The Silk, the Swan, and the Gansu Corridor
Some eight thousand years ago, the Rma peoples first came to the plains of the Gansu Corridor and built a small and fragile civilization there on a succession of oases. The corridor is a narrow strip of land, surrounded by the heights of the Tibetan plateau, the chill of the Gobi Desert, and the endless grasslands of the steppes. The Rma--known to the world as the Qiangic people--lived in a series of fortified villages, known as
zhai, composed of several dozen extended families.
The Gansu is hardly promising land, compared to the great cradles of civilization cultivated by the Ganges or the Nile. However, as trade slowly developed between the growing empires in the West and the East, the Gansu became vitally important. When wheat cultivation came to China, when millet cultivation left, they traveled through the Gansu. By the Common Era, luxury goods were traveling through its narrow passages as well: spices and most famously silks, hence the name Silk Road.
This trading wealth was a treacherous gift. The zhai became wealthy trading outposts, and outsiders looked covetously upon them. in the third century BCE, the Indo-European Yuezhi people invaded the Gansu to seize their wealth. The Yuezhi would in turn be displaced by a tribal confederacy, the Xiongnu, who would eventually be displaced by early Han Dynasty emperors in the second century BCE. In the 280s CE, the Mongolian khagan Murong Tuyuhun led an invasion of the corridor, forming the wealthy and powerful Tuyuhun empire that stood for some four hundred years. At its height, the Tuyuhun’s rule would extend for a thousand kilometers in any direction, unifying large parts of Central Asia for the first time.
The Tuyuhun would see their end in turn, however, crushed between two ascending powers of the seventh century: the Tibetan Empire to the south and the Tang Dynasty to the east. Repeated invasions and internal subversion brought the Tuyuhun to their knees, falling under the suzerainty of the Tang emperors before finally being crushed by the Tibetans in 770 CE. The treacherous gifts of the Gansu had brought down another empire in its turn.
By the 850s, however, the Tibetan empire was itself crumbling. Rival factions of Bön and Buddhist nobles fought for control of the great empire, and as the center collapsed elites on the periphery began to shake themselves loose. In the Gansu, an official’s son named Zhang Yichao mobilized the Han Chinese elite to seize power in the name of the Tang Dynasty. Yichao’s movement, the Guiyi (“Return to Righteousness”) Army, spoke to an influential educated class that had been alienated from the Tibetian regime. His own father, Zhang Qianyi, had been euphemistically known as a “free man”--i.e., an intellectual who would not serve the emperor.
Zhang Yichao would defeat the Tibetans in 856, and an official Han chronicle recorded the battle thusly:
The bandits [the Tibetan coalition] had not expected that the Chinese troops would arrive so suddenly and were totally unprepared. Our armies proceeded to line up in a “black-cloud formation,” swiftly striking from all four sides. The barbarian bandits were panic-stricken. Like stars they splintered, north and south. The Chinese armies having gained the advantage, they pursued them, pressing close at their backs. Within fifteen miles, they caught up with them. This is the place where their slain corpses were strewn everywhere across the plain. [1]
From 856 on, Zhang would reign in the Gansu as Jiedushi, or military governor, in nominal subordination to the Tang emperor Guanzong. The emperor Guanzong would perish in 859, however, and his successors would prove to be weak and ineffectual.
Guiyi was in any case very far from Chang’an, both physically and culturally. The Gansu Corridor had an astonishing linguistic and religious diversity, from the Rma dialects to Turkic, Mongolian, Chinese, Tibeto-Burman, and Persian. In the rural steppes, Mongolian and Tangut peoples practiced a kind of shamanism known as “Root West” (Melie); their shamans were known as Black Heads for their distinctive headwear, and their chief god was depicted as a heavenly white swan. Many Han officials followed the Tao Te Ching or the principles of Confucius and his followers, but their cities held organized communities of Nangchos Buddhists, Nestorian Christians, Uyghur Manicheans, followers of Bön and Islam and Hinduism and even a community of Karaite Jews from the Khazar steppes far to the west. The Guiyi Circuit was bustling, wealthy and cosmopolitan, but its divisions threatened to pull it asunder.
The most formidable internal challenger to Zhang Yichao and his successors came from the Tuyuhun. In the rural lands between oases, Tuyuhun Mongols lived as horsebound nomadics like their ancestors before them. The Tuoba clan in particular became notorious as savage warriors and fierce worshippers of the Swan. In the late 860s, High Chieftain Lang Tuoba led his horse archers out of the plains to claim the wealthy Silk Road city of Shunzhou. He declared the city his new capital, and used its trading wealth to claim other trading outposts on the northeast of the Guiyi Circuit, eventually claiming enough warriors to rival the Jiedushi himself.
The cosmopolitan Han Chinese of Shunzhou regarded their new ‘bandit’ chieftain with deep suspicion. They wrote that he had the manners of a bandit and the ignorance of a peasant, and they made mock of the superstitions of the Melie Black Heads. If Lang was a bandit, however, he was a charming one with a shrewd understanding of human nature; slowly Confucian officials began to mix with the new priestly caste. Tanggut religion, classical Chinese culture, and Mongolian language slowly began to interact, with important long term consequences.
In the 880s, it seemed as if Lang Tuoba might defeat the Tang governor and claim the Gansu for himself. Zhang Yichao had left his nephew Huaishen to succeed him, but Huaishen died suddenly in 877. His successor was a two year old daughter, Bei Liu; few believed that she would hold the throne for long. Remarkably, however, Lang was struck with a great infirmity that prevented him from standing for extended periods or riding a horse. He could not show this kind of weakness and hope to claim the throne, and so the stricken Lang remained in Shunzhou until he died quietly in his bed in 891.
While Bei Liu grew in age and wisdom, the Tuoba squabbled among themselves. Lang had divided his lands among four of his sons, and for the next decade those sons would fight amongst themselves to claim their father’s legacy. Long Tuoba would finally secure his father’s birthright only to die from an assassin’s blade in 899. No one knew if he was killed by supporters of Bei Liu or by one of his defeated brothers.
With Long’s death, the cycle of violence began again: Liang Tuoba warred against his younger brother and his uncles to once again unite the family lands. Liang was, however, a different sort of man than his father and grandfather. He had few memories of life on the steppes, and had spent most of his formative years in the polyglot streets of Shunzhou. He was not only a strong warrior but a witty and urbane man who could quote from the Chinese masters or the teachings of Buddha. His reign saw the rise of a new and more sophisticated Melie religion, informed by the many influences of the Silk Road, in what was known as the ‘Tuhuyun Reformation.’
The Tang dynasty fell in the early tenth century. In response, Bei Liu had herself crowned as the Empress Baiyi, of the Golden Mountain Kingdom of the Western Han. It was a defiant gesture, but without the resources of the Tang empire the new Empress would be more vulnerable than ever to challenges from within and without. In Shunzhou, supporters of the Tuoba began to imagine a far different kind of empire: a revived Tuyuhun empire, ruled by the Tuoba in the name of the Swan.
The Empress had managed relations with Liang Tuoba very adroitly; the shamanistic son of Mongol warriors and the daughter of Confucian officials turned out to have much in common. This relationship allowed her to maintain internal stability while combatting repeated invasions from Uyghur nomads and Tibetan princelings. In 924, however, the courtly Duke of Shunzhou died. His grandson, Shilian Tuoba, was young, charismatic, and ambitious--and he meant to be king.
The Guiyi Circuit, 924
[1] Quoted from the
Zhang Yichao Transformation Text.
