Defending Heaven

China's Mongol Wars, 1209-1370

James Waterson

• Publisher: Frontline Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781848326606
• eBook ISBN: 9781783469437
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

"A very readable account of the protracted and ultimately unsuccessful efforts of the Song, Xia, and Jin dynasties to defend China from the Mongols."— StrategyPage
 
Defending Heaven brings together, for the first time in one volume, the complete histories of the wars the Jin, Song, Xia, and Ming dynasties fought against the Mongols. Lasting nearly two centuries, these wars, fought to defend Chinese civilization against a brutal and unrelenting foe, pitted personal heroics against the inexorable Mongol war machine and involved every part of the Chinese state.
 
The resistance of the Chinese dynasties to the Khans is a complex and rich story of shifting alliances and political scheming, vast armies and navies, bloody battles and an astonishing technological revolution. The great events of China's Mongol war are described and analyzed, detailing their immediate and later implications for Chinese history.
 
In this excellent new book, James Waterson tackles this fascinating subject with characteristic verve and skill. Setting the Mongol war in the wider context of China's ancient and almost perpetual conflict with the northern nomads, it sheds light on the evolution of China's military society and the management, command, and control of the army by the Chinese state.
 
"An excellent contribution not only to the study of the Mongol Empire but also to military history . . . Anyone interested in medieval warfare will find Defending Heaven of interest."—Professor Timothy May, in De Re Militari

1

Heaven Inverted China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasions

See the Southern Gate of Heaven, Deep Green, Crystalline, Shimmering Bright, Studded with Jewels.

On Either Side Stood Scores of Heavenly Marshals, Tall as the Roof Beams, Next to the Pillars,

Holding Metal-tipped Bows and Banners. All Around Stood Gods in Golden Armour . . .

Wu Chengen, the Monkey King’s first view of Heaven,
The Journey to the West, c.1580

China’s ‘Mongol problem’ was not unique to the thirteenth century. Many a Chinese dynasty had expended much revenue and blood countermanding the threat of Turco-Mongolic tribes from the north. Indeed, this dated from far back into the second century BC with the invasions of Han Dynasty lands by the Xiongnu, who may or may not have been the same individuals who were known in Europe as the Huns and who would one day be led by Attila to the gates of Rome.

Chinese policy, in brief, was constructed to a degree of appeasement called heqin or ‘harmonious kinship’, which entailed payments to the barbarian,¹ trading with him through frontier markets, and making the outlaw into an in-law through the giving of imperial brides. Along with this conciliation of the barbarian went construction of defensive lines, and agitation and intrigue among the northern tribes to foment wars among them and thereby to divide potential confederations. There was also recruitment of Central Asian cavalry to serve in Chinese armies and the application of military science in the form of early warning stations and systems for mobilising impressively large forces for the defence of the state and for punitive expeditions. The application of this policy over the period of more than a millennium was, give or take a few glitches, generally a successful one, but in the Tang Dynasty it began to crumble.

Arguably the Kitan, a Turkish confederation lying to the northeast of the Tang state, began their movement into Chinese territory as a direct and slightly panicked response to the chaos that the Tang state had collapsed into by the 870s. The Kitan were forced to undertake an occupation of Chinese territory as the Tang court had become a powerless vessel among a raft of more than fifty Chinese warlord states and was incapable of raising tribute in the form of bolts of silk and silver to pay off the Kitan and of ensuring its safe transport to the Kitan court.

The Kitan occupation was unusual, as Turco-Mongolian confederations aimed, generally speaking, to exploit China through the seeking of tribute, often disguised as ‘gifts’ by the imperial courts, through plundering Chinese wealth and through carrying off manufactured articles that could then be sold on through the Central Asian trade system. Indeed, before the establishment of their ‘state’, it was common for the Kitan to build ‘Chinese’ cities in their own lands as centres of production and commerce. Captured and refugee Chinese artisans were commonly relocated to these centres.²

Occupying Chinese territory and becoming one of the settled, as opposed to one of those who fed off the settled, was always likely to be a dangerous policy for any steppe tribe, as it would strain its political system. The organisation of these steppe tribal confederations was based on a very simple principle of exploitation of a cowed state and not on conquest of that state per se, and certainly not on the careful management, administration and husbandry of a settled state. For a tribal confederation leader to demand that his followers give up the saddle and bow and take up the administrator’s chair, as we will see, was always likely to cause dissent among his own people. Furthermore, a steppe tribe, being made up of nomadic cavalry capable of striking randomly and quickly and at multiple locations, was not suited to controlling a region, and if it did take on garrisoning and consolidation as military tasks it sacrificed its very essence. Indeed, great steppe politician though he was, Chinggis Khan’s invasion of China was arguably one of history’s greatest political blunders.³ Any chance of longevity for the khan’s steppe empire was essentially destroyed when he embroiled his nascent state in the conquest of China.

By the 890s, the Tang emperor had become a puppet of northern warlords who had formerly served as his generals. As China disintegrated, the Kitan moved into Chinese territory, and by 947 they had settled and formed their state in modern-day Inner Mongolia and taken the Chinese dynastic name of Liao. The beginning of the end of the chaos that had gripped China for most of the tenth century occurred a few years after the formation of the Liao state. China’s slow march back from anarchy began at the Battle of Gaoping in 954, which halted the Kitan and Northen Han’s invasion of Shanxi. This battle was part of a campaign that brought together a small group of commanders who would form the nucleus of the nascent Song Dynasty. The man who became the first Song emperor was General Zhao Guangyin, who after the battle was promoted to grand commander of the chief of the palace troops. It was in the palace guard that he formed the military clique that would bring him to power.

In February 960 the new Song Dynasty, having unified much of China, established its capital at Dongjing, modern Kaifeng. The verdict of one historian, that ‘Chinese Empires were built slowly at immense cost in blood, and a lot of its history is not dynastic at all but the chaos in between’⁴ seems justified if we review the bloody and destructive wars that the Song waged to put the former Tang lands under Song control and to solidify the border with the Liao.

That the Song army was a capable force at this juncture was shown in December 964, when two columns of thirty thousand men marched into Sichuan province over high mountains in the dead of winter. Meanwhile a further column to their east forced the Yangzi River defence line via pontoon bridges with a mass infantry attack under General Pan Ai, possibly the first time this had been done by any army on such a vast scale, to force the capitulation of the Shu kingdom. In 970 the army also showed itself capable of operating with the close support of a riverine navy when the Southern Han kingdom was defeated.

A peace accord with the Liao that was struck in 974 allowed Zhao Guangyin, who had taken the throne name Taizu, to reduce the remaining small kingdoms that the Tang empire had shattered into. The Southern Tang and Northern Han were conquered, and in 979 the Song turned their attentions to the ‘lost’ sixteen prefectures, which had been part of the Tang Dynasty’s lands before being lost to the new Liao state. Unfortunately, despite the army sent to undertake this task being led by General Yang Ya ‘the invincible’, it was badly mauled at the Battle of the Gaoling River, just west of modern Beijing, with the Song Emperor Taizong fleeing the battlefield, severely wounded, in a donkey cart. This unlucky ruler then faced a rebellion in his capital and he was forced to exterminate much of the royal family in order to bring it to an end.

The consequences of the year 979 on the Song Dynasty were to be immense. The crushing defeat of Gaoling and the Song’s failure to annexe the sixteen prefectures became a festering wound that blinded the Song court to its own interests in almost every subsequent strategic decision it made about the northern border. That the sixteen prefectures were Song lands and the Liao were illegitimate monarchs over them became a virtual doctrine of the Song court. This obsession with the ‘lost’ prefectures grievously misguided the Song emperors and their counsellors at key junctures during the later contests with the Jin Dynasty and then with the Mongols. Furthermore, the near annihilation of the imperial family by Taizong also required the emperor to create an extensive bureaucracy to assist him in ruling. The Chinese government exam system predated the Song, but Taizong and his descendants formalised it as the only route into government and professionalised the roles of bureaucrats. While there were undoubted benefits to this system of government, a major drawback, as we shall see, was that the Song court often acted like a veritable ivory tower: narrow in its vision and often almost deliberately cut off from the realities and dangers that the state faced.

In the novel Der Glasperlenspeil Hermann Hesse created a fictional city named Castalia, where scholars played the glass bead game, an abstract game of pure intellect. Similarly, the intelligentsia of the later Song court did historians a great service to posterity in that they anthologised and thereby saved for us much of China’s military history prior to their dynasty and maintained censuses of a standard that would challenge many modern states to replicate. Indeed, Sima Guang’s monumental ‘Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Governments’ (zishi tongjian) was produced within the court’s cloistered walls in the late eleventh century. But this vast body of work–the censuses aside–is equally a great potential trap for the historian. There was no Caesar, Guderian or Musashi to recount the achievements and failures of the Chinese military in the field, and the civilian officials assigned to the History Office (shi guan) rewrote, condensed and altered records to suit the court’s world view and to make recorded events fit the accepted configuration of dynastic Chinese history and follow the rules of writing historiography as laid down during the Han Dynasty by the great Sima Qian. Their creations were, then, in many ways far removed from the reality on the ground.

There was certainly plenty of material for these Song historians to draw on. China was a paper-rich society, and records of eyewitness accounts, proclamations and appointments and rewards abounded. Unfortunately, once the court historians had steamrollered much of the reality out of them to create a record in harmony with the court’s view, even documents such as the lubu or announcement of victory and xingzhuang or government accounts of conduct, akin to being mentioned in dispatches, lose much of their primary source credibility. The lubu give us quite exact dates and locations, but often grossly overestimate the numbers of the enemy. They also record the number of enemy killed without recording Song losses.

In simple terms, the shidafu–the scholar-officials who recorded Song’s martial history–give us very little military detail because they were not military men. Troy had Homer, Antioch had the anonymous soldier-author of the Gesta Francorum, but the Mongol siege of Xiangyang, despite lasting some five years, had no directly involved author to record the Song’s defence of the city. The lack of military authors is not surprising, given the divorce between the Song’s general staff and the world of the bureaucrats of the court. A Song general could not aspire to be of the literati who governed and recorded the actions of the state as the Roman Ammianus Marcellinus had done. That we have virtually nothing recorded on battle, tactics or details of combat is a result of the fact that those who led in the field did not write.

The men of the pen also set a genre through their hegemony over the culture of the Song state, and their writings are loaded with conventional literary expressions rather than fact. Even Song poetry avoids any narrative about the battle and the clash of arms, whilst in the texts generals are often found quoting from Sunzi, Confucius and Mencius. Such polished reciting of classics is unlikely, given that Song generals were usually part of dynastic clans of soldiers from the lower nobility. Indeed, it is entirely possible that military men had no contact whatsoever with The Art of War and that its frequent quotation in Song records was in fact a mechanism used by civilian authors, designed both to put military men in their place and to intimate a knowledge of martial affairs.⁵ Our other source, individual posthumous xingzhuang, are also unreliable. The Chinese practice of ancestor worship ensured that relatives or clients of deceased generals eulogised them in these accounts with little regard for fact. The court’s detachment from the realities of war also meant that any general reporting success was likely to receive lavish rewards, whilst those who spoke truth to power and admitted reverses were likely to suffer death.

During its early years of existence the new dynasty set itself two tasks that would both define the state and cause it enormous problems in later years. One has already been described above as an unhealthy obsession, and the Song Dynasty spent the first forty-five years of its life attempting to reconquer the sixteen lost prefectures. In this endeavour it was entirely unsuccessful, and from 999 the dynasty moved to a passive defence of the northern border with a series of canals, paddy fields and dykes running east to west across Hebei. This wall of water severely impeded Liao cavalry manoeuvres and, whilst the Liao commonly continued to defeat Song field armies, their incursions were limited and they always withdrew from Song territory after failing against the Song’s second line of defence, their fortified cities. The lost provinces, however, remained a deep psychological scar that was only deepened by the Liao’s frequent hostility.

The second task that the Song emperors and their ministers set themselves was to depoliticise the army and bring it from under the control of regional military commanders and more fully under the newly strengthened civilian central court’s control. In the modern world this would be recognised as a standard approach to the question of command and control in successful states, and in fact the first Song emperor, Taizu, had begun this policy in a highly effective and civilised manner. It is recorded that military leaders were relieved of their command ‘over a cup of wine’ with the emperor. That Taizu and his descendants should follow this policy is not surprising. Taizu himself had risen to power from being just a popular palace guard who organised a particularly effective palace coup, but what was even more important than this was the fact that a military coup had been the key event that had started the collapse of the Tang empire. The rebellion of the overly powerful military commissioner of the northeast, An Lushan, lasted from 755 to 763 and was the catalyst for other previously loyal generals to break away from imperial control and seek independence as warlords. The over-reliance of the Tang on An Lushan and their imprudent showering of honours and military power on him was a lesson from history that the early Song emperors were willing to listen to. In fact, there were other examples of military coups entirely similar to An Lushan’s revolt dotted throughout China’s history prior to the Song Dynasty. A close reading of the dynastic texts would have indicated to the Song government that the army had consistently been an inherently unstable and unknown quantity in all of the country’s various states and dynasties down to their own. The early Song emperors and their ministers therefore decided that the army had to be kept out of politics in order to ensure the survival of the state.⁶

There were clashes between Song and the Liao until 1005, when the Liao invaded and tried to take Chanyuan. Their general, Xiao Talin, was killed by a Song archer acting as a sniper with a long-range bow, and this one arrow caused the Liao advance to stumble. A peace pact, the Treaty of Chanyuan (modern Chanzhou), was subsequently signed and gave birth to one hundred and twenty years of peace. During this time Song culture flourished, but many influential voices at court viewed the Chanyuan covenant with distaste, even at the distance of over a century, and the unhealthy obsession with the recovery of all the old Tang lands continued to exert its malign influence. Continued payments of tribute in the form of two hundred thousand bolts of silk and one hundred thousand ingots of silver every year to the Liao doubtless added to the revulsion of Song ministers for the accord.

The peace also added power to the process of defanging the military. Peace with the Liao ended the requirement for large-scale mobilisations, it accelerated the demise of the military men’s influence at court and hastened the renascence of the ever-present concept in Chinese intellectual life that wen, high culture, was superior to wu, the martial art.⁷ In this respect, therefore, the Song civilian officials were just an extreme example of how men of the pen, throughout Chinese history, had commonly prided themselves on actually avoiding any involvement with military office.

Peace also directly damaged the body of the army itself. The contemporary writer Ouyang Xiu wrote, ‘for thirty three years there has been peace. All the soldiers who have had any experience of war are either dead or decrepit. Those who have been recruited later know nothing of actual war.’⁸ Some reforms were, however, undertaken by the minister Wang Anshi before his fall from office in 1085. In Wang Anshi’s copying of the Tang fubing system, every household with two or more adult males contributed one man as a reserve archer who would train regularly in peacetime and be called up in time of war. This ‘people’s army’ was only a short-lived phenomenon, as were Wang Anshi’s other reforms that granted finance to farmers between harvests, created waterworks to encourage productivity, prohibited feudal service and moved land-holding tax burdens to landowners and away from peasants.

Wang Anshi’s reforms indicate that at least some at the Song court understood that one advantage the Chinese state had over the northern invaders was the strength of its economic base. In Wang Anshi’s view, sustaining the military was only possible through careful husbandry of the land and looking to the rights of lao bai xing, ‘old one hundred names’, the ordinary peasants who both supported the state through their agrarian labour and who could be called upon to defend it. Wang Anshi’s fall from power was, however, indicative of a contrary trend within Song government that favoured exploitation of the populace, accumulation of economic power in the hands of only a few and reliance on a ‘mercenary’ army that lay outside the people. The changes he made–particularly the forging of a relationship between the ordinary populace and the state, and the ordinary Song citizen’s identification with the dynasty–were, though, to have profound effects at the demise of the Song Dynasty and during the collapse of the Mongol Yuan state.

By 1038, many battalions were at only one-third strength and few men could even pull the heaviest crossbows. The frailty of the yangping army recruitment system that had been introduced in the ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Timeline
• Dynasties
• A Note on Transliteration
• Foreword
• Introduction and Acknowledgements
• 1 - Heaven Inverted China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasions
• 2 - Bystanders to Destruction The Mongol Reduction of Northern China
• 3 - All Under Heaven Song’s Long War Begins
• 4 - Feeding the Beast Song Resistance on the Yangzi and Huai and the End of the Mongol World Empire
• 5 - Rumours of a War Court Politics and the War of Attrition
• 6 - A Chinese Civil War? The Fall of Fancheng and Xiangyang
• 7 - Horses on Heaven’s Wide Plain The Loss of Hangzhou and the Flight of the Song Court
• 8 - Child Emperors and Suicides The End of the Song Dynasty
• 9 - The Phoenix and the Dragon The Ghosts of the Song and the Fall of the Yuan
• Epilogue - A Poisoned Wound? China after the Expulsion of the Mongols
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index