The Military System
As noted in Chapter 9, the Jurchen invasions that forced the retreat of the Northern Song court in 1127 were devastating to China. The garrisons that the Song had established along its northern frontiers, led by military officers controlled by the civilian government, were quickly swept away. The Jurchens, seizing an opportunity for further looting and possibly conquest, launched their large cavalry armies into southern China. The Song armies were scattered and ineffective, and the remnants of the Song court were at one point forced to flee onto junks and take to the sea. Unable to acquire enough craft or experienced sailors, the small Jurchen navy was forced to abandon its attempts to destroy the Song leadership.
Southern China’s topography, unfriendly to cavalry armies, combined with rebellions in Jurchen- occupied areas and the rise of an experienced officer corps, spearheaded a Song revival in the 1130s. Once they had pushed the Jurchens north of the Huai River, the Song armies found their roles reversed. Under the capable leadership of several generals leading now battle-tested soldiers, the Song army reached all the way to the Yellow River. Faced with a devastated north that was unable to supply these new armies, and unwilling to press their luck, the Song court signed a peace treaty with the Jurchens that divided China between them (see Chapter 9). The Song armies were brought back below the Huai River, and most of the powerful, almost independent generals who had commanded them were arrested and executed. Once the crisis with the Jurchen had been managed, the Song court was not willing to invest independent power in the hands of military leaders. Many in the Song court believed that it was better to be conquered by barbarians than to allow Chinese military commanders to threaten the basic Confucian system.
With northern China in the hands of the Jurchens, the Song could not revert to the military system of the recent past, which had proved completely unable to defend the dynasty and the Chinese people. But most of the elite in China were passionate about eventually retaking the north from the Jurchens. The Song court’s goals were thus somewhat contradictory: to have a military too weak to threaten the dynasty, yet strong enough to both defend against further invasions and recover the north.
As the Jurchen threat subsided, the Song military was organized into four main armies and an Imperial Guard. The armies were stationed mainly along the northern and western frontier, with the Imperial Guard in the capital at Hangzhou. Unlike the Tang and Northern Song, the Imperial Guard was not the main army of the dynasty, but only a bodyguard for the emperor. Each of the frontier armies had its own internal administration and exercised a good deal of autonomy, very much unlike the Northern Song armies. The Southern Song armies also each had an attached riverine force, which sometimes numbered in the hundreds of craft. This water force patrolled the major rivers, on which enormous stone and wood fortresses controlled strategic points.
Civilian control was maintained, but in a much looser fashion than in the Northern Song. Officers usually gained their positions through inheritance, with a percentage also gaining rank through the famous Song examination system. Eunuchs could no longer be employed as military commanders, something that had become common in the last decades of the Northern Song. In fact, many of the eunuchs in command of Song armies at the time of the Jurchen invasions were beheaded.
All officers were expected to be conversant in the military classics of Chinese history, which had been collected and edited as the Seven Military Classics. Those gaining officer positions through the exam system were tested on these classics, as well as on their physical strength and ability at archery and horseback riding. The military exam system was a means to introduce fresh blood into the officer ranks and ensure that at least a certain percentage of the officer corps was familiar with Chinese literary traditions. By the late twelfth century, those who had obtained military degrees through the exam system were accorded a great deal of prestige. During times of crisis, which were frequent in the remaining years of the dynasty, local militias were also encouraged. Those that proved successful were often added to one of the four frontier armies, and their leaders given officer positions. And, yet, for all the increasing professionalism of the officer corps, in most instances, the highest commands in the armies were given to civilian officials, and promotion in the army was primarily based on seniority.
The most significant contributions of the Southern Song to the military arts were in the areas of siege warfare and technology. The Yangzi and Han rivers were dotted with fortresses and other fortifications to prevent an enemy from sailing down the rivers or crossing them. Catapults, ballistae, and other weapons were used to defend these fortresses. The fortresses were also equipped with a great number of incendiary devices, many of them launched by catapult. The various river craft included some that were equipped with paddle wheels, enabling them to move swiftly along
the rivers. Southern China was very prosperous during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, allowing the dynasty to equip its armies with vast quantities of iron and steel weapons. In addition, production centers manufactured such things as smoke and incendiary grenades, repeating crossbows, and a kind of flamethrower. (The sources are not entirely clear about Chinese use of gunpowder in guns. There are references to bamboo and iron cannons, or perhaps proto-cannons, but these seem to have been small, unreliable, handheld weapons in this period. The Chinese do seem to have invented guns independently of the Europeans, at least in principle; but, in terms of effective cannon, the edge goes to Europe.) To protect their soldiers from the arrows of the Jurchens, the Song manufactured carts that were sheathed in iron, somewhat like a crude premodern tank. The Song created a complex organization to produce and test new weapons before equipping the army with them. Certainly, the constant threat of Jurchen invasions, and the Song’s determination to recover the north, played a role in encouraging innovation in the military realm.
Conflicts with the Jurchen Jin Dynasty
The century following the peace treaty between the Jurchen Jin and Southern Song was not one of peaceful coexistence. Periods of peace were often used to prepare for coming wars. But topography, manpower problems, and political complications limited the ability of either side to threaten the other seriously. The only war of conquest launched by the Jurchens after the peace treaty, in 1161, met with resounding failure. The Song defenses held the Jurchens to only minor gains and achieved a reduction of the Song tribute. But a major Song offensive in 1206, designed to take advantage of Khitan uprisings in and Mongol raids on Jin territory, was equally unsuccessful. The Chinese population under Jin rule failed to rise in support of the invasion, and, by 1208, the Song were again below the Huai River and paying increased tribute. The payments put only a minor dent in the Song treasury, but the defeat was humiliating. For the Jin, though they won the war, their military had been seriously weakened only a few years before they would have to face the newly unified Mongol armies of Chingiz Khan.
Destruction of the Jin and Defense Against the Mongols
The Mongol invasions of both Jin and Southern Song China are covered in Chapter 13. Here we will look briefly at the Song reaction to these invasions. The Song military continued to be unable to engage in successful offensive operations, in large part because it lacked a significant cavalry arm. Defensively, the Song continued to use its advantages of both topography and wealth to stave off defeat by the Mongols for over forty years.
The Mongol invasions of north China, beginning in 1211, severely weakened the Jin dynasty. In 1214, the Song stopped paying tribute, further undermining a Jin army and administration whose support suffered from Mongol plundering. By 1221, the ultimate fate of the Jin was not in serious doubt. Internal uprisings and Mongol attacks, assisted and supplied by the Song, brought collapse and, in 1233, the extinction of the Jin state.
When the Song received word from northerners that the Mongols had removed most of their armies from China, the Song decided to recover the north. Once again, the Song underestimated its appeal in the north, and it also greatly underestimated the amount of damage that had been done during the Mongol-Jin wars. Enormous armies were sent north with inadequate provisions. The Song commanders had believed that they could live off the land, but the lands of north China were in ruins and could not even feed the population already there. The Song army that reached Luoyang, for example, began to disintegrate as thousands of soldiers starved to death. The Song armies had not even made plans for the transport of supplies overland, as in the south they were accustomed to using the rivers for transport. The returning Mongol armies had little trouble sweeping the Song armies out of the north, the Mongol ponies finding more than enough fodder in the depopulated lands.
In 1235, the Mongols decided to invade and conquer Song China, but for decades confronted the same defensive obstacles that had prevented Jurchen success in the south. It was really not until Song armies defected to the Mongols and provided them with a naval force that the conquest of all of China could be completed. (See the Highlights box “The Siege of Xiangyang, 1268-72.”)
The Military System
Qubilai and the Mongol overlords faced a daunting problem if they hoped to maintain control of China. They were overwhelmingly outnumbered by the people of China, which basically precluded leaving administration in the hands of Chinese hired by the dynasty. The Mongols feared a drift toward assimilation and had many more military adventures they wished to pursue.
What Qubilai instituted was a military occupation of China, one that was to preserve the economic base of China but allow for tremendous levels of taxation to fund the continuing military campaigns of the Yuan. Qubilai believed that China could not be administered from the steppes for long, so he had a new capital city built near the ruins of the Jin capital at present-day Beijing. Large areas of tilled land in north China were turned into pastures for the Mongol ponies, though this was never enough to meet the needs of the Mongol armies occupying China. Vast numbers of horses were brought down from Mongolia as well. Nevertheless, in the last decades of the dynasty, lack of ponies had become a serious problem for Mongol soldiers.
As an army of occupation, the Yuan found it necessary to maintain large military garrisons in the interior of China, ready to put down rebellions. The administration and army were divided into four classes. At the top socially, politically, and militarily, were the Mongols. Next were “Semu,” Western and Central Asians who were neither Mongol nor sinicized, who staffed many midlevel and some top government positions, including tax officials. Next, came the “Han-ren”—northern Chinese, Jurchens, Khitans, and Koreans—and finally the “Nan-ren,” or southern Chinese.
The Mongol army itself was divided into several parts, including the emperor’s personal army, his imperial guard, and the armies of various Mongol tribal nobles. These nobles were usually given sometimes- enormous tracts of land within China, worked by thousands of enslaved Chinese. While technically still under the administrative control of the central government, even during Qubilai’s time, these territories were effectively autonomous, becoming hereditary fiefs of the Mongol nobles who controlled them. In return, these nobles maintained internal security and provided troops for Qubilai’s expeditions. The common Mongol soldier within China was also given lands and slaves to work them. The Yuan tried to enroll every adult male Mongol in the army.
Qubilai Khan
Qubilai Khan, center, wearing the ermine robe, is depicted in a contemporary Chinese painting riding on the steppes with a hunting party.
There were some Semu military units in the Yuan army, but they were usually specialized in such things as logistics or siege craft. More common in the interior garrisons, especially in southern China, were units of northern and southern Chinese. The northerners were given lands from which they were expected to support themselves; the southerners, almost all of whom were from surrendered Song armies or their descendants, were paid from central government coffers. The soldiers in all the Yuan armies were a privileged, hereditary class.
Because the Yuan was in a state of almost constant civil war, especially with struggles to maintain its control of Mongolia and Chinese Turkestan (present-day Xinjiang), the dynasty kept enormous garrisons based in these lands. There were nearly 300,000 troops kept in a series of camps in Mongolia alone. The dynasty was able to rely on transport of the needed provisions from the wealthy south. Qubilai and later Yuan rulers invested heavily in building and repairing China’s system of canals and river transport facilities, especially the Grand Canal, which linked the wealthy areas of the southeast with the capital at Beijing. It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of the rebuilding of the Grand Canal in facilitating the Yuan dynasty’s ability to utilize the vast agricultural and manufacturing productivity of the south for the defense of the north of China. Still, the logistical needs of the Yuan dynasty led to extortionate levels of taxation on some areas of China.
The Collapse of the Yuan
The efforts of the Mongols to resist sinicization were only partially successful. Few of the Mongols adopted Chinese culture, but many of them fell into debt and corruption enjoying the good life afforded by their conquest. The increasing inability of the Mongol leaders to provide adequate horses for training also contributed to diminution of fighting skills. Not all of the Mongols were so affected, but many of the rest were involved in the seemingly constant civil wars. The polity decentralized: Like the contemporary Delhi sultan in India (see below), the Yuan emperor was actually merely the chief of a collection of semi-independent nobles. Rebellions, especially in the south, became larger and more persistent from the early 1330s, for reasons that are unclear. Natural disasters, bubonic plague, and increasing Mongol weakness probably all contributed. The 1350s saw south China freed of Mongol rule by competing Chinese warlords. In 1368, the whole of China came under the control of one of the southern warlords, a man named Zhu Yuanzhang, who founded the new Ming dynasty.
Figure 14.1 Ming China
What is most surprising is not that the Mongols were eventually expelled from China but that Mongol rule endured such a relatively long time. This was the first time a nomadic people from Inner Asia had even succeeded in conquering south China, let alone ruling it. The sheer mass of people, strong cultural traditions, and inhospitable terrain worked against conquest and occupation by a people so unfamiliar with the traditions and topography of the south. In addition, unlike prior to the earlier Sui and Northern Song conquests, southern China in the thirteenth century was politically united, and its military defenses were strong and tested. That the Mongols ruled the vast population of China without being overwhelmed is testament to the system they established.
With the founding of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), China went from being a land occupied by a people dismissive of its culture and traditions to renewed glory abroad and economic and cultural reconstruction at home (Figure 14.1). The Ming military, initially organized in imitation of and reaction to Yuan insitutions, evolved under pressure from two factors. First, the struggle resumed to determine the proper mix of militarism and Confucian-based civilianism in the governing institutions. At the beginning of the Ming, the military element was clearly in command; but, by 1449, the civilian elements of Ming society had come to dominate the military, affecting the whole Ming attitude toward war, defense, and relations with its neighbors. Second, the ongoing struggle with the Mongols continued to influence Chinese policy.
Military Organization of the Empire
The military institutions established by the first Ming emperor, Hongwu, were well suited for an army of conquest but had limited usefulness during long periods of peace, when defense against nomadic incursions was required. In the early Ming army, the highest commands went to those who had been Hongwu’s original subordinates, while scholar-gentry were used for local administration. In all cases, the top civil posts went to Hongwu’s generals. The Ming forces acquired an impressive logistics capability, including thousands of various types of waterborne craft to transport men and supplies. During the struggle to unify China, the Ming army also obtained a cavalry arm, consisting primarily of surrendered or defected Mongol units. While many generals were given a great deal of autonomy, all soldiers were registered, regulated, and subject to inspections from a central military organ based in the new Ming capital at Nanjing. Officer positions and rank continued to be hereditary, but, to prevent the development of independent centers of military power, increasingly, commands were subject to the central government and its bureaucracy.
By the early 1370s, Hongwu believed that Ming control of China was secure. Thus, in 1373, he instituted a set of reforms to ensure the continuance of that security, strengthen his and his family’s position as rulers of the Ming, and rationalize the system of funding his military to reduce its drain on the Chinese economy.
First, army administration was organized into the “Wei-Suo” system. In this system, nearly all families in the empire were categorized into one of three hereditary categories: farmer, soldier, or artisan. Each household classified as military was required to provide at least one soldier. If a particular military family had no sons, distant relatives would be conscripted and their families reclassified as military. These soldiers were then assigned to established units called Wei, each of roughly 5600 men, garrisoned in a designated military district that normally comprised two or more prefectures. Each Wei was divided into five Suo, each with a standard complement of 1120 men and normally assigned to a particular prefecture. The soldiers were trained locally but administratively controlled by a central government organization called the Five Army Commands. Officer positions, hereditary as well, also were administered by the Five Army Commands. When an expedition was organized, the units were detailed from the Wei, with officers usually not leading the men they commanded in garrison. Once in the field, the expeditionary units came under the operational control of the Ministry of War, not the Five Army Commands. Officers thus found it hard to form bonds with their men.
Second, to feed and supply this vast Ming army, Hongwu established the “Tun-Tian” system, which was seen as a means to both supply the armies and bring lands devastated by the Mongols back under cultivation. The various military families were given lands from which they provided their own food and surpluses were given as salaries to the officers or sent to areas of food deficit. The Tun-Tian system was an expansion of the military colony system used in the Han and Tang dynasties. Rather than being a frontier system, as in those earlier times, however, in the Ming, the Tun-Tian was applied to the whole empire. In its early years, the Tun-Tian worked well, with anywhere from 70-80 percent of classified military men working on the farms, providing a decent overall surplus of production. However, within a few years, the relatively unproductive north, which also was the area requiring the posting of the bulk of the armed forces, needed to be supported. The surpluses from the southern Tun-Tian lands were unable to meet these needs, and funds from the imperial treasury were required.
Third, Hongwu created a military nobility. But this Mongol-influenced reform failed to take hold and was insignificant by the end of Hongwu’s reign.
Civilianization and the Shift to a Passive Defense
The last Yuan court fled into Mongolia in 1368, and Hongwu was determined to destroy the Mongol ability to threaten China, if not gain actual control of Mongolia. Also, there were still some Mongol armies within China proper that Hongwu determined to destroy. The third Ming emperor, Yongle (1402-24), was even more aggressive in attacking the Mongols, leading several expeditions personally. These efforts were expensive for the Ming and were marked by periodic disasters as well as major successes. Offensive operations provided security to China but ceased at the death of Yongle.
Yongle had been satisfied with gaining the Mongol tribes’ assent to tributary status, realizing that direct control of Mongolia would probably have been much too expensive to maintain. He was successful, but continued success after Yongle’s death depended on a Chinese willingness to send military expeditions into Mongolia whenever a potential Mongol threat developed. That willingness disappeared. The only offensive expeditions that saw success in later decades of the Ming were those against the camps of Mongols away on expeditions. The Ming army then scored some impressive victories—against the Mongol women and children left in the camps—a strategy that did usually succeed in pulling the Mongols back from their raids on China and, in at least one case, drew them into a trap as they returned to help their dependents and flocks.
Until the last decades of the sixteenth century, Ming policy along the frontier shifted to passive defense. Eventually, great walls would be constructed to keep the Mongols out of China. This defensive policy was necessitated by the increasingly debilitated state of the Ming armies and encouraged by a gradual shift in control of the armies from veteran generals to civil officials and eunuchs. By the 1440s, all Wei and other military commanders answered directly to several layers of civil officials, including the governors of the provinces, who were at times given operational control. The armies located near the capital, which Yongle had moved from Nanjing to Beijing, were usually under the command of eunuchs, who were seen as more loyal to the emperor than either the military or civil officials.
As a result, the Wei-Suo system, really only effective in its early years, had deteriorated almost to uselessness by the 1440s. Training became lax, and the best units, such as they were, tended to concentrate in the capital. The final blow to the Ming army’s ability to project imperial power came with the battle of Tumu in 1449, where the Mongols annihilated a major Ming army, almost completely destroying the last even partially effective military force available to the dynasty. Not until the second half of the sixteenth century do we see a great revival in Ming military affairs.
The native Chinese dynasties of Song and early Ming could not for long resolve the problem of effectively securing their northern frontiers and maintaining a basic civilian orientation and domination in society. Only the Mongol Yuan dynasty had shown success in establishing, like contemporary Japan and India, a militarily dominant social system. Tremendous brutality and exploitation had been necessary to enable the Yuan to control both China and the steppe lands. While unsuccessful in eliminating the northern threats, both the Ming and Song had some success in providing an adequate defense against nomadic invasions. But, as we will see in Chapter 19, the later Ming eventually succumbed to conquest from the north, and it was the resulting Qing dynasty that finally solved the great Chinese dilemma.
In 1266, the Mongol armies of Qubilai Khan resumed their attacks on the Song after completion of a series of civil wars. By early 1268, the armies under one of the greatest Mongol generals, Bayan, had reached the twin fortresses of Xiangyang and Fancheng. Constructed of sturdy stone and well armed with catapults, ballistae, and trebuchets, the two fortresses were connected by a floating bridge. Regular naval patrols ensured that the garrisons had an abundance of supplies and weapons. This complex had to be overcome if the Mongols wished to proceed to the Yangzi valley. The first assaults on Xiangyang were initiated with a massive bombardment by the Mongols’ artillery. The Mongol artillery units were composed almost solely of Chinese from the north, many of whom were by now second- or even third-generation servants of the Mongols. However, the projectiles from the Mongol artillery were ineffective against the strong stone walls, and the attempts to scale the walls and mine underneath the fortress were easily turned back. The Song defenders rained down a steady stream of explosive and flame-producing projectiles, killing thousands of the attackers, most of whom were Chinese, Jurchens, or Turks in the Mongol employ.
When direct assault proved fruitless against the sturdy fortresses, the Mongols next attempted a two-part strategy of pressure and starvation. The surrounding countryside was stripped, countersiege works were constructed to prevent relief forces from arriving by land, and the Mongols’ naval force was brought down to attempt to cut off relief of the fortress by water. Thousands more artillery pieces were also added in order to effect a continuous bombardment on the fortresses. After nearly two years, the strategy appeared near to success when a large Song naval force was able to fight its way into Xiangyang and Fancheng and resupply the defenders. By 1271, the Mongol forces were almost as exhausted as the defenders.
The Uighur commander of the Mongol forces involved in the siege, Ali Haya, informed Bayan and Qubilai that it would not be possible to take these fortresses with the forces present. He requested the construction of much larger siege engines, like those he was aware of in Persia. Engineers from western Asia were then brought to the site, where they constructed trebuchets capable of hurling projectiles weighing more than 200 pounds. The building of these additional siege engines occurred just as another Song relief force had fought its way into Xiangyang, bringing in a large amount of food, weapons, and gunpowder.
The final assault on Xiangyang began in late 1272 and lasted less than three months. While the large trebuchets unrelentingly bombarded the walls, a select force of waterborne Mongols charged toward the connecting bridge. The Song defenders, aware of the danger, used all the weapons at their disposal in an attempt to repulse the attacking force. The waterborne Mongols suffered horrendous casualties before finally destroying the connecting bridge. The fortress of Fancheng was breached and captured a short time later, but Xiangyang itself held out until March 1273. The commander of the garrison, Lu Wenhuan, realized that he could not hold out much longer, as the new trebuchets had laid waste to much of the interior of the fort. After surrendering his position, he was recruited to serve the Mongol cause.
Once Xiangyang had been taken, the rest of southern China was open to the Mongol armies. To be sure, there were still four more years of hard fighting left, but the Mongols now had a much larger navy, a means to adequately move supplies to their troops, and the assistance of one of the Song’s best siege generals. What we can observe in the siege of Xiangyang is the excellent and complex nature of Chinese defensive works, using topography and the most advanced weapons available. We can also see the adaptability of the Mongols of Qubilai Khan, who handily used whatever men, weapons, and strategies they felt would accomplish their goals.