Gao Huan himself exemplified thefluidity of family and culture. Gao
was descended from a Chinese family, grew up on the frontier where he
was steeped in Xianbei culture, and married a Xianbei woman. His modes
of warfare were Xianbei, not Chinese, but many of his subjects were
Chinese. He fought over lands that were primarily Chinese: inhabited by
Chinese people living a sedentary agricultural life. At the same time, he
drew strength from his steppe culture and the frontiersmen who moved
between the steppe and the sedentary worlds of north China. Martial arts
formed part of this cultural matrix, though his choice of military methods
was also based upon the availability of cavalrymen.
This is not to say that Gao Huan’s army was entirely composed of
steppe cavalrymen. Gao drew upon some local Chinese troops for his
army, but he had strong reservations about their value on the battlefield.^40
Some of the Chinese troops were militiamen brought in from powerful
Chinese families who supported Gao. Very few of these soldiers would
have been trained tofight in mass formations against large numbers of
well-trained steppe cavalrymen. Since most of Gao’s troops were steppe
cavalrymen, he would tend to choose battlefields and campaign strategies
that played to those strengths. Another group of Chinese troops were
men directly recruited by Gao’s government in the 550 s. These Chinese
“braves”(yongfu) were brought into the army if their courage and martial
arts met Gao’s Xianbei standard. Some Chinese farmers were also
inducted into the army to fulfill their state labor service. It was extremely
difficult to integrate these Chinese troops with their very different martial
skills and capabilities into the Eastern Wei army.
At a fundamental level, the split in martial arts practice and the inability
of the Eastern Wei to integrate fully Chinese martial practice with steppe
martial practice mirrored a cultural and political fracture line. This sepa-
ration, as Gao Huan himself demonstrated, was cultural and grew out of
ethnic identity. How one fought, the kind of martial arts one practiced, and
the place of someone adept at martial arts in that person’s own society was
culturally determined. An individual could learn a different system of
martial arts, along with deportment and dress, and, at least in North
China, shift between cultures. Yet as shown by Gao’s two-faced admon-
ition cited earlier, the relative value of farming versusfighting was per-
ceived quite differently by the two sides of the steppe-Chinese cultural
divide. Some Chinese didfight, however, and presumably many steppe
people were more inclined to tend their herds and avoidfighting.
Gao Huan had sufficient steppe cavalry to continue the preferred mode
of warfare of the succession of regimes that had ruled north China for
The Return of Chinese Infantry 89