returned. It reached Ferghana and besieged its capital for over 40 days. The
nobles inside decided to blame the whole matter on the king and murdered
him, sending his head to the Chinese general with a proposal:“‘If the Han
will not attack us, we will bring out all thefine horses. Han may choose
what it likes, and we will supply the Han army with provisions. If Han does
not listen to us, we will kill all thefine horses.’”The Chinese agreed, and
the war ended. The Chinese were given 30 heavenly horses and 3,000 of
lesser stock, of which about 1,000 survived the trip back to China.
Subsequently the new king of Ferghana agreed to send two heavenly horses a
year to the emperor. Wudi was so inspired when the horses arrived he wrote
a hymn of celebration entitled“The Heavenly Horses Are Coming,”which
concludes:
The Heavenly Horses have come
And the Dragon will follow in their wake.
I shall reach the Gates of Heaven
I shall see the Palace of God.The chastising of Ferghana was not Wudi’s only military success. Beginning
in 133BCEhe sent a number of expeditions against the Xiongnu in which
his armies, numbering in the hundreds of thousands and led by a cavalry
steeped in Xiongnu tactics, captured herds of horses andflocks of sheep and
cut traditional trade connections, disrupting the Xiongnu economy.
Following a battle in 121BCEin which the Chinese reportedly killed“men
by the ten thousand,”the Xiongnu were expelled from the Gansu Corridor,
and the Jade Gate was opened. Continuing Chinese success on the battlefield
led to internal dissension within the Xiongnu, which split in two in the
middle of the first century BCE. The Eastern (or Southern) Confederation
submitted to the emperor and became allies of the Chinese while the
Western (or Northern) Confederation continued the struggle. Modern
historians long believed the Western Xiongnu eventually moved farther
west, becoming the Huns of Roman history, a theory that has recently been
challenged.
With the Xiongnu humbled, the Chinese could extend their power across
the Tarim Basin, lying between the Gansu Corridor and Ferghana. In the
heart of the Tarim Basin was the Taklamakan Desert, where oasis city states
had long paid tribute to the Xiongnu. These cities owed their existence to
trade and generally bent with the wind in political matters, which was now
blowing from China. In the years that followed, a system of protectorates and
alliances was established and military commanderies and agricultural colo-
nies set up. For a while Chinese power dominated Central Asia as far as
modern Uzbekistan. An official mission was dispatched to Persia, where it
was greeted at the border by the king at the head of 20,000 cavalry. Into
China “wonderful goods of diverse climes were brought from the four
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