Over the course of two centuries (between 133 BCE and 89 CE), China’s Han empire fought a series of conflicts with a confederation of nomadic steppe peoples known as Xiongnu. As Scott Forbes Crawford notes in his fast-moving, readable narrative history The Han-Xiongnu War, the Han and Xiongnu were east Asian “superpowers” whose struggle for power impacted smaller city-states, such as Yiwi, Loulan, Khotan, Yarkand, and Kashgar in what is now northern and western China. The Han empire brought to the conflict greater resources and organization, while the Xiongnu’s strengths were speed, mobility, and maneuverability. In the end, the Han’s superior numbers won out.
The conflict centered on the region of north and northwest China situated between the Gobi Desert and eastern China, much of it located in the Ordos Plateau. The Xiongnu, like their Mongol successors, were great horsemen who excelled at archery while in the saddle. The Han soldiers were largely infantry, protected by armor and armed with swords and crossbows. The Xiongnu conducted raids into Han territory then lured Han armies into the desert and steppe where they prepared ambushes. The Han wore down Xiongnu armies by what Crawford describes as their “massive well of manpower”, conscripted from their own homeland and city-states bordering the steppe. Both the Han and Xiongnu sought alliances with smaller city-states and attempted (sometimes with success) to lure warriors and commanders to switch sides. Both empires suffered through civil wars and internal power struggles during their rivalry.
The book’s narrative readily shifts from personalities to politics, geopolitics, espionage, military clashes, culture, and diplomacy (including marriage diplomacy). Crawford, who lived in China for 13 years and currently lives in Japan, and who previously authored a novel titled Silk Road Centurion which features a Roman soldier falling captive to the Xiongnu, shapes the narrative around the emperors, kings, empresses, and military leaders of the contestants. Each chapter centers around a historical personality, such as Han Emperor Wu who sat on the Dragon Throne for more than a half-century and was known as the “Martial Emperor”; Lui Bang, a battlefield commander who founded the Han Dynasty; Chanyu Modun, the first emperor of the steppe; Li Guang, known as the “Flying General”, whose failed expeditionary campaign to seize the Ordos cost him his life; Wei Qing, a Han general who defeated Xiongnu forces at the Battle of Mobei in 119 BCE; and Zhang Qian, a general and later Han minister who “pioneered” China’s pivot to the west and the opening of the Silk Road.
Crawford’s primary source is the ancient Chinese historian Sima Qian’s Shiji (translated into English in two volumes under the title Records of the Grand Historian of China), which was first published around 85 BCE (after his death). That work included the court annals of the Qin and Han dynasties along with other works of Chinese history and philosophy. There are no Xiongnu sources, Crawford notes, because the steppe tribes were not literate. So this history is very much from the Han perspective, but it does not shy away from describing court intrigues, internal struggles for power, and criticism of Han rulers and generals.
The Han victory sowed the seeds of the empire’s decline. Like Rome, Crawford writes, the Han “built a network of vassal tribes to fight and buffer them against the … Xiongnu”, but when that threat ended the vassal tribes “turned on their masters”, just as the “barbarian” tribes that once protected the Rome’s frontier did.