If you only read one book by the prolific and (now) venerable John Man, it should perhaps be this one, literally so for it “revises and condenses” several chapters in his other books Genghis Khan, The Terracotta Army, Barbarians at the Wall, The Great Wall and Xanadu. It is, as one might expect from Man, a very readable amalgam of history, storytelling and travel-writing.
The histories covered in Conquering the North—the Xiongnu, the Mongols, Ming and Qing relations with the nomads to their north, Sino-Russian relations from the Treaty of Nerchinsk to the 20th century border wars, Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg—have been written about before (even by John Man). The throughline in this book, however, is that China’s history can be told to a very large extent through the lens of its relations with and struggles against peoples and polities to its north. It is a story, some setbacks aside, of overall success and expansion.There are of course other ways of looking at Chinese history—as a success of dynasties and emperors, for example—but Man’s framing has some appeal: by looking at China as what it was not and what if opposed provides an understanding of what it was and is.
Much of this, and probably the general outline, will be known to anyone who has dipped into this subject matter. But Man focuses on episodes that are perhaps less known. One of these is the convoluted (and operatically dramatic) backstory of the First Emperor Qin Shi Huang Di:
the 22-year-old Emperor, Zheng, knows that he is the bastard son of his nominal father’s mentor and that his mother is obsessed by a well-endowed and treacherous gigolo, all with the participation of the man to whom he owes his throne.
Another is the 1449 battle of Tumu, where the Ming were defeated by the resurgent Mongols and the Emperor taken captive. Man includes a detailed rundown of the 1939 Battle of Khalkhin Gol, in which the Russians defeated the Japanese at the Mongolian border and which was, Man argues (as do many others) the real starting gun of the Second World War.
But the book is also a wealth of details, such as how the tremendous amounts of silk the Chinese sent to the “barbarians” up north was just a drop in the bucket:
Coming in rolls or ‘bolts’, the Xiongnu received almost a hundred kilometres of it every year (ten thousand bolts, each just short of ten metres long and just over fifty centimetres wide, weighing about 2.4 kilos). It sounds a lot, but China produced silk in prodigious amounts: in 301 CE, the court recorded that the treasury stored four million bolts (almost ten thousand tonnes, approaching forty thousand kilometres, enough to circle the earth at the equator). On average, every year, China dispensed to the Xiongnu just 0.0025% of its silk-based wealth.
Interspersed with the history and discussions of everything from trade to culture, are Man’s own extensive travels in the region, something he has been doing long to chart the changes in sites and places over decades. One of these is a visit to the Ewenki, or what remains of them, in northernmost Heilongjiang.
Conquering the North is not definitive—one doubts Man meant it to be—but it is informative, entertaining and accessible.