The Great Wall by Julia Lovell

Author:Julia Lovell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2010-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

Given the choice, Yu Zijun would not have ended his wall in the northwest, just shy of the eastern side of the Yellow River loop. Following continued Ming military decline in the late fifteenth century, the capital at Beijing, once a symbol of Ming confidence towards the steppe, had turned into a defensive liability, a favourite raiding destination for nomads further north, protected only by two garrisons, Xuanfu to the west and Datong to the north. Conditions in Xuanfu and Datong were fairly comparable to those in the Yellow River loop before Yu had brought his benign influence to bear: peasants and soldiers were desperately impoverished and fortifications – both natural and man-made – poor (the land between Datong and the steppe to the north is largely flat, offering no natural, protective barriers). In 1484, Yu was put in charge of the military garrisons of Xuanfu and Datong, and, predictably, advocated more earthen wall-building.

But by 1484, moderation was on the wane. Even in the 1470s, Yu’s conciliatory combination of tamped walls and trade narrowly escaped the policy-makers’ veto, as warmongering ministers tucked up safely in Beijing argued themselves to a standstill not over whether to throw troops against the Mongols, but over how many they should send. A decade later, Yu Zijun’s new wall-building plans fell foul of court intrigue and Wang Zhi, the all-powerful head of the eunuch secret police who, like Wang Zhen before him, was anxious to enhance his standing further with the emperor by winning military glory on a border campaign and threw his support behind the war party at court. Yu’s former ally Wang Yue happily lent his energies to another campaign, while Yu protested about the actions of border military commanders who provoked the frontier peoples with acts of violence. This time, the balance of power at court was against him. Believing that eunuchs were ‘defective human beings’ who deluded ‘witless and young rulers’, he unwisely said as much in a memorial to the emperor, urging that eunuchs be demoted back to duties of minding household affairs of the palace.29 Shortly afterwards, work on Yu’s new wall was halted after eunuchs seized on an inspection report which claimed that the construction was too expensive and was causing popular discontent, and which accused Yu of corruption and nepotism. Yu was to die in 1489, spending the last eight years of his life moving in and out of office, between active service and retirement, attempting to avoid a slew of slander and disgrace. Yu had offered the Ming court one of its last chances to escape from a downward spiral of expensive confrontation with the north, through a moderate, cost-effective combination of defence and diplomacy. But once Yu’s way of compromise had been rejected, Ming emperors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were to exhaust first of all their armies, then their treasuries and labour forces with unending wars and walls.

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