Peace Gifts or War? A Han Court Debate, 135 BCE

Farmers, Herders and Walls

1For many centuries, farmers in northern China and herding peoples on the grasslands to the north met, traded and fought. In Han times the strongest of these herding peoples were the Xiongnu, skilled horse riders who moved their herds across the steppe. Earlier, during the Warring States period, several northern Chinese states had built walls of pounded earth along their borders.

2In 221 BCE the Qin dynasty united China. The First Emperor sent his general Meng Tian with a huge army, said to number 300,000 men, to drive back the Xiongnu and to join older walls into one long barrier. Many thousands of people were forced to labor on walls, roads and palaces. The Qin dynasty collapsed in 206 BCE.

3The Han dynasty took its place. In 200 BCE a Xiongnu army surrounded the first Han emperor, Gaozu, at Pingcheng, and he barely escaped. Two years later the Han agreed to a peace plan called heqin, or "peace through kinship." A Han princess was sent to marry the Xiongnu ruler, called the chanyu, and each year the Han sent gifts of silk, grain and wine. Markets opened along the border where Chinese and Xiongnu traders met. Even so, Xiongnu bands still raided border towns from time to time.

4Silk was a Chinese invention. Women raised silkworms on mulberry leaves and wove cloth from the threads, and for centuries no other people knew how to make it. The Xiongnu prized silk. Han officials wrote most documents on strips of bamboo or wood, because paper was still rare.

5Emperor Wu came to the throne as a teenager in 141 BCE and gave official posts to scholars of the Confucian classics. In 135 BCE, when the Xiongnu asked to renew heqin, he asked his officials what to do.

At the Court of Emperor Wu, 135 BCE

1Wang Hui, an official who had served many years on the northern border, spoke first. "Your Majesty, every heqin peace lasts a few years, and then the Xiongnu break it. We send them silk, grain and wine each year, yet their riders still burn our border towns and carry off our people. The gifts teach them that raiding pays. Let us stop the gifts and strike them with our armies, so the border can finally be safe."

2Han Anguo, one of the emperor's senior ministers, answered. "Sending an army hundreds of miles into the grasslands brings no profit. The Xiongnu move like flocks of birds. They come like the wind and vanish like lightning, so our soldiers can hardly catch them. Our men and horses would be worn out before they found an enemy, and the farmers at home would pay for it all. Even if we took their land, we could not farm it. Remember the Qin: it drove its people to build walls and fight in the north, and its dynasty soon fell. Let us keep the heqin peace."

3A scholar of the Confucian classics spoke last. "Confucius taught that when people far away do not submit, a ruler should improve his own virtue and good government to draw them to him. If our land is well ruled and our people prosper, even the Xiongnu will come to admire Han ways. A war that wears out the people goes against the Master's teaching."

4Most officials sided with Han Anguo, and the emperor renewed heqin. Two years later, in 133 BCE, Wang Hui helped plan a trap to ambush the chanyu near the border town of Mayi, but the chanyu discovered it and turned back. Heqin ended, and decades of war followed. Han armies drove the Xiongnu north and west, and by about 100 BCE the Han had built walls and watchtowers as far west as Dunhuang, guarding the routes later called the Silk Road. The wars cost so much that the government raised new taxes to pay for them.