Taking Stock (5)
The Qiang people.
One of the nomadic tribes that had crept over the frontier again and again, plundering supplies and giving the Han Empire one colossal headache after another. They were a people much like the Vikings — to die on the battlefield was auspicious, to die sick in bed was an ill omen.
They were every bit as troublesome as any other foreign tribe, truth be told, but there was exactly one thing that set them apart.
From their very origins, they were a people born of other peoples blending together.
Far older than the Three Kingdoms era. By modern, twenty-first-century reckoning, a people with nearly five thousand years of history. They went all the way back to the age of the Yellow Emperor Xuanyuan — one of the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors, the figure traditionally hailed as the dawn of Chinese civilization. In crude terms, their story stretched back even further than "the days when tigers smoked pipes," as we'd say back home — well past time immemorial.
If you mapped it onto Korea, you could say they were the ones scrapping weapon-in-hand with Grandfather Dangun back in the days of Gojoseon. I know there's all sorts of scholarly debate about when Gojoseon was actually founded, but let's not go down that road.
Anyway — why do I call them a people formed from other peoples mingling? The reason was dead simple. The Yan Emperor's tribe picked a fight with the Yellow Emperor's tribe, got thrashed so flat it looked like dust rising on a rainy day, fled west and south, and the people who emerged from their mixing with the local natives became the Qiang.
Oh, and one small note: the Huangdi of Xuanyuan and the Huangdi title Qin Shi Huang coined for himself are actually written with different characters. Seriously, what was with the naming sense of the ancients? Everything sounds the same.
When you rank the great strategists of Chinese history, one name always comes up: Taigong Wang. He wasn't Han Chinese either — he was Qiang. Yes, that's right. The very same Jiang Taigong you think of whenever anyone mentions fishing.
Jiang Taigong — Jiang Shang, that is — did not look kindly on the Shang Dynasty, a quasi-Aztec state that offered up Qiang heads as sacrificial offerings. He eventually became the revered teacher of King Wen of Zhou and his son King Wu, joined them in the great dynastic overthrow, toppled the Shang, and brought all under heaven to order. Granted, it helped that the king ruling the Shang at the time was a genuine lunatic.
King Zhou — yes, that bastard — the one who giggled and frolicked with the seductress Daji while letting an entire dynasty rot beneath him.
So in any case, because the Qiang were a blended people rather than a single bloodline from the very start, they thought nothing of formally joining with peoples from entirely different cultural spheres. Han, Di, Turk, Mongol, Tibetan — the bloodline simply didn't matter. Their guiding philosophy was basically, "If we join together, we're family!" In a way, they might have been the most enlightened of them all.
Households woven from Han and Qiang were common in practice. And the child born of one such union — half Han, half Qiang — was that very man.
Ma Teng, courtesy name Shoucheng.
The records say this half-Qiang Ma Teng stood a towering eight chi — six foot one by modern measure — with a massive frame and a striking face atop a high-bridged nose. Isn't that just the textbook description of Western features?
"Hm~ hm-hm~ ♪"
I watched a woman humming to herself in one of the camps of the army under my command. Even from a distance, her bluish-silver hair gleamed like woven silk. Her beautiful eyes sparkled like cut diamond.
Ma Chao, courtesy name Mengqi. The woman famed as the Splendid Ma Chao of Xiliang for both her looks and her prowess was strolling along with an utterly delighted expression on her face.
"Guh…."
What I found amusing was that the Qiang around her quietly, stealthily backed away at the sight of that expression — keeping their distance like men who had seen something they were never meant to see. That alone was enough to leave a deep impression on me.
CRASH—!
Just then, a tent near Ma Chao collapsed all of a sudden, pulling every eye in the camp toward it.
"Hahahaha! I won, you weak little twerp!"
"Ugh… you damn boar of a man…."
Two soldiers emerged with their armor half-fastened, barely draped over their shoulders. Apparently they'd been holding a test of strength out of sheer boredom. Foreign tribesfolk — strong as oxen, temperaments like wildfire. Inside a camp where men like that were packed together, this was simply the everyday scenery.
…Though this time it may have gone a touch too far. Those two were rolling around on bare ground — did that not hurt?
With a bit of luck, it was the kind of hijinks that could have been brushed off without a second thought. But right now, those two were terribly, spectacularly unlucky.
"……"
Because Ma Chao herself had just witnessed the whole thing.
The Qiang who had won and guffawed, and the one still rubbing his aching back — both of them froze solid the instant they laid eyes on her.
"…Well, shit."
"We're fucked."
I thought so too. The Ma Chao I knew would have pummeled them half to death on the spot, "so they'd never be bored again."
I was already fully aware that she turned docile in front of me and me alone. But where there is misfortune, fortune is never far behind.
"…Don't do that again. Understood?"
"Y-yes! Understood!"
Ma Chao, in far too good a mood to care, let the whole thing slide and continued on her way. Could sharing a bed with me really have made her that happy?
'Yes…! Use me like a beast, as much as you want…!'
…Yeah. She sure as hell enjoyed it. Once Ma Chao crossed the line she'd spent her whole life blushing in front of, she turned out to be a woman who came on shockingly strong.
"Good heavens, what in the world…."
"…I saw nothing."
The funny thing was, when Ma Chao showed mercy, the Qiang soldiers grew more terrified, not less. That, I suppose, is the face of a man who has just witnessed something truly horrifying.
"……"
"Hrk—!"
Ma Chao flinched for an instant as she sized up the situation, and the Qiang soldier nearly jumped out of his skin, breaking into a cold sweat. So that's the type who pays good money to get beaten. When the very person who spared you makes a face like that, of course it's going to feel maddening.
"Hoooh…."
But Ma Chao, knowing full well I was watching from nearby, endured even that with desperate, white-knuckled patience. Does love really widen a person's heart like that? It was a genuinely amusing thing to observe.
"My lord! I shall follow you to the very ends of this world!"
Those were the words Ma Teng had once roared at me with every ounce of his lungs. These days, treated half as the Qiang's official representative purely because he was the father of Ma Chao — their most beloved living star — he bowed respectfully to me and continued in a measured tone.
Why, you ask, do the Qiang support Ma Chao so devotedly? …Good question. I'd guess it comes down to shared blood, more or less. You know — tribal solidarity and all that.
Ma Chao's grandmother had been Qiang, and in the original history she rose, alongside Han Sui, to stand at the very summit of the Xiliang warlords. In fact, the Qiang threw in behind Liu Bei — who had seated Ma Chao in one of the realm's highest offices, General of Agile Cavalry, and treated him with honor — and spent years hammering away at Cao Cao's blind side in Shu's service. It was true during the Hanzhong campaign, when Liu Bei and Cao Cao clashed head-on, and I'd wager that even long after Ma Chao was gone, during Zhuge Liang's northern expeditions, the Qiang were still siding with Shu.
Think about that. Rough, violent men who could barely scrape together their own livelihoods and survived day to day by raiding — yet for the sake of a single man named Ma Chao, they kept faith with Shu to the very end.
In other words, it was no exaggeration to say that our faction had begun absorbing the Qiang in earnest from the very moment we took in Han Sui and Ma Teng. Ma Chao, the face of the whole enterprise, already occupied a high post, while Han Sui and Ma Teng had each carved out a place for themselves within the Han court and were serving as bridges between the two sides.
Of course, they were slippery customers, every one of them, each bent on his own survival above all — so the absorption was bound to take time. Even so, I could see it clearly. If things kept flowing this smoothly, the Qiang, just like the Nanman, could somehow be woven into the fabric of the Han.
This, mind you, is one of the marquee foreign peoples — the ones who carved out kingdoms of their own in China during the era of the Five Hu and Sixteen Kingdoms. And in truth, the Qiang endure to this very day as an ethnic minority in modern China. Set that beside the Di, the Wuhuan, the Xianbei, the Xiongnu — tribes once every bit as famous, swallowed up by other powers until their very names vanished — and it's a remarkable thing.
"……"
Foreign tribes. Foreign tribes, huh….
China is simply so vast that far too many peoples share her borders. But looked at another way, they were an opportunity. I wasn't about to plant a sign reading FOREIGN TRIBES WELCOME at the front gate and start begging them to defect — but a country already stretched thin just developing the land it has would gain enormous strength by taking them in.
Naturally, all manner of problems would erupt — discrimination and the rest — but push through them, achieve real stability, and we might just build a thousand-year empire like Rome. Hadn't Rome grown rich and powerful precisely by absorbing one people after another? Granting conquered peoples the same citizenship as any born Roman was a genuinely radical policy. The result: the countless peoples living under Rome came to think of it as their own homeland, and every time the empire found itself in crisis, they all fought for it with their lives on the line.
Could the Han I now lived in manage the same? …Only the future would know the answer. For now, my task was to play my part faithfully — to bind a great many peoples into one, and make the nation strong.
Northern horse tribes of the steppe — just you wait. I'm going to seize you by the scruff of the neck and relocate every last one of you. The reason you've been invading Han lands since time began was that life back home was unbearable, you say? Then I'll simply make it so it never is again.
"Hahh… hahh… My lord! So THIS is where you were!"
"…Meng Huo? What is it?"
The bronze-skinned woman who had followed me all the way from the Nanman lands. Their king — the very embodiment of her people — broke into a confident grin at my question.
"I missed you, so I came looking! That's all!"
"……"
"And I found something absolutely incredible here in Luoyang! You simply must come see it with me!"
"Uh… sure?"
There was a fairly high probability I already knew the place in question. I was, after all, the man governing Luoyang.
"……"
Well — good was good, I suppose. I let out a soft chuckle at the sight of Meng Huo's sparkling eyes and followed after her.
Awkwardly draped in Han-style clothing, her waddling gait still brought to mind nothing so much as a duck.