The Secret History of the Mongol Queens

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 because that was where the wealth accumulated. With such minute populations compared with the vastness of China, the steppe tribes could rarely conquer more than a few cities before spreading their armies too sparsely. The most successful conquerors had formed dynasties by leaving behind a thin stratum of the Mongol elite at the top of the local social hierarchy, but rarely did these regimes last for long. The enormous population of China eventually swallowed the barbarians or spit them out again.

Sentiment and nostalgia make poor diplomacy, and even worse military strategy. The emotion behind Manduhai’s move remains difficult to ascertain, but she had a clear strategy for specific military and commercial goals. The army that controlled the Silk Route controlled the trade. To maintain the east-west unity of the Mongol people that she had imposed through war, she needed the cooperation of the Mongols south of the Gobi to obtain trade goods. If she could keep the trade goods flowing, whether through military force or by a more peaceful means, she could keep the Mongols united.

Focusing on an external goal and foreign enemies offered a small opportunity to keep the quarrelsome Mongol tribes from directing their hostility toward one another. Manduhai realized that she could protect her government and nation by channeling that aggression toward the Muslims and the Ming armies.

Manduhai proved unwilling merely to sit north of the Gobi, as her first husband had done, and wait for caravans of traders to arrive with whatever goods they happened to have left over, demanding whatever price they could. She needed to control the caravans from their source to determine which goods they carried and in which direction they flowed. She needed to develop a new approach to China. She had learned from the negative example of the Golden Prince how difficult it was to unite the Mongols north of the Gobi with the ones south of the Gobi in a concerted effort. Even if united, she knew that they could not control China.