The period of disunion in China saw north China ruled by a succession of nomadic dynasties from the north and west that relied on their mostly cavalry armies to maintain control of the region. Nearly all of these dynasties established dual administrations, in which the Chinese areas were ruled primarily by Chinese in civil matters, while the non-Chinese peoples and the military as a whole were ruled separately by the tribal rulers. They usually took care to maintain their tribal armies as the mainstay of their rule. The dynasties took care to keep their armies free from Chinese civilian control or even administration.
All of these conquest dynasties—indeed, every native Chinese dynasty throughout the history of China—had to pay special attention to threats from other tribal peoples in the north. Failure to do so led several times to changes in the groups that ruled all or part of northern China. (See Chapter 6 for more on the Central Asian nomads.) One of the most successful of these conquest dynasties was the Northern Wei (386-534), which eventually gained control of nearly all of northern China.
The Northern Wei dynasty was founded by a Turkish people called the Toba, who were, like all the steppe peoples, horse-riding nomads. The Toba rulers soon saw the advantages of Chinese-style rulership, with a theoretically all-powerful ruler, and began a process of selective sinicization. For example, in 398, the Northern Wei ruler ordered the construction of a Chinese-style capital city, complete with Confucian halls and a library. Yet the early Northern Wei rulers understood that to maintain their control of north China, they had to retain their military edge over their competitors on the steppe lands. This consisted primarily of their tribal cavalry forces, but the Northern Wei also recognized that their control of north China provided them with advantages not possessed by their competitors. The most striking advantage was the vast number of people in China compared with the steppe lands. While numbers are difficult to ascertain with certainty, the Northern Wei ruled over a land of at least 30 million people, and probably many more. The Northern Wei, then, utilized its main elite military force of Toba and other steppe cavalry to put constant pressure on the northern nomads. To protect its territories in China, the dynasty established a string of garrisons along the frontiers, commanded by Toba nobles and consisting of a mixed grouping of Chinese and other nomadic tribesmen. These garrisons defended the frontier from nomadic incursions and provided a ready force to assist in expeditions into the steppes.
Although the Northern Wei system had its unique features, much of the system resembled that of the Cao Wei dynasty of the Three Kingdoms period (222-265), in which vast numbers of people were resettled along the frontiers, provided with agricultural land, and utilized as a militia to defend the borders of the dynasty. The Northern Wei system initially relied more on an integration of settled Chinese and tribal peoples, but, gradually, these garrisons became quite large, and many of the officers in them came from Chinese aristocratic families allied with the Toba nobility. Eventually, a separate military class of Chinese was established by the Northern Wei in these garrisons, which were expected to be fully selfsupporting. Soldiers and their families were registered as military households. Soldiers trained with their units and, when not training, were expected to engage in the agricultural activities that supplied food for the garrison. The rest of the military family was likewise tied to the land, working on communal plots, the production of which was turned over to the unit commanders.
Members of this military class could only marry from within it and were restricted to the area of the garrison; special permission was required to travel outside the garrison district. And these military families were expected to provide soldiers for generations. Although the soldiers themselves were apparently treated relatively well, for most of the members of this military class, their lives were not much better than that of slaves, and most hoped to get out of this situation. However, military households could not change their status (that is, become registered as civilian households) without going through a complicated process. Basically, only the Northern Wei emperor could change their status, and this was only rarely done.
Over time, the Northern Wei dynasty became more sinicized and neglected matters along its frontiers. The lot of the military households became worse, and new military households were added by settling the garrisons with the families of criminals or those thought to be rebellious. There was enormous deterioration in the quality of these soldiers, though this process was not sudden. The tribal elements of the garrisons for the most part became indistinguishable from the Chinese, and by the early sixth century, their military effectiveness was highly questionable.
The Northern Wei dynasty moved its capital to Luoyang in 494, an area deep within the Chinese world, and the sinification of the Toba Turks was almost complete. Chinese-style walls were erected around the main Northern Wei cities, and sinicization went so far that the wearing of steppe-style clothing was prohibited. Neglect of the military garrisons on the frontier eventually led to a massive rebellion by many of the garrisons. Large numbers of the dynasty’s officials in the region were slaughtered, but, instead of forcibly suppressing the rebellion, the court agreed to resettle most of the military families in the interior of China, which was more fertile than the lands on the frontiers. The basic system remained intact, and was even added to, but its genesis as a frontier defense system had been seemingly forgotten.
Eventually, the Northern Wei split into two new dynasties—a sinicized dynasty in the east and a nomadic dynasty in the west, more in the tradition of the conquest dynasties of the age. The more nomadic dynasty in the west, calling itself the Western Wei (505-556), attempted to reverse the sinicization process. In an attempt to turn Chinese into mounted archers, they required all soldiers to take a Turkish surname, to wear Turkish-style clothing, and to obey commands issued in Turkish.