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MongoliaXiongnu and Yuezhi
The first significant recorded appearance of nomads came late
in the third century B.C., when the Chinese repelled an invasion
of the Xiongnu (Hsiung-nu in Wade-Giles romanization) across the
Huang He (Yellow River) from the Gobi. The Xiongnu were a nomadic
people of uncertain origins. Their language is not known to
modern scholars, but the people were probably similar in
appearance and characteristics to the later Mongols. A Chinese
army, which had adopted Xiongnu military technology--wearing
trousers and using mounted archers with stirrups--pursued the
Xiongnu across the Gobi in a ruthless punitive expedition.
Fortification walls built by various Chinese warring states were
connected to make a 2,300-kilometer Great Wall along the northern
border, as a barrier to further nomadic inroads.
The Xiongnu temporarily abandoned their interest in China and
turned their attention westward to the region of the Altai
Mountains and Lake Balkash, inhabited by the Yuezhi (Yüeh-chih in
Wade-Giles), an Indo-European-speaking nomadic people who had
relocated from China's present-day Gansu Province as a result of
their earlier defeat by the Xiongnu. Endemic warfare between
these two nomadic peoples reached a climax in the latter part of
the third century and the early decades of the second century
B.C.; the Xiongnu were triumphant. The Yuezhi then migrated to
the southwest where, early in the second century, they began to
appear in the Oxus (the modern Amu Darya) Valley, to change the
course of history in Bactria, Iran, and eventually India.
Meanwhile, the Xiongnu again raided northern China about 200
B.C., finding that the inadequately defended Great Wall was not a
serious obstacle. By the middle of the second century B.C., they
controlled all of northern and western China north of the Huang
He. This renewed threat led the Chinese to improve their defenses
in the north, while building up and improving the army,
particularly the cavalry, and while preparing long-range plans
for an invasion of Mongolia.
Between 130 and 121 B.C., Chinese armies drove the Xiongnu
back across the Great Wall, weakened their hold on Gansu Province
as well as on what is now Nei Monggol Autonomous Region
(Inner Mongolia--see Glossary), and
finally pushed them north of the
Gobi into central Mongolia. Following these victories, the
Chinese expanded into the areas later known as
Manchuria (see Glossary),
the Korean Peninsula, and Inner Asia. The Xiongnu,
once more turning their attention to the west and the southwest,
raided deep into the Oxus Valley between 73 and 44 B.C. The
descendants of the Yuezhi and their Chinese rulers, however,
formed a common front against the Xiongnu and repelled them.
During the next century, as Chinese strength waned, border
warfare between the Chinese and the Xiongnu was almost incessant.
Gradually the nomads forced their way back into Gansu and the
northern part of what is now China's Xinjiang-Uygur Autonomous
Region. In about the middle of the first century A.D., a
revitalized Eastern Han Dynasty (A.D. 25-220) slowly recovered
these territories, driving the Xiongnu back into the Altai
Mountains and the steppes north of the Gobi. During the late
first century A.D., having reestablished the administrative
control over southern China and northern Vietnam that had been
lost briefly at beginning of this same century, the Eastern Han
made a concerted effort to reassert dominance over Inner Asia. A
Chinese army crossed the Pamir Mountains, conquered territories
as far west as the Caspian Sea, defeated the Yuezhi Kushan
Empire, and even sent an emissary in search of the eastern
provinces of Rome.
Data as of June 1989
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