Country Driving [41]
Sometimes these captives adapted so well to life in the north that they seemed happy to stay there. It’s a type of pragmatism that’s still recognizable in modern times—Chinese who leave home learn to make the best of their new environment, whether they’ve gone south during the Reform years or north during the Ming dynasty. One text from the early sixteenth century, translated by David Spindler, describes an encounter between a group of nomads and some soldiers who were guarding the Great Wall. The nomads are accompanied by a Chinese man, originally from a town in Ningxia Province, and he makes no pretenses about his group’s desire to gather information. The Ming report reads:
One morning, a party of five Mongols approached a signal tower and addressed the soldiers guarding it, saying, “I’ve been sent here by the Mongol leadership to find out the reason for all of the movement of oxen and carts on your side of the wall.” The soldier replied, “The Governor-General is using thousands of men to haul grain in preparation for an attack on you Mongols inside the bend of the Yellow River.” The Mongol: “There are lots of us in this area—you don’t want to attack us. I’m actually [a Chinese person] from Weizhou and I’ve come to trade a bow with you as a sign of my sincerity.” The soldier retorted, “Well, if you’re from Weizhou, why don’t you just surrender and come home?” The other man replied: “Things are bad in Weizhou and good out here on the grasslands. Why should I come back?” He handed the bow up to the soldier, but the soldier didn’t give him a bow in return. The “Mongol” then sped away on his horse.
Officers like Yin Geng described methods of identifying these turncoat Chinese. Their hair tended to be short, like the Mongols, and they often had visible scars. They smelled shan. If you asked them the year of the emperor’s reign, they sometimes couldn’t answer correctly, because they had lost track of time. They often referred to China as nan chao, the “southern dynasty.” In one battle, Chinese soldiers captured a man named Puning, a Chinese who had been kidnapped by the Mongols. An officer described the man: “Puning had been living among the barbarians for so long and eating meat and cheese that his frame was stocky and his face was like that of a lion.” The officer continued, “He was fat, his hair was short, and he walked like a duck.” In ancient China, race was essentially cultural, and a person who lived among barbarians could lose his “Chineseness.”
For Mongols, though, political legitimacy ultimately depended on genetics. Leadership was supposed to be confined to the direct heirs of Genghis Khan, and anybody outside this line had few ways of improving his standing. One common solution was to try to gain goods and titles from the Chinese, and David Spindler has researched a number of instances in which this strategy culminated in attacks across the Great Wall. During the 1540s, Altan Khan rose as a capable Mongol leader, eventually founding the city of Hohhot. But he found himself limited by genealogy—he was the second son of a third son. In 1550, in an attempt to gain wealth and status among his Mongol peers, he turned southward, leading tens of thousands of Mongols on a surprise attack northeast of Beijing. At that time, the Ming fortifications consisted mostly of crude stone walls, which the Mongols easily penetrated. They pillaged for two weeks, killing and capturing thousands of Chinese. After that, the Ming began using mortar on a large scale to improve fortifications around the capital.
Altan Khan’s oldest son, known as the Imperial Prince, tried another strategy for dealing with genealogical shortcomings. He married dozens of women from important Mongol families, hoping to solidify alliances. But he ran into financial problems, which he solved in the simplest way possible: he sent the women back. Lacking money and accompanied