The Era of Chinese Predominance, 1000–1500 57
handsomely for animals and animal products because the work force
under their control could not raise equivalent livestock nearly as
cheaply as the nomads did.
China’s trade with the nomads achieved quite elaborate organiza
tion under the Han,^67 but it is impossible to follow the ups and downs
or regional patterns of ebb and flow, which must have been extreme.
Probably trade relations between steppe and cultivated land tended to
become more important during the first millenium of the Christian
era. The prominent place merchants held in Mongol society in the
time of their greatness is proof that trading and traders were securely
at home among the heirs of Genghis Khan.
The Mongol conquest of China in the thirteenth century opened up
new possibilities for nomad tribesmen. Under Kublai and his succes
sor, for example, the garrison of Karakorum received more than half a
million bushels of grain each year from China, delivered by wagons
that took four months to make the round trip.^68 Such deliveries sup
plemented the meat and milk products available locally to allow more
people to survive on the steppe than could otherwise have done so.
But dependence on grain supplies from afar also meant risk of real
disaster should deliveries be cut off. As long as Mongols ruled China,
grain deliveries were assured; but when the Ming dynasty came to
power (1368), Chinese authorities were tempted to embargo grain
export as a way of bringing pressure on their steppe neighbors. They
actually did so in 1449. The Mongol response was to go to war, with
the result that they captured the person of the emperor.^69 Anything
less would have meant starvation for at least part of the population of
the steppe.
It is worth pointing out that nomads (as well as transhumant
pastoralists in Mediterranean Europe) shared this kind of vulnerability
with city folk. Urban populations, too, suffered catastrophe with any
prolonged interruption of food supply. Cities, especially big cities,
survived only on the strength of a smoothly functioning transport
system capable of bringing food from afar. Nomads and transhumant
pastoralists were particularly well fitted to undertake the overland
transport tasks involved in feeding inland cities, since they possessed
- Cf. Yü Ying-shih, Trade and Expansion in Han China: A Study in the Structure of
Sino-Barbarian Economic Relations (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967), p. 209 and passim.
- According to Hsiao Ch’i Ch’ing, The Military Establishment of the Yüan Dynasty,
pp. 59–60, between 200,000 and 300,000 shih of grain were delivered annually to
Karakorum. A shih weighed 157.89 pounds, or roughly three bushels of millet, two and
three-fourths bushels of wheat.
69– Jacques Gernet, Le Monde chinois (Paris, 1972), p. 351.
