The Secret History of the Mongol Queens - Jack Weatherford [113]
The instability of the horse trade drove up prices. The presentation of an average horse by a Mongol required the payment of a bolt of high-quality silk, eight bolts of coarse silk, and a cash payment equal to an additional two bolts of coarse silk. At the horse markets maintained along the border, similarly disproportionate terms remained in effect. A good horse required payment of 120 chin (132 pounds) of tea, and even a poor horse required payment of 50 chin (about 55 pounds) of tea. Not only did the Chinese have to pay for poor-quality horses, as tribute they even had to pay for horses that died on the way to presentation.
By the 1470s, the black-market trade in horses had resumed in a vigorous but unofficial way that benefited private merchants more than the government officials, who were barred from participating. The government officials divided into two camps. Some favored allowing the black market to operate because it prevented the large, armed Mongol convoys from marching on tribute missions to the capital. Others, however, regretted the loss of imperial revenues and control of the horses. By 1479, even the authorities had to recognize the importance of the horse trade, and in an effort to recoup control of the profits from it, the Ming monarch restored its legality as an official matter of policy.
The influential eunuchs in the court struggled to confine the horse trade to the traditional system of allowing barbarians to submit tribute. In the official ideology of the Chinese court, by coming to the court and seeing firsthand the world’s most opulent and advanced civilization, the barbarians would naturally become at least semicivilized. True civilization for the Chinese consisted of three primary parts: acceptance of Chinese writing; urban or otherwise sedentary living; and loyalty to the emperor. While barbarians probably would not adopt all three, the closer they came to doing so, the better, in the Chinese view.
To facilitate the spread of these three primary aspects of Chinese civilization during the Han Dynasty in the first century, strategists had recommended five types of bait certain to lure the barbarians, strategies still followed by the Ming Dynasty more than a thousand years later. The lures included luxurious clothes to corrupt their eyes; superior cuisine to corrupt their mouths; beautiful women and music to corrupt their ears; massive buildings, slaves, and granaries to corrupt their appetites; and, finally, wine and feasts to corrupt the minds of their leaders.
The Mongols rejected all three aspects of Chinese civilization; they had their own writing; they were committed nomads; and they would never bow to a foreign ruler. Manduhai needed trade, but she refused to go through any of the ceremonies of submission or the rituals of tribute, and she was not tempted by a single one of the five types of bait. The Chinese struggled to understand it. The rejection posed more than a mere insult; it challenged the fundamental worldview of the Ming authorities and threatened to undermine their power if they could not convince a barbarian queen of their superiority.
When she looked southward beyond the Gobi and below the Mongolian Plateau, Manduhai saw enemies on every side, but she also saw home. She knew this land because she was born and reared there. This knowledge and experience gave her an advantage over Genghis Khan and earlier conquerors. Over millennia, the steppe tribes had focused on raiding and conquering cities