsetting, too, when magicians turned out to be frauds! One adventurer dressed himself up in a feathered costume, pretended he was only half-mortal, and the wretch couldn't even turn cinnabar to gold.

Increasingly the Emperor pondered the uncertainties of death. Were there Immortals? Where were they? Was there an Afterlife? Or a yawning blank? He travelled up and down the Empire in search of the answer. He sacrificed on mountaintops. He followed up rumours of an immortal footprint. Sometimes the omens were favourable. One year they caught a unicorn, which was encouraging. Then the fungus of immortality sprouted inside the Imperial Apartments, which was better. But why didn't the Immortals eat up the dried meat and jujubes he set for them on a special terrace? And how the court flatterers lied: first they told him to imitate the exploits of the Yellow Emperor who had been lifted, with his retinue, up to Heaven on a whiskered dragon. They then said, ‘This is the grave of the Yellow Emperor,' which it couldn't be. Then, realising their mistake, they said, ‘This is the grave of his coat and hat.' Immortality was a very, very confusing topic. As he grew more confused and mistrustful, he concluded that the answer lay in the Far West – with the Heavenly Horses of the King of Ferghana.

As the Chinese people had multiplied, their field systems had crept over the face of China like a skin rash. In the south there were rice paddies, in the north, millet; and as Chinese rainfall was irregular, farmers always had to irrigate their crops. In a mountain village the headman would delegate a cheerful work-party to dam the local stream. But down on the plains, stopping the Yellow River in spate required an authority more versed in the art of repression.

Chinese civilisation, like that of Egypt, rose from the banks of great rivers. Under the ritual, the Emperor was Chief Water Authority; his government a machine for the control of corvée labour; his granaries the National Bank which could starve as well as feed. Imperial decrees used to begin ‘The World is based on Agriculture'; for the settled world - the only conceivable world – depended on fettering millions to the land and forcing on them a back-breaking routine of work on fields or dykes. Hence the horror of the officials when the machine broke down. Hence their dismay as they thought of the nomads on the northern frontiers. Hence their Great Wall – not so much a defence to keep outsiders out as a fence to keep their own people in.

An ocean of grass extends westwards from Manchuria to the Hungarian Plain. Over its undulating horizons, mounted nomads moved their flocks on a restless search for food. In winter they sheltered under the lee of mountains from the
buran
or white wind of winter; in the spring they relaxed when the flowers lacquered the ground. They were squat men, glued from childhood to their horses, their faces as red as their leather boots. The elements, which hardened them, produced an inflexible attitude of mind. Perpetual movement was their creed, not simply to avert the bad consequences of sitting still, but as an end in itself. In their eyes man was a born migrant, settlement the perversion of degenerates, and cutting the soil to grow crops, murder. They had no use for ceremony. Their migration was their seasonal ritual, their music the howling of mastiffs, clanging of bells, and pattering of feet. But they did have an idea, terrifying in its simplicity, of an All-Powerful Something in a Bright Blue Sky. They called on it to justify all their actions.

In the reign of Wu-ti, the nomads who hovered over the northern frontiers of China were the Hsiung-nu, who were to reappear as the Huns four centuries later when they ripped the Roman Empire apart. Living in felt tents or covered wagons they reduced their possessions to bare essentials, channelling their appetite for finery into brilliant clothes, patchworks of dyed skins and an art of metal ornaments that writhed with snapping monsters. In camp the rich lived as the poor, drank the same fermented mare's milk and ate the same lamb. Wealth could be measured only in terms of livestock, and the lack of stored goods blurred social differences. In any case wealth in animals was precarious. One late snowstorm or a bad drought could reduce a rich man to penury; and this gnawing unease made him cast envious eyes on sitting targets in China. The steppe might appear limitless, but there was never enough grass to go round. Tribes were unstable within their territories and the nomad world was racked with raids and counter-raids.

To a sovereign as spirited as Wu-ti it was intolerable to have a frontier boiling with these kidnappers and extortionists. Without provocation their mounted horsemen would spill over the Wall, swoop on farmsteads ‘like flocks of crows', spatter the countyside with blood, truss up their loot and disappear into fogs. But he refused to be blackmailed into sending them provisions and silks (the Huns even had the nerve to call it tribute). If they wanted the luxuries of civilisation, they'd have to come and beg for them, prostrate themselves and become citizens. However, it was useless to argue with their ruler, the Shan-yu. Morally, he lived in another world. The only way of controlling the menace was a mixture of deceit and force. And as the Huns wore wolfmasks and armour with reptilian leather scales, it was preferable to think of them not as men, but as dangerous animals.

To defeat them Wu-ti had to get horses, horses so fast they could outrun the Huns' steppe ponies, for before the days of aerial bombardment the power of any empire depended on the extent of its horseflesh. But China was not good horse country, and the Chinese were not used to riding. Their past battles had been fought with chariots, but these were unable to compete with the mounted bowmen of the steppe. Although the Chinese had gingerly made some efforts to sit in the saddle, it did not come easily to them. Wu-ti insisted that his armies beat the Huns at their own game and he ordered the training of a light cavalry.

He was rewarded by the discovery of a boy of eighteen called Ho-Ch'u-p'ing, who appointed himself the scourge of the Huns. In 142 BC he split off from the main army with a band of rough-riders, rounded the Gobi Desert, slaughtered the astonished enemy, captured a ‘million' animals and made off with a prime minister. The Emperor loved the marvellous boy and kept enlarging his estate by several thousand households, but the boy said he couldn't think of houses as long as a single Hun breathed. He lectured him on principles of strategy and advised him to read Sun Tzu's
Art of War
(one day to become the military gospel of Mao Tse-tung), but the boy said: ‘The only thing that matters is how
one's own
strategy is going to work.' He was, one suspects, a little monster. He was nasty to his soldiers; one day in the middle of nowhere they were on the verge of collapse, and he had them level a private football pitch. However, the
enfant terrible
burned himself out and died very young. The Emperor heaped a huge mound over the grave, with a stone horse trampling a Hunnish bowman underfoot.

Elsewhere Chinese diplomacy had been meddling in far-off places. Since nomads always quarrelled among themselves, Wu-ti attempted to persuade other tribes to attack the Huns from the rear. Some years before there had lived on the western frontier of China a people called the Yueh-chih, who had reddish hair and blue eyes and who spoke an Indo-European language similar, at several removes, to Gaelic. The Huns had horribly defeated the Yueh-chih and converted the skull of their king into a drinking cup. The latter had then trekked over the deadly sands of Sinkiang and had installed themselves near the present city of Samarkand. The Emperor sent his ambassador, Chang-ch'ien, to find them in the countries of the Far West and persuade them to return to their old pastures. He was delayed on the way for ten years by the Huns, but managed to escape and continue his journey. But the Yueh-chih had no desire to leave the Trans-Oxiana to become a buffer state in a scrubby waste between two equally rapacious peoples.

That part of the mission was a failure, but Chang-ch‘ien had also visited the Kingdom of Ferghana (Ta-yuan). Its inhabitants will have been like the Tajiks who live in the region today, whiskery men with deep-set eyes. They were mad for commerce and lived in mud houses. It was a delicious country, abandoned by Alexander's Greeks not long before. The valleys were strips of emerald between purplish hills. Jade-green streams flowed from the Pamirs through the gardens. White roses twined their way up poplars. There were peaches, apricots, mulberries, the most sumptuous melons in the world, and grapes, several varieties of which Changch' ien took back to China – ‘The White Crystal', ‘The Vegetable Dragon Pearl', and the long one called ‘Mare's Nipple'. The ambassador also reported on the King's stud of horses. They sweated blood, ate alfalfa, and their ancestor had descended directly from Heaven.

From that moment horses and power politics were inseparable for Wu-ti. But it was, apparently, impossible to wheedle the Heavenly Horses out of the King of Ferghana. Then the Emperor heard of another people in the West called the Wu-sun, living in present-day Soviet Kazakhstan. They also had fine thoroughbreds and might be persuaded to attack the Huns from behind. In 111 BC the aging Chang-ch'ien, Wu-ti's Central Asian expert, was dispatched with Imperial gifts, and, with considerable force of character, made the King of the Wu-sun prostrate himself. ‘If you do not prostrate yourself, I shall have to take them back.' The ambassador then said the Son of Heaven would gratefully receive the horses as a gift. The King was pleased to send some, but in exchange he required an Imperial Princess.

At this news Wu-ti consulted the Book of Changes. That convenient book replied: ‘The Heavenly Horses will come from the North-West,' and so he horse-traded an Imperial Princess into the wilds of the Far West. The King was called K'un-mo and as a child had been abandoned on the steppe, where wolves were said to have suckled him and birds had dropped gobbets of raw meat from the sky. But to his bride he was a decrepit old man who could only drink a cup of wine with her. The princess wrote a sad little poem which the late Arthur Waley translated:

Occasionally Wu-ti found time to send her exhortatory messages.

He idolised the Heavenly Horses, until one day his spies told him that Wu-sun horses were not properly Heavenly Horses. True Heavenly Horses belonged only to the King of Ferghana who kept them shut up in his capital. Their whiskers reached their knees. Their tails swept the ground. They had a ‘double-spine like a tiger'. Their hooves were ‘like a thick wrist'. When the sun was at its height they sweated blood. They could grasp the sun, and travel 1,000
li
a day (about 300 miles).

Three thousand miles across the Roof of the World, the King of Ferghana had the horses locked in his stables. Wu-ti had to get them from him. All the curiosities of the West, the jugglers or ostrich eggs, were nothing to the Heavenly Breed. First he tried diplomacy by offering the King a golden horse in exchange for real ones. But the people of Ferghana were bored by Chinese presents and evaded the issue. They felt quite safe. Were there not 3,000 miles of saltpans and singing sands between them and the Emperor's anger? Then in a fit of pique the ambassador took a mallet, smashed the gold horse to bits, cursed all present and left. But the King ordered him to be killed on the frontier.

The Celestial Emperor would not be humiliated by any minor monarch, however far away. He commandeered an enormous army, and put General Li-kuang-li, the brother of a court favourite, in charge. In 104 BC, the army disappeared through the Jade Gate, only to reappear hopelessly reduced some months later. Locusts had eaten every blade of grass that year; tens of thousands of men and horses had collapsed and died. But Wu-ti's generals retreated only in the direction of the executioner's axe, and it was stopped just in time to save their necks. Then an even vaster expedition was planned. Wu-ti emptied the jails of criminals; he sent horse-tamers, and water engineers to divert the rivers of Ferghana; he organised relief supply-trains of dried boiled rice for the whole journey. And this time he succeeded. The army besieged the capital of Ferghana. Its inhabitants killed their irritable old king and promised Li-kuang-li a pick of the Heavenly Horses if he would lay off. The latter chose thirty breeding animals (with the promise of two more to be sent annually) and 3,000 of lesser breeds. And the few Chinese who didn't litter the sands with their own bones returned to marquisates and showers of gold. For what could be more glorious for the Emperor than to have the divine steeds browsing on amethyst fields of alfalfa beside the vermilioned eaves of the palace?

What was the Wonder Horse that sweated blood? It is hard, at this distance in time, to say. But one thing is clear. The Kings of Ferghana had got hold of an animal with ‘hot blood', and ‘hot blood', as any bloodstock expert will tell you, comes from the Near East. Somewhere in North Africa or South-West Asia there had once existed the ancestor of the modern Arab horse: the late Professor Ridgeway said it may have looked like a quagga (an extinct form of zebra), and the Arabs say it all began with Baz, the great-great-grandson of Noah, who captured wild horses and tamed them. Among these early domesticated animals was the horse described by Job: ‘The glory of his nostrils is terrible . . . he paweth in the valley . . . swallowing the ground in fierceness and rage . . . '