The Secret History of the Mongol Queens

At least in the short term, attacking the civilian camp produced the desired impact on the Mongols. As Wang proudly reported, “When the unfortunate Mongols learned of the massacre of their wives and children they fled with tears in their eyes and for a long time afterwards did not show up in Ho-t’ao.”

The few Mongols who managed to escape fled the area, and Beg-Arslan was forced to retreat with his Mongol warriors from the Great Loop; they crossed back across the Yellow River and temporarily disappeared back into the unknown wastes from whence they came. The defeat of the Mongols and the massacre in the Ordos achieved the Ming court’s short-term goal of driving the Mongols back north of the Yellow River, but it did not extinguish the Mongol desire and determination to take and reoccupy their former territory. The retaking of the pasturelands south of Gobi became the primary objective of the Mongols under Beg-Arslan, and control of the Ordos ranked as the most important objective toward that goal. Like a wolf retreating into the brush or finding a cave to lick its wounds, the Mongols had left, but they certainly would return.

In the meantime, Commander Wang had become a hero, and a triumphant excitement surged through the court in the Forbidden City. He had achieved the first Chinese rout of the Mongols since Esen’s military capture of the emperor in 1449. Rather than detracting from the conquest, the clever ruse by which Wang had won the victory only added to his credit, since it cost so little money and was accomplished with so few troops. Commander Wang had fulfilled his superiors’ hopes for him when they had counted on his tactical cleverness to drive out the Mongols.

The Chinese military reports categorized the Mongol casualties together according to age and sex but gave no names or individual information. By contrast, the Mongol chronicles, as they almost always did with a horrendous or shameful loss, ignored the massacre with no mention at all. The Mongols never record the names of the fallen in cases such as these.

The Ming court lacked the will or the means to follow up on the victory in the desert. The Mongols withdrew, and the Chinese army could have retaken and occupied the entire Ordos. They could have crossed the Yellow River and driven the Mongols back up onto the Mongolian Plateau and north of the Gobi. Instead, the Ming forces abandoned offensive strategies and turned to the older defensive mode of rebuilding the wall.

For Manduhai Khatun, the encouraging news of the Chinese victory offered only limited grounds for optimism. The Ming commander had stopped the advance of Beg-Arslan and Ismayil, but he had not killed them. The civilian massacre at Red Salt Lake forced the Mongol army farther back, but Beg-Arslan had lost few soldiers. In some ways he now posed a greater threat to Manduhai than before the defeat.

Despite the Chinese victory, the Ming court recognized that the expulsion of the Mongols from the Ordos would offer no more than a temporary abatement of the struggle. Knowing the reprieve would probably be brief, the Ming officials needed to make a long-term decision.

Lacking an alternative plan of action for a permanent solution, the central government finally acquiesced to Yu’s request to build a wall. Rather than wait for the autumn, both Wang and Yu were ordered to begin building different parts of it simultaneously. Yu began immediately in the spring of 1474 with a building corps of forty thousand men. Despite the uncertainty about the stability of structures erected along the highest ridges, Yu built the wall precisely as he had proposed it, stretching out approximately 600 miles or 1,770 li. The total cost exceeded a million taels of silver, more than 1.7 million ounces. The final wall consisted of approximately eight hundred connected units of forts and beacon or sentry towers. It had a tower or other fortification about every three-quarters of a mile along the connecting wall.

Wang built his part of the wall farther to the west, and it stretched 387 li, or 125 miles. Together, however, the two walls created an impressive barrier. Although the two commanders saw these fortifications as temporary measures until the Mongols could be pacified and peace imposed, they had initiated a major change in Ming military policy that would take more than a century to unfold. For the time being, however, the long-term effectiveness remained difficult to ascertain.