The Chinese Eunuch and Assorted Chinese Cultural Notes

[GhostDancer]

^No. 

[GhostDancer]

By a quirk of nature, the Chinese struggled to create an effective cavalry force because Chinese soil lacks selenium, a mineral essential to the breeding of sturdy horses.  They could only import their mounts from the steppes, something the nomads often agreed to, safe in the knowledge that the buyer must soon come back looking for replacements.  It was as if, during the early twentieth century, one side always had a monopoly of tanks.

 

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Under the Tang, the influence of nomads was so strong that the Chinese came to adopt many barbarian customs, from sitting in chairs to wearing trousers.

 

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In the old Yuan dynasty imperial hunting parks to the south, peasants developed an ingenious method of market gardening, which enabled them to supply the court all year round.  They built greenhouses heated by pits dug beneath the carefully tended seed beds.

 

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Junipers are planted at tombs, not just because their twisting and curling trunks look like dragons but the Chinese once believed that their branches housed strange creatures called wang liang that frightened off evil spirits.

- City of Tranquility by Jasper Becker

[Markdoc]

 

By a quirk of nature, the Chinese struggled to create an effective cavalry force because Chinese soil lacks selenium, a mineral essential to the breeding of sturdy horses.  They could only import their mounts from the steppes, something the nomads often agreed to, safe in the knowledge that the buyer must soon come back looking for replacements.  It was as if, during the early twentieth century, one side always had a monopoly of tanks.

 

Unfortunately, there is no truth in this at all. China has a wide, wide variety of soil types, and selenium levels vary wildly across the country, from quite low to extremely high - China actually has some of the highest selenium levels in soil on the planet. Indeed, Enshi in China is often called the “World Capital of Selenium”. Not only is it extensively mined there, but seleneosis (a disease you get from too much selenium in your diet) is common - in fact the Chinese government is looking at ways to decrease the amount of selenium consumed in these regions.  In contrast, Mongolia  has long been know to have low levels of selenium in soil, and this can be directly measured in the vegetation grown there and in animal meat (though it is rich in other areas of central Asia - Kazahkstan and Russia, for example). So yeah. I don't know where this idea comes from, but it's absolutely not true. I should note by the way that selenium is also essential for humans: areas where selenium levels are low enough to prevent horse-raising are also unsuitable for people.

 

The Chinese have long had indigenous cavalry - cavalry are depicted in many contemporary art and accounts going back a couple of thousand years, and the Tang in particular were famous for the amount of cavalry they used, and their emphasis on horse-breeding. But even Tang armies were still mostly infantry. It is true that Chinese cavalry was considered inferior to its nomad counterparts and the Chinese armies were always dominated by infantry. But that's got absolutely zero to do with selenium. and everything to do with culture and economics (see the epic thread drift on the spear and shield thread for a similar discussion).

 

Horses require grazing to thrive, and good cavalry requires a culture where riding is an integral part of everyday life. The nomads grew up in a culture with the horse in the centre. They started learning to ride not long after learning to walk, and horses were valued almost above any other possession. Meanwhile in China, historically,there has never been a chinese (ie: Han) horse-centred culture and history shows a progressive loss of grazing land (and horses!) to intensive cultivation (and people!). That's still going on. I spent last summer in Western China and the process of converting the rich grasslands on the northern slopes of the Tibetan plateau is proceeding apace, as are huge schemes to pipe water to marginal lands in Xinjiang to convert grazing lands there to cropland. The signs and work are literally everywhere you look.

 

As result, the nomads raised the best horses and made superb mounted warriors, no question about it. The Chinese raised horses by the hundreds of thousands - but they did not focus on them the same way, so they raised competent mounted warriors ... but that's about it. In the end, the Chinese struggled to raise effective cavalry forces not because of a lack of horses, but because their burgeoning population and their urban, centralised culture pushed them to focus on intensive agriculture. Lots of people and no mounted warrior caste = infantry armies.

 

cheers, Mark

[GhostDancer]

Thanks, Mark.  I saw a toddler saddle in Mongolia, a rope construct that included lashing the child's ankles together under the horse's belly.

[Markdoc]

Actually I should also note that the Chinese ended up attempting to solve their problems the way the Romans did when faced with a similar problem: they imported breeding stock from countries that did have an indigenous horse-breeding and riding culture and they employed mercenaries from those cultures as well.

 

Under the Song and Tang, there was an imperial office specifically concerned with breeding horses for the army, but the program as a whole was never a huge success. In the Tang era the official breeding herds were recorded at about 350,000 horses (so it's not like they were not breeding horses), but even those large numbers were simply not enough. In part this is because the breeding was never heavily funded, but mostly because the competition for arable land meant that the horse-breeding program was continually being moved out to the margins. Again it's pretty simple economics: horses require grazing and plenty of space. As a rough rule of thumb, you need around 3/4's of a hectare per horse allowing space for resting the grazing. That's about 1 1/2 acres. But that land under chinese farming techniques will produce 1 to 1-1/2 tonnes of rice a year (it should be noted that that's about 20-25% of typical modern yields). It was no contest: tax-paying, food-producing and soldier-producing peasants were far more attractive for chinese land-owners and administrators than horses. As a result, the horse-breeding programs were squeezed out onto the most marginal land that could support them .... aaaaand not surprisingly, were never highly productive. In addition, they were often on the borders of the regions, so exposed to attacks by nomads and rival kingdoms, who were more than happy to steal horses. The Kok Turks of western China trashed the Tang horse-breeding program in the west exactly like this.

 

cheers, Mark

[GhostDancer]

The prospect of tax revenues convinced Mongols to slaughter fewer conquered peoples, advocated for by Yelü Chucai (耶律楚材), a statesman of Khitan and Liao Dynasty heritage.

 

Ogedai Khan reportedly* mocked him, asking "Are you going to weep for the people again?"

 

In response to betrayal and tough resistance the Mongol army faced while trying to conquer the Jurchen Jin's southern capital of Kaifeng, some Mongol officers in high command recommended the complete razing of Kaifeng and the deaths of all its occupants. Yelü Chucai convinced Genghis Khan to rule and tax the people instead, and make use of their superb skills.

 

Yelü Chucai was six-foot eight-inches tall and had a waist-length beard.

 

*Empire of the Steppes, René Grousett