Nomads, Commanderies, and Feudalism
"I've been studying the matter carefully."
Liu Bei said it out of nowhere, after only a few months of living mixed in among us nomads.
He had endured an unfamiliar life in the tents, learned the Xiongnu tongue, lain down at night to the distant howling of wolves, and eaten not grain but meat and foods fermented from the milk of the herds. Only after weathering all of that did he finally speak.
"At first I wondered whether you Xiongnu might do what Shang Yang did — adopt the commandery-and-county system. I don't think it would work."
"Xuande has been entertaining some interesting thoughts."
This year Liu Bei had chosen a courtesy name for himself — Xuande, just as history recorded it. His given name, Bei, means "to be furnished with," so paired with the courtesy name it would mean something like "furnished with virtue." In any case, I had been addressing him by his courtesy name since the start of the year. I was far younger, but Liu Bei held no office and I was a prince, so I was entitled. He did not seem to mind.
"But the people of Qin were farmers, were they not? We are people who wander and tend our herds."
"If you look back through history, the Qin were never truly of the Central Plains to begin with. They were closer to the Western Rong, if anything."
That was Guan Yu's opinion after reading the Spring and Autumn Annals, Liu Bei added — not his own.
"So you thought that what succeeded for Shang Yang in Qin would work for us Xiongnu as well?"
"You Southern Xiongnu are just like Qin before Shang Yang. The powerful clans have carved everything up among themselves."
Liu Bei's observation was correct. The Huyan, the Xubu, the Lan, the Dangyu, the Yuldi, the Han — and beyond them the Qiulin and the Wuli. The Southern Xiongnu did not run as a centralized state under the Luanti. It functioned more like a confederation of great houses.
"When Shang Yang established the counties, he all but dismantled those clans. The ruler's authority grew stronger for it, and Qin became, just as the Book of Lord Shang set down, 'a state that claims the title of king.'"
In this age, four centuries into the Han, "king" was understood as a rank beneath the Emperor. But in Shang Yang's day, a king was the Son of Heaven.
"You thought we Southern Xiongnu could dismantle our clans the same way and become a nation centered on the Luanti?"
"The land you occupy was once Qin's commanderies, after all."
Liu Bei was not wrong. The Hetao Plateau of Monan, where the Southern Xiongnu now dwelt, was composed of Shuofang Commandery, Wuyuan Commandery, Yunzhong Commandery, Xihe Commandery, Shang Commandery, and others. We drifted across the grasslands between those commanderies, but living pressed against the Han, we tended to follow their administrative boundaries to a degree. The territories of the great clans rarely strayed far outside those old commandery lines.
The states that had first established and maintained those commanderies were Zhao and Qin of the Warring States.
"But before Zhao and Qin ever planted their commanderies here, this was already the land of the Rong and the Di."
It was true. Those commanderies had been carved out by the people who would later be called Qin, and then Han, after they drove the inhabitants of the Hetao Plateau from their homes. At their root, the commanderies of this land could not help but carry — if one had to name it — a colonial character.
Because the political interests of the Han and the Southern Xiongnu had aligned, the expelled had returned and now lived intermingled upon that colony. Lü Bu and I had done what we could to melt the old resentments down, but a faint sediment remained that would not dissolve. It was not a matter of simply saying, There are commanderies here already, so why shouldn't the Xiongnu adopt the commandery system too?
Liu Bei nodded.
"The Xiongnu Khagan is right. In the end, Qin and Han are nations of people who till the soil, and the commandery system was devised to govern people like that."
What the Book of Lord Shang stressed without fail was this: a man must be bound to one of two occupations — farming, or war. The pursuit of scholarship or art, a talent for debate, the accumulation of wealth through commerce, the hunger to make a name for oneself — all of it was classified as "the cunning," as "evil."
The Confucian path of rising in the world — polishing the self, practicing filial piety and fraternal duty, and at last making a name by those virtues — Shang Yang regarded the very existence of such thinking as a cunning evil. By his measure, we Xiongnu, the life of pastoral nomads, could only appear as bands living as they pleased, beyond the reach of any central control. A people among whom marriage alliances and custom still outranked the Great Chanyu's law. A nation where Modu had once established a military discipline of absolute obedience, yet that discipline had never expanded into the law of the state.
And by the measure of Liu Bei, who had drunk from the Book of Lord Shang, we were —
"Cunning and wicked Northern Di."
He said it with a crooked grin.
"It can't be helped. That's how it looks through a farmer's eyes. How do those people even pay their taxes? Are they wandering to dodge corvée? They say they answer the court's summons and send cavalry, but do the able-bodied men really all turn out...?"
The human heart is quicker to resent the side that might be receiving a privilege than the oppression it already suffers. A ruler exploits that heart, encourages denunciations, and clamps down hard on those below. The strength Shang Yang's reforms forged in Qin was built of exactly that.
"It's not as if there's no way to force the commandery system onto the Southern Xiongnu. Gather the chieftains of every tribe in one place, poison the lot of them at that Dragon City Grand Sacrifice or whatever it's called, seize the horses and herds from their people, and make them farm assigned plots of land."
Of course it could be done that way.
Even now, great numbers of Qiang lived throughout Liang Province and Guanzhong — the western reaches of Sili, centered on Chang'an — but in ancient times there had been far more. The Qiang, or the Rong. The original capital of Zhou had been Haojing, in Guanzhong. When the Rong destroyed Haojing, Zhou moved its capital to Luoyang, and that was how the Spring and Autumn period began. Qin had grown by fighting the Rong ferociously for the Guanzhong lands Zhou had abandoned. The struggle was so bitter that a Qin ruler fell in battle. Naturally, the defeated Rong lost every foundation of their way of life and were absorbed into Qin.
That policy had continued after the founding of Han, and it was still the reason the Qiang nursed such deep grievances against the Han people and rose in rebellion. And if that same policy were applied to the Xiongnu?
"If a rebellion broke out, it would be a disaster — and if it succeeded, it would be a disaster too. Because —"
"You'd lose the strength of the Xiongnu."
"...Exactly."
It was true that a nomadic empire, however systematic, struggled to match the systematic order Qin and Han had built in the Central Plains. Even when a powerful sovereign arose and bent every tribe to his will, the thing often died with that single generation.
But a powerful nomadic sovereign meant an outstanding military commander. More precisely, it was because he was an outstanding military commander that he could become a powerful sovereign at all. The nomadic life itself — the hunt and the herding — was the soil that grew superb mounted warriors. They grew naturally accustomed to ending lives with bow and arrow. They raised horses and raced them, and so they understood the horse with their bodies. When warriors like that met a brilliant leader, you got an empire like Tanshihuai's.
Force those warriors down from their horses because they are hard to control, bind them to the soil, and they lose the beast in them. Off the horse, a man is just an infantryman. What strength is there in that?
The Han had spent long ages developing infantry tactics to stand against nomads. The Xiongnu had no such tradition. Force the commandery system onto them, turn nomads into farmers, and you would have to start over centuries — a thousand years — behind. Before you ever built a powerful system, you would be as helpless as a newborn.
And besides —
"Emperor Wu's might, Huo Qubing's ability to drive all the way to the Han Sea — that came from succeeding at raising cavalry on a massive scale, not from the strength of Han infantry."
Liu Bei had chosen Emperor Wu and Huo Qubing as his examples because I had said I wanted to return to Mobei, no doubt.
Of course, my plan was not to abandon western Bingzhou either. I would "conquer" Mobei, then take northern China with the overwhelming cavalry power of Monan and Mobei combined. One way or another, I would have to face the Xianbei.
But as things stood, with no system in place, what tribal chieftain would agree to an expedition into Mobei? And even if a system were built, could a half-formed infantry force even cross the desert and strike at the vast Mobei Steppe?
Next year — 181 — Tanshihuai would die. His son Helian would succeed him, but from 182 through 184 the Xianbei raids would cease for about three years, which suggested he had been too busy putting his own house in order. The Han, however, had never avenged their defeat in the expedition against Tanshihuai. In 184 the Yellow Turban Rebellion would erupt, and the Southern Xiongnu would be levied to suppress it.
I did not want to miss the opening. But the Southern Xiongnu itself was the shackle on my ankle. No matter how far my fame as Tengri's apostle spread within the Southern Xiongnu, it was still, in the end, a commotion at the bottom of a well. I could not escape the limits inherent in the Southern Xiongnu itself.
What was I supposed to do?
That was when Liu Bei spoke again.
"The way I see it, you Xiongnu are something like a feudal system."
"Feudal..."
Feudal...?
"The tribes bear different surnames, but generations of marriage have bound their blood together. And you, Xiongnu Khagan — the Luanti house you belong to is, if you trace it out, kin to my own Liu imperial clan, is it not?"
"That is... true enough."
It hardly meant anything in practice, but if you could follow the genealogies, most people named Liu could claim kinship — excepting the Xiang clansmen who had surrendered at Xiang Yu's death and been granted the Liu surname by Emperor Gao. That was how the Luanti royal house, myself included, had come at some point to style themselves Liu, and how I had become Liu Bao.
"Feudalism is the system by which the Zhou royal house enfeoffed princes and meritorious ministers as lords here and there. Isn't that rather like you Xiongnu?"
It was similar. But more than that, the word feudal had sent my mind to the distant Western system that the same word was used to translate.
"The road from feudalism to the commandery system is not traveled overnight. Even our Han began with the Emperor's commanderies existing alongside the fief-kingdoms of various kings, and only after the Rebellion of the Seven States did we introduce commanderies across the whole realm."
Kingdoms still remained, but in practice they operated with the kingdom's chancellor filling the role of a Grand Administrator. The post Liu Bei would one day hold — Chancellor of Pingyuan — meant precisely "chancellor of the Kingdom of Pingyuan." A rank equivalent to a Grand Administrator.
"You mean we Hu should find our own Hu road from feudalism to the commandery system?"
"That's right."
"How would that even be possible?"
"Khagan — you taught the rites to those Wuhuan I gave you, didn't you?"
"I did."
"Those people have no roots here. But as the ones who officiate the rites of the Xiongnu Heaven God, couldn't they, in your name and the Heaven God's, 'inspect' the chieftains of every tribe?"
Like our Han inspectors, Liu Bei added.
The inspectors of the Han provinces were portrayed in the games as if they were the superiors of the Grand Administrators, but they were not, not really. They inspected the Grand Administrators, and that was all — at least until Dong Zhuo appeared and the provinces and Luoyang became completely estranged.
So that was it. Liu Bei was telling me to send out something like inspectors.
No. More than that.
My thoughts kept drifting in another direction.
Feudalism.
Western titles were translated as duke and count and the rest, but originally a Western count had not been a rank of nobility at all. Counts had been officials dispatched to inspect the dukes — the great tribal chiefs.
And if I could give the Wuhuan I had taught the role of priests...? Hadn't the churches and clergy of every land also served as a check upon feudal lords?
Besides, we were all cavalry.
There was the old argument of which came first, the chicken or the egg. Had feudalism been necessary in order to raise cavalry on a massive scale, or had a military system centered on cavalry developed on the foundation of feudalism?
Whichever it was, I knew the result. Could I not reverse-engineer it?
Perhaps I had concentrated too hard on the fact that I was Xiongnu. Xiongnu and Hun... perhaps, without meaning to, I had been trying to become something like Attila. I had thought that was what it would take to conquer northern China earlier than the original Xiongnu dynasties of history — the Former Zhao, the Northern Xia.
But perhaps there was another road.
The road of becoming the Charlemagne of the Central Plains.