Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
and captured. Wudi insulted his reputation and otherwise belittled his
record. Sima Qian had the temerity on this occasion to disagree with
Wudi publicly and come to the captured general's moral defense.
Wudi was so enraged that he presented Sima Qian with two possible
punishments: death or castration. Sima Qian reluctantly chose castra-
tion and was thus deprived of the opportunity to produce male off-
spring to carry on his name. This situation greatly distressed Sima,
and he channeled his paternal instincts into his historical writing. He
decided that, if he could not have human progeny, his bequest to pos-
terity would be his topic of history. The end result was a magnificent
history of China from earliest times to his own day. In this work, Sima
Qian set forth the facts in a straightforward and fairly objective man-
ner. He held and expressed his own strongly held opinions on Confu-
cian morality and other many historical issues, but he was careful to
designate these as such and to separate them from the formal histori-
cal record. Much of what we know of China's pre-imperial history
comes straight from the pen of Sima Qian, and his topic became a
model or template for much of subsequent historical writing in China.
The man Wudi had meant to disgrace and perhaps even destroy was
to become China's model historian for two millennia.
The Xiongnu
As China was unifying itself under the Qin, a great and powerful foe
was also emerging in the steppe lands on China's northern borders:
the Xiongnu, or the Huns. The Xiongnu were pastoral nomads. They
were pastoral because they domesticated animals and relied on milk
and meat products for their diet, and they were nomadic because they
moved from place to place in search of naturally occurring grass pas-
turage. They were skilled equestrians who rode horses while herding
their animals (mostly sheep). A highly mobile people, they rejected
permanent abodes and elected instead to live in collapsible and port-
able felt tents traditionally called yurts. They occasionally hunted wild
animals to supplement their food supply. Because they were good
equestrians and skilled riders, they were able to apply their know-
how militarily, and they became formidable mounted warriors who
could shoot arrows accurately even while riding at a fast gallop.
The Xiongnu and other groups of pastoral nomads who came after
them very often were at war with China. For 2,000 years there was
intermittent warfare between the agricultural world of China and the
pastoral nomadic world of the grass steppe lands north of China, an
area we today call Mongolia. The pastoral nomads were by far and
