Warfare in Ancient China 10,000 BC—221 BC

The Great Wall of China and the famous Terracotta Army vividly symbolize the power of ancient China, to the point that they have been featured in movies countless times. In the Mummy Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, a 2008 release that did no honor to the 1999 classic, the army even came back to life. The historical creator of the real Terracotta Army, the first emperor of China, probably conscripted some 700'000 workers to create his massive mausoleum. It covers an area of about 56 square kilometers and includes the Terracotta Army with its 8'000 clay soldiers, 130 chariots and nearly 800 horses. These figures represent China's army at the time, an army more powerful than China had ever had. This army allowed Qin Shi Huang, the King of Jin, to unite the warring states of China and unify them under his rule as the first emperor. Before Qin Shi Huang unified China, the region consisted of seven states that struggled for power. This era, known as the Warring States Period, is subject to many Chinese myths, legends and even modern movies. For example, in the film genre wuxia, history and legend blur. A famous example is the 2002 film Hero, starring Chad Li. Mythological and historical elements are linked not only in popular media, but also in how the Chinese perceived their history. To get a clear view of China's early history, we need to untangle the history from the myth. To do that, we will jump back even further and have a look at how the sparsely populated China of the Stone Age developed into a complex network of warring states and eventually a mighty empire. About 12,000 years ago, the ice from the last Ice Age melted. The hunter-gatherers that had lived in East Asia for more than 100,000 years began to settle near rivers and swamps, especially in the south of present-day China and along the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers. Over the following millennia, they developed a sedentary way of life based on agriculture. People lived together in clans, cultivated millet, cabbage, and ham, and raised pigs, dogs, and chickens. As usually happens when permanent settlements are established, the increasing contact between tribes and cultures led to conflicts and therefore the need for protection. For this reason, people soon built low stone walls or ditches around their settlements. At first, these had a double function. They prevented livestock from wandering off and they were an obstacle for raiders. Somewhat later, in the Middle Stone Age, which lasted from about 7,000 to 5,000 BC in China, the first earthen ramparts combined with ditches emerged in the Yangtze river basin. They primarily served a military function, making them the first indisputable traces of violent conflict between groups in China. According to the historian Korshik Roy, these initial conflicts mainly involved small-scale fighting between villages, cattle raids, and feuds. The fortified settlements turned into cities throughout the next millennia and their small earthen walls became impressive fortifications. One of the numerous Neolithic cultures found in China, the Liangshu culture, was located in the lower regions of the Yangtze river, around 3300 to 2300 BC, and is known to have had cities of up to 30,000 people. The Longshan culture also had large cities and in the 3rd millennium BC massive ramparts of rammed earth that were up to 25 meters wide. This construction technique was still used in China about four millennia later, when the Ming built their capitals in Nanjing and Beijing. The sheer size of these cities and fortifications makes clear that the Liangshu and Longshan cultures were complex communities that had mastered many cultural skills. These included, for example, the cultivation of rice, practiced since about 7000 BC, especially in southern China, the production of silk and the processing of bronze, which began around 3000 BC. The introduction of bronze work was accompanied by new technologies that decisively changed art, agriculture, and at least warfare. But before we dive right into the depth of Chinese history, take a moment and relax. Look, cold turkey may be great on sandwiches, but there's a better way to break your bad habits. And right now I'm not talking about some long-forgotten ritual from ancient China, I'm talking about the sponsor of this video, Fume. They look at the problem in a different way. Not everything in a bad habit is wrong, so instead of drastic uncomfortable change, why not just remove the bad from your habit? Fume is an innovative, award-winning flavored air device that does just that. Instead of electronics, fume is completely natural. Instead of vapor, fume uses flavored air. 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Traditional Chinese historiography recognizes an even earlier dynasty, the Xia dynasty, but many western scholars doubt its existence because there is no clear evidence of central government during this period and the first accounts referring to it were written some 1000 years later. Yin was the last capital of the Shang, who lived in numerous cities on the central plains of the Yellow River Valley. Excavations have shown that Shang society was very complex and heavily stratified. At its head was a king who was advised by priests, who gave him instructions from the Shanghai god Di. Just as many Chinese do today, the Shang also worshipped their ancestors. According to the historian Li Feng, the Shang kings traveled around their lands to govern their kingdom and established a kind of hegemonic rule, in which the authority rested with them and was enforced with the help of the army. Members of the upper class lived in houses and palaces resembling those of the Forbidden City in Beijing, while the common people lived in simple pit houses. Most commoners lived in the countryside, cultivating wheat and raising sheep, goats, and water buffalo. Merchants and artisans formed a kind of middle class. They built the temples of the rich and made tools, vessels, and weapons, being especially known for their skills in bronze working. The Shang needed those weapons for their armies, who defended the state against nomadic neighbors who sometimes wanted to do more than just trade. The army also played an important societal role because it was needed to take captives. The Shang demand for prisoners of war was substantial because they used them as human sacrifices. Human sacrifices are documented in various graves, as well as the oldest written sources from China, the famous oracle bones. These were animal bones used for divination during the Shang dynasty. They contain short inscriptions that frequently reference battles, fights, and sacrifices. One bone, for example, says that after a successful campaign, quote, 2,656 men were chastised, that is executed, with the halberd. While this figure is probably not to be taken quite literally, archaeologists have identified as many as 600 skeletons of sacrificial victims in the graves of high-ranking individuals. Unfortunately, we do not know much about the Shang military. We do know, however, that there was a simple bureaucratic system and that the Shang king maintained a standing army of about 1,000 professional soldiers, supplemented by levies in times of crisis. The conscription system was based on clans which provided 100 men each, led by their chiefs. In this way, armies of 3,000 to 5,000 men, and in extreme cases more than 10,000 men, could be raised. The finds at Yinshu, along with other archaeological evidence, hint at how these armies were structured. The burial suggests that the armies of the Shang consisted of infantry, archers, and chariots. The infantry was composed of regiments of 300 men, each divided into three companies, left, right, and center. Ten regiments from the larger unit of 3,000 men, also divided into three groups. The Shang soldiers were armed with halberds, bows, and spears, and the so-called kou, or dagger-axe. Probably, only the richest could afford bronze versions of these weapons. Around the 13th century BC, another piece of army equipment was introduced to China from the northwest, the chariot. According to Kaushik Roy, nomads who traveled between the Caucasus and the Urals used chariots, and knowledge of these vehicles was brought to China by prisoners of war or traveling merchants. As the discoveries in Yinshu show, the chariots of the Shang were quite complex. Two horses pulled them, they had a single axle with spoked wheels, and they had space for an archer, a driver, and often a third person armed with a kou or shield to protect the driver. Five such chariots formed a squadron, and five squadrons formed a chariot company. This army provided the Shang with stability and control for several centuries, until a powerful contender arose in the 12th and 11th century BC. In 1059 BC, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn formed a conjunction visible to the naked eye, and somewhat later the comet 1P Halley passed by Earth. The rulers of Shu interpreted this as a supernatural sign that they were destined to rule. Not long after, probably in 1046 BC, King Wu of Shu marched for Yin with an army that was supposedly composed of 45'000 men. He clashed with the Shang defenders at the Battle of Moye. This was the culmination of a period of increasing tensions and rivalries between the ruling Shang and the vassal Shu, and ended in a clear victory for the Shu who conquered the capital. This ended the Shang dynasty. The fall of the Shang is a central topic in one of the earliest written sources of Chinese history, the Book of Documents. It contains various battle speeches that justify the attack on the Shang by portraying them as violent and corrupt. This coincided with the Shu's creation of a new political ideology called the Mandate of Heaven. The Mandate of Heaven shaped China for centuries by legitimizing the rule of kings and emperors. According to this doctrine, Tian, which literally means heaven but refers to a superior impersonal deity, gave its mandate to a worthy family, making them the rightful rulers. If they proved unworthy, Tian revoked the mandate and allowed a new ruler to overthrow the old one. This was what had occurred with the Shang, at least according to the Shu. The king of Shang, with strength, pursues his lawless way. He has cast away the time-worn sires and cultivates intimacy with wicked men. Dissolute, intemperate, reckless, oppressive. The innocent cry to heaven." In fact, the Shu and the Shang were not all that different. Along with the Xia dynasty, if it existed, the Shu and the Shang dynasties grew out of the Longshan culture. They coexisted in three separate areas but replaced each other as the dominant power. According to John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman, experts on Chinese history, there was, quote, a high degree of cultural homogeneity and continuity between the Shang and the Shu. They even spoke very similar languages. The cultural and political center of the Western Shu dynasty, which succeeded the Shang dynasty, was in the Wei river valley, near their capital Fenghou. Soon after their rise to power, the Shu began to expand their sphere of influence, leading campaigns against the nomadic tribes in the northwest and forays into the areas adjacent to the Han, Yangtze, and Huai rivers. To control their vast territory, the Shu established a new system of government, the Fengjian system. As in the Western feudal system, the king would grant land to a noble, making him lord of that region in exchange for a pledge of allegiance. The central pillars of the Shu's power were the ritual authority of the king, now seen as God's representative on earth, as well as a complex bureaucracy and a powerful army. According to the standard reference on military history, World History of Warfare, the Shu army initially differed from that of the Shang only in size. The Shu were reportedly able to mobilize more than 75,000 men. The core of this army was still made up of infantry and chariots, but the latter were now drawn by four horses and accompanied by four infantry units, one on each side. In addition, drums, bells, and banners were used to communicate. For example, lowering the banners on the commander's chariot was the signal to retreat. When a Shu army was on the march, the chariots formed a barricade around the camp. This arrangement was comparable to later wagon forts. Exactly how fighting took place is difficult to determine. This is due to the way early Chinese literature talks about war. In most cases, the actual act of war is omitted. The literary scholar Jing Hixian Wang calls this the ellipsis of battle. This is perfectly illustrated by the poem The Sixth Month from the Book of Songs, also known as the Classic of Poetry. Several verses are devoted to describing the preparations for battle. How people prepare their horses, fill the quivers with arrows, bring in the harvest, and march to the battlefield. But when it comes to the actual battle, there is one short sentence. We smote the Xian Yu as far as the Great Plain. There is, however, an idealistic, strongly ritualistic description of how battles played out. According to this description, the commander first consulted an oracle. Depending on the result, the army broke camp and retreated, or took up battle formation. In the latter case, the officers then assembled in a general's tent. The general gave a battle speech, delivered his orders, and asked gods and ancestors for support. When the drums beat for the attack, the army advanced. According to the world history of warfare, tactics and strategy were less important than leadership, momentum, and morale. While an infantry melee ensued in the center, the nobles met on the flanks and fought separate fights and challenges on their chariots, in combats that often had a ritual character. If the Shu were victorious, they would feast on the enemy's supplies and sacrifice some prisoners of war as blood for the drums. Whether the Shu really followed this procedure or instead flexibly adapted the rules of combat to the situation is hard to say. In the 9th century BC, the rule of Western Shu began to crumble. Military defeats, pressure from neighboring nomadic tribes, and the accumulation of power among important vassals led to tensions, revolts, and eventually the end of the Western Shu dynasty. The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting These words are taken from one of the most famous books on strategy and warfare ever, The Art of War by Sun Tzu. This book, written in the 5th century BC, is still read in military academies and business schools, and its principles are still applied to conflicts. The Art of War, along with other writings on military theory from this period, is an expression of the professionalization of Chinese warfare. The Shu got off lightly from their crisis and established a new capital in the eastern part of their territory, Wenchang. Thus began the Eastern Shu dynasty. Nevertheless, the Shu rulers never fully re-established control and order. The end of their dominance allowed other states to expand their influence, leading to an ongoing struggle for supremacy. The ensuing competition and seemingly endless wars promoted technological progress, intellectual endeavors, and the professionalization of warfare. For example, this was the time of Confucius, the great philosopher who remains very influential across China and East Asia to this day. As early as the 6th century BC, the chariot and the ritualized form of warfare associated with it gradually became less important. Chariot companies were replaced by large, disciplined, and powerful infantry armies, mainly consisting of recruits from the peasantry and by fast, agile cavalry. New technologies such as the crossbow, invented in the early 5th century BC, catapults, and finally, towards the end of the 4th century BC, mounted archers, like those used by the nomads of northwestern China, with whom the northern empires were in constant conflict, further changed warfare. These skilled horse warriors gave the Chinese troops a hard time, which is why the northern states of Jin, Cao, and Yan began to fortify parts of their borders with walls. These walls were the beginnings of the defensive line that would become the Great Wall of China. These military and architectural developments were made possible by a series of social and technological innovations. The warring princes continually chased new ideas and technologies that could give them an edge over their competitors. For example, the liberation of peasants through the abolition of the feudal system meant that masses of commoners were now available for military service. The development of irrigation systems improved harvests, and the extraction and processing of iron allowed for better tools and weapons. Thanks to these innovations, armies became bigger and better. In the 3rd century BC, some armies may have numbered as many as 400,000 men. Although numbers such as these should be taken with a grain of salt, they show the tremendous progress the armies of China and the states producing them had made. During the warring states period, the more powerful empires conquered more and more of the smaller ones, until only seven states remained. After centuries of struggle for power, one of those warring states, the Jin, gained the upper hand. Although the others forged alliances against him, Zheng, the king of Jin, eventually subdued one state after the other. By 221 BC, he had conquered all of China. He became the first emperor of China under the name Jin Shi Huang. In 1974, farmers near Jinyang in central China dug a well near Jin Shi Huang's burial mound. Unexpectedly, they found ancient clay shards, bricks and bronze arrowheads. The news of this find spread quickly. Archaeologists began to examine the site more closely and discovered the legendary Terracotta Army. It is no coincidence that Jin Shi Huang made it part of his mausoleum. Not only had he united his empire in war, but he had also changed the intellectual attitude toward war and made the self-portrayal as warrior a distinguishing feature of his dynasty. During the period of stability his rule brought, Jin Shi Huang created the foundations of the Chinese state system. He reformed the army, expanded military infrastructures, and centralized the administration and bureaucracy. Among his most important reforms were the abolition of serfdom, the standardization of weights and measures, and the harmonization of Chinese writing. Perhaps his most famous legacy, though, was the expansion of the individual sections of the wall in northern China into a continuous line of defense, the Great Wall of China. This massive defensive line served the empire well for centuries, but it is none of these achievements that shaped our memory of China's first emperor, but rather the actions he took towards the end of his life. Jin Shi Huang became paranoid, had books burned and scholars executed, and searched obstinately for the elixir of life. His search was unsuccessful, the first emperor of China died in 210 BC, and his empire plunged into turmoil. 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