Manduhai seemed determined not to repeat the painful mistake of Genghis Khan, who had been a genius in war, politics, and governing but had failed as a father, particularly to his sons. They grew up fearful of him, but undisciplined. They were rowdy and drunken, more intent on hunting, racing, gambling, and womanizing than on learning how to rule. Genghis Khan’s shortcomings as a father, in the end, helped bring down his empire and thus undid his lifetime of work.
Manduhai did not have the luxury or the problems of so many extra sons. She had but this one boy, and she was determined to make him into a leader in war and in peace.
She kept him constantly close to her and guarded and sheltered him without delegating that responsibility to anyone. In the words of the The Jewel Translucent, Manduhai “protected her jewel-like son.” She sought divine blessings for him, and “she truthfully and strongly prayed” to the Eternal Blue Sky: “Lord Tengri, you must watch out for sinful and evil-thinking people!” Constantly but “fearfully she watched over and kept safe her important son.” Through her actions she saved the lineage of Genghis Khan, or in the more ornate phrasing of the Buddhist chroniclers, she facilitated “the spreading of the wish-granting, jewel-like Borijin Golden Clan.” In this way, “by protecting the infallible Dayan Khan, she lit the Borijin hearth fire.”
Manduhai may have united the Mongols under Dayan Khan, but she had not lessened the threat from the enemies outside Mongolia. The Ming Dynasty in China, to the southeast of Mongolia, and the warlords of the Silk Route to the southwest each claimed the right to rule the Mongols, and each eagerly sought to exercise that right. Whoever controlled the Mongols had access to the richest supply of horses anywhere on Earth. For the merchants of the oases, such a treasure promised infinite riches in trade. For the Ming military, access to the horses would provide them with the basis for a larger and more powerful cavalry.
Manduhai’s western campaign captured the attention of both rivals. They welcomed the increased turbulence in the Mongol steppes, but the victory of Manduhai and her success at uniting the fractious eastern and western Mongols created a new source of concern for them. Both the warlords and the Chinese still smarted from the pains inflicted on them and the capture of their leaders when Esen nearly united the Mongols. Both wanted to avoid a repeat of those episodes.
While strengthening military control over the Mongols, Manduhai’s victories jeopardized existing commercial links. Mongolia had no need to be united if the result was to be left alone in isolation without trade and commerce. Unlike the first Mongols, who only needed a few trade goods such as metal, Mongols of the fifteenth century required commodities from cloth and incense to tea and medicines. The political turmoil and social upheaval since the fall of the Mongol Empire had done nothing to lessen Mongol appetites for the variety of goods they had learned about during the empire’s height.
The only thing that the Mongol steppe could produce in substantial excess was animals. The Mongols produced many times the number of animals that they needed for their own subsistence, but they had no one with whom they could trade except the Chinese. The civilizations of Central Asia and Europe lay much too far away, and this left only the Chinese trade as the way that the Mongols could convert their extensive animal production into any other type of goods.
In response to the new round of potentially threatening behavior from the tribes on the Mongolian Plateau, the Ming court in Beijing tried to cut off, or at least control strictly, trade with the Mongols. The lack of trade created a widespread and persistent scarcity of luxury goods for the Mongols, but for the Chinese it created a small but very specific problem. Chinese farmers devoted almost all arable land to the production of crops and to a few animals, such as pigs and chickens, that could live from the scraps of an agricultural society. In so doing, in order to irrigate and plant the fields, they destroyed the pasturelands where horses might graze.
Most Chinese did not care about the reduction in horses, but for the military it was a crucial issue. To fill the need, the Chinese army sought other suppliers of horses when they could not get them from the Mongols. They sometimes imported horses from incredibly faraway places, including Korea, Japan, and even the distant Ryukyu Islands. But no matter how much the officials in the Forbidden City tried to curtail trade with the Mongols, the Chinese soldiers continued it on the border. To ensure the constant supply of horses, they had to provide a constant flow outward of trade goods coming from all over China.
The instability of the horse trade drove up prices. The presentation of an average horse by a Mongol required the payment of a bolt of high-quality silk, eight bolts of coarse silk, and a cash payment equal to an additional two bolts of coarse silk. At the horse markets maintained along the border, similarly disproportionate terms remained in effect. A good horse required payment of 120 chin (132 pounds) of tea, and even a poor horse required payment of 50 chin (about 55 pounds) of tea. Not only did the Chinese have to pay for poor-quality horses, as tribute they even had to pay for horses that died on the way to presentation.
By the 1470s, the black-market trade in horses had resumed in a vigorous but unofficial way that benefited private merchants more than the government officials, who were barred from participating. The government officials divided into two camps. Some favored allowing the black market to operate because it prevented the large, armed Mongol convoys from marching on tribute missions to the capital. Others, however, regretted the loss of imperial revenues and control of the horses. By 1479, even the authorities had to recognize the importance of the horse trade, and in an effort to recoup control of the profits from it, the Ming monarch restored its legality as an official matter of policy.
The influential eunuchs in the court struggled to confine the horse trade to the traditional system of allowing barbarians to submit tribute. In the official ideology of the Chinese court, by coming to the court and seeing firsthand the world’s most opulent and advanced civilization, the barbarians would naturally become at least semicivilized. True civilization for the Chinese consisted of three primary parts: acceptance of Chinese writing; urban or otherwise sedentary living; and loyalty to the emperor. While barbarians probably would not adopt all three, the closer they came to doing so, the better, in the Chinese view.
To facilitate the spread of these three primary aspects of Chinese civilization during the Han Dynasty in the first century, strategists had recommended five types of bait certain to lure the barbarians, strategies still followed by the Ming Dynasty more than a thousand years later. The lures included luxurious clothes to corrupt their eyes; superior cuisine to corrupt their mouths; beautiful women and music to corrupt their ears; massive buildings, slaves, and granaries to corrupt their appetites; and, finally, wine and feasts to corrupt the minds of their leaders.
The Mongols rejected all three aspects of Chinese civilization; they had their own writing; they were committed nomads; and they would never bow to a foreign ruler. Manduhai needed trade, but she refused to go through any of the ceremonies of submission or the rituals of tribute, and she was not tempted by a single one of the five types of bait. The Chinese struggled to understand it. The rejection posed more than a mere insult; it challenged the fundamental worldview of the Ming authorities and threatened to undermine their power if they could not convince a barbarian queen of their superiority.